When he dialed my number, did he think of the scarf, our house chaotic with boxes, the teapot whistling in the kitchen? What did he see when he looked at me that day? When we still had the potential to be nothing to each other? I was just a girl, a girl in the same general shape as his sister, but not yet an extension of her. Or maybe, to him, I was only ever what I am now: an accessory of Marlena’s, just as he was to me. As soon as I finished the knot, he pushed out the door and darted through the snowdrifts that separated our yards. His house was dark, but he went inside. To what, I can still only really guess, despite how many hours I spent there.
I would call him back. Of course I would. It was less a decision than it was an acceptance. Alice knocked on my office door, two sharp raps that made my hungover ears ring. We had a staff meeting. I smiled and sat up straight in my chair, ignoring the hard throb in my head when I changed positions, and jammed my feet back into my shoes. Steady old Cat. I always come when called.
Michigan
A few days after Christmas, I woke late—nearly one in the afternoon, though I’d gone to bed before midnight. What a luxury, the endless velvet of teenaged sleep. Now I sleep patchily and have trouble waking; less than eight hours or more than three glasses of wine, and I’m hungry and dim.
Mom was on the couch, reading the classifieds. The house was dark and cold, except where the winter sun splashed in through the living room window, a shriek of yellow that made me squint. “Good morning,” she said, glancing away from the paper. Her hair was in a fresh braid, and she wore jeans and a white pullover in her actual size—all good signs. “It’s the year 3000 and we’re still alive. But the bad news is, the aliens heard a rumor that lazy people taste the best.”
“Ha-ha.”
“You hungry? Want me to make you something?”
“I think I’m going for a walk.” How else would I be able to have a cigarette? I wasn’t hooked yet, not physically, but it gave me something to do, and I treasured having even that small action to hang my days on.
Mom followed me into the kitchen, filling the teakettle with water while I poked around in the cabinets, loading up my sweatshirt pouch with fruit snack packets. Tea and wine, tea and wine; Mom was always drinking one or the other. “You know how expensive those are?” Mom said. “We’ve gone through like two boxes in a week.”
“It’s not my fault we don’t have anything else to eat.”
“We don’t? We have apples. We have cereal. Why don’t you make yourself an egg? There’s soup in the cabinet too—”
The teakettle hissed and she stopped talking. Mom has a way of dropping out of conversations. She gets a little worse as the years pass. At her second wedding, it happened during her toast, Mom standing at the foot of the long table and going silent right in the middle of explaining her own happiness, so that Roger had to pick up the thread. Dad would have made fun of her, especially given such a public opportunity, and I started falling for Roger then, when he paused, smiling, and asked her a question to get her started again, pulling her closer to him. Like Liam can be—gentle. But when I was a girl, I had no patience with Mom’s scramble to find her place in her own mind. “Let me make you a sandwich,” she said, finally, and I pictured how, if Dad were here, he’d meet my eyes, the two of us in on the joke. And we’re back! he used to shout at the dinner table, banging his hand against the table so that our plates rattled.
In my room, I packed my bag with the cigarettes, the lighter gun, my phone, a copy of Franny and Zooey, and the fruit snacks. Mom appeared in the door frame, holding a brown paper bag, and I zipped my backpack in a hurry. She’d lost at least ten pounds since the divorce; her cheeks had caved into a permanent fish face. Jimmy and I gave her new nicknames—Elly the Skelly, Clickity-Clack, Mr. Bones—and though she laughed with us, it must have stung. Even at her skinniest, she was lovely, with her Nordic coloring and elfin cheek dimple, her intelligent eyes. I hated that she hadn’t passed their color—aqua blue and distinct—down to me. For a teenage girl, a beautiful mother is a uniquely painful curse.
“Heads up,” she said, and tossed the sandwich. It hit my shoulder with a crinkling sound and landed on the floor. I picked it up, sighing pointedly. “Don’t go too far. We don’t really know what’s out there yet.”
*
Our houses butted up against a swath of open field, big enough for a full-fledged game of soccer, that ended, abruptly, with a row of trees. Up against the woods stood a rotting jungle gym with a dented slide. Marlena and I would lie there hundreds of times over the next year, our legs dangling off the platform edge, blowing smoke into the sky. Winter, spring, summer, fall, tenting a garbage bag over the wooden stakes like a roof when it rained, meeting at all hours of the night to talk. About the future, I think, and the past, and what we wanted and who we were and especially who we weren’t. Sometimes we’d take a harmonica with us, Marlena’s busted-ass guitar, and sing until our throats were raw.
I walked straight toward the pines. Trails that started and stopped at random twined through the snowy field, converging a few yards behind our houses into a wider one, tramped down by a steady battering of boot prints. I followed it all the way to the jungle gym, where I crouched under the slide to light my cigarette. The path swung a little to the left and disappeared into the trees. I continued on, the woods thickening around me. Thanks to Dad, king of facts, I knew that the unruly rows of trees probably meant the forest had been around for a long time, since well before loggers struck down miles of Michigan trees and replanted them in perfect lines.
What was I doing here? The same thing happened to my family that happens to many families: my parents decided they didn’t want to be married anymore. But that didn’t exactly explain the move up north, which had driven me, an otherwise steady girl, to scream into my pillow at night, to saw off my own hair with kitchen scissors, to press a razor into the skin on my upper thigh until it drew blood. (Result: I didn’t have the stomach for it.) I turned fifteen the first week of December, a few days before we left Pontiac—it was cheaper, Mom said, to move in the winter. She had hung a Happy Birthday banner up in the living room, emptied, by then, of everything that made it ours.