Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “Would you like something?” Bethany asked as they sat.

  “I’ll just have a Diet Pepsi. I still have an hour to Worthington after this.”

  “That’s where your parents are now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how about your brothers? I see Patrick sometimes.”

  This was what she wanted least: to play catch-up like they were old friends.

  “Patrick, Becky, and the girls are still here, and Pat just got a promotion at Jeld-Wen. Matt’s in Columbus. He teaches high school PE and coaches the baseball team.”

  “That’s wonderful. And you’re back in school at Michigan?”

  Bethany looked old, and even though it had been almost a decade since Stacey had seen her, this aging went beyond time’s standard punishment. This was more than just ignoring the Revlon eye cream. She’d gained weight that stretched at her emerald blouse and the high waistband of her jeans. Her makeup cracked around wrinkles that had spread deep into her face. The droop beneath her chin waddled when she spoke. The flesh around her eyes was tumid, swollen as if from the scrape of tears. Her hair, the same highlighted, immobile bowl from high school, was the only part of her that seemed unchanged, and therefore it stood out. It looked like a wig.

  “Yeah, for a doctorate in literature if everything works out.”

  “You couldn’t go to OSU like a good Buckeye.” She grinned. Stacey didn’t respond, in no mood to fake like she cared for the ridiculous small talk people milk from a college sports rivalry.

  “How are your parents?”

  Working the zipper of her left boot up and down, feeling the satisfying click of the teeth, eased her pulse.

  “They’re fine. Dad’s happy at the new job and Mom’s back working a few days a week for an accounting office.” In truth, her father had not been happy when Buckeye Mulch closed its New Canaan location, and he settled for a transfer that paid nearly fifteen thousand dollars less. Her mom had to go back to work, and he did not expect to retire for at least another ten years, but what was the point of bringing this up.

  The waitress came, and she put in her Diet Pepsi order. It was a Coke establishment, so she settled. Bethany ordered non-caffeinated tea with lemon.

  “What were you doing before Michigan?”

  “I worked overseas for a long time. First, I was in Croatia teaching English, then I took a year to travel around Europe.”

  “Oh wow.”

  “After that I moved to Ecuador to do the same. Then when I got my acceptance letter from Michigan I spent six months traveling around South America.”

  Bethany smiled and nodded along. Stacey savored revealing how much she’d seen and done while this woman grew old in the same town where she was born.

  “That’s wonderful. That sounds really wonderful. And you got a tattoo.” She pointed to Stacey’s forearm. “What’s it mean?”

  “It’s from a poem.”

  “Oh.”

  The waitress brought her Diet Coke and Bethany’s tea. When she left, Bethany sipped, delicately replaced the cup in the saucer, folded her hands, and said, “I suppose you want to know why I asked you here.”

  She waited, arms crossed.

  “First, I just wanted to say that . . .” She fidgeted with the straw in her water. “I don’t want to drag up old things. We don’t need to talk about old things. But I do want to say I’m sorry for all that happened with you and Lisa back then.”

  “You’re sorry for what happened between us?” Her heart quickened, and her blood felt thick and fast. She heard Patrick saying, Hell is real, Stacey. Followed by the phantom scent of his Pine-Sol–smelling cologne. “Or you’re sorry for what you did? How you acted.”

  Bethany closed her eyes for a long moment, as if in prayer. When she opened them, she said, “I’m sorry for the way I behaved. Like I said, I do not want to drag up old things. But yes, you girls didn’t deserve . . . the way I reacted to everything. Those old things, though—that’s water gone under the bridge.”

  She wanted her to call them old things one more time, so she could summon a satisfying fury.

  “Fine. Water under the bridge. Apology accepted. Glad we cleared all that up. Now we can just be some gal pals gabbing at Vicky’s, I guess? Great.”

  She hated how she sounded, shrill and emotional and vicious, but after nearly ten years, there was a speech much more cruel trying to clamor up out of her from some dark hole, reaching for daylight. It was all she could do to keep this from metastasizing into a wail of accusations and tears.

  Bethany gnawed a fingernail. She could see the ragged cuticle and all the tiny, nibbled wounds. The highways of blue and purple veins on her hand.

  “And I’m sorry. I am. I’ve had so much time to think, Stacey. You don’t know how much I’ve prayed about this. Years and years. I know the way I reacted—I know you girls weren’t—I got this from her last month.”

  As if just recalling it, she reached for her purse and pulled out a postcard, the corners worn from handling. Stacey stopped playing with her boot’s zipper and took it from her. A picture of a gondola-like boat docked in front of temples with tiers like birthday cakes and sharp, needlelike spires rising into mauve twilight. She flipped it over and immediately recognized Lisa’s looping cursive scrawl. Her handwriting rang of who she was: wild, unpredictable, devil-may-care letters.

  “It’s why I wanted to see you. She doesn’t write much. But enough that I know she hasn’t given up on me. And now at least I know where she is. I know I haven’t done everything I can to say I’m sorry. To get her to come home.”

  Took a two-week trip to Bangkok. Beautiful city, beautiful country, beautiful people. Strange, but the pollution makes the color of the sky here remind me of home—or maybe I just stole that from a Harrington song Have been thinking of you. Hope all is well. Permission to turn my room into a hot tub/party spa.

  –L

  She felt a sting behind her eyes and quickly handed the postcard back. “I don’t know what this has to do with me.”

  “Yes. I . . .” Bethany took a moment to sit up, her eyelids in a hummingbird flutter to keep back her own tears. “I know she left for many reasons, and even though she writes me—not very often, but she does—she keeps talking about how apologizing isn’t what she wants. But she never says what she does want.”

  “Maybe she’s not interested in forgiveness,” Stacey said. “Maybe she doesn’t want to come back and never will.”

  “I’ve considered that. I have. But . . . you see, she has been back. The last e-mail she sent, Alex told me he checked something called an IP address. Do you know that?”

  In her stomach, she felt ripples of nausea, of insects scuttling over one another.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Right. So he said this e-mail—I think it was the summer of 2011—it was sent from a computer in Ohio. At the New Canaan Public Library. She came home and left without telling me. I wrote over and over to ask her why, but she never e-mailed back. Then finally, I get this postcard from her—finally she writes to me . . .”

  The sting behind Stacey’s eyes grew sharper. She wouldn’t have been in the country then, but Lisa never so much as reached out to ask.

  “I keep thinking . . . I keep telling myself that she’ll come around. That’s what Bob keeps saying. But it’s been nine years since she left. Ten years next summer. And I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything. I lie awake praying until I’m exhausted all day every day. I just want her to come home to me.”

  Her voice cracked on the last few words, and Stacey could see how this particular mode of crying had impacted her face, gouging specific wrinkles into her mouth and brow, around her eyes. Stacey tried to hold on to what she’d carried for so long. She wanted to spit on her. Ask her what she’d do if Lisa brought home a real butch dyke. Nine years spent loathing Bethany for her cruelty, for driving away someone she’d loved, and she sprang a couple of goddamn tears, and it all went melting away.

 
; Because I know exactly how she feels. And suddenly her bitterness was directed elsewhere.

  “I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking me for, Bethany.”

  “Just . . .” She pinched the knuckle of her index finger hard, like she might rip it off. “I don’t know. Just write to her. She might listen to you. If you tell her how sorry I am, and how badly . . .” Her voice cracked again in that discomfiting pre-sob way. The waitress passed from the kitchen and darted a curious glance in their direction before minding her own business. “Just tell her how badly I miss her.”

  They sat in the booth for a while longer, Bethany dabbing her eyes with a napkin, Stacey staring at the table. Finally, Stacey said, “I’m not in touch with her. I haven’t spoken to her since . . . I don’t even know.” This was a lie. She knew the time stamp on the last e-mail Lisa ever wrote to her because she’d just looked at it: 4:54 a.m. EST, September 2, 2004.

  “I’m not asking you to move mountains, Stacey. But I know she still cares about you. If you talk to her, she might listen.”

  She put her hand on Stacey’s. How quickly contempt can dissipate when faced with the pathetic humanness of another person. You see inside them for even the briefest moment and suddenly empathy blows through. A dark sky cleared by a hard rain.

  “I can’t promise anything. But if I do talk her, I’ll tell her what you said.”

  * * *

  She was not great at staying friends with people. Her family was her only constant, and she was one of those lucky/unfortunate women who was best friends with her mom since the moment she learned to speak. Other than that, whoever Stacey was dating tended to be her most intense friend until that relationship ran its course, at which point she was back to square one. It was surely a lousy way to organize her friendships, but she seemed incapable of adaptation. Natalya, an artist of indeterminate income and reputation with whom she spent a month living in Lithuania, asked Stacey when she knew she was gay. Young Lithuanians are a gorgeous people with a preponderance of neck moles, and Natalya had a line of them down the left side of her neck and one near her nipple on her otherwise milky and objectively incredible body. Most of Natalya’s art was zombie-related: massive canvases filled with hordes of the living dead shredding the flesh of terrified men and sultry women. Natalya’s zombies were overtly sexual. They ate the genitals first. The clothes of their victims always seemed to come sluicing off mid-portrait. They had disagreements about what the popularity of zombies signified (Natalya thought it was the suffocation of sexuality, the fear-mongering of the dominant culture that sought to eradicate non-normative sexual practices; Stacey, of course, maintained that it was a metaphor for pandemic, resource scarcity, and ecological collapse). Natalya claimed she knew her destiny as a sexual being when she was just a small girl, that she drew pictures of her female friends and watched them while they slept. Stacey found this impossible to understand because she truly had no clue.

  There was a Goth girl two grades ahead of her, marginalized even within the school’s marginalized population. She wore baggy jeans and Slipknot T-shirts, dyed her hair black and red, had a face full of piercings by age fifteen, and coated herself in white makeup until she had the complexion of a mannequin. Bloodred lipstick and the eyeliner quantities of a comic book villain. A bit overweight but still pretty beneath all her attempts not to be. Stacey could no longer recall her name. It was in the second-floor bathroom, just the two of them, when she was coming out of the stall as Stacey was walking toward one. She knew in the back of her head that this girl had noticed Stacey noticing her. That sometimes Stacey stared at her for reasons that were inexplicable to her at the time. She looked Stacey up and down and sneered, “Want me to eat your pussy on the toilet, Stretch?”

  Stretch, Stacey supposed, because she was tall.

  Of course, she reacted with horror, turned a deep shade of pink that must have still been on her face when she got to class because her music teacher, Mr. Clifton, asked if she was all right. That night she masturbated for the first time in her life, and wouldn’t you know she was in such phenomenal denial about herself that she didn’t put two and two together until years later.

  Then there was Kaylyn. Before things began in earnest with Lisa, when they were dating the three boys, and they were all just friends, Kaylyn was the pure, unchecked, blood-tingling crush she chose to never acknowledge. If eugenics experiments became commonplace and were led by a bunch of horny, scrotum-petting midwestern boys, Kaylyn would be their product. Long and slim, trash-sexy, she was always coiled around something, serpentine in her movements. At lunch, she’d pull apart her sandwich, eat the turkey, and then scrape the mayo off with long, lascivious strokes of her tongue before throwing out the bread. On the floor in Lisa’s basement, writhing in her own stillness, her dirty blond waterfalling on the carpet as she lay with her head propped on her hand. At a dance, arms draped around Rick’s industrial shoulders, hips swishing while he stood stock-still and enjoyed it like he was at a strip club. Even at her desk at school, she sat in such a way that her body seemed to melt over it. Stacey would study her face and try to understand how she plucked her eyebrows into these slim, skeptical arches; wish for the sprinkling of freckles and crystal eyes. She never felt entirely comfortable being alone with Kaylyn. At first she thought it was because she was older, desired by the entire school, but really Stacey was a part of that mess of desire. She wanted to feel different pieces of Kaylyn to see if her fingers might evanesce into those parts if she gripped hard enough.

  “Stace.” Kaylyn beckoned her to hang back. They were on their way from the locker room to the court for a game against Mansfield Senior, arch nemesis of Jags volleyball. It was Stacey’s first game on varsity, and she had so much raw energy, she thought she might be able to break a nose with her spike if she got the right set. So when Kaylyn slipped a little blue pill into her palm, smiled, and bounced her dirty blond eyebrows, she already wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “What is it?” Stacey asked her.

  “Adderall, darling—nothing wild.”

  “What’s it do?”

  Kaylyn laughed. She had her hair pulled into a tight Dutch braid, so sturdy it looked like you could use it to climb to a castle keep. Stacey had a couple inches on her, but Kay had the most penetrating green-eyed stare. She vivisected you every time she glanced your way.

  “It gives you hallucinations of spiders crawling all over your skin.” And Stacey’s face must have gone dumb with shock because Kaylyn burst into bright laughter. “Jesus, Moore, it’s for concentration. It’s an ADHD med. It’ll help you focus out there. I wouldn’t poison you. Although I admit, one time I did feed Jess Bealey an ex-lax–laced empanada on Mexican food day in Spanish. Slut had it coming, though.”

  Stacey so did not want to take that pill, but Kay’s eyes were on her, waiting, and her palm seemed to draw it up to her mouth of its own accord. That game, she regretted every moment on the court, where she felt jumpy and wired and three times sent the ball sailing over the heads of Mansfield and into the crowd.

  Yet for all her devilish qualities, there was subterranean delicacy to Kaylyn as well. Stacey saw it on the rare occasions she needed a breath from her inhaler, which she hated doing in front of people. In their last game of the season, Kaylyn got a vicious asthma attack. No one could find her inhaler, and they had to stop the game. Lisa and their coach rubbed her back while the team tore apart the visitors’ locker room. When the inhaler was finally found (on her seat on the bus), Kaylyn wrapped her lips greedily around the device and depressed the canister with her thumb, but she still looked terrified. Like maybe despite the medicine, her next breath still wouldn’t come.

  It wasn’t until after Kaylyn graduated in ’03, along with Rick, Ben, and Bill, that Stacey came to think of her differently. She asked Lisa if she thought she’d visit Kaylyn in college.

  “Not likely.”

  They sat cross-legged on the carpet in her room, looking at Lisa’s books. She pulled and piled the
m, agonizing over what to put in Stacey’s hands next. Gaia still sat on her shelf, unnoticed.

  “We grew up in the same neighborhood, then played volleyball, and then our boyfriends were gay for each other. But I don’t think we have anything in common.”

  “That actually sounds like the definition of friendship, Han. Like long-lasting, maid-of-honor-at-your-wedding friendship.”

  Lisa flipped her hair back in an exasperated gesture. “You’re kind of a nag, you know that?”

  “Just curious. Seems like you and Kay and Hailey went from dudettes to enemies and none of you even knows why.”

  “Dudettes,” she repeated, smirking. “With Kowalczyk, it’s different. That was stupid freshman chick shit because she was being a total monster to Danny.” Lisa and her Rainrock Road club. Her loyalty to Dan Eaton had no explanation, no comparable situation in her life, and no limits. She simply loved this goofy neighbor kid and was as protective of him as of a three-legged puppy. “With Kaylyn, you know . . . Trust me. She’s two-faced. So like Bill used to win over my stepbrother by buying him packs of basketball cards—when Alex was that age where it was all he cared about. Not to mention he worshipped Bill, loved watching him play and all that. For his birthday, Bill bought him this expensive card, you know, supposedly worth fifty bucks or something ridiculous. This Shaquille O’Neal rookie card. And this became Alex’s total obsession. He had this fishing tackle box that my stepdad gave him, and he kept all his favorite cards in it, but this Shaq card he kept in a hard plastic case in his pocket. Took it everywhere. Then one day it goes missing, and he was, like, freaking out. Crying, screaming at us, the whole thing. So even though he’s a shit, I helped him look for it, and we tore the house apart, but it never turned up. Anyway, like a year later I was at Kaylyn’s house spending the night—I think you might have been there—we were in the living room hanging out, and I wanted to change into shorts. So I went to her room and was looking through her drawers for a pair. I’ll admit I got kind of snoopy once I opened the top drawer because she had all these little knickknacks under her clothes, lots of strange stuff. But then I found this little sandwich bag with some pieces of cardboard inside, and as I was looking at them, I realized it was my brother’s Shaq card. She’d shredded it and then kept the pieces. I never told anyone. But from that moment on, I just never trusted her.”