by Amy McNamara
I rub my clammy hands on my legs. My scraped knee’s stuck to my jeans. The part of me that thought I might be able to ask him questions, have a conversation, is long gone. I don’t really care why he’s up here. I just want him to go away. Leave me alone.
Then, thank God, even though my heart’s a runaway pony in my chest, my trick finally works. I harden. Calm. Cool. Like I slipped behind a cemetery wall. I feel it happen. I’m a cold, carved thing. A person who keeps it together.
“That’s all,” I say. As in, that’s all, folks. The end. Because it is. Just me, left.
He keeps looking at me, like he thinks he might hold me or something, reach into me somehow, but I see him through an impossibly long tunnel. The tiny end of a spyglass. He’s far away. Insignificant. It’s almost funny, how sincere he looks.
I’m calm, a stone girl.
He lets out a long breath. “Wren, I’m so sorry.”
Whatever. Words. Just words. Mean nothing.
Cal’s eyes stay on me, like he’s worried I’ll startle if he moves.
For a second he rushes forward in my focus, and I see his open face. Full and kind and beautiful. Like a person who still wants things.
I push him away again.
“Thanks for checking on me. I’m fine.”
I climb off the arm of the chair and leave the room.
After a little while, I hear the door close and his car pull away.
if you
tell
me
you’re
okay
IF YOU SLIP FAR ENOUGH out of your life, time picks up. Passes in waves instead of notches. One month rolling by, then another.
Winter sets in. The trees sag with snow. Icicles dangle from eaves and boughs.
The phone wakes me. My daily alarm. Either that or tears pooled and cooling in my ears. Apparently some kind of floodgate’s open now or something, and they just keep coming. Even in my sleep.
“Mamie,” my mother is saying as I try to wake up. “I can’t make the drive this weekend. Not with this nor’easter. Too much snow on the roads.”
I yawn and try to sound disappointed.
“It’s okay, Mom. Dad canceled his London trip, so he’ll be here this weekend.”
That would have been cozy. The three of us. Snowed in.
We get together when we have to, but Mom’s frosty, Dad looks pained, and we sit there, miserable. I can only take it a few minutes before I want to divorce them both. It was worse right after the accident when I quit talking. I would kill to have a sibling, someone else to take the heat.
“So, I was thinking you could take the train to the city,” she says.
No way.
“Mom, I can’t. It’s fine. It’s not like you don’t talk to me every day. You can come up in the spring or something.”
I hold my breath a second. She’ll be hurt that I pushed the visit so far out. Or maybe she’ll take the hint instead. Skip it altogether.
“I see,” she says, her voice formal.
Feelings hurt.
This is the kind of daughter I am. Now.
“Well, Wren, I’ve been talking to your dad, and we think . . .”
I cut her off. “You’ve been talking to Dad?” Impossible. “On the phone?”
She sighs.
“Well, no. We e-mail. About you, of course.”
My mother didn’t remarry. There was a guy, when I was in eighth grade, but she never even invited him to the house. Didn’t last long. She claims she doesn’t need another man in her life. She has her work and she has me.
“Your dad tells me you’re living like a recluse.”
Here we go.
“He says you’re not working on anything.” She’s gentle with me. “That you spend most of your time jogging in the woods. That you’re not even trying to make friends up there.”
Silence.
She sighs.
“Look, honey, I let you go because I thought a change of scene might be good, but Wren, you’ve had a while now. The longer you wait to start school, the harder it will get. We agreed . . .”
We agreed on nothing. I made a choice.
“Mom—”
She cuts me off. “I’ve been on the phone with the admissions people at Amherst and they are still amenable to letting you join them at the end of January.”
“Mom,” I say again, somewhat forcefully, “I decided to come up here. Me. It was my decision. We agreed not to fight about it. I’m not going to school. Not yet. I can’t.”
I can hear her breathing. I’ve been doing a lot of that since May. Listening to people breathe while they wait for me to say something.
She tries again. Her voice is carefully cheerful. Like altering her tone could maybe make anything different, better.
“That editor from Focal Point called to say she’d be happy to let you finish your internship if you were to come back to the city before you start school.”
Focal Point. I almost laugh. At Bly, my school, we did this project called Senior Endeavor. If you had the grades, you did early exams and then proposed some kind of internship for the month of May. The internships were meant to be a way for us to reach beyond the bubble of school toward the larger world before they packed us all off to the next bubble. I told Meredith I wanted to do a project I’d call “Anonymous Lunch.” I would put an ad on Craigslist for strangers to come have lunch with me. My treat. The only requirement was that they let me set up the tripod and take a photograph while we ate. I thought it would be cool. I liked the idea of how uncomfortable it might be, lunching with a stranger and catching that look on their face. Meredith said I was a weirdo.
My actual Endeavor was to intern at Focal Point, a fine arts magazine in one of those cast-iron buildings in SoHo. The office was in a massive, high-ceilinged room at the top of the building. The rickety elevator bounced a little at every floor, and I worked at a desk near a window that overlooked an internal courtyard. If you let your eyes go soft focus, and didn’t look down, it was just this white-washy light from the sky spilling down into a vast private interior. I loved it.
I interned in the design department and worked with one of their editors. The work was more technical than I’d expected, mostly learning layout, but I spent my days looking at incredible photographs. It was a great compromise for my mom and me. She felt I was learning something practical about how the world works, and I got to spend all my time looking at art.
That was then.
“I’m not going back to Focal Point, Mom,” I say. My Endeavor seems like it was a thousand years ago.
“Mamie, really, what are you doing up there?” she asks, weary of the same question over and over again.
I’m in a nowhere place.
“Honey, the best cure for melancholy is industry.” Her soft voice. No perma-cheer.
Family rule: If things fall to pieces, don’t drop the ball. And if, God forbid, you do, pick it up and toss it in the air again like nothing happened.
I can’t think of anything to say.
So I say nothing.
That’s how it started, before. My not speaking. It was like a heavy blanket I pulled over myself. All those moving mouths asking me could I hear them, telling me I was okay, telling me Patrick was dead, then my mother’s cool hand, smoothing my hair from my face, whispering, whispering, almost a lullaby in my ear. I dropped down into my own silence like an anchor to the dark sea floor. Silt silent and all that heavy water above. Words are mostly pointless. I let go of the thread between my mind and my mouth, and it went from chaotic to peaceful.
My silence makes her nervous. I feel bad for making her worry, but I’m empty. I don’t have anything else to offer.
“Mamie?” she says, “Please don’t—are you there?”
“Yeah, Mom,” I say quietly. “Only it’s Wren now, okay? Please don’t call me Mamie.”
Another big sigh from her.
“Oh yes, well, I’m sorry, Wren. It’s hard. I named you, you’ll recall. I’
ll try.”
I roll over. The sheets stink a little. I’ve let everything slip. I’ll have to get on that. Today. Laundry.
She pauses a second, then, “Meredith called. She’s coming home for the holidays. She wants to know if she’ll see you.”
“No. No way.”
I answer that one fast. I can’t see her. Talk to her. How could I see Meredith? Like everything hasn’t changed? Been ruined? She’s too close. She’ll pull me back. The thought makes me sick.
“Well, she’s asking again for your father’s address. She wants to send you letters,” Mom says.
Letters. Our letters. Summer after tenth grade Meredith’s parents broke with tradition and sent her to Italy for the summer. Then Mom seized the opportunity and made me do a program in the city on economics and social policy. Right up my alley. Nerds in khakis and polos prepping for future desks in D.C. Total nightmare.
Meredith read somewhere about these old-guy poets who’d written to each other once a week, their whole lives. We figured if they could do it, so could we. The letters saved me. Once a week, mailed on Wednesday.
We kept it up when she got home. Even though we saw each other all the time. It was kind of like writing in a journal, but one that talked back, saw you more truly than you saw yourself. Every Wednesday, no matter what, no matter how busy we were.
We went through phases with them. We gave ourselves assignments, calligraphy only, or cut and pasted like a ransom note. We competed to see who could make the coolest envelope. Mostly we just wrote them on our laptops. But they had to go via U.S. Post. That was part of it. Printed and mailed. Old-school. No possibility of forwarding them to anyone else.
They were our secret, confidences we held for each other, from the rest of the world. Sometimes we argued about things on the page that we wouldn’t dare talk about face to face.
“. . . I really hate telling her no,” Mom’s saying. “It seems like a perfectly reasonable request.”
I’m quiet. Go back there in my mind. Back to the city, back to my little room. In our house. On my bed with a letter from Mer. Writing mine back.
I can’t think of any of it now without knowing what happened. What it came to. I pull my knees up to my chin. Curl into a ball.
“Mamie?”
“Mom,” I say. “Don’t give her the address, please.” I’m tired. Beaten down. The last thing I need are Meredith’s letters streaming in, making me feel worse about everything. “No,” I plead. “Please don’t give her the address. Say sorry—I’m sorry. But no. Please, Mom, please.”
Big sigh.
“Mamie,” she says, after a minute. “I’m concerned. Moping in your father’s empty house in that little backwater isn’t the best thing for you right now. For your future. You’re going to lose your momentum.”
Momentum. She’s got to be kidding.
I can hear her tapping her desk with her finger. She makes little sounds like that when she’s upset.
“Mom, I’m hanging up now,” I say. And I do.
It gets easier all the time. She might call several times a day, but I can end the conversation.
I roll over to the cooler edge of the bed and look outside. The trees are soft with snow. And I like how it falls and falls into the gray ocean—back to where it came from. Oblivion.
A knock on my door startles me.
“Wren?” Mary’s voice. My dad’s assistant.
“Come in.” I sit up. Pull on a sweatshirt I threw off in the night.
Mary. My mother would have a field day with her. Appraise her with one of those tight smiles she has for people she finds foolish or impossible to understand.
It took me a few weeks to realize Mary was even around, working in the studio, coming and going from the house. I didn’t look up much when I first got here. I can’t keep all my dad’s people straight.
Mary’s in her usual bright something-or-other. Today it’s a cherry-red scarf gypsy-wrapped around her head, with her nearly white-blond hair sticking out of the top of the fabric in a crazy twist. Huge hand-tatted white lace earrings drift from her ears like she has snow under her command. Stained overalls and boots. She’s like an ice cream sundae in work clothes.
“You’re here early,” I say, taking the mug of hot coffee she’s offering. She even knows how much milk I like.
She looks at the clock and laughs. “It’s nearly eleven.” Sits on the bed next to me, a painful little intimacy. “Were you up late?”
Mary does this. Pops into my room. Asks little questions. I say nothing. It’s eleven and I’m still under the covers.
“Do you think you’re sleeping too much?” she asks. Her eyes dart like birds between my face and the clock. It’s overly personal and annoying, and knowing my dad, something he asked her to do. Check on me. The great delegator. Even up here, I can’t catch a break.
“What do you need, Mary?” I avoid her eyes, look around for my running clothes.
She leans back on her elbows.
“Two things—I was going nuts with the quiet when I first got up here—you know, I like to be around people—so I started this Secret Cinema Club in the back room at Gallagher’s Bar. Every Tuesday. All ages. A decent group shows up. Do you want to come?”
I don’t answer and for a second she looks the tiniest bit nervous or something. One hand flutters up near her ear. Fiddles with a snowflake. She takes it off and inspects it, her short neon-orange fingernails teasing out a loose thread, finally lifting it to her mouth and snipping the stray bit off with her teeth.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just learned how to make these, and that thread’s been driving me nuts. Tickles the side of my neck. Anyhow,” she draws the word out with a grin. “Secret Cinema—the theme this month is kind of dark—dead under thirty.”
She gives a sudden, high laugh, like she just realized how inappropriate this invitation might be. I love her a little for it.
She forges ahead anyway. “This one wasn’t my idea”—another bright laugh—“Anyway, last week was My Own Private Idaho, River Phoenix, of course, and this week I have 10 Things I Hate About You with Heath Ledger. Have you seen it?”
I shake my head and set the mug of coffee down on the floor next to the bed. “The second thing?”
“Oh yeah, sorry, the second thing is that your dad wants to have lunch with you in the studio. Check in. But come to Gallagher’s? You’ll like it, I promise.”
I lie on my side. Lunch in the studio. Great. He’s definitely been talking to Mom. This is a first. An invite to the studio during the day. I let out a huge sigh.
“Thanks for the invite,” I say, without committing to anything. “What time does he want me? My dad?”
“Around one.” She bends to peer at me. “And you’re supposed to bring lunch.”
I groan.
Mary laughs and leaves the room.
“I’m on it,” I call after her. Check in. More like checking up on me. I can’t blow it.
My running clothes stink. Worse than the sheets. I keep meaning to wash them, but then I don’t. Nothing’s clean. My room’s a disaster. I never really settled in. I’m sleeping on the twin bed Dad bought when I was little. He offered to get me a new one, update the room, but I don’t really care. The closet’s so full of his stuff, I just left my suitcases on the floor in front of it. A small shelf by the bed holds a reading lamp and my cell phone charger. The rest of my stuff, my iPhone, laptop and camera are all on the floor.
My camera.
My old eyes. I look at it for a second. Try to remember what it felt like, heavy in my hand. Why I was sure it was so important.
My clothes are rank. So, no run. I still have a few standards. I’m pretty sure clean clothes are kind of a bare-minimum marker of mental health. Don’t want to wave the red flag of poor hygiene. I scoop up everything and carry it to the little, dark utility room where my dad has the washer and dryer. Throw it all in the machine on a short cycle.
Make lunch. I said I’d do that. The fridge i
s empty. A few bottles of wine, some old cream, part of a dried sausage-looking thing, and a waxy rind of cheese. I’ll have to shop. Something I’ve mostly avoided. A trip into town. My heart does a little lurch. Stupid lunch in the studio. Dad’s truck keys are on the hook by the door. I open the drawer near the sink. He leaves an envelope of cash in there, in case I need it. Which I haven’t. Until now. Sitting around is totally free. I pull it out.
I sit and make a grocery list until I can move my stuff into the dryer. Then I go back to my room and flop on the bed to wait.
Most of my friends fell away. A few came to see me after the crash, but the not-talking thing kind of spooked people, I guess. Social death. When you decide to stop speaking, people hang on to you a little while. Try to figure out what’s been shaken loose. I missed the funeral, thank God. Meredith delivered the blow-by-blow, as if that might snap me out of it. Stalked into my room after it ended and recounted the whole thing to my silent face, dragged me to it in words. Emma’s shaky voice up at the podium reading a letter to her big brother, Patrick’s mom sinking to her knees on the rain-soaked ground at the edge of the open grave.
Emma. That Snow White coloring like her brother, a surrogate younger sister. She and Patrick were a package deal, nothing like Meredith and her little brother Jay. Mer and I kind of adopted Emma, especially at Bly. When she was crushed at the prospect of wearing her braces for an extra year, we took her back to my house after school for an image upgrade. Meredith’s idea. She does stuff like that. Takes up the cause. She redid Emma, head to toe. When they were done, I took pictures. Cute ones she could post when she felt bad about the mouth full of metal. I can still see them, her bright eyes under those dark brows, turned up like morning glories to the sun.
Her letter to Patrick would have killed me.
My cell chirps. Sounds like a text. No one texts me anymore. I pull a pillow over my face. It trills again like a wicked little alarm, a reminder of exactly how selfish I am. I didn’t say a word to any of them. Patrick’s parents. Emma. Didn’t call. Not once. I couldn’t. Can’t. Even Meredith gave up on me, but not before she came by one last time to tell me how terrible I was, for not speaking, for shutting down. “You weren’t even hurt,” she hurled at me. “You’re being selfish. And now you’re making us lose you, too.”