by Emily Gould
“But I want a Popsicle!”
“You can have a lollipop.”
“Does Kayla get one, too?”
“Not right now.”
Marie snuggled under Matt’s arm, satisfied that the negotiation had gone in her favor. Laura chanced another attempt at eye contact with Matt, but he was resolutely staring at the TV. On the screen, a dragon in a pink tutu floated down an inner tube on a lazy river.
“Come on in,” the dragon said in a plummy, supercilious voice. “The water’s delightful!”
PART III
10
The night that Marie threw her phone at her mom—impulsively, almost accidentally—was a new low. She had been waving her arms around and shouting and it left her hand and flew, much faster than she’d thought possible, straight into her mother’s face, connecting with Laura’s cheekbone with an audible thwack that made them both stop yelling. They stared at each other for the duration of a long silence that ended only when Laura put her hand up to her face and turned away from Marie, sitting down heavily on the couch.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
Laura didn’t answer immediately, and Marie felt, irrationally, even angrier at her. The ball was now in Laura’s court, because Marie’s bad behavior had justified her anger. Before she’d thrown the phone, Marie had possessed the moral high ground, she thought. It was crazy that she wasn’t allowed to go out, it was a Friday, she’d done her chores and homework, she would check in at whatever intervals her mom wanted, literally all of her friends were going to this show. She wasn’t a little kid, she was fourteen years old. She had not mentioned that Tom would be there, of course. There was no reason to mention Tom to her mother.
In addition to anger, Marie also felt crushing guilt and the barest tip of a giant iceberg of sadness that was always lurking just below the surface. But the anger was much easier to feel, so she felt it first, and more, and then let it take over. The sadness about having hurt her mom—physically, this time, and not just emotionally, like always—was too big to touch. Her mind couldn’t go there.
“Seriously, Mom, come on. Say something. Are you okay?”
Laura sighed heavily, then reached down and picked up Marie’s phone. “No, not really. That hurt, Marie.” She handed her back the phone with what seemed like effortful stoicism. Marie felt a hard something in her chest, an achy coldness.
“I just don’t understand why I’m not allowed to go do something fun and harmless! I didn’t mean to throw the phone. Honestly, I was not trying to hurt you.”
Laura was still rubbing her cheek. It was shiny and red, probably going to bruise. “I know you weren’t trying to, but you did. And ‘harmless’ is in the eye of the beholder.”
Marie clutched her phone. “It’s an all-ages show! I’m going to come home and go to bed at a reasonable hour. I get that you’re concerned, but like … you need to trust me. I am way, way more mature than you think. I’m the most mature person I know.”
Laura stopped looking like she was about to cry and started to laugh. “Okay, that doesn’t make me feel better.”
Marie saw the flaw in what she’d said and laughed, too, breaking the horrible tension. But then they stopped laughing and looked at each other for a long moment.
“Look, I’ll check in every half hour,” Marie finally ventured. “I will not be out past ten.”
Laura’s face clouded again. “Jesus, Marie, I said no! Why are you testing me like this?”
“I’m not testing you! I’m telling you, I’m going!”
They were right back in phone-throwing territory.
“You just threw something at me, and I’m supposed to reward you?”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Actually, you didn’t!”
“Well, I am! I am really sorry. I feel really bad that I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. But having me spend the night sulking in my room won’t change what happened.”
She walked over to the pegs near the front door that held a dangling, untidy mess of the family’s coats and started pawing through, looking for the lightweight leather jacket of Laura’s that she had adopted as her own as soon as it fit her.
Laura’s eyes brightened dangerously. “You know what? I have a great idea. I’ll come with you.”
Marie stopped looking through the coats and turned to stare at her mother with agonized fear in her eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
Laura feigned ignorance. “Sure, why not! I was just going to sit around watching TV. Maybe Kayla wants to come, too, we should ask her.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what? It’ll be fun! It’s been forever since we did something together as a family.”
Kayla, perhaps hearing her name, came to the end of the hallway and squinted through her glasses at the scene in the living room, looking from Laura to Marie and trying to figure out who, if anyone, to throw her loyalty behind. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m sixty pages from the end of the fifth Darkwall Chronicles book. You guys have fun, though,” she said absently, then headed back to the girls’ bedroom.
Outside, an ambulance went by, which happened a dozen times a day, but this time they both noticed it. Probably without consciously meaning to, Laura touched her injured cheek.
“I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me. I’ll call you later. Bye,” Marie said, and walked out the door.
Laura opened the door and ran after her a few paces, then stopped at the top of the stairs. “Are you going to be warm enough in that coat?” she called after her, but Marie was already at the bottom of the stairwell, almost out the door.
* * *
A couple of years earlier, a few months before Marie turned twelve, she had woken up one morning feeling like she was about to die. Instead of dozily getting ready for school, elbowing Kayla at the bathroom sink and eating a sloppy bowl of cereal as she had every day up until this point in her life, she’d stayed pinned to the bed, unable to move. There was a weakness in her legs and arms and a tight feeling in her chest and stomach. Her throat clenched and her heart raced. She told her mom that she needed to stay home from school because she had a stomach bug, and spent the rest of the day in bed, occasionally trying to read or watch TV. But the characters in books and TV shows were all so annoying and everything they did was so pointless. Didn’t they understand that we were all going to die?
The next day she got up and the crushing sadness was still there. Some instinct told her she would be better off making herself go to school than she would be lying in bed, and it turned out that she could distract herself from the weakness and icy clench and ache for short periods of time by forcing herself to go through the motions of being a person. But she worried, as she sat in class and ate her lunch and hung out with her friends on the playground after school, that everyone could somehow see how fake she was being. In every moment, she was trying to figure out how the real Marie would act, and then act that way. She could make herself smile, and even laugh. Sometimes she would even get caught up in the moment and be real Marie, but almost as soon as she realized this was happening, the replacement sad Marie would come back, and she would have to start pretending again.
The feeling had come and gone like that for a few days, and then it came and stayed. She knew that she had to tell her mom what was happening, but when she tried, she couldn’t talk at first, only cry. Laura sat next to her on the couch, rubbing her back, trying not to show how much she was freaking out. Marie felt her trying, and that made everything even worse. When she was done crying, she didn’t feel better. She told Laura that all she looked forward to, all she wanted to do, was sleep.
Laura took her to the doctor, who referred them to a psychiatrist. It seemed like he mostly saw much younger kids. His waiting room had a heartbreaking box of wooden toys next to the coffee table covered in New Yorkers and New York magazines. He prescribed an SSRI and a benzodiazepine for Marie to take as needed when she felt panicky. She had taken one the of the as-needed pills on the subway
on the way home from the appointment, breaking it in half as instructed. Nothing changed immediately, but by the time they had reached Seventh Avenue and emerged from the subway she noticed a faint floating feeling and a loosening of the invisible turtleneck corseting her chest and neck. She took her mom’s hand and they walked down the sidewalk together, a little bit cautiously and slowly, as though Marie were a toddler again and just learning how to walk for the first time.
“Your dad—your biological father, I mean—also struggled with depression,” Laura told her as she tucked her into bed that night. “I’m sorry we haven’t talked about that before. I feel like we should have been prepared for this, or that we should have prepared you.”
Marie didn’t want her mom to feel bad, too. She already felt bad enough for everyone. Laura looked like she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She kissed Marie on the forehead and said she would stay till she fell asleep if she wanted, but Marie told her it was okay, she could go. Then she lay in the dark alone for hours, listening to her own breath, thinking about the endlessness of the universe, which they had learned about in school. At the center of all the endlessness, it now seemed, was Marie. Inside of her was black emptiness. Outside of her was something terrifying and large and inexplicable with no known limit. The next morning she woke up and there was blood on her sheets and she felt a little bit better; she had gotten her period. That was the beginning of her life as a woman.
* * *
Matt was working late all week, editing an ad for an agency that had the account for a national burger chain, watching gooey ooze seep from between the halves of a bun over and over again. He had told Laura a million times that he liked the soothing repetition of his work and the satisfaction of getting each puzzle piece in its perfect place, but she couldn’t help but project her own thwarted-artiste shit onto him; wouldn’t he rather be editing his own animated short films, the ones he’d worked on before he and his ex had Kayla? He always claimed that he genuinely did not. He liked doing assignments and getting paid and going home. His work was a game he was good at and his life happened elsewhere, though for years now he’d been working harder and longer than he wanted to. The reality of having two same-aged children who were going to go to college, which they’d once joked about, was now imminent and not at all funny.
The suburbs were an option, of course. Matt could commute, and Laura could teach music anywhere. But the thought of moving upstate or to the suburbs on the cusp of entering her forties was too sad to bear. It would be like definitively admitting defeat. Once she’d floated the idea to Callie, just to see what she’d say, expecting reassurances that would be comforting even if she knew they were lies.
But Callie hadn’t even bothered to lie. “No, I would not come visit,” she’d said. “You could visit me, but I don’t have time to take the PATH out to bumfuck to see how innovatively Matt has renovated your split-level. I’m busy, and you need to be somewhere we can hang out all the time when I’m in town. You’re not moving anywhere. You’re not allowed to. End of discussion.”
So as of tonight Laura still lived in her apartment. It needed a thorough cleaning but was hers, and Matt’s, and Kayla’s and Marie’s. The line of light seeping out past the door of the girls’ bedroom had disappeared around ten thirty and now Laura was alone, with nothing to do but wait for Marie to come home. She puttered around, picking up stuff off surfaces and neatening piles and putting stuff down onto other, more appropriate surfaces. She put away the pile of dishes in the dish rack and made everyone lunches for the next day, which the girls were supposed to do for themselves but rarely did. She scrubbed the kitchen countertop as she looked out the window at the curling leaves of the mulberry tree that grew in the backyard of their building, half listening to whatever was on WFMU as she tried to prevent herself from thinking about what, exactly, Marie was up to. At eleven thirty she sent her a text asking as nonconfrontationally as possible what her plans were.
“Hanging out at Anna’s. Don’t wait up,” Marie responded almost immediately. This was grounds for getting in trouble—she’d promised to be home early—but Anna was a good kid, and Laura had no fight left in her.
“Okay, see you in the morning. Sweet dreams,” she replied. She added a double pink heart emoji as an afterthought. Three dots briefly appeared, then receded. “Okay, fuck you, too,” Laura said out loud. She still felt insulted when her daughter withheld these little displays of affection. Until recently they had still said “I love you” every time they said goodbye, unselfconsciously and honestly, if reflexively. When had they stopped?
On her way to her bedroom, Laura couldn’t resist the temptation to peek in on Kayla; she craved the satisfaction of seeing at least one child safe and comfortable at home in her bed. Kayla was in bed, but awake, looking at her phone. She shifted around to glare at Marie. “Hi, knocking is a thing?”
“Sorry, honey. I just wanted to say good night.”
Kayla could be oblivious, but Laura’s sadness was too blatant to ignore.
“Marie’s still mad at you?”
“I guess so. She’s at Anna’s.”
“If I tried to pull something like that …” Kayla glowered at her, then trailed off as she saw the pain in Laura’s expression and changed tactics. “You know, I never break any rules. I should get a special reward.” She smiled to make it clear that she was joking.
Laura smiled. “Yes, that would be a good lesson to teach you about how life works.”
Kayla rolled her eyes, but kindly. “Dad’s not home yet, either?”
“Still at the office.”
There was a small silence, and Laura thought about asking Kayla if she wanted some hot cocoa or something, but it didn’t seem quite right for her to get her teenage stepdaughter out of bed just so she would temporarily feel less lonely. “Okay, honey, sorry to bug you. Sweet dreams.”
“You too,” said Kayla. She paused. “Want a hug?”
Laura accepted, feeling slightly pathetic.
Instead of going to bed, she padded back out into the darkened living room, remembering something that Callie had told her once, one of the times when she’d been trying hard to get her to write or play again. “You know those moments when you feel like you want to smoke a cigarette or run around the block? There’s something uncomfortable crawling around inside you and you just want to cough it up or extinguish it somehow?”
“Of course,” Laura had said.
“What do you do in those moments?”
“Nothing? Wait for them to pass?”
“Wrong! That’s when you’re supposed to get out your guitar,” Callie had said.
Maybe it was advice that she’d once given Callie, now dispensed back to her; they’d been friends for so long that this was always possible. Regardless, it wasn’t bad advice. She opened the hall closet and got out her guitar, smelling the sour velvet of the case’s lining before she even finished opening the latches. She took it to the couch and then sat, singing and playing softly so as not to wake Kayla. She played a lullaby that she’d once sang to the girls when they were little, which had nonsense words but a pretty tune, and a tear ran down her cheek and stung the abraded skin where Marie’s phone had hit her.
* * *
Marie should have worn a warmer coat; it was an annoying realization, not only because she was cold but also because she hated it when her mother was right. In fairness, though, she hadn’t anticipated that she would be spending half of this early-autumn night outside with Tom, in an overgrown corner of Prospect Park where people mostly went to have sex and do birdwatching. Tom had claimed that he wanted to show her the goats, but of course she’d already seen them. They were in a fenced-in hillside area, brought there to eat all the poison ivy out of this corner of the park in advance of a renovation that would displace the cruising men and birdwatchers permanently. The goats were pretty interesting-looking—several different types, all different colors and with those eerie, marble-like eyes. Marie and Tom had taken a
desultory glance at them and then sat down on a bench to make out. From the woods nearby they could hear some dudes having a guttural, grunting romantic endeavor, or maybe that was the goats.
Tom hadn’t been that aggressive about making out with her, which was either because he was restraining himself or because he actually wasn’t that into her and was interested in Marie only because of her connection to the Clips. But just the touch of his hand on Marie’s was making her feel crazy; she wanted to grab it and pull it onto her thigh, up her thigh, past the waistband of her jeans. She shivered, sort of from the cold and sort of not. He didn’t notice. He was talking about her dad again.
“So then they played that show at Brownies—no official recordings exist, but there are some bootlegs floating around online. And that’s when they debuted ‘Don’t Let Me Come Over,’ which has got to be my favorite Clips song, maybe my favorite of all the songs your dad recorded with them.”
Marie nodded, pretending to listen as she studied the shape of Tom’s face and the movement of his lips. She loved making out with him—it was the ultimate distraction, a great way of obliterating the tick of thoughts and worries that spun too fast through her brain at almost all other times. She was always on the hunt for that feeling, or maybe just the level of feeling that blotted out thought.
It was too bad that Tom was maybe gay in some deep unbeknownst-to-even-himself way. He was definitely gay for the memory of Marie’s dead dad, she knew. But a lot of people were, especially boys. It had always been that way ever since she and her friends got old enough to be into things in general—some people were into Star Wars, or video games, or dancing or acting or writing. Some people were into music, and of those people, a very small but vocal subset were into her dad.