“I just sit, you know, in those chairs they have for the men, and wait for her,” he said. I sometimes think you can tell how a man feels about his wife by his tone when he says the word, and Sal said it with pride. I was happy for him, and said so. Sal thought New York was an interesting place, but he would never want to live here. His wife, though, she just loved it, he told me. He had a tattoo on his neck, a small black anchor. I suddenly remembered standing with him in my mother’s bathtub, trimming the hair above his ears with a pair of red-handled scissors. Marlena sat on the bathroom sink, directing.
He ordered a beer. After a beat, staring at the laminated menu, I asked for more hot water. If I took it one choice at a time, it seemed doable. To order water. Something, anything else. Whenever Sal tried to rest his arm on the table the whole thing shifted to one side. We made small talk for a while, and then he told me that he’d found my information on my old freelance website. That his wife—they’d only been married, I came to realize, a few months—had encouraged him to look up people who knew Marlena, because he didn’t have many connections to his real family and those connections were not the kind he wanted to preserve. Sometimes he felt a little lost, he said, without those roots. When he mentioned his parents, it took me a second to realize he meant his foster parents. He had a solid job managing a lakeside bar in a resort town near the Upper Peninsula. He confessed that he barely remembered me—just that I was nice, and I was shy, and that I’d been around. Greg, who he’d stayed in loose touch with, had told him that I was in New York.
Sal praised Marlena a lot—her beauty, her intelligence. She had a mythological quality for him too. Her death was a “tragedy.” He didn’t mention the drugs, specifically—perhaps he didn’t really know—but he said that she had her demons. A little blushingly, a hitch in his voice, he told me that he tried to be better because of her. He’d never been much of a student but he stayed away from partying, that whole life. People didn’t realize the danger. He drank fast, though, in long gulps that lowered the level of beer in his glass, centimeters at a time. I could taste the beer, just watching him—the cold, sour mouthful, the buzzing on the tongue, that yellow, wheaty flavor. He was so young when she died. He kept referring to it as an accident, and so I did too. Marlena was more like a mom to him than a sister, Sal said, and because of that, he never really knew her.
“What was she like?” he asked.
I tried to explain. He ordered another beer. “Water,” I said, again, and drank it while I talked and talked.
When we hugged goodbye, all the things I still knew that he never would, the details of her he hungered for, were between us like a presence. I gave him Marlena’s pin, tucked in a sealed envelope with a handwritten note. When he took it, superstitious as it sounds, I felt relief. A long-set curse, unraveling.
The next morning, I walked to a church near my apartment. I arrived at a quarter after eight, late enough that I almost turned around. Inside, I followed the paper sign to the basement, where, after grabbing a cup of coffee, I took an open chair near the front. Fifteen people or so, most, like me, dressed for work. One by one, they stood up. They told their stories. I’d told mine before, in that very room, but this time I didn’t know how to start. I stared into my lap, at my fingers twisting a drink napkin into a shreddy cone, and stayed silent. A week later, I came back.
Marlena
Our real ending was a few days before that dull Sunday in the park. A school night, I want to say Thursday, November and cold, cold, cold. The two of us up in the jungle gym, legs dangling toward the earth, snow falling so slow it would take a lifetime to reach our faces. Her teasing me about how I didn’t answer her texts all day, how I was too busy now, already forgetting about her.
“I knew this hero-worship phase of yours was only temporary,” she said.
“Oh, shut up.” I tilted my head onto her shoulder and looked skyward, past the curve of her chin. Her hair itched my forehead. The world was a bowl tipped over—huge, but we could see the end, the curved line where it met the earth.
“You’ll be out of here soon. I’m just getting ready. College, wherever, whatever you’re gonna be.”
“What do you think I’m going to be?”
I wanted so badly to know. Even then, I thought she could tell me. So close, just up ahead, we were in our futures—tasting sushi for the first time, screaming at each other on some city side street, texting good luck on the first day of big jobs, falling in and out of love, father-less and stronger for it, learning how to walk in heels and trim our own bangs and not blow all our money at once and how to explain what we liked and didn’t, speaking up in public, driving cars alone to no particular place, embracing each other after a year apart, growing our hair out and cutting it all off, wandering through endless forgettable minutes, singing our old and still favorite songs, saying remember when, remember when, remember when. I believed in those girls, our older, wiser selves.
“Whatever you want,” she said, and kissed my scalp with a mwah, like a cartoon mom. “Just try not to forget, okay? When you get there. Promise to come back and visit me. I’ll be an old lady with a thousand cats and I’ll need the company. I’ll be desperate for it, probably, stuck in Silver Lake.”
“You won’t be stuck here.”
“Promise,” she said, and I did, a lie so easy it felt like the truth.
I don’t know how long we were there. An hour? More? It got later. We sat up, smacking our legs to warm them. I was ready to go home, but I stayed a little while for her. I had nowhere else, yet, to be. We jumped off the wooden platform, knees buckling, that old dare, and brushed the stinging flakes off our palms. Arms linked, we traveled the hundred yards or so through the grass, powder clinging to our boots, until we reached the row of trash cans between our two houses. Silver Lake silent, the trailers almost pretty in the slow-falling snow, their windows dark, not a car on the road.
“Want to come over for a bit? I’ll fix your math.”
“I’ve got to get up, Mar,” I said, annoyed by the touch of need in her voice.
And we went in. One of us turned first, one of us was already gone. Into our empty houses, two girls at the end of the world, separated by dim rooms just a few dozen feet apart. One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don’t want it to. Maybe that’s all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won’t let you go.
Marlena—look. I didn’t forget.
I wrote it down.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my mother, Elizabeth, for her patience, understanding, and belief in my imagination. Thank you, Mom, for making this book—and everything else—possible. Your grit and grace inspire me. Thank you also to my siblings, Kelsey, Will, and Taylor, for your mighty, astonishing brains. I am proud to come from you.
For your sustaining belief in this project and my voice, and for the blazing insight I am pretty sure is your superpower, thank you to my agent, Claudia Ballard. I am so grateful to have you on my team.