Left

by Tamar Ossowski

  “Hey!” I shouted and snatched it back.

  “Least you could do for forgetting to send out my invite.” He took my napkin and used it to wipe the corners of his mouth.

  “Daryl!” Sara had her hands on her hips, but she was grinning. Daryl smiled back. A coffee cup flew into the air and she was off again.

  “So, Lavi, what brings you here?” He hooked his feet into the base of my stool and swiveled himself around.

  “Not sure that’s any of your business,” she replied, now rolling the empty sleeve of her straw into a tight, hard coil.

  “Actually it is,” he said, bringing his knees up so that they sank into the outside of my thigh. I hunched down to avoid the line of fire.

  “I’ll ask you again. What are you doing here?” This time he hissed the words and they skipped over my back like razor-edged pebbles.

  She didn’t speak or look at him, just kept tearing little bits of her placemat off and rolling them into tiny pointed toothpicks. Then I heard her mutter under her breath. “Fat ass.”

  “What did you say?” He leaned forward, toward me and Lavi and I felt his kneecap against my thigh.

  “All you want is for everyone around you to be as miserable as you are.” Her face turned red and she pushed herself hard off the stool. She bent down to get her backpack, but as she stood to leave, he reached across me and grabbed her sleeve. The material collapsed in his hand like the petals of a flower and she winced.

  “Stay out of this, Lavi.” His knuckles turned white as he gripped her tighter. Then, suddenly, he let go. She didn’t move, frozen, like she was still being restrained. Before I could let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, she was gone and all I heard was the door to the diner slamming loudly behind her.

  Daryl stayed where he was, his feet still hooked to the base of my stool. Then, as though he just remembered something he had forgotten, he disengaged himself and stood up to leave. “Tell my mother I had to get going and I’ll see her tonight.”

  I didn’t look up, but I could feel the draft of his quick movements push past me like a wave. Sara walked over to the door and closed it. She came back and sat beside me.

  “Thank you for being their friend, Matilda. I know that sometimes it’s probably really hard.” She smiled and I felt a sparkle run through me that reminded me of the millions of tiny pinpricks I often felt when my arms or legs fall asleep. I shook my head a few times until I was sure that I had erased whatever it was I thought I had felt. Then I looked back at my plate and focused all my attention on gathering as much of what was left of my pie onto my fork. I was so lost in thought when I walked out, I didn’t notice he was outside.

  Waiting for me.

  He grabbed me as soon as I passed the blinking neon leprechaun in the window of the Good As Gold.

  “We need to talk,” Daryl said, taking me by the elbow and hurrying me along. I was more startled than scared, so I didn’t have time to consider how he planned to get what it was he wanted from me. He led me to a small office building that had a FOR LEASE sign in front and pushed me down the alley. He pointed to a rusted metal fire escape ladder.

  “You want me to climb up there?” I asked, looking up at what seemed like the last place I would ever go, beside maybe the side of a highway in the middle of the night.

  He smiled. “You’ll be fine, Mytilda. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Not terribly comforted, I contemplated my options. I could refuse and try and outrun him, but part of me was curious to find out what it was he wanted. The other part understood that the likelihood of outrunning him was unlikely. So I handed him my backpack and used both arms to lift myself up onto the ladder. As promised, he came up behind me, his arms never far from my feet. When we reached the top, I jumped off and he followed. I noticed that in the corner of the roof was a doorway. “Why couldn’t we have come through the door?”

  “Because I don’t like doing things the easy way.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I said nothing. He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a brown paper bag, then unscrewed the cap off a bottle and handed it to me. “Drink.”

  “You first,” I said, pushing it back in his direction. Without hesitation, he tipped it into his mouth. After several gulps, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and handed the bottle back.

  Besides stealing some sips of wine from my mother’s glass, I had never really had alcohol before. The first sip tasted fruity, but it burned going down and reminded me of cherry cough syrup. I choked a little and he laughed. “What is this?”

  “Blackberry brandy. Good stuff.”

  I nodded, not knowing any better. The sweetness lingered in the back of my throat, but I could still feel the burn. I wondered what my mother would think of me now. I took a few more sips, this time ignoring the burning feeling, which I was slowly getting used to. He grinned at me; I was now a member of some private club.

  “What do you know about Lavi and my father?”

  So that was what he was interested in: finding out what was going on with his sister and her plot to reunite their parents. I would have lied to protect her, but I didn’t need to because she hadn’t confided in me. She didn’t trust me anymore. The muscles in my body loosened and I felt like my bones were made of liquid. I tilted my head back, closed my eyes, and felt the heat spread into my cheeks. He reached over and grabbed my arm, shaking me out of my dream.

  “I don’t know anything, Daryl. Except that your sister thinks that your mom and dad should get back together.”

  He let me go and took another sip from the bottle. His backpack was still unzipped and there was a small notebook hanging out of it, so I reached over and took it. He tried to grab it back and, when I sensed it was important to him, I pulled it close to my chest and crossed my arms. He reached from behind, putting his arms around me and trying to get me to release my grip. He was angry, muttering things under his breath that I could not understand.

  I tucked my head in and kept my arms tightly closed. After a few minutes, I felt his anger subside until there was no struggle left. I was sitting between his legs and he had his arms around me. His chest was moving up and down fast. His breath hit the tip of my earlobe and then he swiveled me around so that my head was resting in the crook of his arm, like a baby.

  I was closer to him than I had ever been before and then his lips were on mine and I closed my eyes because it felt good and I didn’t want it to stop. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, wrapped up in each other, quietly rocking under the heat of the setting sun. When he separated himself from me, I unlocked my arms, which were still clutched around his notebook, and I handed it back.

  “Aren’t you going to look at it?” he asked.

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “I don’t.” he snarled, the warmth of the moment instantly gone. “C’mon. We gotta go.” He stood up and walked toward the door.

  “I thought you didn’t like doing things the easy way.”

  “Believe me. This isn’t the easy way.”

  When I stood up, I understood what he meant. My stomach lifted into my throat and the clouds started spinning around my head. I put my hands out to steady myself, but that made it worse. He came over and took my arm and led me across the roof. I wanted to say something to turn him back into the Daryl whose breath I had felt against my neck, but every time I tried to speak, the words got jumbled up in my mouth. When we got to the door, he pulled a small screwdriver out of his pocket. He kneeled over the doorknob and eventually pushed it open. I followed him down four flights of stairs with a tight hold on the back of his jacket.

  When we got to my house, he opened the door and pushed me inside. Through the window I watched him walk the path to his unit. When I was sure I was alone, I raced up the stairs to the bathroom. I got down on my hands and knees and heaved into the toilet. I wretched for a long time, holding on to the rim of the seat and watching as my insides emptied themselves into the bowl. I thought about leprecha
uns and cough syrup and lemon meringue pie and made promises to myself I knew that I wouldn’t keep.

  Afterward, I cleaned my face and got into bed. My mother worked late that night, and when she came home, I told her I had the stomach flu. I don’t think she believed me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

  Except Daryl.

  When I wasn’t thinking about Daryl, I was thinking about how much I missed my sister and my grandmother and that it had been a very long time since I could remember feeling anything else but sad. One night, as I tried hard to fall asleep, I rolled over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. And that’s when I heard it.

  Footsteps.

  Someone was walking down the stairs. I pulled the covers closer around my ears and looked over at the clock radio on my nightstand. 12:23. I rolled back over, hoping maybe it was all in my imagination, but then I heard it again. The only thing remotely weapon-like I could find in my room was a shoe, so I picked it up and walked along the outer edges of the carpet, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  My mother’s bedroom door was open, but something about the way the light filtered through the hall made me know she wasn’t inside. I chewed the ragged skin around my thumbnail and crept slowly down the hall with the shoe in my other hand. When I reached the top of the stairs, I crouched down low because I could hear my mother’s voice. I flattened myself out on the landing and leaned my head as far out onto the step as I could.

  “Slow down.” She was talking on the only telephone in the house, which hung on the wall in the kitchen. I pictured her winding the cord over and over, making little white nooses around her finger.

  “You can handle this. It will be okay.”

  I had a mosquito bite on my ankle. As hard as I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t resist scratching it. I raked my fingers across the skin, gently at first, but then harder and harder until it started to hurt.

  “You will figure it out,” my mom was saying.

  She whispered something that I couldn’t hear, so I inched myself closer, but then the shoe slipped out of my hand and went careening down the stairs. I watched as it fell, making a muted thudding noise as it hit each step. I only had a few minutes to decide what to do. I thought about tiptoeing back to my bedroom and crawling under the covers, but I was tired of being a coward. I sat up on the step, crossed my arms across my chest, and waited for her to come find me.

  She hung up the telephone, walked to the staircase, and looked up at me. Her hair was folded around her head like she had been tossing and turning for most of the night.

  “What are you doing?” she said with a sigh as she lifted her hand to her forehead and massaged her temples with her fingers.

  “Listening to you.” I walked down the stairs so that we were standing eye to eye. “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?”

  “Nothing that concerns you.” She turned and walked into the living room and flopped down onto the couch.

  The room was dark, but I followed her and hit my toe on the coffee table, which made me even angrier.

  “Maybe if you told me what was going on, I wouldn’t have to eavesdrop in the middle of the night,” I spoke it into the near blackness, not seeing or caring what impact my words had.

  “Why do you always have to make things difficult?” She leaned back so that her head was resting on top of the cushion.

  Once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see that both her hands were up, covering her face.

  “Why couldn’t you handle taking care of Franny anymore? Why did you dump her off at the first place you could find?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, her voice muffled as she continued to hide her face from me.

  Maybe I was tired or still half asleep, but I was not willing to give in to her as easily as I usually did.

  “I do understand. This is about you because everything is always all about you.”

  She dropped her hands. Even in the dark, I could see her face turn pale; I had caught her offguard. She said nothing and that made me even angrier.

  “I wish you would have just left me behind.”

  I wondered how long those words had been sitting inside of me, like a round of ammunition, waiting to be shot out.

  “Oh, Matilda. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve wished the same thing. But for whatever reason, you are the one I am stuck with.”

  She walked back into the kitchen and then I heard the jingle of keys and the door slam behind her.

  I don’t really know where she went or how long I sat alone in that dark, empty room. All I know is that after a while I got up and went upstairs to my bedroom. I’d grown tired of waiting.

  In the morning, the only evidence of the night before was an empty container of ice cream left on the kitchen counter. There was a big brown spot where she had left her spoon. I walked past my mother slowly, because I wasn’t sure what she might do or say. I waited for her to apologize, to tell me that she didn’t regret bringing me along and that she never wished she had left me behind. When that didn’t come, I opened the cabinet and found the peanut butter. I took out a butter knife, swirled it around in the jar until I got a thick rounded wedge, and spread the peanut butter on a slice of bread. Still nothing.

  As she started to pack her things, I cleared my throat and she looked up. Interrupted. “What is it, Matilda?”

  I didn’t know how to respond, how to tell her that I felt cracked open and needed her to glue the pieces back together. She handed me a permission slip for a school trip I had forgotten I had given her, and when I didn’t take it, she left it on the table. I opened the refrigerator door and felt the cool air hit my face when I reached for the strawberry jam. When I pulled my head back out again, she was gone.

  I crumpled the permission slip, tossed it into the trash along with my halfmade peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then because I couldn’t stand being there for one more second, I left. Even though it wasn’t warm enough yet, I put on a pair of flip-flops because I liked the sound they made when I walked in them.

  Once I got outside, I didn’t know where to go. Most people had left for school or work already and the air felt empty. I thought about walking toward the row of mailboxes at the end of the driveway, but it was too early to get the mail and, even if it wasn’t, nothing ever came for me since no one knew where I was. So I walked in the grass, which was wet and made my feet feel slippery.

  Maybe I ended up there because there wasn’t any other place for me to end up. I was at the edge of the complex where Daryl had taken me that night to watch the trucks trample his jeans. When I looked down the hill, I saw him sitting on the ground, scribbling in what looked like the notebook I had tried to take from him that day on the roof. I tried to sneak up on him, but my flip-flopping gave me away. He turned towards me, the curl of his lip reminded me of a hissing snake. When he saw it was me, his face softened, but only for a second.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked as he shoved the notebook into his backpack.

  I had to rewind to the last time we were together to decide how to approach him. It was like losing my place in a book and skimming through the pages to find where I last left off.

  “Thought this was a free country.” I sat down, took my flip flops off, and buried my toes into the soft, wet grass.

  “No school for you today, Mytilda?”

  “It’s Maaatilda, and yes, it’s an unofficial holiday.” I leaned back against my elbows. “What’s the big secret with your notebook?”

  A car drove past and I wondered what we looked like to someone passing by.

  “It’s nothing.” He pulled a blade of grass out of the ground and used the soft flesh of his thumb to flatten it.

  I wanted him to confide in me. Tell me things he wouldn’t tell anyone else. But I knew that first I had to offer him something that would make him know that I was trustworthy. “I have these dreams, sometimes.”

  He put the blade of grass in his
mouth.

  “It’s always dark and I am screaming. Everything around me is swirling and then suddenly it all turns red.”

  A plane flew above us, but neither of us looked up. He didn’t say anything, just stared straight ahead. “Does your mother know you’re out here?”

  I laughed and it sounded short and mean. “My mother wishes that I would just disappear.”

  “Then, maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  He was quiet and I felt betrayed. Exposed. I started to get up to leave and that’s when he tossed it at me.

  His notebook.

  As curious as I was to open it, something held me back. For a moment, I thought that maybe not knowing was better. I looked up and saw a van drive slowly past. On its side were the words JOSEPH’S PLUMBING and I wondered what it felt like to travel through the world with a sign that told the whole world exactly who you were.

  I opened the book.

  It was filled with drawings of big shoes and tiny heads like Daryl had been looking up from deep within the ground when he drew them. They were normal everyday people, except for the little corners of capes hanging from behind their backs. Tiny squares here and there, peeking out from pockets and jackets and zippers, all colored a bright sky blue. His notebook was filled with drawings of superheroes. Except that they were superheroes in disguise.

  I closed the book and squeezed it tightly to my chest, but not like the last time when I was trying to take it away from him. “I think my sister would like it here.”

  He didn’t answer. Just kept pulling at the grass.

  “Except for before she was born, this is the longest we’ve been apart.”

  “Is she a part of your screaming dream?”

  The tone of his voice and the fact that he was actually listening surprised me. “Franny is never a part of that dream. I am always alone.”

  “It’s probably something stupid like your mom wouldn’t let you eat candy when you were a kid.” He snickered and Mean Daryl quietly crept into our moment.

  I slipped my feet back into my flip-flops. I hated when I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me.