“I brought you these,” I said, holding the granola bars out to her. She looked at them, then back at me, her eyes raw. She opened her mouth, tightening her lips, and hissed. Her teeth were outlined in a grimy yellow, and one on the bottom was entirely gone. “I’m sorry,” I said, and leaned forward far enough to drop the bars onto the book. She kept hissing, her teeth bared. Spit rattled in the back of her throat, leaped from her mouth and landed on my arm, a row of shiny beads. I backed away, but she kept hissing, folding herself over the back of the chair. In my periphery, a little girl in an armchair near the entrance to the kid’s room was staring, frightened. She would remember this later, maybe, as an adult—the woman unhinged in the library, a little split in her reality.
I was a safe distance away, near the checkout desk, when Alice came up beside me. The girl now appeared to be trying to pluck her eyes from her skull. Every few tries she stopped, shook herself, and then ground her palms into her face. Her lips were moving but no sound was coming out; still, it would have been impossible not to notice her. The jerking of her body, her arms, was so inhuman that it gave off a kind of sound. I wiped my arm against my jeans but I felt her spit still there. A few children streamed out the front door, their mothers leading them. “I called,” Alice said. “They’re on the way. Are you all right?”
“Who? The police? Why did you do that?”
“Cat, are you kidding me? Look at her. She’s not safe. She’s on crack or something.”
“Meth, I think.”
“Whatever,” said Alice. “She is fucked up. I always wonder when I see people like her, where is the family, you know?”
The girl was docile by the time the police arrived. They led her to the library’s entrance, one on either side, like they were escorting her to a ball.
“I am so relieved that’s over,” Alice said, once the library was back to its quiet self. “Maybe now she’ll get help.”
“Do you know her name?”
“No,” Alice said, looking at me strangely. Maybe I smelled like booze.
Michigan
“Unbelievable,” said Jimmy, channeling Mom. We were standing in Marlena’s backyard in the Thursday dusk, just the three of us, smoking. I could exhale perfect Os. It was okay with Jimmy that I smoked, but not okay to miss school. I didn’t point out that his reasoning seemed sort of confused—I was just glad I could count on him to drive to the gas station and buy cigarettes for me with the money I saved from cleaning with Mom. After starting with Camels, I’d settled on Parliaments, like Marlena—a drier and more sophisticated flavor, I actually said once, to Greg, who was kind enough not to make fun of me.
“What,” Marlena asked.
I pulled out my phone and opened up the text—Dad had sent Jimmy and me the same one, notifying us both that he’d be in our “neck of the woods” for a few hours on Sunday, and that he wanted to take us out to lunch so we could all “catch up.”
“Whoa! The devil emerges from his den of iniquity.” She exhaled a jet of smoke. “I think this is nice. It’s good. At least he wants to see you.”
“Almost six months,” said Jimmy. “That’s how long we’ve been here, a barely five-hour drive from where he lives. Cat’s basically gone overboard, and it takes him six months to get up here so we can all ‘catch up’?”
Jimmy threw his half-smoked cigarette wastefully into a drift of melting snow and turned toward our house, though the three of us were an hour into a Monopoly game with Sal. His boots left prints that filled with water as soon as he lifted them; early May, and still snow pocked our yards, brown patches of it like sculpted mud. Despite the junky houses and trash pits and busted cars, Silver Lake had been strangely beautiful in the dead of winter. But over the last few weeks, as the weather warmed, everything was turning ugly.
“Well, I don’t see why he had to up and leave,” said Marlena, her disappointment and longing transparent, for once. She’d shown up at my house first thing the day after the incident with her dad, near tears, a row of bruises scaling her right arm. She hugged me and said she was sorry for calling me clingy. She said, what would I do without you? She said she’d only said such a mean thing because she knew that in order to get me to leave, to keep me safe, she had to hurt my feelings bad enough that I would go. I can handle him, she said. You can’t. He’s my dad, she said. As much as I hate his fucking guts sometimes, he’s a part of me, you know? I get him. I believed her.
I followed her into the barn, wishing a Dad-wish for each of us: that seeing mine wouldn’t be a disaster, and that hers wouldn’t be home for a long time, or maybe even ever again.
*
On Sunday morning we couldn’t find Jimmy. Mom woke me up early; we were meeting Dad at noon in Gaylord, a two-hour drive from our house, a three-hour drive, he claimed, from wherever he was living. He and Becky were going to Toronto and couldn’t be bothered to go out of their way, despite the fact that Silver Lake was really only an hour or so west of the highway they’d be taking up to Canada. We only have the week off, after all, Dad texted, ending his message with a:). I checked for Jimmy outside. He was probably just up early, steeling himself against the day with a bowl of weed, but I didn’t see him out back or out front. I glanced toward Marlena’s window, my attention catching on the prints that traveled back and forth to her door, surely just the ones he’d left yesterday.
Jimmy’s bed was all messed up like he’d only just left it, but his boots and coat were gone, his cigarettes too. I kicked through the piles of clothes on the floor, taking advantage of the opportunity to snoop. He never let me in there. My bare foot landed on something sharp and cold. It crunched a little under my weight. I bent over to see what I’d stepped on. Marlena’s pin, popped open from the pressure of my foot, spilling white powder and triangular shards of pill. I’d seen her wearing it as recently as the day before; I remembered her fiddling with it, one of her thinking tics, while we were playing Monopoly. The door to the tiny house wouldn’t close properly, and the pin part was bent to the side. Had I ever seen her not wearing it? I rubbed the pill powder into the carpet until it basically disappeared and took the pin to my room, where I messed with it for a while, trying to bend the sharp part back into place, panicking about having broken something so important. The panic distracted me from the question I should have asked the second I realized what I’d stepped on. Why the hell was Marlena’s pin on Jimmy’s bedroom floor? Someone knocked, and, heart leaping, I hid the busted pin in the pocket of a wretched sweater hanging in the far reaches of my closet.
“He could have at least left a note,” Mom said when I opened the door, her face half-hidden by a curl of steam rising from the mug she carried.
“He’s so fucking childish. I can’t believe he’s leaving me to handle Dad alone.”
“What a lovely mouth you have.”
“Fucking,” I said. “Fucking, fucking, fucking.”
Mom stared into the milky eye of her tea. “We’re leaving in twenty minutes and if you’re not ready we’re not going at all,” she said. I rolled my eyes, and then, realizing she was already walking away, sighed loud and hard, so that she’d hear. I decided I would try not to think about the pin and where I’d found it, though what I’d learned was there, butterflying at the edges of my thoughts, waiting to be named. It’s easy to ignore something you really don’t want to know.