by Emily Gould
Kayla cleared her throat. “Guys, there’s no point in punishing or lecturing her now. She’s probably not even going to remember it.”
“Thanks for your input,” said Laura sharply before she could stop herself.
“Hey,” said Matt in a warning tone, quietly, but still.
It was a single syllable, but somehow it was all it took to make Laura feel completely enraged—not just at Marie, but at Matt and Kayla, too, at the whole stupid situation. How had she so fully lost control of what happened to these kids? Did no one in this household respect her at all?
She almost ran to the bathroom door, then pounded on it. “Marie? Let me in. You’re in serious trouble. We have to talk about this.”
From down the hall, she heard Matt and Kayla talking in murmurs, maybe discussing whether to intervene, and then the clink of silverware as they quietly cleared their places. They were so reasonable, so quiet. She suddenly felt the chasm in the middle of her family, the awkwardness of the combination of their households. How had she and Matt ever thought they and their wholly dissimilar daughters could all live together in harmony?
She pushed the door open. Marie was sitting next to the toilet, leaning her cheek on the toilet seat. Her cheeks were smeared with smudged eyeliner, and there was unflushed pink puke in the toilet. Laura was torn between the impulse to wet a washcloth and comfort her the way she had when she’d been little—the way she had even a year ago—and a warring impulse to shake her for being so irresponsible with her precious self. Above all she wanted someone she could blame, so that she could stop feeling guilty for having been out at a bar herself while Marie had been getting into trouble.
Instead she just stood there, waiting for Marie to look up. “Do we have to take you to the hospital?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. No. I mean, I’m conscious, I can talk,” said Marie. “I’m really sorry, okay?”
She didn’t sound sorry, though. She sounded like she was just saying whatever she thought would get Laura off her back.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Marie. This is really unacceptable. I’m so worried about you, we all are. You can’t do this kind of thing! You just can’t!”
Marie looked up at her with tears in her eyes. “Do you even care how I feel right now? If you’re so worried about me, maybe you could try to act more concerned than angry. Because I am already feeling really bad right now, okay?”
The effort of this whiny plea seemed to deplete her, and she slumped back to the side of the toilet, then said, “Oh, shit,” and shakily leaned over it again to release another torrent of puke. Something about the color and smell awakened a sense memory in Laura. She knelt on the floor next to her daughter, rage draining from her and leaving something confusing in its place: tenderness and nostalgia. She smoothed sweaty hair away from Marie’s forehead and gently stroked her heaving back, flushed the toilet when she was done, and then let her slump in her lap and rest her head against Laura’s chest. Without meaning to, she deeply inhaled the top of her daughter’s head. She smelled like fruity teenager shampoo and booze sweat, but there was still some hint deep down of the smell that Laura had spent years huffing when Marie was a baby and a little girl; whatever it was that was unmistakably Marie and always had been, underneath whoever she was becoming. Filled with tenderness, she found herself taking a slight risk: opening herself up to Marie’s disdain and shedding her scolding mom role for a second.
“I was throwing up red wine on the night I met your dad. Your bio-dad, not Matt.”
“You’ve never told me that story,” said Marie. She curled her shaky body into her mom’s and prepared to listen, as if Laura were about to read to her from Dr. Seuss.
“Well, let me start by saying that I was twenty-two. Like, legally of drinking age. Okay?”
“Mom.”
“Callie had taken me to see this band, and then we went to the after-party at their apartment. I had been living in New York for a week or something, I didn’t know anyone, and I accidentally got way too drunk. I rushed outside to throw up in the gutter, and when I stood up he was there. Somehow it was cute and not disgusting.”
“And then you guys lived happily ever after,” said Marie. Laura looked down to see whether she was trying to be mean, but she seemed to think it was romantic.
“Well, you know, obviously not,” said Laura.
“I do know, but you were happy for a minute, right? I mean, you were in love.”
“I was in love. He was a special guy. He had a lot of problems, and he wasn’t a very good boyfriend. But who knows? Maybe he would have become a good man. He might have even been a good dad to you.” She could hear in her own voice that she didn’t believe it.
“But probably not,” said Marie.
“Well, who knows,” said Laura. She was trying to spin the story into something edifying, or at least positive. “Maybe better than nothing, but definitely not better than Matt.”
“You’re a good mom,” said Marie, as if intuiting that Laura wanted to hear it. “I mean, we’ve never been close, but you do a good job with, you know, the mom stuff.”
“We’ve never been close?” Laura tried to keep the pain out of her voice, but her body had stiffened, and Marie, still slumped against her, must have felt it because she sat up and looked at Laura as she tried to explain.
“Don’t be offended. It’s just obvious, right? I mean close like how Matt and Kayla are close—how they always finish each other’s sentences; they always win at Taboo when they’re on the same team. I know you love me, because you worry about me all the time, and tell me what to do, but it’s not like we text each other jokes or like the same music or have similar brains. Which is lucky! For you, I mean.”
Marie was just drunk and rambling, but Laura couldn’t help but feel lacerated by this little spiel. Not close? Not close? Did she not realize that for the first three years of her life, they’d slept in the same bed, breathing in the same rhythm, Marie’s little legs kicking her in the stomach as she drifted from one dream to the next? Did she realize how, before that, they’d shared a body? You couldn’t get much closer than that.
“I’m … I’m sorry you think we’re not close,” said Laura. She wanted to say it dispassionately, so that Marie wouldn’t know how badly she’d upset her, but instead it ended up sounding mean and dismissive, like she thought Marie was mistaken about her own feelings. Marie sighed.
“I just think I might have had more in common with my dad. If he’d lived,” said Marie.
That’s so unfair, Laura thought. But she didn’t say it. She wasn’t going to engage with this bullshit. If her daughter wanted to dismiss the sacrifices she’d made and the love she’d poured into her to idolize a dead idiot whose mediocre songs would likely have been forgotten if he hadn’t died, there was nothing she could do or say to change her mind. All she could do was defend herself from being hurt anymore by the little monster she’d ruined her life for in order to protect.
She put up a mental wall around everything Marie had just said and reinforced it with mental concrete. Callie had been right. She needed a distraction from the disaster of her life.
They got up off the bathroom floor after that, and Marie got into the shower. She assured Laura that she would not pass out and drown, but Laura still waited outside the bathroom till she heard the water turn off. She knocked on Marie and Kayla’s door a few minutes later and came over to where Marie lay in bed. “Maybe you’re right about having more in common with your dad,” she said. “At least at this moment in your life. But I’m your mom, and I’m here, and I’ll always be your mom.”
“I’m gonna try and fall asleep, okay?” Marie sounded annoyed.
Laura left the girls’ room and went into her own room. Matt patiently reiterated truisms about how teenagers are for a long time, but Laura couldn’t seem to stop crying. She was still crying as she fell asleep, like a heartbroken child herself, like a baby crying it out alone in a crib.
11
&
nbsp; The next morning, Kayla and Marie walked to the subway alone. Laura had left a note next to their packed lunches on the kitchen counter, saying that she’d had to leave for work early. Marie, who had been dreading a lecture, breathed a sigh of relief. Kayla looked at her with alarm.
“No, this is worse,” she said. “She’s letting it fester. She’s still really angry with you. You’re not going to get off easy. She’s going to stay mad for a really long time.”
Marie shrugged and opened the fridge to get some cold water from the pitcher there. She couldn’t exactly remember what she had said to her mother in the bathroom when she’d gotten home but there was a strange numbness around her thoughts about it, as if her brain was trying to protect her from an extremely bad feeling that was still to come. Her stomach did not feel great. What had happened with Tom wasn’t good, either. She still liked him, maybe, though probably that wasn’t a correct way to feel. She tested out the memory of being in his bed to see if it felt exciting, the way imagining it had felt exciting, and found only the same curious nothingness. She imagined checking her serotonin levels the way you would check the level of a liquid in a deep, opaque container by dipping a stick in. She imagined that the stick would be wet only at the very bottom.
As they left their building and stepped onto the wide sidewalk, Kayla put on her headphones. Marie reached over and pulled them off.
“Talk to me, please? I’m not feeling good.”
Kayla blew air out between her lips. She looked pretty today, Marie distractedly noticed. She wasn’t wearing makeup, she almost never did, but she’d brushed her giant tangle of hair and tied it up in a cute patterned scarf, and she was wearing new jeans with one of her typical oversize sweatshirts. For some reason, maybe her expression, she looked less like a little kid than she usually did.
“Oh, I’m sorry, are you suffering a consequence of your actions? Let’s stop everything and tend to your needs, Marie. Let’s just ruin everyone’s lives until you start feeling good again.”
“Wait, what?”
“Do you think it’s easy, being the one they don’t have to care about?”
“Of course they care about you. They just don’t have to worry about you, because you’re so …”
“So what? So boring? So not fucked up? You have no idea what’s going on with me, Marie. No one does. I might as well not exist!”
Marie fumbled around inside herself trying to find the right feelings to have about what Kayla was saying. She was right, of course, but there was nothing Marie could do about it retroactively. It wasn’t her fault that she had always been her parents’ most high-maintenance kid, and she resented being blamed for it. But she also cared about Kayla, and recognized that being in her position right now sucked. She was just so tired, though. Caring about anyone besides herself seemed like it would take a kind of energy that she didn’t have.
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing to do. It’s just a shitty situation. Luckily we don’t have to live at home much longer. Luckily I have friends who actually notice how I’m feeling and are curious about what’s going on with me, unlike my own sister.”
“I’m curious!” said Marie.
“Bullshit,” said Kayla.
They started walking again in silence.
“I do care about you,” said Marie after a while. “I’m sorry I’m such a terrible sister.”
“You’re not even really my sister,” said Kayla, very quietly. They were almost at the subway. It was too cold to be out in just a sweatshirt. Kayla’s makeup-less lips were pale, and her hands were fists inside her baggy sleeves. Marie couldn’t even muster enough energy to feel angry at her. It was true, they weren’t related by blood. But of course Kayla was her sister. They had slept in the same room, sometimes in the same bed, since they were old enough to remember anything. She decided to let Kayla be mad. She deserved to be mad at Marie; everyone did. They all deserved a break from Marie. She wished that she could take a break from herself.
“I’m going to get a coffee before I get on the subway. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“If the train comes before you get to the platform, I’m taking it,” said Kayla, trying to sound indifferent and not upset.
“That’s fine. You totally should. I’ll talk to you later. Love ya.” She tried to say it casually, like it was something she said all the time, but erred on the side of inaudibility; at least, Kayla didn’t show any signs of having heard her.
Marie walked to the bodega on the corner by the subway. When she’d been younger, she’d had a good relationship with the teenager who manned the counter in the early-morning shift, relieving a relative who’d been up all night selling cigarettes and Red Bulls and lottery tickets to the people who bought those things at two and three and four a.m. They’d bantered whenever she came in, and even broken the unspoken rule of bodega boundaries by introducing themselves and sharing some biographical information about each other. His name was Ashraf and he was from Yemen. And then one day he’d been gone, replaced by a similar-looking guy who didn’t even thank Marie when she put her tea on the counter and handed across her dollar fifty. The new guy had earbuds in his ears and was always in the middle of a phone conversation. Marie had never gotten up the nerve to interrupt his phone call to ask where her friend—well, semi-friend—had gone. Maybe back to Yemen, or maybe he now worked a different shift. She had grown up with this kind of disappearance happening perpetually all around her, and most of the time she didn’t even consciously notice it. The neighborhood where she’d lived as a small child was now unrecognizable; only a few storefronts, like Peter Pan Donuts and some of the Polish stores, were the same ones she’d walked past on Manhattan Avenue every day to go to day care. Glass towers rose near the waterfront wherever you looked. The run-down playground at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn, which had once been full of intriguing stray cats and canopied by 360-degree skies, was now nice but ordinary, and walled in by construction sites. People and buildings were whisked away as soon as you got to know them; there was almost no point in remembering that they’d ever been there at all.
She filled her paper cup with hot water and selected a tea bag from the little display of boxes in front of the coffee station, noting with satisfaction that there were exactly as many bags of her favorite kind, Devonshire English Breakfast, as there had been on Friday, when she’d last been here. No one else drank her tea here. This bodega was almost an extension of her home.
While she waited for the tea to steep, she turned to get money from the ATM. An idea was forming in her mind, still very vaguely, but the one certainty was that she would need money to make it work. She had an allowance that was supposed to be for clothes and shoes and school supplies, but she had managed to save it lately; she hadn’t bought new fall clothes and shoes yet. She checked her balance: about $250. If she took a bus to Boston, a cab to where Daisy lived shouldn’t be that expensive. She would just go for a day, not long enough to really worry anyone, and then come right home. She would see whether meeting her biological grandmother would help her somehow, and she would find stuff out about her dad that you couldn’t find out from the internet or from her mother. And she would ask about the lost tapes, for Tom, because he’d like that and he’d like her more. Then she would come home, apologize to Kayla and her mother, and turn over a new leaf, somehow.
She finished up at the ATM and took her cup to the counter. The new cashier looked at her with his usual lack of interest as she handed over her change, but then surprised her by handing her a banana. “You need to eat,” he said, and she wasn’t sure at first whether he was talking to her or talking on his phone. But she was grateful for the banana as she waited for the subway. She hadn’t managed to eat anything yet that day and hadn’t realized that she was ravenous.
12
Laura had been sitting in a gray-walled recording studio in Midtown since before sunrise, alone with her guitar and a mic and a kind but vague
stranger behind the soundboard who tentatively asked her now and then if she’d like to go again. She had a piece of paper where she was pretending to jot things down, but really she was just getting more and more frustrated with herself, occasionally checking her phone to see the increments of her rented time counting down. She had to be at school in just under three hours, and it would take at least thirty-five minutes to get there. There both was and wasn’t still time to make today’s endeavor worthwhile.
She’d wanted to book a session in the same recording studio where she’d visited Dylan fifteen years earlier, but that building and everything else on its block in Bushwick had been demolished, it turned out; on Google Earth, she saw the glass-and-steel condo lump that had risen in its place. It was too bad because she had been counting on memories of the heightened, desperate feeling she’d had in that room to help her get into the right mind-set to produce a song. She needed access to that fever pitch; she had never managed to create anything without it, except for the nonsense jingles she’d made up for the baby classes out of loopy sleep-starved desperation.
Though, thinking about it more, she had wanted badly to write real songs during that part of her life. She remembered spending time with toddler Marie—those endless hours before a morning nap, or the similarly infinite spans in the late afternoon before bedtime—and feeling the stifled urge to release a song that was thrumming inside her, keeping her alert as she picked up and restacked blocks or reread a book about animal noises for the fourth consecutive time. Of course, if she’d been presented with a spare day in a recording studio in any of those moments, she’d likely have flailed around not knowing what to do with it, just like she was doing right now.