Our house is dark when I arrive. The twilight shepherds in indigo clouds, shrouding stars above the neglected roof. I hit the button. The garage opens with its usual screech and I watch as a light pops on in the den. My stomach seizes and I breathe through it, snagging my bag from the passenger’s seat. I gingerly pick my way through the cardboard box and plastic bag–riddled garage floor. Inside the house it’s hot, sticky. The thick scent of stale cigarettes permeates everything: the flocked green wallpaper, the threadbare tufted sofa, the shredding vinyl chairs in the kitchen. It’s in my clothes. My books. My bed. They say you get used to a smell, become scent-blind when surrounded by it for long enough. But that’s not true here. Sometimes I think the smell is the only thing holding the house together.
“Abigail!” Mom calls. I stand in the dining room and dump my bag on the cluttered tabletop. As approaching wheels rumble on the kitchen linoleum, dread overtakes me. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I had to stay late,” I say.
She enters the room. The rolling grumble of her wheelchair dampens on the stained Berber carpet of the dining room. “I need my pills. You didn’t put my pills on the counter this morning.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot.”
“Is that the excuse you’re going to use when I’m dead? You forgot to give me my pills?”
“I’ll get them now,” I say. I try to get around her wheelchair but she grabs my upper arm. Her fingers press into the stitches and I wince, slicing pain stinging my skin.
“If you want me dead, girl, all you have to do is wait.” Her voice is low and gravelly and full of loathing. “It will happen in due time.”
“I don’t want you dead,” I say through the pain, and it doesn’t sound as believable as it should.
She lets go. “Uh-huh.”
I look down at her as I pass. The scars map her scalp, lacy and intricate, tufts of graying blond hair on the unmarred skin. It could be beautiful in its graceful lines if it didn’t mark time like a gravestone.
Mom whirls around and zooms back into the kitchen behind me. She’s too strong today, like she was last week when I forgot to leave her meds on the counter. I grab the stepping stool from the pantry. The pill bottles are on the highest shelf in the Tupperware cabinet, where she can’t get to them. She may be strong, but she can’t get out of the chair except to hoist herself into bed or onto the toilet.
“Where’s the car?” she asks, knowing damn well it’s in the garage.
“Garage.”
“Surprised you didn’t wreck it.”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll do it again soon enough.”
The words make my chest ache. But she knows that. That’s why she said them. She ensures there’s a daily reminder of what I did. As if my father’s absence isn’t enough.
“Aunt Jinny called today,” Mom says.
“Oh?” I drop one blue pill on a small bread plate, followed by one white and two green. I should know the names, but I don’t. I know which pills make her sleep, though. The peach-colored ones. “What did she have to say?”
“Wanted to talk about the money again.” She wheels closer. “Hurry up with those damn pills. I’m getting shaky.”
I scoop them up in my palm and hold them out for her.
Mom’s fingers clamp around my wrist and she pulls her face close to mine. “Jinny said she thinks someone has been siphoning money from the account. She thinks it’s me, but it’s not me.” Her breath is sour. She hasn’t eaten for hours.
“I don’t have access to the account yet. You know that.”
She releases my wrist, and I drop the pills into her hand. “Fix my Diet Pepsi. I’m going to watch my show.” After placing the pills in her lap, she wheels through the kitchen and into the den, where she parks herself next to the coffee table and lights up a Parliament. “There’s still glass in the corner,” she says, jerking her head to back of the room. On the wall, a dripping stain of Diet Pepsi, and a small, almost undetectable splatter of blood.
My blood.
My arm pulses where she dug her fingers into the stitches.
The TV is loud when it flicks on. It’s too loud for her to hear me take down the other bottle of pills, the only ones left on the shelf. The peach-colored ones. It’s too loud for her to hear me crush them up. At first two, then I add in one more. It’s too loud for her to hear me pour the Diet Pepsi and stir and stir and stir, hoping the crushed pills dissolve. It’s too loud for her to hear me curse when they don’t.
I scoop out half the sludge at the bottom of the plastic cup—because I’m never giving her a real glass again—and place it on a plate. The other half dissolves well enough in the Pepsi, hiding in the bubbles. I mix what’s left on the plate into a spoonful of peanut butter, and hand her both.
She lifts a brow at the spoon in her hand.
“You need something in your stomach,” I say, and nod to the pills nestled in her lap.
Mom sneers in my direction, kicks back the meds, and takes a long swig of her Diet Pepsi. I wait for a reaction but she only coughs, wipes her mouth, and licks the peanut butter off the spoon.
“Is this super crunchy?” she asks.
I nod. Smile. “Just how you like it.” I sink down into the sofa and feign interest in her Hollywood gossip show. I examine her face in the jaundiced lamplight. Her forehead is crosshatched with ever-cracking lines and her cheeks with branching, broken capillaries. Beneath that wrinkled cage of stress and cruelty her fine features still hold symmetrical beauty. When we lived in Miami, I remember her lying by our pool, face tracking the sun like a marigold, a sweating rum and Diet Pepsi next to her. She laughed a lot back then. We always preferred her drunk, Daddy and me.
I tunnel my fingers under the hairpiece clipped to my head and snag a strand growing from my scalp. I twirl and pull. And then another. Twirl, pull, twirl, pull, twirl, pull, while I wait.
Thirty-five minutes later, she’s slurring her words. The ash is long on her cigarette and perilously close to collapse. I pick it out from between her fingers, my palm catching the ash, and toss it in her empty plastic cup.
“I stopped,” she mumbles. “I stopped loving you.”
It doesn’t shock me. I’ve heard it before. “I know,” I say, slapping the ash off my palm. The words rush from my mouth before she says them. It’s easier to hear it in my own voice. “I ruined your body. Killed your husband.”
“You got out of your car seat.” She tries to wheel toward me but her hands slip. “Why the hell did you get out of your car seat?”
You hit Daddy, I want to say, like I want to say every time she asks me that question, but I only tell her I don’t remember why I unlatched my seat belt and dove forward. Before the accident, after one of their arguments, I overheard Mom tell Aunt Jinny that her fights with Dad were only little incidents.
I pick up the spoon she’d licked clean from its spot on the floor, snag the cup from her lap, and take them to the kitchen. By the time I return she’s snoring, head hanging and mouth drooling. As I drape the granny-square afghan on her lap, she snorts awake and mumbles, “I should have aborted you when I had the chance.”
Ah, there it is. The statement that finally pierces me, like she’s been throwing darts at me all night, and bull’s-fucking-eye. Finally this one strikes me in the chest. I let the afghan slip to the floor and leave.
* * *
Kirby lives on a quiet street in Birdland, a neighborhood Grandma loved when she was alive. She wanted to buy a house there when she and Granddad moved to Middleborough. Not the concrete, louver-windowed house Mom and I live in now, aged beyond its years by nicotine and hostility.
I roll my car into the darkness of a broken streetlight across from Kirby’s house. The address wasn’t difficult to find. They’re the only Mathesons in town.
Their driveway is empty. No cars are parked out front. The house is dark. I crack the window and sink down in my seat, leaving my phone facedown in the cupholder so the cold bright
screen doesn’t highlight my face in the night. I peel off the fake eyelash and pluck a few of the real ones left while I wait. A couple of houses down, a person drags a trash can to the curb, the rumble of its wheels the only noise besides a barking dog.
My eyes drift closed.
I allow myself to think of Kirby, because I need to think of him. I imagine what we’d talk about, how he’d touch me. I’d show him all I know about my body and what I know about his. Where to kiss, stroke, lick. He’d be impressed by my experience, excited by my willingness, eager to explore whenever we could steal away from school. From our homes. From my home.
I pop awake when the busted muffler reverberates around the corner. The thrill of it shoots me straight in my seat, only to slump back down as the headlights sweep across my windshield, then highlight the facade of the Matheson house and finally flick off as he parks in the driveway.
Kirby swings the door open and ducks out of the car. He’s wearing the same sweatshirt, same jeans, sneakers, a backpack draped over his shoulder. I love his height, a tallness that will eclipse my own frame, and his gait is long and apathetic, as if the world should be in a hurry to get to him and not the other way around. Unlike his rush to leave the grocery store earlier.
Another car pulls up to the front of the house.
“Kirb,” a man calls through the passenger’s-side window. “Out of the driveway!”
Kirby turns from the front door and sneers back at the man. He dumps his backpack on the front steps and stomps back to his car. The two exchange parking spots. As the man approaches the front door I realize it must be his father. His build is lanky like Kirby’s but he’s taller, skinnier, with a hunched back and haphazard hair.
His father sweeps an open palm to the front door while peering into Kirby’s car.
Kirby doesn’t move from his place behind the wheel. The bones of his face are lit from below, the sterile light of a phone blinding him to his father’s frustrated invitation. His father gives up, goes inside, the door thudding closed behind him.
Kirby is close, parked catty-cornered to me, so I slip lower, my eyes at the horizon of the car window. He shakes his head at whatever he sees on the phone. Raising his head, his face goes slack, staring off into the middle-distance. I jerk back when he explodes. One punch into the dashboard, two, three. I can’t hear what he yells—it’s too muffled by the glass and steel surrounding him—but I know with the deepest part of me that I can help.
He’s in pain and I’m in pain. He’ll see when we’re together that we can save each other. All I need is the chance to coax him into understanding this.
Kirby storms out of the car and into the house. A light turns on in a room on the side of the house. I don’t debate it in my head long because the desire to see him in his environment lures me deep into the shadows of the side yard.
Through the parted curtains, one shaded lamp throws off a sallow glow. I creep closer, peer in through the sandy dirt smeared on the glass. His room is small, perhaps depressingly typical. A neatly made bed. Posters on the walls. His abandoned backpack slumps on a desk chair. Spare and monklike, it’s a cloistered, solitary room. I think back to his doodle-laced notebook in debate class, his scattered counterpoints, and his muddled arguments. Ah. So this room is an ordered place for a cluttered mind.
That’s information I can use.
I duck against the wall as he comes back into the room. He throws the window open and I shrink back. I sense he’s motionless, standing before the window, staring out at the nothingness. He murmurs a soft curse.
I want to take a few steps and stand before him, gently caress his face. Tell him we’ll both be all right if we’re together.
Thick rain drops thud on the ground, fluttering leaves above me. I wait for what seems like fifteen minutes for him to turn away from the window, and then I dash back to the car, rivulets of water snaking down my arms and legs. I flip wet bangs from my eyes and back the car up until I have a better view of his bedroom window.
I strip the fake lashes away and resist fingernail-tweezing the tiny hairs left on my lids. I rub my eyes, but the compulsion to pick is too strong. I find a single strand of hair on the left side of my head, where I’ve allowed the hair to grow back into short tufts, and twirl and pull—the pop of the root escaping the skin calming me.
It’s time, I decide. And without further thought—because there’s no need for it—I get my phone and send the e-mail.
It’s before sunrise when I wake, the clock in the dash reading well after six thirty a.m. I push myself upright, stretch my neck to the right, to the left, and drive away from Kirby’s house. The headlights pick up the swirling fog on the asphalt as I speed home. In the den, the lamp still burns in the window. The garage screeches open and I run inside.
Even though I’d rather get right in the shower, I check on Mom. She’s still slumped over in her wheelchair in the den, the afghan resting unused at her feet. I approach slowly. Quietly.
“Mom?” I whisper.
No answer.
“Mom?” I say again, this time more loudly, and wait for a reaction.
Nothing.
I reach out and nudge her shoulder. It’s warm. A begrudged relief.
Her head tilts back, forward again.
“Mom!” I shout. When she lets out a wet snore and a curse, I know she’s fine.
I’m too excited when I arrive at the library forty-five minutes later. But Kirby isn’t there. I drag myself along with the day, searching for Kirby in the halls at school, in the cafeteria, even trying to inconspicuously walk by his locker a number of times, but I don’t see him. When he slumps into his chair in seventh-period debate, calm overtakes me and I know the two of us will be okay.
I stay behind after school, a notebook open on the desk in front of me, and I stare at the line of cars filing out of the parking lot outside. The waiting is excruciating, and I wonder why I keep doing this to myself. Hold out the carrot for the donkey and hope it bites.
I grab a strand of hair to keep my shaking hand busy and twirl. Pop. Twirl. Pop. And another. And another. And another until I exhale a long, slow breath through my pursed lips. I’m calm. Ready. I replace the hairpiece on the side of my head and focus on the open notebook, strewn with a latticework of hair.
There’s a knock on the classroom door.
“Ms. Leeland?” Kirby says.
I look up. Smile warmly. Close the notebook. “Hi, Kirby,” I say.
“Hey,” he says. “Got your e-mail. You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, come in,” I say, gesturing to the chair on the other side of my desk. “And will you please close the door behind you?”
HYPOTHETICAL TIME TRAVEL
The walls in this house are thin—thinner than at home—so I can hear my parents clearly in the next bedroom. During my fifteen years of life, I’ve made it a policy to tune out when they argue, but this time, I need to hear. I point the remote at the small TV on the antique dresser and turn the volume way down.
“I can’t do this!” Mom sounds nearly hysterical. “And I won’t. So stop asking!”
I’m sitting propped against a pile of lace-edged pillows in a guest room where the walls are covered with paintings of flowers in vases, Victorian tea sets, and fluffy cats. At my feet, Pepper, my dog, opens his eyes and jerks his head up. I pat the lumpy mattress a few times until he crawls up the length of the quilt to lie beside me.
“I know it’s hard,” Dad says. “But we have to figure it out.”
“We don’t have to figure out anything. I already told you. This is up to you. Make your decision and leave me out of it!”
There’s silence for a moment, and then the sound of their door gently closing. Dad’s voice comes through the wall beside me just as loud as it was before. “Grace, please!”
If my brother were here, this would have been the point when we’d roll our eyes at each other. I’d have whispered something like, “For two otherwise intelligent people, you’d think they’
d know that closing a door won’t make it soundproof while they’re yelling.”
He’d have responded with, “Intelligent? Them?”
Then I’d have gotten annoyed because, really, they’re very smart—Mom’s a crash reconstruction engineer and Dad was a computer programmer before he started writing gadget reviews from home three years ago—but Kirby never gave them any credit or cut them any slack.
Of course the fact that my brother isn’t here to criticize them, and never will be again, is exactly why my parents are so wrecked. They have decisions to make: Should he be buried or cremated? Now that they’ve found a minister willing to perform a memorial service, should we go ahead and have one for our family? If yes, now or later? And how much later?
“I understand what you’re feeling,” Dad tells Mom, “because I’m feeling it too. Believe me. But Kirby was our son, and despite how things ended, we’ve spent over sixteen years loving that kid. Making these decisions and going through this process together is going to help us get some closure—”
“And remind us that he spent all those years not loving us back?”
“I don’t . . .” Dad pauses for several seconds. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“I do. Because a person who loves their family”—Mom is gasping between words, like she’s fighting to keep from crying—“who has empathy, who isn’t evil, they don’t get a gun and start firing. They . . . they wouldn’t be capable of it. But he did. He was.” Her voice breaks. “So that’s how I know he didn’t love us.”
There’s a creaking noise, and I imagine that my father must be sitting beside Mom on their borrowed bed. I rub Pepper’s ears as I strain to hear Dad’s next words.
“Honey, that wasn’t our son. You know as well as I do that when people are going through something, they can lose themselves—”
“Jack, don’t.” Mom’s words come out hard. “This isn’t like what happened to your brother. Or like when you lost your job.”
“I know. But in a way—”
“No! Roger only wanted to hurt himself, and you didn’t get around to hurting anyone. But Kirby planned this. He wounded kids. He murdered them! And he did it in front of Carah. I can’t ever forgive that. Any of it.”