Maya locks herself in the bathroom. She hears her dad shouting at Leo, then her mom shouts at her dad to stop shouting, then they shout at each other about who has more right to shout. They’re frightened, angry, powerless. Parents always are.
Maya’s seen photographs of them before they had children. They were young and happy then; they don’t laugh like that anymore, not even in photographs. They used to be so in love that they hungered for each other, her dad’s fingertips brushing her mom’s bangs, her mom who could raise the hairs on her dad’s arms with a single glance. Children have a purely biological reaction against their parents’ love for each other, but when it disappears, they hate themselves.
Maya is sitting on the bathroom floor, opening and closing the dryer door, click, click, click. The sound feels almost meditative, until she sees the T-shirt inside it. It’s Leo’s. Only he would be stupid enough to tumble dry a cotton T-shirt, because he never does the laundry, he doesn’t know how to do it. Maya pulls the shirt out; the bloodstains are still visible. She knows what he’s done; she burned her own clothes after that night at Kevin’s because no one at home would have understood. Leo has been fighting, and Maya knows who for.
She hears her dad shout louder, “You want to play gangsters in the forest with hooligans? Have you lost your mind?” Leo shouts back, “At least they’re doing something! What the hell are you doing? You’re just letting all the goddamn cocksuckers in Hed trample all over our town!” Then her mom yells, loudest of all, “YOU DON’T USE THAT KIND OF LANGUAGE IN MY HOUSE!”
Click, click, click. Maya opens and closes the tumble dryer. She knows her family aren’t arguing about words or about the fight or about anyone’s town. They’re arguing about her. Everyone is.
She used to count butterflies with Ana, talking about “the butterfly effect,” that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can have such a devastating effect on the universe that the tiny air current it creates can cause a hurricane on the other side of the earth. Maya sees a whole town failing in the wake of her decision now. She’s the cause, and all the fighting and violence are the effect. If she hadn’t been here, if she’d never met Kevin, never gone into his room at that party, not been drunk, not been infatuated, if she’d just said yes and not put up a fight. That’s what she’s thinking, that’s how guilt works. If only she hadn’t existed, none of this would have happened. Her dad is shouting “We haven’t raised you to be a fighter!” Leo yells back, “SOMEONE IN THIS FAMILY HAS TO FIGHT, AND YOU’RE TOO MUCH OF A COWARD!”
* * *
Maya hears a door slam. Realizes that it’s her dad who’s stormed out. Blinded by grief.
* * *
That night Maya writes a song she’ll never perform. It is called “Hear Me.”
Every man I know, every father and brother and son,
Always these clenched hands. Where did you get that idea from?
Always this violence, always round holes and a square block,
The absurd idea you were sold, that we want you to fight for us.
If you want to do something for us,
Put a weapon down for me,
Close the maw of hell for me,
Be a friend to me,
Try to be good men for me.
You boast about all you’re going to do for me.
So when are you going to stop ruining things for me?
Do you want to know what you can do for me?
Start by hearing me.
* * *
Her mom is standing outside the bathroom door, asking Maya in a whisper if she’s okay. Maya lies: “Yes.” Her mom says, “We have to go to Hed. To . . . sort something out.” As if Maya doesn’t understand. So Maya lies, “Don’t worry, I need to study, see you later.”
When Leo’s mom fetches him tersely from his room, he doesn’t protest. He’s already got his coat on and puts on his new shoes. They set off for the police station, the door closes behind them, and Maya sits on the bathroom floor, unable to breathe. She gets up, feeling a desperate, panicky need for air. She suddenly has to get out of the house, away from the town. She knows only one place for that, and only one friend. So she texts Ana a single word: “Island?”
She starts to pack a backpack and puts her phone into her back pocket. She doesn’t wait for an answer, she knows Ana will come. Ana would never let her down.
30
They Aren’t the Kind of People Who Get Happy Endings
Of course Ana will be there. You can’t set out to grow a friendship like theirs. But there are other things you can’t grow either: parents are a sort of plant you can’t choose, with roots that go deep and catch your feet in a way that only the child of an addict can understand.
Ana is already in the forest on her way when her phone rings. It’s Ramona. The old woman is hard but never cruel; she has made many such phone calls over the years and always speaks the same way: sympathetic but not patronizing. She says Ana’s dad has “drunk his way out through the door,” which means that someone had to throw him out of the Bearskin and he isn’t in a fit state to get home on his own. “It’s starting to get cold,” Ramona says, because she doesn’t want to have to embarrass Ana by saying that her dad has been sick all over himself and needs fresh clothes. She knows the girl understands. Ramona has watched people drink themselves into the gutter for half a century, and she has learned that some children need to see the worst aspects of alcohol so that they leave it the hell alone.
So she says, “Your dad needs company on the way home, Ana,” and Ana stops in the forest, nods, and whispers, “I’m on my way.” She always goes. She’d never leave him.
* * *
Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace.
* * *
Ana doesn’t call Maya, because Maya has perfect parents. A mom who never abandons her family and a dad who’s never been sick all over himself when drunk. They’re like sisters, she and Maya, but the only thing they haven’t had in common is that shame. Ana can’t bear the thought of Maya seeing her dad like that.
* * *
Maya sits alone on the island all night. Looking at her phone. Eventually she gets a text message, but not from Ana. Another anonymous number, again. She’s still getting messages, but she’s stopped telling Ana about them, she doesn’t want to go on making her friend sad. It’s Maya’s secret now: “Do you suck cock for 300 kronor?” this one asks. She doesn’t even know if the people writing them know why they’re doing it anymore. It could just as easily be someone in Hed who wants to break her as some girl at school who hates her or a gang of kids who are daring one another to “text that girl who got raped by Kevin Erdahl.” That’s all Maya will ever be for those people. Victim, whore, liar, princess.
Back in the summer Ana buried an expensive bottle of wine out here; her dad had been given it by an elderly neighbor in the Heights because he’d given him some meat after a hunt. Ana didn’t have the heart to throw it away, but she didn’t dare leave it in the kitchen among all the fragments of her dad’s heart, either. So she hid it out here. Maya digs it up and drinks it. She doesn’t care if she’s being selfish; being drunk doesn’t bring relief or peace, just bitterness. “I always rely on you to come,” she thinks about her best friend. “I was relying on you when Kevin pushed me down on the bed, too. My best friend will come, I thought, because my best friend would never leave me!” She throws the empty wine bottle at a tree. It smashes, and one of the pieces flies back and cuts her arm. Blood drips from the wound. She doesn’t feel it.
* * *