The story was metaphorical, had to be—murder simply wasn’t done in Mill Valley. Maybe something else had happened to Calista’s mom. Maybe Calista feared or, in the reckless destructiveness of teenage desire, wished it would.
Molly remembered this intensity of feeling. At sixteen she’d spent her days walking in circles, warm wind carrying dust over the sidewalk to rasp in her lashes, and with it the smell of the Central Valley, of sun-baked manure and smog. The houses on her street were stuccoed, pale as ghosts, alike except for the details meant to convey the illusion of personal taste—a square or curved front door, a pewter or copper light fixture, a trim of white or brown or cornflower blue. Around the community (for “community” was what they called it) wrapped a high cinder-block wall. There were so few colors there, no tall trees—as a teenager she’d felt alien and alone with her Bob Dylan T-shirts and her Doc Martens rip-offs and the claustrophobic rage that she could not explain to anyone, because her sister was little and her father was working and her mother was gone and there was no clear reason why she should be in any particular moment so furious, so bored.
The next day, Molly was sitting down at her desk for lunch when Calista floated past her open door in a white cotton dress and white woven sandals. She was alone.
“Calista?” Molly called. “Come in. I want to talk to you.”
Calista hesitated. Molly understood. As a kid, she’d clung to doorways too; she’d liked the safety they offered, the option of being neither in nor out, neither here nor there. But then Calista came inside, and slid into a chair opposite Molly’s. She wouldn’t look at Molly, quite. She wouldn’t commit to looking anywhere. Molly glanced back over her own shoulder but there was nothing—just the whiteboard, blank, with rectangles of fluorescent light reflecting off its surface.
“Your Gatsby paper,” she said. “There were some interesting ideas in there, really compelling stuff.”
“Really?” In Calista’s face Molly detected a flicker of interest, or hope.
“Definitely. But the thing is, it was more a stream of consciousness than an essay. Did you realize that?”
Calista crossed her arms and gazed vaguely away. Molly saw the error she had made. She said carefully, “What happens in this story, is it something you worry about? Something happening to your mother?”
“What do you mean?” Calista said.
Molly paused. “You know, my mother left when I was twelve.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“No,” Molly said. This wasn’t strictly true. Her mother had never stopped sending her emails and postcards, even misguided birthday gifts, from the various cities she passed through: L.A. and Portland and Austin and Vegas, Nashville and even New York. Molly accepted these scraps of love but sent nothing in return. And her mother continued to roam, hunting for something she’d probably never find. She wondered if it had been worth it.
“My mom almost died,” Calista said suddenly. She reached out to skim her hand along the edge of the desk. “Breast cancer. I was in middle school. It was like, we kept waiting for her to die, but she just kept getting worse and worse. That’s what no one tells you, how slow it is. It takes forever, and eventually you just want it to be over with, one way or the other.”
Calista had never before uttered so many words in a row in Molly’s presence. Molly’s heart quickened; she stopped herself from reaching for the hand that trembled just slightly on the other side of the desk. “I’m so sorry, Calista. That must have been so hard on you.”
Calista shrugged. “It’s okay, she got better. It was weird, though. No one told me she was going to die, and no one told me she was going to live.”
There was nothing to say to this, other than: “It must have been a great relief, to have everything back the way it was.”
At that, Calista’s eyes shifted into focus. Her irises were startling, stippled with gold. She said, in a voice that was cynical and strangely weary, weary of Molly, weary of all the adults in the world who could not, or would not, understand her, “Nothing ever goes back.”
What did it mean? Molly wanted Calista to believe she’d been right to confide in her, to know that she saw her. But communicating with Calista Broderick was like shouting through a block of ice. If only Molly could find the right thing to say, she might break the ice and release the girl from herself. She set her elbows on the desk, leaned in. “You are such a perceptive, intelligent person, Calista. You could do anything you set your mind to, but I see you just floating along. Why not try?”