*
I carried the cake out to Marlena, who was sitting at the kitchen table in jeans and one of my collarless Tshirts, her hair in a half ponytail, her face lit up in places by the candlelight. “Happy birthday,” we sang, Mom and Jimmy harmonizing, a wetness only I saw, I think, flooding Marlena’s eyes when I placed the cake in front of her. She blew out the candles in three tries, cursing herself for being a smoker.
“I’ve never had a birthday cake like this before,” she said. “What happened to the B?” Jimmy shrugged, his face giving him away.
I’ve gone over and over that year, and this is where I often pause. This, right here, in our little cardboard house with our too-sweet box cake, Marlena’s eighteenth birthday, an instant that in memory is somehow removed from the fact of her death, as if she were spared, still around somewhere, moving on with her life, thirty-six at the time of this writing, an age I will be soon. Look at her, sitting at our table. She’s waiting to find out which of all the things that could possibly happen, will. I need someone else to see her. That half ponytail, bound together with one of my hair ties, her ears sticking out a little, the candlelight glowing through them, pinking her skin, the shadow of her collarbone, all her thoughts, all the things she wanted that I never even knew, everything we lost.
Marlena only had two things to open, since Jimmy’s present was mysteriously “on its way.” From Mom, a used cookbook with recipes for thirty-minute meals, and a white button-down shirt. “I’m sorry they’re so practical, sweetie, but anyone with little kids around needs to know how to make food fast. And the shirt’s for work. So you don’t always have to go washing the one you have.” Mom was on her third glass of wine, and we were all sweeties.
“Thank you. It’s perfect. I’ll have to tell them that at the hearing. ‘Can cook at least ten kid-approved thirty-minute meals’!”
“You can practice on me,” said Jimmy. “I’ll eat all that Frito pie shit.”
“Isn’t it so funny how you just can’t imagine where you’re gonna wind up? I never saw you guys coming, and now you’re like family.” She gave us one of her too-big, too-beautiful smiles, that one she deployed when she was trying to get something.
“Open mine,” I interrupted, hating myself.
I’d wrapped the pin up in newspaper and taped it all around with Scotch tape, so it was stupidly hard to open.
“Is it a bomb?” Jimmy asked.
Marlena sucked the frosting off her knife and slid it under the tape.
“Where’d you find this?” Her voice, flat. My stomach fell.
“I didn’t take it. I just found it, on the floor. By the couch.” The lie was reflexive.
She held it up to a candle flame in the center of the table and then brought it in close to her eye, a jeweler inspecting something dubious. “It’s been lost for a long time. I thought it was gone.” Her Marlena-ness was fading, turning her back into a regular teenager, all that happiness gone. No one could tell but me—Mom too buzzed, Jimmy too stoned.
“That your pin?” he said, reaching for it, but she didn’t pass it to him. She popped open the door, closed it, popped it open again.
“I had to get it fixed. I didn’t want to tell you I found it because I was going to surprise you! I wanted to fix it and surprise you.” I didn’t know why I was apologizing.
“It’s good as new, anyway.”
“What’s that?” Mom asked. “Kind of ugly, isn’t it?”
“Something I used to wear a lot,” said Marlena, and she poked the needle through her shirt.
*
October came, as it was always going to. The day before Marlena’s custody hearing, we wandered through the woods chain-smoking, a tiny bit drunk off the forty we passed back and forth as we rehearsed the questions Candice told Marlena to be prepared to answer. Leaves clung to the sleeves of the sweatshirts we wore, hoods up, drawstrings tied against the chill. Marlena was breaking out—on her chin, a zit the size of a pencil eraser. I was on my period; hers still hadn’t come back. I noted its absence every month, jealously. The air smelled like moss and rot.
“Ms. Joyner,” I said in a dramatic baritone, my fake lawyer-voice. “What are your responsibilities at Mulvie’s? Describe your weekly schedule.”
“It makes me nervous to hear you talk in that voice, and you suck at it.” She finished the bottle and placed it carefully between the roots of a tree, as if we were going to return to it on our way back, pick it up and invent a recycle bin.
“You want me to talk in my regular voice?”
“I’m going to blow this. I can’t talk in front of a room. Plus all those people know my dad. How’re they not going to be thinking of him when they look at me?”
“Maybe you should acknowledge it. Hey—I know my dad fucked up, but I’m not him, and I hope you won’t take his crimes into consideration, or something, when you’re making this decision? Are you getting kind of cold?” I had cramps, coming and going, waves of pressure. I wanted to go back, but it seemed insensitive to ask if we could turn around.
“I wish Candice could just speak for me.”
“Doesn’t it matter, what Sal wants?”
“Who even knows what Sal would say if they asked him if he wanted to live with me. He’s been such a little shithead lately.”
“Probably don’t call him a shithead.”
“I’m the only one who knows how to deal with that little shithead!” she yelled to the treetops, kind of singing the word head, so that it ricocheted off the branches, vibrating into the sky. Then, quieter, to me: “Are you convinced?”
*
I hardly slept that night. Marlena kept sighing and turning over, pulling the blanket with her, baring one of my knees, my foot, to the cool air. I knew she wanted to talk, but I had an in-class essay in English, first period, and I was nervous about having to write four pages in less than an hour. “Hmm,” she said, a sigh that turned into an actual sound, and flopped onto her stomach, pulling the cover completely off my legs. I tugged the blanket back hard enough to uncover some of her skin, too. “Sorry,” she whispered, and got up, moving around my room in the dark for a few minutes before leaving, shutting my door behind her with an overly cautious click. That woke me for good. I lay there until the window went gray with morning, anxious about where she’d gone, hoping she was just on the couch or with Jimmy, not off with Bolt or someone worse.
Just before my alarm was set to ring, she opened my bedroom door and turned on all the lights.
“Wake up,” she said, holding a coffee mug. “What do you think I should wear?”
“I’m sleeping.”
My alarm went off.