*
I see Jimmy once a year or so, at Christmas usually. I call him on his birthday and he calls me on mine and we talk for twenty minutes, half an hour, and it’s always better, easier, than I expect. Our child selves creep back into our voices, that old sibling shorthand. He ribs me, asks about Liam, and I annoy him, act younger and less capable than I am. When my big brother corrects me, even if he’s wrong, I don’t fight back. He lives in an old copper-mining town in the UP where the cliff faces are swirled with mineral-green veins, and black bears, Jimmy says, come right up onto his back deck. Liam and I visited him there a couple of years ago, renting a car and driving it up from Detroit, stopping at Mom’s on the way. The house is stick-built and decorated like a rental—generic landscapes on the walls, plaid rugs, itchy blue blankets in the guest room, where my brother keeps a bunk bed for no reason I can discern. In the winter, Jimmy covers the panes with sheets of tight plastic. He makes less money than I do, but not so much less, building summer homes on Lake Superior. He gets stockier and stockier, and each time I see him I think he might be getting fat until we hug. He looks, as an adult, nothing like Dad did, except for this thing he does when he tells a story, squeezing his hands, giving away his eagerness for you to laugh. The woman he’s been dating for four years or so lives a couple of miles away from him in a house of her own. They haven’t moved in together and have no plans to, at least none that he tells me about, and so in the story I have invented, Janie, a woman I have never met but who lingers on the periphery of all his anecdotes and also the pictures he sends now and then, has suffered a terrible tragedy at the hands of a man, and so will never fully let my brother in. I like that story better than the other one, which is that he’s the one who won’t.
*
Marlena’s body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive—deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she’d no doubt tell me all about soon.
Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.
*
In the weeks after Marlena died, I began to have trouble being alone. Day and night I checked behind my closet doors over and over, convinced I felt a pair of eyes peering through the slats. I slept comatose, for twelve, fourteen hours straight, or not at all. Mostly, that time was full of Mom—Mom tearing the sheets off my bed, Mom packing up boxes of stuff for Sal, Mom snipping the plastic top off a freeze pop, Mom pulling the car to the side of the road because I’m sure that something’s wrong with the wheels, Mom with her arms around Jimmy in the Walmart checkout aisle, his face blank as a piece of paper. Mom even handled most of the details of Marlena’s funeral.
Mom still looks young for her age. Except for her hands, which, from some combination of years of professional cleaning and genetics, are the opposite of feminine. By fifty she’d be unable to straighten out her ring and pointer fingers, and would lie awake at night with zapping pains running through the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. When I was a teenager it sometimes scared me to see them, resting witchily on her lap, filled with blood, unhappy-looking and at odds with her face, her thinness, her long and not yet gray hair. After moving to New York, I never cleaned for money again, but still I see her hands in mine. When I wear nail polish they look absurd. I understand my mother better now, as I learn what it feels like to move through the world with her dimensions. I massage lotion into my knuckles, my mother’s knuckles, into the cracking skin around my cuticles, and I think of her, too, Marlena, who would have gotten her mother back if she lived even a little longer, in this tiny, physical way, just by being herself.
*
A few months after Marlena’s funeral at St. Patrick’s—her father howling in the very first row all through the ceremony, Sal in his terrible little suit—Mom arranged for me to go back to Concord, as a boarder, for my senior year. She contacted the school and explained the circumstances; she got my scholarship reinstated, plus a little extra on the basis of need. My grandmother on my dad’s side coughed up the last five thousand and change because Mom convinced her, somehow, that I was in danger. I can’t imagine what that conversation might have looked like. My dad’s mother was never a part of our lives. Maybe she was feeling guilty about Dad, and it was her way of paying us off. Mom made me write her a long and passionate thank-you note; I filled two pages with frilly cursive, my hand cramping.
Without Marlena, there’s nothing, really, to remember. A quick, wet spring, followed by a quick, hot summer. A revolving stack of books; pink evenings and the microwave and empty packs of cigarettes. There was one drunken night, me and Tidbit and Greg, holed up in my bedroom, talking about her, Tidbit crying and crying, bent over into her own lap, making an animal noise. I put my arm around her, but I felt a cold and disgusted pity, the icy beginning of a numbness that would follow me through my life, presenting itself especially in moments when other people showed emotion. “It was Bolt,” Greg said, mumbling his theory, how it wasn’t first degree but accidental manslaughter, TV talk, she fell and he left her there, he didn’t want to be involved, he was obsessed with her, we all knew it, why else was he always around? He wasn’t stalking her, I knew, but I didn’t say so, didn’t interrupt to tell him how just as many times as not, Marlena would be the one trying to get in touch with Bolt.