Pulp

by Robin Talley

  Someone knocked on Abby’s bedroom door.

  “Not now!” Abby barked, holding the phone to her chest.

  “Sorry, what was that?” the voice in the phone said into Abby’s white cotton blouse.

  “Sorry!” Abby shoved the phone back up to her ear. “Sorry! I didn’t mean you!”

  “Is everything all right, Abby?” Marian Love said.

  The knocking came again. Why the hell were her parents seriously pushing this right now?

  Abby stumbled across the room and yanked the door open. “Mom, Dad, whoever, I can’t talk to you right—”

  Ethan was standing in the hallway, biting his lip, his fist raised.

  “Abby? Can I come in?”

  “Look, I—”

  Before she could say anything more her little brother burst into tears. Fierce, shuddering sobs, the same kind Abby had just poured out all over the curb.

  For a second all she could do was freeze, watching him. Then, slowly, she raised the phone to her ear.

  “I—I’m so sorry.” She took a breath, trying to sound measured, and not as though she was freaking out to the depths of her soul. “I swear, I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t important, but could I call you back in a few minutes?”

  The voice paused, sounding taken aback. “Certainly, Abby. You can reach me anytime at this number.”

  “I will. Thank you, so much.”

  She clicked off, staring down at Ethan.

  She wanted to hate him for taking Marian Love away from her, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  He was her kid brother, and he needed her. Just like he’d needed her on the playground the day he busted his nose.

  Abby needed him, too. The two of them hadn’t made this mess, but they were still stuck in it together.

  She pulled him into her room, closed the door behind him and hugged him tight.

  “Hey, hey, I know.” She steered him toward the bed without letting go. “I know. I know.”

  Abby couldn’t be sure how long she held him while he cried. It felt like going back in time—but it also felt like she finally had a purpose. At last, there was someone she truly mattered to.

  When Ethan finally pulled back, his sobs fading into regular tears with a few hiccups mixed in, he looked younger than Abby remembered. His eyes were red and puffy, and his left cheek was imprinted with the crease from the sheets he must’ve been lying on in his room.

  He didn’t look anything like a soon-to-be teenager. He looked like the bratty little brother who’d made a huge mess of all the glitter glue Abby had carefully laid out for her ninth birthday party.

  How long had he been lying in his room by himself? All day? All night, too? With no school to break up the time, it must’ve been even worse for him than it was for Abby.

  She scooted over on her rumpled comforter. Ethan leaned back against the wall next to her, pulling his knees up to his chin. He was still wearing his old, rumpled pajamas, the black-and-green-plaid ones with a skull and crossbones printed across the chest. The shirtsleeves only came down halfway past his elbows.

  Ethan wiped his eyes and leaned forward, tracing a wide circle with his finger on the bedspread. When he finally spoke, she had to lean in close to hear him.

  “When did you first know?” he asked.

  Abby closed her eyes. Hugging was one thing, but if she had to think about the actual details, she’d probably start bawling again herself. “I—look, I don’t want to talk about this.”

  Her brother nodded without looking at her. He straightened out his legs and started to scoot off the bed, wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve.

  “Here.” Abby handed him a tissue from the box on her desk, but he ignored her and went on using his shirtsleeve. Ugh. He was so gross.

  “Thanks,” Ethan mumbled, taking the tissue and blowing his nose in that over-the-top way little kids always did.

  “Don’t mention it,” Abby muttered. But at the same time, his gross nose-blowing triggered something in her mind.

  Ethan really was a little kid.

  A year from now, Abby was supposed to be someplace far away, starting a whole new life. Ethan, though...he still had years and years ahead of him. The better part of a decade, stuck in a family that was only now getting around to admitting it had been screwed up for a long time.

  Abby and Ethan were the only two people in this house who didn’t want anything to change. They were also the only ones who didn’t have a say.

  “I think I knew last year,” she finally said. “When Mom started going out of town just as often as Dad did. What about you? Was it when he didn’t come for Rosh Hashanah?”

  Ethan shook his head and wiped his nose again. “It was when we stopped having Tuesday dinners.”

  “Oh, wow. When was that? Last year?”

  “The year before.”

  Abby had forgotten all about Tuesday dinners.

  When she was younger—elementary school, probably—the rule had been that the whole family always had dinner together at least Monday to Wednesday. “We only have to make it to Wednesday,” Mom used to say. What with work and school and rehearsals, it was too hard to make sure everyone could be there every single night of the week, but if Monday to Wednesday were covered, Mom counted it as a family-bonding win.

  But the older Abby got, the harder it was to stick to the three-nights-a-week plan. She wasn’t sure exactly when things changed, but by the time she started middle school, Mom had stopped talking about making it to Wednesday. Family dinners were on Mondays and Tuesdays, end of story.

  It didn’t seem like a big deal. They had those two days to eat together, and the rest of the week they played it by ear. Some nights everyone was home, some nights they weren’t. Either way, everybody ate, and everything was fine as far as Abby could tell.

  Now that Ethan had brought it up, though, Abby remembered how things had changed after that. Around the start of her sophomore year, Tuesdays had mostly fallen off the calendar, too. By then, Mom had been promoted to president of the organization where she worked and Dad had started going to New York more often. By the year after that, either Mom or Dad was gone pretty much all the time, which meant Monday dinners were off the table, too.

  These days, whoever happened to be home on any given night might eat together, but they also might not. There was always food in the fridge, and Abby had stopped thinking about actually sitting down to dinner a while ago.

  What was in New York—or Chicago or Los Angeles or any of the other places her parents were always disappearing to—that was so much better than being here with them, having family dinners?

  Was there such a thing as love that made you want to stay with someone forever, outside of all those old-fashioned romantic comedies?

  There had to be. Paula and Elaine were nothing like the characters in the cheesy movies, but they’d still lasted, and they’d been up against a lot more than Linh and Abby or Mom and Dad.

  “Do you think they were really working on all those trips?” Ethan’s words echoed Abby’s own thoughts.

  “I don’t know.”

  She wished she’d talked more at those family dinners. Instead, most of the time, she’d shrugged and snuck looks at her phone under the table when Mom or Dad asked how her day had been.

  Maybe if she’d talked more, they’d have wanted to spend more time at home. Maybe then none of this would be happening.

  “Do you think it’s because I didn’t make the senior tap company?” Ethan’s voice broke. “I thought I would, but they took Paul instead, and I know Mom was upset. Maybe next year—”

  “No.” Abby heard her dad’s words, his stupid script, coming out of her mouth. “This isn’t our fault, it’s theirs. It isn’t about anything we did.”

  That was what people said when something like this happened. It was supposed to make
you feel better.

  But Ethan still hung his head. Abby knew exactly how hard it was to believe that line.

  Maybe with all this finally out in the open, they could all stop lying so much.

  She tried to think of what Marian Love would do if she were the one in this position. She certainly wrote about tragedy often enough.

  She wrote about what happened after the tragedy, too. She wrote about moving on.

  No. Abby rubbed her eyes. It wouldn’t help, trying to think of how Marian Love would have done things.

  Besides, Abby had been thinking about her all wrong anyway. Marian Love wasn’t some divine, all-knowing entity. She was a woman, with a real voice and a real name.

  And even Marian couldn’t have told her how to make this hurt less for Ethan. Abby was on her own for that. If she could figure out the words that would help him, maybe she could use them on herself, too.

  “I’ve been trying so hard.” Ethan sniffed and wiped his nose again. “I thought if I was good—if I got okay grades and stuff—Mom and Dad would want to go back to normal. But I kept messing up. Like with Mr. Salem and that water bottle.”

  “I know.” Suddenly, Abby wished she’d been talking to Ethan about this all along. Of course he understood how she’d felt. He was the only one who could. “I mean—I don’t think you did anything, but I... I know what you mean.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “What happened anyway?” Abby had to ask. “With the fight you had at school?”

  “I don’t know.” Ethan scrubbed at his eyes with his filthy pajama sleeve. “Michael just said the alien antennae on my recital costume looked like balls. And I said his face looked like balls, and then he shoved me. Or maybe... I shoved him. I can’t even remember how it started, but either way I—I lost it. I don’t really know what happened after that.”

  Abby nodded. It sounded a lot like how she’d felt on the train with Linh on Saturday. “I get it. The losing it part, I mean.”

  “It was like the day I threw the water bottle at Mr. Salem. I knew it was wrong, and I hated that I was even doing it, but it was weird—it didn’t feel real. It felt as if I wasn’t even in that room at all. Like I was watching it all from above.”

  Abby nodded again. That was how she’d felt the day before. Maybe other days, too.

  Nothing seemed real lately. Nothing except the worlds she read about, and the ones she made up in her head.

  “I think...” Abby spoke slowly. “I used to think that if nothing else changed, this wouldn’t happen. That if I didn’t do my college applications—maybe even if I didn’t graduate at all—I wouldn’t have to go away next year. Everything could stay the way it was, forever.”

  Ethan didn’t say anything, but he’d turned to watch her. His eyes were wide, his skin blotchy.

  “I thought if I didn’t leave, they wouldn’t, either.” Abby met his gaze, even though it only made her want to cry again. “I thought—if I could just get together with Linh again—if everything could just stay exactly the same as it’s always been...maybe then, things would be normal. Only it didn’t work.”

  “I don’t think anything ever was normal,” Ethan said.

  Huh. Since when did her kid brother start sounding so profound?

  “Even if it was, you can’t just make things stay the same as they used to be.” Abby shook her head. “We’re supposed to be going forward. I guess that means we get to start new lives, whether we’re ready for it or not.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready.”

  Ethan’s eyes were still wet. He looked calmer, but Abby knew how that kind of calm really felt.

  She wrapped her arm around his shoulders, meaning to reassure him. To tell him that whatever happened, it would be all right.

  It didn’t seem to work. A few minutes later, he started shaking in her arms, fresh tears running down his face. Abby wrapped her arms around him tightly because, sometimes, you just needed someone to hold you.

  Maybe sometimes she could be the strong one.

  20

  Friday, August 12, 1955

  Janet watched from the alley until she was sure the house was empty.

  Traffic had been light, and her bus had gotten back to Washington earlier than expected. She’d been away for nearly a week, and the sight of her hometown when she first spotted it from the road had felt entirely different than it had all her life.

  She couldn’t help noticing how tiny the drab government buildings here looked compared to the skyscrapers she’d grown used to in New York. Only the Washington Monument stood soaring into the skyline, as though the city was self-conscious of its failures and had tried to make up for them with false grandeur.

  Washington did have a better smell, though. There was no mistaking that. In New York, Janet hadn’t yet found a city block that didn’t carry the same odor of grime and grease. Here, even in the damp heat of August, she could smell the open sky. It smelled like possibility.

  As she’d walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by the city smells, Janet had felt that sense of possibility on every side of her. The prickling weight of the future that beckoned.

  But it was still the early afternoon, which meant Janet’s future was at least a few hours away from truly starting. First, she had to wait until Marie finished work for the day. Janet intended to catch her leaving the office and take her aside to explain why they had to return to New York together right away. It would be tricky—Janet would have to make sure no one at the State Department saw her lurking outside, and she’d have to find a nearby place where she and Marie could talk without being overheard.

  And that was assuming Janet could convince Marie to listen to her in the first place. Given how their last conversation had gone, Marie was just as likely to walk away from Janet before she’d even said a word.

  It was the reason Janet hadn’t tried to call her from New York again. By the time she’d woken up that first morning on Flo’s couch, she’d realized it was no use. Her only choice was to talk to Marie, face-to-face, and pray she gave Janet a chance to explain.

  Since she had to wait, though, Janet had decided to go to her family’s house for a few things. It had turned out she needed more clothes than she’d realized. Flo had helped her get a job working the lunch shift at the diner, where the boss wasn’t nearly as horrid as Mr. Pritchard, but the staff there didn’t wear uniforms and Janet needed to save every last dime of her tip money for her first month’s rent. The new clothes she’d bought her first day in New York already looked worn at the seams.

  She hadn’t called home again, not since that first night at the Sheldon. Before she’d hung up with her mother, she’d mumbled something about being home soon. It shamed her to think she’d lied yet again, and it hurt, deeply, that she still didn’t know what had happened to her grandmother.

  If Grandma was alive, she must’ve told Mom and Dad the truth. In that case, Janet would no longer be welcome in their home. If she’d died, though, Janet would carry that guilt for the rest of her life.

  Maybe it was better not knowing.

  Her key still worked in the back door, so that gave her some encouragement. The house was as cold and empty as she’d hoped, but it looked different, somehow. The creaky wooden staircase, the chintz curtains lining every window—it all looked skewed, as though the house had been picked up and set back down again at an awkward angle. There was dust on the kitchen countertops, too, where Janet had never noticed dust before, and dishes in the sink that hadn’t been washed. Almost as though no one else had been here in all the time Janet had been gone.

  She walked through to the front of the house, trying to make sense of the disarray—were her parents spending all their time at the hospital with Grandma? Or had they been busy with funeral arrangements?—when she spotted it.

  The pile of mail by the entry table was high and jumbled, as
if someone had been taking the mail out of the box and simply tossing it onto the table without looking at it. Off to one side was a package wrapped in brown paper, with Janet’s name typed across the front.

  The return address read Bannon Press.

  Janet blinked down at it three times in case she’d made a mistake. The package was the exact size, the exact thickness, as the brown parcel she’d carried to the post office the month before.

  The FBI hadn’t found her manuscript after all. Nathan Levy had.

  When the rapping noise came behind her Janet whipped around, trying desperately to think of a lie, before she realized her parents wouldn’t be knocking on the door. They’d have used their keys.

  But who was knocking so sharply in the middle of the afternoon? All Janet could see was a heavy shadow through the curtain that covered the glass window.

  Anyone could be on the other side of that door. Including the FBI. Janet hadn’t seen anyone watching the house when she’d come through the alley, but what if someone had been watching her?

  She was backing away, willing the wooden boards behind her not to creak, when she heard the voice calling softly through the glass.

  “Janet? Are you home?”

  It was Marie. God be praised, it was Marie.

  Janet lunged at the door, twisting the lock and jerking it open. Her heart leaped into her throat, and she wanted to shout.

  I love you! I love you, I love you, I love you! Come back to me!

  But when she pulled open the door and got a look at Marie, her mouth fell closed.

  Marie looked terrible. She was dressed for work in the same neat blue suit she’d worn to dinner with Janet on that first night at Meaker’s, with a shiny new brooch fastened to the collar, but the jacket was damp around the armpits, and her makeup was streaked with tears behind her glasses. Her hair, usually so neatly pinned, was mussed, with loose strands blowing in the breeze. Her purse was tossed over her arm, and she was holding a small cardboard box. Janet could see a comb and a single floppy carnation poking out of the top.