“‘You can’t always get what you wa-ant,’” she sang. How could I explain it to her? She’d gotten married after dropping out of college. But I’d had Concord. How could I go from those ivy-covered buildings, from the cafeteria where students argued about Nietzsche and paid for coffee drinks with their own credit cards, to KHS—from a future that had seemed limitless (even if I couldn’t imagine a single thing about it) to one more like Mom’s, babies and a husband, every night the kitchen growing dim in the same way, the carpet forever in need of vacuuming. I really was a terrible snob.
I tried to enlist Jimmy’s help. He could explain that I was motivated enough to practically home-school myself; he could remind Mom of the time I created a set of Spanish flashcards for him, color coded by conjugation, and picked up enough in the process that after a couple hours I could quiz him without even using the cards. I banged on his door. It took him a long minute to open it. Just a few days into his new job, and his eyes seemed deeper in his face, as if someone had pressed them into his skull with their thumbs.
“In case you couldn’t tell, I’m trying to sleep,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
“I can’t go,” I said. “She’ll listen to you.”
“You’re a moron,” he said, and shut the door on me.
Dad was next. I stood on the porch. It was so cold the air had a smell that reminded me of holding my breath underwater. A shadow drifted through the barn’s windows—too large to be Marlena or any of her siblings. Perhaps it was her dad. It didn’t occur to me then, and not for a long time after, to wonder how Marlena really felt about her mother. I was so focused on my father’s disappearance that I hadn’t realized a mother’s might be even worse.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Dad’s number. The phone sang “Country Roads” into my ear—Dad had figured out how to change his ring into music. He was great at everything useless. The song was almost halfway over before he answered.
“Dad,” I said. “Let me come home.” The shadow in the Joyner window disappeared. I wouldn’t beg.
“Hi, babe,” he said, his voice so close, so his, that for the first time I thought about what a phone actually does. “What are you talking about? You are home.”
*
The night before school started I carefully cut the collars out of every single one of my Tshirts. I put one on—plain white except for C-O-N-C-O-R-D in red letters across the chest—and stood in front of the narrow mirror that hung off a plastic hook on my closet door. Now the T-shirt slid off my shoulders when I slouched to one side, cocking my hip; it gaped toward my cleavage when I leaned forward, even just a little. It looked good—better. Sexier and tougher at the same time. I balled up the leftover collars and shoved them into a mateless sock that I buried in the back of a plastic drawer.
New York
As usual, the conference room was boiling. We went around in a circle, delivering our weekly updates. I talked about the platform-wide surge in followers we’d been enjoying since my intern posted an animation of a sleepy bunny falling headfirst into an open book; I reported that the gala invites would go out by Friday. No one asked why I was sending them late. I manage our branch’s communications—a lot of copywriting and event planning, lunches and meetings and social media strategy. Details and people. “Close enough to being a writer, isn’t it, working at a library?” Liam said, on one of our early dates. I’d just gotten the job after years of sixteen-hour days, internships and volunteer gigs and networking, all sandwiched between waitressing shifts and nights behind the bar. He didn’t mean it that way. My phone vibrated in my blazer pocket and I sneaked it out onto my lap like a college kid, expecting some follow-up from Sal.
Liam, with a question about when I’d be home.
What did Sal want to know? It was hard for me to pinpoint where one memory stopped and another began. The tattoo Marlena talked about getting on the inside of her wrist, the word blue, her favorite color, her favorite album, a bridge across her pale blue veins, became the color of the walls in Liam’s old apartment. The tattoo I myself got—yes, a word, just as hers would have been—when I was thirty, to celebrate a year of sobriety that didn’t last much longer than that. Yes, because I needed a physical reminder to say yes to the person I want to be, not the person I mostly am. Now my ankle says yes for no reason.
It was the only time I’ve voluntarily had a needle against my skin, at least outside of a doctor’s office. I won’t tell Sal that part. Thank God he was too young then, to remember much. To remember how when it was Marlena and me, when he was with us, at the movies or in the backyard, driving around in Ryder’s car, she was always high and I was usually drunk, and if we were both drunk I was drunker.
Our last Fourth of July, she braided a section of her hair, skinny as a pinky finger, and left it in until Halloween. I tugged the elastic off and tried to unwind the strands but they were stuck fast with sand and salt and smoke and grease, all the moments that made up our summer, knotting them like a dread. I’ve heard your hair retains an imprint of everything you ingested since it started growing. A single strand is like a fossil that way. We soaked it in conditioner and still couldn’t get it untangled. I cut it off for her, at the scalp, leaving behind a funny, spiky tuft. I think, maybe, I could tell Sal this.
I never once imagined him grown up, and now he is. He looked exactly like her, as a kid—his hair was shorter, but not by much, longer than normal for a boy. It brushed his shoulders. His nails were always filthy, fingers tacky with juice and who knows what else. I didn’t always like it when he tried to hold my hand, though mostly I let him. The winter we met, he’d made a game out of jumping off the hood of a broken-down car in their front yard, into a drift of snow. He screamed when he hurled his body into space, arms spread, so that he cycloned through the air. Ow! he cried when he landed, stunned every time. The force of his weight compacted the snow until it was slick and hard and almost shiny. And yet he did it over and over again, demanding that we watch.
*
Alice untied and retied her headscarf, releasing the almond-butter smell of her hair and ridding the air, for a second, of its onion miasma. I felt a wave of fondness for her that lasted only until she brought up the girl. “We can’t just let her loiter in here,” Alice said, sitting up straight for the first time in an hour, leaning into her outrage. “Day after day, for hours. She takes up half the table.”
“Most of the time no one’s even in there,” I said, and then, “We are a public resource. Who does she bother?” Pretty much everyone agreed with Alice, I could tell, but I pushed, asking again who she bothered, and because of the tone of my voice Alice was the only one who said, “Me, she bothers me.” We came to no conclusion. When we all trickled out of the conference room, the girl was gone, her place at the table empty, three crumpled wrappers under the chair where she’d sat.