by Emily Gould
She finished loading the dishwasher, squeezed the water out of the dingy sponge and put it on the corner of the sink. “Well, I guess, if it’s okay, I’ll need to figure out a place to sleep?”
Daisy shook herself out of her slumped-over position at the table. “Of course. You can sleep in your dad’s bedroom.”
16
Laura had considered canceling her studio time the next morning, but Matt had convinced her not to do anything differently; she couldn’t spend the day clutching her phone, waiting for Marie to call. Callie hadn’t replied to the email; maybe what Laura had thought was a spark had been a dud. As she tried it over and over and made it sound somehow worse every time, it certainly seemed that way.
As she fumbled through her song one last time, she became aware that the band that had studio time booked next had arrived a few minutes early; she could hear them milling around in the cold cement hallway outside. This distraction was the last straw; she quit aimlessly strumming and started packing up her little pile of gear, turning off switches, generally aiming to leave the place nicer than she’d found it, unlike whoever had left an open bag of Cape Cod salt-and-vinegar chips on the console before her. Their stale, almost bodily odor mixed with the warm electrical smells of the room in an almost pleasant way, but she had still been mommishly offended. When she was satisfied that everything was tidy, she opened the door and let the band in.
They were kids, four boys, probably ten years younger than Laura. They mumbled hey and walked past her with their heads down, studiously rushing to maximize their time. The tallest one looked her in the eye as he passed. “Thanks for the extra ten minutes,” he said.
“No problem; I wasn’t getting anything done anyway,” she admitted. She realized she sounded pathetic, but he laughed. “We’ve all been there. We’re probably about to be there, but you gotta give it a shot.”
There was a sharp line where his haircut ended and the skin of his neck began. On a man her own age, this kind of attention to grooming would read as suspicious, narcissistic, or overcompensatory. He was still looking at her, squinting in what seemed almost like recognition.
“Hey, this is so random, but did you play a show in Philly with the Clips like ten or eleven years ago?”
She was so shocked that she almost dropped the cord she was too deliberately bundling up. “Yeah, that was me. You’ve got a great memory.”
“Oh, it made a huge impression. I mean, I was sixteen; it was one of the best shows I’d ever seen. You were incredible. Do you still play with them?”
“No, I …” She couldn’t figure out how to explain the lost decade of her life quickly to a stranger. “It was just that one time.”
“Well, if you ever want to sit in with us, it would be a total honor. I’m Leo, by the way.”
She put down the cord so they could awkwardly shake hands. He was still making eye contact. Laura decided to pretend to Leo and to herself that this was the kind of encounter she had all the time, instead of only the second time she’d been recognized and admired in more than a decade.
“Hey, what are you doing right now? We didn’t have anything we were really itching to play. We could just, like, jam?” He rolled his eyes as he said it to make sure she knew that he wasn’t the kind of person who said “jam” in earnest (but was also still sincere about wanting to jam).
“I’ve got to go. I have a … thing,” she said, for some reason not wanting to mention that the thing was work, or that the work was teaching middle schoolers.
“Okay, well, let me give you my number. We can do it some other time. Or not, but just so you know, it’s, like, an option.” Leo seemed weirdly flustered. It was bizarre to Laura to be the person in this situation who was making someone else nervous. She studied him more closely as he took her proffered phone and typed his number into it, then sent a text from it saying, “Hi Leo, it’s Laura .” He looked up at her shyly as he did this.
The likeliest explanation for his behavior was that he just moved through the world like this—seducing everyone a little bit as his default mode. He probably got a lot of free coffee. She remembered going through phases, pre-Marie, of doing the same kind of thing—deciding to approach ordinary situations in an extra-charming way, just for fun, for variety. When she’d done this, she’d thought of it as “being Callie.”
When he handed her the phone back, she tried to turn on that Callie mode, smiling with a “we have a mutual joke or secret” look in her eyes. She let her hand brush his during the phone handoff, and he actually blushed—it was working! She still had whatever measure of “it” she’d ever had access to. It was nice to know this, but also bittersweet to realize how meaningless this power was, and also how finite her access to it was. She was thirty-seven; how many more hand-brushes would there be?
On the curb outside the building she waited for an Uber, and when it came, she tried to keep her streak going with the driver, letting an extra hint of breathiness enter her voice as she made some meaningless comment about the weather. The driver made a noncommittal noise and returned to his phone.
She pulled her phone out, too, and looked at the text “she’d” sent Leo, then added another line. “Nice meeting u,” she typed, then spelled out “you,” then deleted the whole thing, settled on just a waving hand, but then couldn’t decide whether to render her skin tone as white or tan or stick with default yellow. She finally picked one at random and then put her phone away and stared out the window, feeling her heart beat, thinking about a song.
* * *
Marie woke up early and tried to fall back asleep, but it wasn’t working. She didn’t want to be awake, but her heart was racing; something in her dreams had been chasing her through a maze, and she didn’t remember the details, but she had not managed to escape. She rolled over and burrowed more deeply into the stale-smelling bed, trying to dive back down into unconsciousness. Her mouth was sticky and dry and there was pain in her body, not anywhere specifically but everywhere slightly. This was always the first sign of slipping back into depression: not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, not wanting to be awake but not being able to sleep, either.
Marie felt a surge of anger. She hadn’t done anything to deserve a mood collapse. She’d taken her medicine, she’d talked to her therapist, she’d sat with her uncomfortable feelings instead of shoving them back down. It was so unfair that this curtain of blackness could just descend without warning and force her to slog through it. Was this just how her life was going to be forever, no matter how hard she tried to keep her brain healthy?
Maybe if she just started doing things, had some coffee, the black mood would lift, not worsen. Maybe she could will herself to feel better; maybe that would work this time. She pulled back the covers and forced herself to get out of bed and look around at the room, which she hadn’t really seen last night, when she’d drunkenly fallen asleep in her clothes, facedown on her dad’s old bed.
It was a teenager’s room, but from another era. There was a Discman on the desk and a stack of CDs next to it, and the posters on the walls celebrated bands she’d barely heard of: Fugazi, Operation Ivy. She opened the shades and looked out on the expanse of the yard and the woods beyond. Snow had fallen overnight and turned everything pristine white. She tried to force herself to appreciate its beauty—sometimes this worked, fixating on details and making herself admire them so that her brain would stop chanting at itself about how bad she felt.
There were small black birds jumping around in the snow. The sky was bright gray. She had no boots and her jacket wasn’t waterproof. Would she be able to leave as easily as she’d arrived, with snow on the roads? Part of her wanted to leave as soon as possible, but the process of getting a car to come pick her up and take her to the bus station, then getting a bus ticket, seemed unbearably daunting and exhausting. She felt weak and sick. Maybe she wasn’t depressed, only ill? But she had no physical symptoms except a lack of appetite and a desire to lie down and drift into blankness.
&n
bsp; The house was cold, echoey and empty-feeling. The dog was curled up on a rug in front of the woodstove, still asleep, and it seemed that Daisy was, too. It wasn’t yet seven. The kitchen was more obviously dirty in the blank-white snow light; the bottle of wine on the table had fruit flies in the dregs at the bottom. Marie felt an overwhelming urge to get out of there. She wanted to text Kayla but wasn’t getting a signal inside the house. There were coats and boots piled by the door, more than could plausibly be Daisy’s, and Marie thought about how they must have belonged to her dead father and his dead father. She pulled on the first jacket that seemed like it might fit, a faded-red Patagonia parka, slipped her feet into Daisy’s boots, and opened the door as quietly as she could.
The snow was perfect and untouched for as far as she could see; there weren’t even animal tracks disturbing it, and the air stabbed at her lungs as though she’d plunged into cold water. She crunched to the edge of the yard and then saw what looked like the beginning of a trail leading into the woods; someone had cleared the brambles and pushed logs aside, at some point. Though it was now overgrown it was far from impassable. She imagined herself being led into the woods. The warmth of sleep still clung to her and made the air seem warmer than it was, but she was still aware that it was chilly. She took out her phone to see if her weather app had been able to refresh, so that she could see how cold it actually was, but her phone blinked off as soon as she pulled it out of her pocket. Well, that was how cold it was, then. So much for texting Kayla.
She heard a distant rushing sound that could have been a road or a river. Whichever it was, she decided to walk toward it, just to have a goal in mind. She wasn’t worried about getting lost; she knew she would be able to retrace her footsteps in the snow, which would be a great plan until it started snowing again. The trail got less well defined and eventually she had to admit that it had stopped really being a trail at all. But then the rushing became louder, and she found herself walking along the edge of a stream. It was frozen at the edges but still moving in its center, and that led her to the edge of a frozen pond that stretched so far into the distance that the falling snow obscured its other shore.
It was beautiful, she told herself. There was so much beauty in the world, but she didn’t get any satisfaction from any of it; it entered her through her eyes and did nothing to fill the infinite hollowness that had opened up within her. She was tired of walking, and so she sat down in the snow, feeling the cold and wet seep through her thin pants into the skin of her thighs and calves. She took out her phone again and noticed that her body heat had managed to revive it. With a reflexive flick she tapped the button that pulled up her most recent conversation with Kayla.
“I’m sad,” she typed, a non sequitur under the last thing she’d texted, which had been about her homework assignments. Kayla responded immediately, asking where she was and when she was coming home, but her phone blinked off again before she could type anything back. She lay back and let fat flakes settle on her cheeks and trickle into her eyes. Dimly, the way you know information in a dream, she knew that she should be panicking, but somehow there was no panicky energy left in her. She closed her eyes and felt her body sink deeper into the packed crust of snow.
17
The perfect song that Laura had written as a teenager was coming back to her. Something about what she’d experienced with Leo—that flush, that wave of crush-feeling—had cracked the safe where her talent had been sitting and moldering away all these years. She was struggling to write quickly enough to keep up with her thoughts.
It was her lunch break, but she hadn’t eaten; instead, she was sitting in the burnt-coffee-smelling glorified closet that passed for a teachers’ lounge, scribbling in a college-ruled notebook she’d taken from the lost and found. Someone had previously used it to take notes in math class. She couldn’t tell whether she was remembering the words she’d forgotten long ago or making up new ones, but it didn’t matter. She summoned up a mental image of Leo, to linger in the moment that had felt so exaggeratedly good: the moment of being admired, being seen. The line of fresh-cut hair at the nape of his neck, and the idea of how it might feel under her hand. The feeling she’d been waiting to feel for so long was finally back, like it had never left; she knew this was a real song, and she could already imagine singing it over and over again.
She was so engrossed that it took her a minute to realize that her phone was vibrating, and she almost silenced it without even checking to see who it was, but habit overruled her tiny irresponsible impulse, and when she saw it was Kayla, she answered.
“Hi, honey, is everything okay? I’m in the middle of something and can’t really talk.”
“No, it’s not okay, Laura, would I be calling you if everything was okay? I’m worried about Marie.”
“I am, too, Kay, but we just have to wait. She’ll come home when she’s ready. I’m sure it won’t be long.”
“I think she’s in trouble. She texted me a few minutes ago, and now she’s not responding to my texts or calls. I have a bad feeling. She was weird when she left the other morning. What if she’s getting depressed again, like, really depressed? What if she tries to hurt herself?”
“I think she’s just acting out, pushing us away—I don’t know what there is to do except wait for her to snap out of this.”
Kayla was silent for a minute and then said, “I don’t think so. I’m just telling you that I think she’s not okay right now. Just call whoever she’s with and see what’s going on there, please—you have this woman’s number, right?”
“I’ll call her right now and let you know what I find out. Deal?”
She could hear the relief in Kayla’s voice. “Deal. Please call back as soon as you can.”
Laura looked at the time as she searched her texts with Marie to find Daisy’s number. There wasn’t enough time left in her lunch period to get any more work done. What if that spark was gone again the next time she tried to access it? Well, then it was gone. She couldn’t worry about that now. She just had to have faith that it wasn’t a fluke.
Daisy, when she answered the phone, sounded as if she’d just woken up. Laura could hear shifting around, footsteps, a dog barking, and then a silence on the other end of the line as she asked to speak to Marie.
“Seems like she went out for a walk … took my coat, that’s good, it’s much warmer than the cheap one she was wearing when she came here.”
The sting of the insult about the coat barely registered. Laura reeled at the news that Marie was just wandering around.
“Seems like? Do you know when she left? Did she say when she was coming back?”
“No, I’ve been, I’ve … I’m not feeling well this morning. Tell you what, though, I’ll have her call you as soon as she’s back. It probably won’t take her long to get tired of tramping around in the snow. It’s freezing.”
“Daisy, I’m concerned. Why did you just let her walk out the door? She has no idea what she’s doing.”
“Now this is my fault? No, I don’t think so. It is not my fault that you can’t control your own daughter, you dumb bunny,” said Daisy.
Laura took a deep breath; getting upset would not help. Panicking would not help. She had to try to get Daisy on her side; the important thing was making sure Marie was okay. Beneath Daisy’s defensiveness there was guilt, Marie could tell; she knew she was in the wrong, and was trying to shift the blame so she wouldn’t have to feel it.
“You’re right. You’re so right, Daisy. But I know you know how it feels to worry about your child and to know you can’t protect them. Right now it would just make me feel so much better if you would go outside and see if you can find her. Maybe she’s right nearby and we can both breathe a sigh of relief together. Okay?”
Daisy was silent, but Laura could hear rustling. “I’m putting on my coat,” she finally said grudgingly, then hung up the phone. Laura sat in the teachers’ lounge silently for a minute, hoping she would call back immediately, but when a call did
come, it was Kayla.
“She’s not sure where Marie is,” Laura admitted. “And it’s snowing there—I think you were right to worry.”
“Come pick me up and let’s drive up there right now.”
Laura looked down at the math notebook, but only for a second. The music had left her mind completely; she was already figuring out the logistics, rehearsing the excuses she would make at the front desk and telling the student teacher who’d cover her class which busywork exercises to assign. “I’m on my way to you. Maybe your sister will call us back before we even get to the car.”
“Probably,” said Kayla, but Laura could hear in her voice that she was pretending to have confidence that she didn’t feel, and that brave effort on Kayla’s part was what finally pierced her with real terror.
All the fear she’d felt up until this point in Marie’s life, she realized, had been tempered by a deep-seated belief that everything would actually be okay, that nothing truly bad could or would happen to her own family. But that wasn’t true now; it had never been true. The compulsive loops of worry had been a shield, but they hadn’t worked. She almost ran out of the building. She left the notebook behind.
18
Matt was waiting for them at the garage with a bag packed with basic clothes, toothbrushes, and contact lens solution, as she’d requested. He also had a backpack of his own stuff with him. Laura stared at the bag and at Matt.
“You’re coming?”
“Why wouldn’t I? You don’t know what you’ll have to deal with when we get there, I can help with the driving, and I already took the day off work.”