*
After she moved back into the barn, we still saw each other most days, but she started complaining when I showed up unannounced—more than once, she snapped at me that it was rude. She lost her job at Mulvie’s. When I pressed, she told me it was because the manager was intimidated by how much the customers loved her. Bolt’s car was often parked in her front yard, even when my brother was home. She and Jimmy had been mostly off for weeks, and when I asked about it he dodged me. When I asked her, she said he was controlling. Once, when she was changing, I thought I noticed a bruise on her left arm, irregular and large, just below the crook. Later, in a similar manner—her turned away—I snatched a glimpse of the same spot, laddered with cat-scratch marks, inflamed and hot-looking. She left me a couple of incoherent voicemails. You have no idea when I’m high or not, she said in one of them. Nobody does. Are you okay? I asked her over and over again. I’m fine, is all she ever said. I’m just bored. I was just tired. One evening after school I was studying with Caroline at Mulvie’s when I glanced from my textbook to the window and saw Marlena leaving the Fifth Third Bank, her legs so skinny I couldn’t believe they held her up, her cheeks all puffed out and her hair in a ragged knot. A person I’d never met, a girl I honestly knew nothing about.
New York
I suppose it’s strange that I sometimes direct my inner voice to her—her, or some younger version of myself. There’s an argument we’re always having. But, Marlena, I tell her. It’s November. Scarf weather in New York. It’s been years and years and I’ve stopped hurting myself so much on purpose, taking too many pills, eating nothing just to see if I can. I go to my job. I work hard, and there’s a pleasure in it I never expected. I take the subway with everyone else. Sometimes days, weeks, months go by, and it’s like you never existed at all. I push the garbage bag into the chute and listen to it drop. I ask Liam about his day, I curl up beside him in bed and breathe in the soapy scent of the base of his head. I meet my deadlines. In my early twenties I was pregnant once, for five and a half weeks, and I didn’t think of you until the bitter end, when the blood was coming out in clumps. I’ve never told Liam; it was before him. It hasn’t happened again. Maybe my body won’t let it—maybe I already had my chance.
Being an adult—it is not the same. It is not, actually, anything like what we wanted, what we imagined for ourselves. But, Marlena, mostly it’s better. Sometimes I’m so grateful it feels like a miracle. For the dumbest things—a cup of hot coffee, a funny text from Liam, that I can read George Eliot again and again, every Saturday afternoon, that I hate my body less, that I love my mother more, that I still have time to choose. The colors are less sharp, but I’m glad I’m here.
You’re trying too hard to convince me, I imagine she says.
I forgive her for being a skeptic. She’s still eighteen.
The thing is, Marlena, I’ve messed a lot up. But every day I get to try again.
*
When my mother was a couple of years older than I am now, her husband left her after eighteen years, a relationship that began when she was a teenager. So she bulldozed what remained of her life and started over, making up the rules as she went along. Your mom is ballsy, Marlena used to say. She disagreed with my mother’s choice of place—Silver Lake was Marlena’s greatest enemy—but she loved that Mom had just pointed at a spot on the map and said, Has to be better than where I am. I was too angry to admire anything about Mom’s decision, though there was more logic to it than I recognized at the time—the lure of a small town far away from Pontiac, where everyone knew how Dad had switched one woman out for another, and the cost of living, which was cheap enough that Mom could use her divorce settlement to buy property. What a triumph that place must have been; it makes me proud of her. Even if the bank wound up taking the property back when she left for Ann Arbor without a buyer. When I was in college, Jimmy told me our move up north had been inspired, in part, by an email relationship that had fizzled out just days after we arrived in Silver Lake; I’d had no idea. Even as an adult I didn’t believe Jimmy until he coughed up a name. The man, Jimmy said, had been much older than he’d let on. Mom never talked about it with me.
Now Mom and Roger live in his condo near the University of Michigan campus. He taught her how to ski. They are one of those windbreaker-wearing, granola-eating older couples, red-faced and healthy, Mom more strong than skinny, her biceps bigger than mine. Jimmy sees them all the time—he’s an eight-hour drive away, but there’s lots of skiing in the UP. Roger has no children and not very much money and so I send them checks. He’s just an old man; I never expected him to be my father. When Mom comes to visit us, I feel compelled to make everything seem grander than it is—here, here is our expensive furniture, the money in the bank that grows and grows, the whole coffee beans from the specialty store and our long-haired, hypoallergenic cat. My job, the promotions that come every couple of years, our successful friends, all that we’ve built. Haven’t I done well? Haven’t I come so far? Mom gets a little weepy when she leaves, but I can also sense her relief. Maybe she feels the airlessness of this life, the too-goodness, the list of tasks to get through, the recycling bin full of its secret bottles.