by Una Mannion
I headed for the woods, barefoot. If I stepped on a copperhead, it would serve Marie and all of them right. I walked past the clumps of fern toward the tall grove of birch, the straight dignified silver-white trunks, the shimmer of green between them standing there, guarding the entrance of the woods. I stopped.
Sound changes in the woods; everything diminishes to the hum of the ground and the slight rustle of leaves at the top of the canopy, the light gathered in isolated clouds, everything green and light and shadow. “‘The green quiet,’” my father used to quote from a poet. I didn’t know what it meant, but beneath the mysterious words was a feeling I understood. The green quiet, that still calm in the woods.
I turned onto the trail and headed down toward the Kingdom. Inside, I smoked one of Charlotte Adams’s menthol cigarettes from our stash at the base of the red oak. The cardboard matches kept falling apart when I tried to strike them. I finally hit the match against the flint half-heartedly, and that one lit. I inhaled and leaned back against the oak. I thought the cigarette might be stale—Sage often said that with absolute authority when they’d been buried in her bag or in the tin in the earth for a long time—but I didn’t know for sure.
Sage and I hadn’t been here together since that first day of the school vacation, the morning after Ellen jumped from the car, and it was as if nature had reclaimed it, the laurel and rhododendron pushing farther into the space, erasing our time here together. I stood up and tried to break off the branches with the cigarette just hanging from my mouth, the smoke wafting into my eyes. I sat down and kept smoking. It made me feel sick and light-headed. Sage had started buying Marlboro Lights. Menthol, she said, was for old ladies. I reminded her of this when she continued to steal Charlotte’s menthols and smoke them. The sticky sap from the rhododendron on my fingers had grubbed the cigarette paper, and I wondered if it was poison to inhale. The nectar of the rhododendron, laurel, and azalea are all toxic. I smoked anyway, even when the sapped paper sizzled against the ember tip.
The rhododendron blossoms around me were dead and hung in bowed clusters, their vibrant purple faded, pale in death. Seven or eight pods hung from the tips of threadlike stalks. Each pod, I’d read, contained over five hundred seeds. I tried to calculate what that meant per cluster and for every bush. Millions. I looked at the petals all around me on the forest floor; I was sitting on the possibility of billions of future rhododendrons.
I needed to get home, so I didn’t miss Marie leaving. Instead of walking back along the trail toward my house, I walked farther down and cut through the Hunters’ property. I clapped my hands to scare away copperheads as I moved off-trail through the laurel and trees, barefoot down toward their backyard. The Hunters were away on their summer vacation in Ocean City, New Jersey. Meredith Hunter, who was two years younger than me, mentioned it every time Ellen and I met her coming down the street from the Mountain Swim Club in her bathing suit, a towel slung around her shoulders. She was deeply tanned and blond, with those stiff highlights only chlorine in the sun can make.
They had a deck at the back and a small pond with goldfish and koi. There were wildflowers growing around it, daylilies, violet, and heartsease. Dad used to say that Americans had the seasons wrong, that summer started on May Day. When he was growing up they had a tradition of picking spring flowers—cowslip, buttercup, bluebell—and bringing them back to the house to scatter across thresholds, doors, and windowsills, so that nothing and no one would be taken from them that year. I looked at the Hunters’ flowers and picked six of each, rolled them in the bottom of my T-shirt, and tucked it into my cutoffs.
As I came back up the street, I could make out two cars in our driveway, a blue Oldsmobile I didn’t recognize and Wilson McVay’s dad’s Buick. The trunks of both cars were open. Marie’s trash-bag luggage was in the trunk of the Oldsmobile and the bike we shared was in the trunk of Wilson’s car, along with the turntable. My mother, Wilson, Marie, Marie’s friend Rae, and a man I had never seen before were all standing in a circle, talking and laughing. Rae waved at me as I came up the driveway and my mother turned.
“Libby, where’ve you been? We’ve been waiting. Marie has to go.”
“You’re taking the bike?” I asked her, but I really wanted to say You’ve brought him here, again? After everything she knew, I couldn’t believe she had asked him to help her move.
“It’s mine. So, yeah,” said Marie.
Everybody knew Wilson McVay was a head case, and yet my mother was completely untroubled. She was making introductions. “Libby, this is Rae’s father, Mr. Dixon. He’s helping Marie move.” Mr. Dixon put out his hand. “And Wilson’s helping too. I think you know him.” What was wrong with her?
Wilson stuck out his hand, the knuckles still visibly bruised, as if to shake mine. I stepped back from his outstretched hand, repelled. They all laughed, like I was making a joke.
“Really, Wilson, we are so grateful. It’s so good of you.” My mother was gushing. She had a strange imbalance of being rude when it counted—like to teachers or other parents or neighbors—and effusive when it wasn’t appropriate, like to the local delinquent who was wrecking our lives.
“I’m happy to do it, Faye, and when we get there I can help Marie move the boxes up the stairs.”
I nearly choked. Had he just called my mother by her first name? Had she told him to call her Faye instead of Mrs. Gallagher? What was wrong with everyone? A deranged psychopath was driving Marie to her new life, and everyone was behaving like this was normal.
“And Wilson,” my mother continued, “Ellen tells me that you were the one who cut the grass a couple weeks ago. I really must ask you to take some money.”
“I was glad to do it. I couldn’t accept payment. It needs another cut. I can come down when I’m back.” Wilson smiled. Rae’s dad looked pleased. Marie was smiling. Ellen and Beatrice clearly thought all this was wonderful. Even my mother was smiling.
“Actually, the grass is my job. Mine and Thomas’s. We don’t want you to cut it again.”
“Libby!” I had embarrassed my mother. Marie shot me a look as if to say Please don’t do this.
Wilson looked straight back at me. “I wouldn’t want to upset you or Thomas. I could bring down our lawn mower if you want to borrow it.”
Fuck him. He was saying all the right things. My mother’s face softened. I hated him.
“We’ve already borrowed one. From someone else.”
Everyone was silent, my lie hanging there.
I looked over at Marie. She was wearing a vintage black lace dress and her Doc Martens with bare legs. She was tiny but strong-looking, her hair on the side that was long hanging across her eye. She already looked like she belonged somewhere else.
“Well, I guess I’d better say goodbye, then,” she said, and went to hug Beatrice first.
“Well, okay then, Marie,” I interrupted. “I have to go rearrange my new room. Hope you enjoy your new life in the city.” I didn’t even look at her when I said it.
I slammed the back door hard and ran to our bedroom. I looked out the window. Rae’s dad was shutting the trunk, and my mother was hugging Marie, something that we didn’t do very often. But it only made me angrier. Why wasn’t she taking Marie to the city? Why was it okay for strangers to take her? How did she get like this—or was she always this way? I couldn’t remember. I decided she probably was. Even before Dad left.
I had ruined the goodbye. I’d wanted to punish both of them. I heard the slam of car doors and the acceleration away as the cars climbed our road. I reorganized our shelves and closet. Marie had left the Marksman hidden in a B. Altman box. She’d taken everything else, so I wondered why she’d left that. Mom went out, and Thomas, Ellen, Beatrice, and I ate SpaghettiOs in the kitchen. Then I lay on my trundle. I’d told Ellen she could have Marie’s single bed.
On the longest day of the year, I waited for everyone to fall asleep. Mom still wasn’t home when I went around all the doors with the flowers. I crawled back ont
o my trundle, Ellen asleep across the room, and the bed below me empty for the first time, and waited for the sound of my mom’s car coming home. She left it on the driveway and came in through the back, so silently I could hear the hum of the crickets when the door opened. There was quiet then. A few minutes later I heard the sound of the vacuum cleaner starting up in the rec room, and I knew the flowers and all their possible protection would be gone. Something would be taken from us, again.
13
I found Harriet the Spy under my pillow, Marie’s favorite book from childhood. I remembered the first time she read it, one of my few memories of Marie crying, sitting on the stairs, trying to tell us how Ole Golly was leaving and now Harriet would have no one because her parents weren’t like real parents. Something about Harriet and Ole Golly had hit her in a place where there was no armor. She was eleven; I would have been eight. I later read it, too, at about the same age, and expected a burst of emotion that never came. It was sad when Ole Golly left, but not devastating. I didn’t know why it had upset Marie so much.
I sat on the front step the morning after she had gone and read, skipping ahead to that part when Ole Golly goes. I’d forgotten about the illustrations. The writer had done them herself, sketches in black pencil. Ole Golly looked almost monstrous, a mix between Morticia Addams and a linebacker. In Sage’s basement they had paintings—or prints, as Sage called them—by Modigliani. The people in them were elongated and out of proportion. Ole Golly looked like a Modigliani painting, except in crude black pencil. I could remember exactly where I was when I’d read it first—in our closet with a flashlight, thinking that I was a bit like Harriet. I had even started a notebook for spying on others.
When Ole Golly leaves, Harriet wishes she could still tell her the things that were happening. She imagines it must be even worse when someone dies. I felt differently. I didn’t want my father to know the things that had happened after he’d died, what our grass looked like, what had happened to Ellen, what was happening with my mom still sneaking out to meet Bill, how when she was home her door was closed, how Thomas was becoming the same way. I didn’t want him to know things that had happened in the past either, the things that would cause him pain, like Mr. Warren. I wanted to go into the past and say things differently. I wanted to go back and tell him the things I never did or change the things I did say, or say them better. I wished I had called him more when he was alone.
I wasn’t bookish like Marie, but we’d just read The Catcher in the Rye in sophomore English. Holden Caulfield talks to his little brother who is dead, and he changes the things he said to him in the past, to make up for the times he left him out. He tells Allie it’s okay, he can come with him now, to go get his bike and meet him outside Bobby Fallon’s house. When Suzie Sheerin read it aloud in class, my throat hurt. I understood how he wanted to go back to fix the things that could never be fixed. I felt like that every day.
I heard laughter in the distance and looked up. At the top of the street, two figures turned the corner. One of them was Sage in her J. C. Penney’s uniform. She had to come down our street to take the trail to the bus. Abbey was with her. Sage had her head down, but Abbey saw me and waved.
“Hey, Libby,” she called. I half waved back but pretended to concentrate on my book.
Sage didn’t say anything until they were almost past the house. “Did Marie leave?” she called out. She had stopped and was looking back up toward me. She was wearing her sneakers and holding her waitressing shoes. She had her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. Even in her ridiculous outfit, she looked cool.
I wanted to tell her “Yes, and it’s awful,” but instead I got up and went inside the house and shut the door behind me. I watched them through the window as they walked down the street, catching glimpses of Sage’s peach-and-white uniform through the trees. She had tried to make it up with me. She was always like that, being fair and kind and seeing the other person’s side. It was something about her that I admired and hated. It was like having a friend who was a reasonable adult while I was a childish brat. The only other time we’d had a fight like this was after she had met Bill, and I’d been so angry with her I hadn’t spoken to her for weeks.
Sage had met Bill in a snowstorm. It was during the unexpected blizzard earlier that year. She was at the mall, working, when the snow started. By the time she got on the bus for home, the roads were nearly impassable, and the snow was still falling in a whirl of thick flakes. Her bus crawled up Route 23 to the base of the mountain. The driver let her off. There was no one there to meet her, so she started the climb by road in just her uniform and a thin coat. Night had fallen, and there were no tire tracks; no car had even tried to make it up the hill.
She had walked for nearly an hour, she said, when she started to get scared. Her legs were soaking wet and freezing. The snow had reached her knees and was still falling. She had another two miles to go and had started to think she might just have to find a house for help when she heard a low thrum and saw headlights in the distance. There was a truck making its way up through the snow, spinning some but never stopping. She stood to the side of the road and watched as it approached, hoping the driver could see her in the dark through the blue haze of snow. She could hear the heavy chains wrapped around the wheels, giving it traction. It pulled in beside her, and the passenger door opened. She didn’t recognize the truck—she said it was red and oversized, one of those king cabs—and she looked in. My mother was sliding over to make room, and a man Sage didn’t know was driving. They continued up the hill. Sage said she had been so cold and it was so dark, she never got a good look at him. They plowed up through the snow in silence. She saw him in profile when she got out of the truck: he was broad, wore a brown suede coat with sheepskin lining and collar, and his hair was brown and curly.
Sage called our house the second she got inside, her voice shaking with cold and excitement.
“I met Bill. He drove me up the mountain with your mom. They’re on their way to your street.”
I hung up the phone, shouting for everyone to come quick, Bill was on his way. In a minute we were in the rec room, pulling on our Irish Wellington boots underneath nightgowns and over pajamas, all five of us, Marie, Thomas, me, Ellen, and even Beatrice, who had probably just seen him a few days earlier. We galloped like lunatics down the drive, falling into the snow with no coats. Struggling up, we staggered forward, lifting our legs high. The snow was too heavy and deep to kick through, and it fell into the open top of my boots, freezing my bare feet. Several times I walked right out of them. We ran and fell, elated that we might finally catch sight of him.
“Shhh . . . ,” said Thomas.
We stopped. It was so quiet and still. Snowfall at night casts its own strange spell, and the streetlights glittered across the white drifts and the whole world, as I knew it, was erased by this beauty. When I looked up toward the lights, I could see the thick flakes still falling.
“I heard a door slam,” he whispered.
And then we heard the rumble of the truck starting up at the top of the street and watched as a streak of red taillights disappeared in the haze of snowfall. A dark figure was trudging down the road toward us—my mother. We turned to get back inside the house before her. We had missed him. We had missed the best chance we ever had.
I was staying at Sage’s house a week or two after she met Bill. I quizzed her endlessly about the truck, about him, details she noticed in the truck, anything in the back of the truck, tools, machines, and was it a Pennsylvania license plate. She’d listened while I complained about my mother and Bill and the secrecy. When we were falling asleep, she said something else.
“Libby, maybe Bill makes your mom happy.”
It sucked the air out of me. I was stunned that she would say something so treacherous.
“How can you say that? How can going around behind everyone’s backs be anything good?”
A while before, Marie had told me to stop going on about Mom and Bill, that
I was turning into a weird Hamlet. “I don’t even know what that is,” I told her, and she said Hamlet obsesses about his mother’s affair with his uncle and thinks about them together. “That’s sick, Marie,” I said. But I did worry about why they met at truck stops and diners. I worried that Marie was right: Bill was probably married, or else they would just go to his house or apartment and we’d have met him by now.
Sage kept talking to me in the dark. “I’m not saying they’re going about it the right way. But your mom obviously likes him and wants to be with him, and she probably deserves that—you know, after your dad and all that.”
“You mean she deserves Bill because my dad is dead?”
“No, you know: before that, the way he was with your mom, the stuff you told me.”
“Please shut up now.”
“I’m not trying to upset you, Libby, but maybe she loves Bill. Don’t you want her to be happy?”
I lay in the dark on the other bed in Sage’s room. She had matching twin beds with matching green bedspreads that matched her drapes and carpet. She had what Charlotte called a vanity and an overstuffed armchair with throw cushions that also matched the bedspreads. It all suddenly seemed vile. I put on my sneakers and jacket over my nightgown and stood over her bed, where she was lying on her side.
“I’m going home,” I said. She didn’t say anything back.
Sage’s bedroom was on the ground floor, and I opened her window and crawled out. There was still snow and ice on the ground, and the moon was full. I ran home in the bright cold, angry. I would never forgive her. I ran and stopped only when I reached my own driveway. I sat there on the quartz boulder in the freezing cold in my nightgown and hated myself. I had told Sage too much. Did I not want my mom to be happy? Did I even love her? I wondered, if it had been me instead of Sage on the road that night in the snow, would they have stopped? Would my mother have left me there on that road?
