He considered this, frowning. Sal was quick, and no one seemed to notice or care, and even in just those few months I’d watched his temper grow into something unmanageable, a little beast curled up inside him, eager for blood.
“But you have to try it,” he said.
I lifted him under the armpits, all squirmy forty-something pounds of him, so that he could dump the boxes of pasta into the water. It wasn’t boiling yet, but Sal was impatient. When had he last eaten? Marlena was in the bathroom. After I strained the pasta, I let Sal stand on a chair and mix in the powdered cheese and a half stick of only partially hardened butter I found in the bottom drawer of the fridge. There was no milk, so we moistened it with water and added lots of salt and pepper.
“I want like a lot,” Sal told me. “I can eat more than my sister.” He always called Marlena that—my sister, my sister, a stamp of ownership and pride.
We watched a show starring a group of teenage monsters attending monster school. One held its eyeballs in its hands, occasionally using them as weapons. I ate an entire bowl of pink macaroni just to make Sal happy. “Tu es mon diamant,” Marlena told Sal, when he finished all of his food. “Je t’aime beaucoup.” How strange to hear those swinging vowels—all city lights and crusty loaves of bread and blue shutters and expensive perfume—in that place, with its cement floor, with its bone chill and empty cabinets. It made me suddenly and extremely sad, and I pulled Sal to me and hugged him hard.
“Don’t,” he said, staring at the TV.
When Marlena’s dad got home, we were giving Sal a makeover. He sat on a splintery chest that served as a coffee table, surrounded by Marlena’s impressive collection of mostly stolen drugstore makeup. “You aren’t as pretty as my sister,” he told me, as I used lipstick to draw red circles onto the apples of his cheeks.
“Oh really,” I said. “How about now?” I bared my teeth and jutted out my chin. Sal laughed, scattering flecks of mascara under his eyes.
“You will be rewarded for your loyalty, Sal,” Marlena said, adjusting his rhinestone headband. “Voilà! You, mon petit prince, are the prettiest one of all.”
No car announced his arrival. Later, when I thought about it, I decided he must have come from the woods, from the railcar, and taken a snowmobile. Otherwise we would have seen headlights, shining through the single window on the street-facing side of the barn. He slammed in the kitchen door, taking us all by surprise, so that Marlena dropped an open tub of eye confetti, sending sparkles careening across the floor.
“Smells in here,” he said, the word here dissolving into a series of body-shaking sneezes. Why is it always so obvious when someone is very, very high? The seams of their body don’t match up with their surroundings—it’s as if they’ve been cut out of their lives and then stitched back in all wrong. When Marlena was really out of it, it felt like her movie was in black and white while mine was in the regular old colors of every day. Marlena’s dad was messed up, his wrongness curling like smoke through the room.
“Get that shit off your face,” he said to Sal, taking a few unsteady steps. “Who is that? Who are you?” His eyes were focused just above my head, so I wasn’t sure if he meant me or some figment visible only to him. Sal was gone, a magic trick. The fringe of the blanket we’d tied around his neck disappeared into the dark loft above.
“Dad, it’s Cat. You’ve met her. You know who she is. Our neighbor.”
“Oh yes, the noisy one. Nosy.”
He sat down between us on the couch and wiped his lips with his knuckles. I didn’t like his leg against mine. “You two been drinking?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re a liar,” he said.
“Cat, go home now,” said Marlena. “You need to leave.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Marlena’s dad said, mimicking me. “She doesn’t want to go.”
Marlena said something in French, too fast and sharp for me to understand it.
He put his hand on the small of my back and my entire body stiffened.
“What are you, Indian?” His thumb drifted along my spine, a place no one, I realized, had ever touched. “You got Indian eyes.” Then his hand was up underneath my sweatshirt, playing with the clasp of my bra. “Black,” he said. He unhooked it with a twist of his fingers and breathed loud, a version of a laugh. I could feel Marlena thinking hard in her stillness. My bra hung open, freeing my breasts, but I didn’t move. He pulled his hand away and a shiver hummed through me, from the scratch his skin made, leaving mine. “You have titties like a fat girl but you’re small,” he said.
I fucking giggled.
“Stop it,” said Marlena, looking at no one.
“You drink too much, Lena-bee. You drink like a grown man. Like a loser. I think you drink more than me.” He picked up one of the water bottles, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed. He threw the capless bottle hard. It hit the stairs in an explosion of ice, the plastic landing with a thunk on the ground. “Where’d you learn that from? Your momma didn’t drink like that.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and stood, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Take a hint,” said Marlena, still looking off.
“What?”
“You’re so clingy.” She pressed her palms against her closed eyes, as she did when her head hurt. “This is not your business. I want you to leave—please don’t make me tell you a million times. Just go.”
“Come with me.”
“Go home, Cat.”
I would not cry. But what she said had left me airless, scooped clean.
“Marlena?”
She shook her head.
I’d been dismissed, and she would not acknowledge me again. Just like the night I’d seen her in Bolt’s car outside of her house. Addict behavior, I know now, that shutting out. I do it to Liam sometimes. Marlena whispered to her dad in French, soothingly, the way you’d talk to a frightened dog, kneading the back of his neck, her lips beside his ear. This was how Marlena handled men. This was how she removed their stingers without them noticing. This was how, even if they took from her every last thing they wanted, she convinced herself that she’d still won. I stood there until I couldn’t any longer, bra still unhooked. Then I left her alone, like she wanted me to.
Outside I struggled to fix my bra without removing it, lifting my sweatshirt and flashing the blank, black woods, so deceptively quiet, full to the brim—I knew—with watchers. I was a twenty-minute walk away from that railcar. How many matches would it take to blow it to the sky? There was lighter fluid in the shed—I could use that. If I threw the match from a safe distance, and it didn’t burn out mid-air, I might be able to run fast enough to escape the flames.