Good Grief: A Novel

  She nods and glances eagerly past me into the house. Her damp hair sticks out in crazy spikes and her cheeks are flushed.

  “Did you walk here?” It’s about two miles between my house and hers. She nods again. “No umbrella?” She shakes her head, clutching the sleeves of her jean jacket in her raw, chapped hands.

  “I brought stuff. I thought I could, like, crash here.” She takes a resolute step forward, but I lean against the doorjamb, blocking the doorway. I want to let her in, but on my terms, which I need to establish before she crosses the threshold.

  “What about school tomorrow?”

  “Spring break.” Her eyes scan the porch. “I need help with my pre-algebra. My teacher’s gonna, like, flunk me if I don’t finish this take-home test.” Her backpack is so swollen that the zipper has burst and she’s fastened it with safety pins.

  I wish Ethan were here to help Crystal with her test. He had a knack for tutoring, asking questions and leading you to the right conclusion, making you feel as though you figured everything out on your own. I picture him spreading Crystal’s books across the big wooden kitchen table and saying, “All right, what have we here!” and somehow managing to make a take-home pre-algebra test fun.

  “I don’t know how to do algebra,” I tell her.

  “Dude! But you’re, like, a grown-up.”

  “I know. Theoretically.” I’ve decided I don’t mind being called dude; if you can’t be called miss anymore, why not dude? It’s better than ma’am.

  Crystal slides off her backpack and collapses cross-legged on the porch. The trees shudder in the wind, water spilling from their leaves. I don’t have the heart to send her home. First of all, I don’t think she’d go home. Even if she did, there’s probably no one there.

  “Come on, you’re getting wet.” I extend my hand and she grabs it, her skin cold and rough against mine. She’s remarkably light as I tug her through the door.

  “Can we order a pizza?” she asks, peeling off her jean jacket and tugging off her clunky boots. They look several sizes too big.

  “You walked in those?”

  “They’re my dad’s.” She lines them up by the front door. As someone who wears her dead husband’s ratty ski sweater, who am I to judge?

  We eat in silence at the kitchen table, pizza staining our paper plates bright orange with grease. I scoop salad onto my plate and reach for Crystal’s.

  “I don’t want that,” she snaps, swatting at the lettuce and tomatoes with her fork.

  “You mean ‘No, thank you’?”

  “Whatever. You sound like my mother.”

  “Well, thankfully I’m not.”

  Crystal plucks the pepperoni off her pizza and piles it like a stack of coins on the edge of her plate, then polishes off her crust in big bites, lips glistening with grease.

  The radiators in the house have only two settings—scorching or off—and the kitchen feels as hot as Death Valley today. Crystal chews and stares into space, absentmindedly pushing up her sweater sleeve. The inside of her forearm is striped with red marks. At first I think she’s drawn all over herself with a red pen. No. The marks are cuts. I stop chewing. She quickly tugs down her sleeve, clenching the cuff in her fist.

  “Don’t like pepperoni?” I swallow and lean toward her.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” she says disdainfully. “Probably I’m going to be a vet.”

  “A veggie vet?”

  She nods. “I saw a nature show on a guy who saves horses? Sometimes he can’t fix them and he has to, like, give them a shot so they die.” She fans herself with her dirty paper plate.

  “Why don’t you take off your sweater?”

  “No.” She finishes her soda in two big gulps. I notice that the cuffs of her sleeves are caked with something reddish brown. Blood? Food or dirt, I hope.

  “Crystal, will you show me your arm? It worries me.”

  “Okay.” But she doesn’t move.

  I reach across the table and wrap a hand around her wrist. With my other hand, I push up her sleeve, then turn over her arm. The soft white underside is slashed with crisscrosses of cuts, raised like argyle. Her skin feels hot and jagged. Crystal sucks in her breath, blinks.

  “What happened here?” I feel my pulse race but try not to seem alarmed. Some of the wounds are fresh, congealed blood at their edges.

  Crystal jerks her arm away and yanks down her sleeve. Her shoulders curl into a hunch.

  I move my plate aside and fight to maintain the same even calm I kept when Ethan’s skin was as gray as oatmeal and he was too weak to climb the stairs. You don’t want a sick person to see in your expression or hear in your voice how frightened you are for them.

  Crystal bites her lower lip.

  “Did you do that on purpose? Like the burns?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Duh.”

  “I see.”

  “Can I smoke?”

  “Okay. On the porch.” Earlier, I decided I wouldn’t let her smoke during our outings, but now smoking seems like coloring with crayons compared to the cuts. I follow her outside, helplessly grabbing a plate of lemon-frosted sugar cookies on the way. We sit in the big wicker chairs, watching cars chug through the wash across the street.

  Crystal tugs up her pant leg, slides a box of Marlboros out of her sock, and lights one. What else is she hiding under that cloak of black clothing?

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” I ask her.

  “Yeah. But it, like, makes it feel better, too.” She exhales a huge puff of smoke.

  “What it?” The wind slams a door shut in the house and I jump.

  “You know.”

  I nod, but I don’t know. I can’t understand being this kind of broken. I want to know, though. “Better? You mean like putting your fist through a wall better?” I can imagine doing this. I know that horrible, helpless feeling of wanting to bang your head against the wall until all the moths and spiders fly out. But cutting yourself?

  “I started out digging my nails into my skin?” Crystal tries to explain. “But cutting works better.” She takes another long drag on her cigarette. “A serrated knife hurts more.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  She shrugs and puffs out little smoke rings that break into question marks and parentheses.

  “I see.” I dig into the cookies, sugar and flour soothing my nerves. “Does your mom know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she say?”

  “She yells. What am I doing to myself, what am I doing to her. She called me a freak. Hello! She’s the freak.” Crystal gets up and stubs out her cigarette in the wet grass.

  “Please don’t leave that there,” I tell her.

  She shoves the cigarette butt in her pocket and slumps back in her chair.

  “What about your dad? Does he know?”

  “I guess not. Since I haven’t, like, seen him for ten years.” Her lower lip trembles and she jams a cookie in her mouth.

  “Right.”

  “I bought him a card for St. Patrick’s Day?” she says thickly, her mouth full. “I send him one every holiday. Even on Passover, and we’re not Jewish.” She swallows. “Even on Secretary’s Day. ‘Dear Dad, Thank you for being such a great secretary. Your coffee’s the best!’” She slides down in her chair and gets to work chewing her nails. “None of the cards have come back. So I think he got them or they’re, like, holding them for him. He might be in Alaska on a fishing boat.” She kicks the porch with her bare foot, thinking. “It would be cool to live on a boat.”

  It’s stopped raining and the sky brightens overhead. We sit listening to the high-pitched whir of the brushes and the rumbling whoosh of the dryers at the car wash.

  “Does anyone else know?” I finally ask. “About the cutting?”

  “I go to a shrink on Tuesdays after school.”

  “Does he help?”

  “It’s a lady.” She shrugs, raises her eyebrows. I can relate to this reaction. How exactly do you know if you’re getting better?
“You’re not grossed out?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “My mom says it’s disgusting.”

  “There’s nothing about you that’s disgusting. Besides, I’ve seen it all: tubes, bandages.” I recall the incision in Ethan’s back, which oozed and scabbed over, how I cleaned it gently with Q-tips, chattering while I worked, trying to distract him from the pain.

  “I’m sorry about Edgar,” Crystal says softly. I think this is the first nice thing she’s said to me.

  “Ethan.”

  “Ethan.” She says his name again slowly, her tongue resting for a moment on her front teeth. “E-than.” She looks at me and wrinkles her nose. “Was he, like, your boyfriend for a long time?”

  I cave in and let Crystal sleep over. She calls her mother’s cell phone twice before reaching her. Roxanne doesn’t seem to mind where Crystal spends the night. Isn’t this beyond the definition of a latchkey kid?

  I set Crystal up in the guest bedroom beside mine. She sits cross-legged on the bed, jams her Walkman headphones over her ears, and cranks up the volume. Tinny music tinkles around her head. I’ve noticed from her CD collection that she favors dead musicians—Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain—as though death’s the ultimate cool sulky thing to do. She pulls her math book from her backpack. The spine makes a cracking noise as she opens it.

  “You’re going to study now? With music?”

  “Dude, I’m going to ace this test.” She is serious, manic.

  I shrug and head off to bed.

  As I crawl under the covers, I wonder if there are cuts anywhere else on Crystal’s body. I’ve never seen her bare legs. Colonel Cranson stares down sternly from the sepia portrait on the wall, his handlebar mustache drooping into a permanent frown. Mrs. Cranson’s black dress is buttoned to her chin, and her slick black hair is pulled into a tight braid. The sheets are chilly as I tug them over my shoulders. I still hate sleeping alone, hate the absence of heat and weight and someone to discuss the day with. I pull The Joy of Cooking from my night table, lay it open across my lap, and turn to meringues. I imagine the Cransons spooning in this big brass bed. Maybe the colonel wore a nightshirt and cap, like the man in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” I inhale the crisp smell of the bleached pillowcase, imagining Mrs. Cranson’s long white eyelet nightgown. Then the bed is a cloud and I’m floating and the colonel is leaning over to whisper that the house’s smoke alarm is shrieking.

  Fire, Crystal, slippers, run, my sleepy brain tells my feet.

  As I lurch out of bed, the cookbook smacks the floor. I bound across the hall and shove open Crystal’s door. She’s perched on the edge of her still-made bed, peering into a metal trash can. Thin gray smoke spirals toward the ceiling. An orange flame curls over the top of the can, then dips back inside.

  “Crystal!”

  “Take x and y and shove them up your ass,” Crystal grumbles, tearing a page from her math book and stuffing it into the fire.

  “Crystal!”

  She stands and stares into the trash basket, her arms straight and stiff at her sides. “What?”

  “Fire, that’s what!”

  “It’s in the can.” She scratches through the fabric of her sweater at the scabs on her arms.

  “My God!” I scramble down to the kitchen for the fire extinguisher and sprint back up the stairs two at a time, repeating the words I once learned during an office safety drill: Pull, aim, squeeze, sweep. Pull, aim, squeeze, sweep.

  As I grab the fire extinguisher’s cold chrome handle, yellow foam shoots across the room, hitting the trash can and caking in globs on the bedspread. The fire dies. I cough, waving my hand in front of my face. Stinky yellow talc coats the Oriental carpet, which is strewn with Crystal’s broken pencils and torn papers. I should have just thrown water in the can.

  “Ruined.” It’s the only word I can muster and I think I mean this relationship, too.

  Crystal sits on the edge of the bed, one foot maniacally tapping the floor.

  “I don’t even know if I can fix this beautiful carpet now.” I hear my voice quaver. “It’s old and fragile.” Like me.

  “I got stuck on a problem.” Crystal flops onto her back and talks to the ceiling. “Besides, you’re the one who wrecked the place with the fire extinguisher.”

  I snatch a towel from the bathroom and swab the carpet, tapping and then pounding the foam. “You got stuck on a problem so you’re going to start another fire?” I hear my voice getting louder and faster, like a train approaching, and can’t stop it. “Burn down this beautiful house that’s in the Historical Register and I can barely afford to rent?” I’m shouting now. My head pounds, and the tacky fire extinguisher powder makes my fingers itch.

  “My mom says there was no Colonel Cranson.”

  I stop blotting the carpet and stare at the baseboards, fighting the urge to throw something, to break a lamp.

  “Get your things together,” I finally tell Crystal. “I’m going to call your mother and have her pick you up.”

  “No! Don’t call her.” Crystal sits up and frantically rubs the insides of her arms. “She’s sleeping at her boyfriend’s.”

  I spread the towel over the stained carpet, crawl into the armchair beside the bed, and lean my head against the wall for support. “I’m confused,” I tell her. “Do you want to spend time together?”

  She nods, squeezing the insides of her arms and rocking.

  “Well, we can’t do that if you have no respect for me or my house.”

  “Okay. Sorry,” she mumbles.

  I move to the edge of the bed and peer into her face, looking for a sign of anything I can reason with. Her pale blue eyes are smoky, vacant. She nods and rocks, nods and rocks, working her jaw back and forth, her teeth sawing into her lower lip.

  I sink toward the soft center of the bed. “Don’t bite like that.” I grab her chin. “Here, have a drink.” I pass her a can of root beer she left on the night table. “Algebra’s hard. A lot of students struggle with it. Did you know that?”

  She shakes her head, holding the soda between us. Her lips are swollen and cracked, and the color has drained from her cheeks.

  “I barely passed,” I tell her. “Then guess what? You get geometry. It’s worse, like someone’s forcing you to learn to play the tuba. But that doesn’t mean you get to start fires.”

  I feel bad that Crystal has no one to help her with her homework. It took me lots of help from my dad just to get a C in algebra. On Sunday mornings he fixed us pancakes and sausages, then helped me study at the dining room table.

  “If Lucy baked three more than twice as many cookies as Sally, and Julio ate a fourth of them, how many would be left?” he’d coax gently. My brain seized up like a tangled bicycle chain. Instead of answers I produced tears. I’d hunch over the sour-smelling pages of the book as the sunny morning passed outside the window, the smooth, empty street begging me to roller-skate.

  “I think you need a tutor,” I tell Crystal now. “I can’t help you, because I stink at algebra. But I’ll help you find someone.”

  “I don’t care if I flunk! I fucking hate school.” Her face tightens into a red grimace, like a baby’s. She sobs.

  I loop my arm around her shoulder, my elbow sore from where I smacked it while taking a corner too fast with the fire extinguisher. She recoils from my touch.

  “I hate fucking Amber and Tiffanie. As if I want to be invited to their stupid parties. They don’t even know who Janis Joplin is. They are such losers!”

  She starts to rock again, hugging herself and shivering. I want to tell her to watch the language. Instead I try to hug her. Despite the fact that she’s skinny, it’s hard to get my arms around her. She’s sharp and angular—all elbows and shoulder blades. I pull her closer. I’m embarrassed by my effort and give up. But as soon as I let go of her, Crystal’s arms tighten around me.

  “Here’s a secret,” I say, rocking with her but slowing her down. “Ninety percent of the wor
ld hated junior high.” Her short hair is bristly against my cheek.

  “Not my mom.”

  “Okay, not your mom.” My realtor, Kit, told me that Crystal’s mother was quite popular in junior high school. “Oh, Roxanne Lowman’s daughter,” he said, blushing and tipping his head when I told him about Crystal. Turns out she was two grades ahead of him and all the boys had crushes on her. They called her Foxie Roxie. I got the sense that this was her apex, though, and it’s been downhill for her since.

  “If you want to know what hell’s like,” I tell Crystal, “you’re in it: junior high. You’re not crazy.” I remember bumbling through school without a mother, doing my best to avoid the scary gum-snapping girls who trolled the halls in packs. Fighting every morning to wrestle my curly hair into Farrah Fawcett feathers like theirs.

  Crying in quiet hiccups now, Crystal untangles herself from my grasp and leans back into the pillows, listening attentively, as though I’m telling her a bedtime story.

  “I know school’s hard, and your dad left you, and you don’t get along with your mom. I’m sorry, and I do want to help. I’m on your side.” I nod at the carpet and the disaster of a room. “But you have to go easier on me.”

  Crystal rubs her eyes until they squeak under her fingers. “Okay.”

  I take her hands and hold them in mine, examining her bitten fingernails, which are raw and rubbery, like erasers. “You have to realize that life isn’t easy for other people, either, Crystal. That’s the part you’re missing, and that’s the part that’s hard about growing up. It seems like a conspiracy—like life’s only hard for you, but it’s not the case.”

  “But those bitches have dads, at least.”

  “I know they do. It’s not fair.”

  Crystal slides under the quilt with her clothes on.

  “You can stay tonight. But this is your last chance. No more fires.”

  She nods.

  I reach under the covers and help her tug her sweater off over her head, static electricity snapping at my arms. Her little white T-shirt exposes her mottled arms.

  “Where are your pajamas?”

  “I don’t have any.”