All We Left Behind

by Ingrid Sundberg

  I like that they won’t.

  She’s not like Vanessa. Vanessa would never swim in this water. She’d care too much about her hair or looking stupid or whatever. Marion wipes her nose, and lipstick comes off on her hand. I like it on her hand more than her mouth. It suits her better.

  “I haven’t seen you at one of these parties before,” I say, inching closer.

  “I’ve been to a few,” she says. “With Lilith.”

  “I’ve seen Lilith. She comes to these all the time, but you . . .” I trail off, wondering why I haven’t noticed her before.

  “I know.” She laughs. “It’s hard to miss Lilith.”

  “I guess.” I shrug, realizing it’s her hair. I’m used to seeing it up, not down and spread out over the lake.

  “No, she’s . . .” Marion’s voice gets low. “Well . . . she’s Lilith.”

  I don’t know what that means, but she stops treading water and the lake swallows her up to her chin.

  “You’re cuter than Lilith,” I say, but she eyes me suspiciously. I meant it to be nice. But now that it’s out there, I don’t know what to do with the way she’s staring at me. Like she isn’t interested in the charm and the bullshit. Like she wants me to be something else.

  I rack my brain for a joke, but it’s freezing, and my balls tighten as we circle each other. Yeah, this was a real genius idea. I adjust my shorts, thinking about how much they’re going to cling when we get out of this water, and how little they’re going to show.

  “You feeling warmer?” I ask, and her bottom lip distracts me, bobbing in and out of the water.

  “Sure,” she says, but it’s a lie.

  “It’s fucking cold,” I say, and she breaks into a smile. “I’m an asshole.”

  “Okay, a little,” she says, and I can feel the pulse of the water beneath us. “I mean the cold part,” she says, her teeth chattering. “You’re only half an ass.”

  “Oh? Only half?” My hand finds the wet of her shirt, where she’s soft under this water.

  “Yeah, it—”

  But she stiffens at my touch. Making me not sure. Like I should remove it. Like maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about that bobbing lip and my mouth on it, or underwater skin. But I like the wet feel of her, and the cold buzz of the lake. Only, I can’t read her. She strips me with that look, like she’s waiting for something and I should know what it is.

  “This was your idea,” she breathes, her fingers fluttering against the surface. I want them. Her. I want the ripple, and this uncertain feeling, and her mouth in the water tasting of tin and sticks.

  Smack!

  Her foot whacks against my leg, and I grunt, surprised.

  “Shit! Sorry!” she yelps, her arms cutting away from me. “Are you—?”

  “It’s fine,” I say, reaching out.

  “No. You just startled me—”

  “Marion. It’s fine.” I find her under the water. Find her waist. “The guys kick me at practice every day.”

  “Right.”

  I squeeze her side, but that doesn’t comfort her.

  “It’s no big thing,” I say.

  “Right, of course they do.”

  “They do.”

  “I know.”

  The ripples calm, and my hand is a rock against her hip.

  “I, uh . . . ,” I begin, but she’s so quiet. Eyes on me, and I’m at a loss for what to say. Her skirt floats up against the back of my hand like the tentacle of a jellyfish, like it wants to wrap around me and pull me down. “It’s um . . .” I look to the shore and keep my eyes off her blond hair snaked out over the surface. “We should . . .”

  Only I fill my lungs with air and duck under the water without finishing. She mumbles something I don’t hear because I’m already underwater. Swimming away from her.

  Headed back to shore.

  Marion

  I don’t know how to sit next to Kurt and be still. He’s been sitting next to me staring at the lake for what feels like an eternity—saying nothing.

  His clothes cling to him from our swim and I can see his skin through the soaked cotton. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. The air to dry him? For me to say something?

  I shiver, but he doesn’t react.

  I wait, but only the stars fill the quiet.

  I should get up and leave. I want to.

  He’s the one who gets up and walks back to the lake house. He’s the one who motions for me to follow.

  And I do.

  Kurt

  I walk Marion to the lake house and find her a towel. When she’s not looking, I disappear into the crowd.

  Conner finds me and asks why I’m all wet and gives me that look. I tell him I went skinny-dipping with a girl and he ignores the fact that my clothes are drenched. I ask him for his keys, wanting to bail, but I don’t have a ride. Only this is his uncle’s place and he’s probably staying the night. I’m surprised when he hands them to me without a fight, and I almost say something, but he tells me to fuck off and pick him up in the morning.

  I drive the ten-mile stretch that leads to the main road without the headlights on. I let my eyes adjust and push away that unsettling feeling that came from the brush of her skirt on my wrist. I focus on the road till I hear nothing but tires on gravel. Gravel on tires.

  Slowly the dark turns to shape, and when I think I can trust what little I can see ahead of me, I close my eyes.

  I coast, trusting the road will be beneath me as long as I drive straight.

  I press the gas and rocks smack against the undercarriage.

  Rumbling.

  Slapping.

  Metal and dirt and fast.

  And I wonder if this is what it’s like to be out of your mind and drunk and barreling away from us.

  Into dark.

  * * *

  When I get home the house is so quiet you’d think no one lives in it. The place smells of stale tobacco, and a yogurt cup on the coffee table overflows with ash and cigarette butts. A half-eaten sandwich sits on a paper plate in the sink, crumbs everywhere, and the microwave blinks 12:00 in bright red numbers. The way it does when the power goes off. Dad left for his shift hours ago, which means I get the house to myself. Just me and that damn wet plate he’s not going to touch. It’s the only evidence he’s been here. He sleeps while I’m at school. Then works through the night. I can’t complain. It’s been four years since Mom. I’m used to it. The microwave always blinks twelve o’clock.

  I chuck his plate in the trash and change out of my wet clothes. The dryer hums after I throw my pants in, and something metal whacks against the inside wall. Metal from my pants. The zipper maybe. Wham. Wham. It’s too loud. It’s the kind of thing Mom would use to start a song on her guitar. Only she’s not here and that shit doesn’t happen anymore.

  I go outside and sit on the back porch step, my foot finding the divot where the paint’s stripped bare from her cowboy boots tapping. Chipped gone from all those nights out here—Mom and me—like a couple of crazies with our guitars, howling at the wind.

  Mom was made for music. Could have been famous if she’d ever left this town. Would have taken the country music scene by the balls, if she’d had enough money to record an album. She sat out here every night after waiting tables, curled over her guitar. Hair wild. Fingers ready. Once she started playing, that was it. Strumming. Bobbing her head. Slapping the side of her guitar to fill in the drumbeat. Playing with her fingers over the top of the neck, not under, like how Andy McKee does it. She’d forget my father on the couch with the TV drowning her out. Ignore Josie hovering behind the screen door. Hell, sometimes she wouldn’t even see me playing right next to her.

  If tonight had been Mom’s, I know she’d’ve used the thump in the dryer to write a song. Not something for those pubs she played in on weekends, but a song for right now. For us. My fingertips itch and they want my guitar. They want to make sense of that girl with water up to her chin.

  I go to my room and pull the two guitar cases out f
rom under the bed. I miss running my hands over the strings. Miss the first note that cuts through the silence so sharp you can taste the tang of metal in it. Miss searching through the messy notes of sound for one rib of pitch that makes sense. Speaks in ways you can’t.

  My pinkie runs against the side of her leather case like Marion’s skirt on my arm, and I shove Mom’s guitar back into the dust. Not sure I’ll ever open it again. If I do, I’ll smell the sour that sang on her breath, the one that came with gold wings printed on the bottle.

  Lint kicks off with the latch, surprising me with how long it’s been since I last played.

  I sit on the floor, leaning against the bed, and try to remember. Three years? Four? A hint of beer hangs in the air and I almost shove my case into the dark with hers and forget this.

  Only, I want to itch out this bunched-up feeling and go to bed. Thrum out the blonde. Sleep.

  Inside the case, the guitar gleams, the cheap wood shining in its bed of black. I pick it up by the neck and cradle the body against my knee, letting my head hit the mattress. The strings feel good, the thin lines taut against my fingertips. I press through a series of chords, working my way down the neck. Remembering how the hollow wood feels, too light in my hands.

  But I don’t strum. I don’t breathe. I don’t make a sound.

  Marion

  Lilith wants to know why I didn’t jump Kurt when we were swimming.

  “You two were out in the middle of the lake away from everyone,” she says, sitting on my bed cross-legged, her legs sprinkled with sand. “It was private.”

  “I was treading water.”

  “You can kiss and tread water at the same time.”

  I pull my ponytail down and smell the lake behind its curtain of blond.

  “If he wanted to kiss me he would have kissed me.”

  “Au contraire,” Lilith says, crawling across my bed and wrapping her arms around me from behind. She nuzzles her head into the crook of my neck and I lean into her, wanting the safety of her touch. Touch that’s not covered in water. “Sometimes boys need a little encouragement.”

  “Kurt strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn’t need anything.”

  “Probably true.” Her head nods against my neck. “But not the point.” She runs a finger over my collarbone. “Did you want to kiss him?”

  I close my eyes and feel the swirl of her finger on my skin. It makes me think of that flush, that piece inside me that blossomed and stretched and pulled me into the water after him.

  But then I was in it. Swimming, with my skirt floating up to my hips. Water touching under and over. I almost turned around and swam back to shore, where I could dry by the fire. Where I could breathe in the sparks and air and ash and forget that embarrassing thing I had done.

  But then he saw me. Swam toward me, and I was up to my neck in it. With him. Swimming forward and into.

  “Sure,” I say to Lilith, her fingers spiraling over my collarbone. But my mind is on Kurt, on his shirt, his chest.

  “Then don’t hesitate,” Lilith says, her hand blooming up my neck. Five fingers of softness cover my throat, making me shiver. I can’t help it. “If you want it”—she traces a star over my windpipe—“then take it.”

  Her hand pulls away and I almost gasp at the separation.

  My whole body is hot. Too hot. I stare at the ceiling, hating my skin for not asking permission. Lilith moves away, uncapping a pen from my nightstand, and starts to draw stars on the inside of her legs, near the hem of her dress. But my mind is on Kurt, swimming around me. My skin thrumming. On how I can’t stop thinking about his hands. How I want his hands, but don’t know how to ask for them.

  He was supposed to make a move, wasn’t he? In that water, when I was close enough to see his skin through his soaked shirt. Or on the shore maybe, with the lake water dripping down my legs. Or am I supposed to make the move? Is that where I went wrong? Is it my job to put his hands in my hair?

  “How do you . . . ,” I start, but then I fluff up my pillow to distract myself. This is all so easy for Lilith. Her lips may be bare now, but she had no trouble drawing red over the mouth of Kurt’s teammate. Taking it. Not asking. As if there was an unspoken agreement beneath each of their tongues.

  Ballpoint stars run the length of Lilith’s leg, from knee and thigh, and I’m not sure she heard me start to ask—how. How her legs can give permission. How she can cover them with stars that burn up the night. How magically, without hesitation, she can take without a word, and wake in the morning to find those stars still intact. Not blue-smeared and rubbed off.

  * * *

  The summer before seventh grade, everything between Lilith and me changed. It was the summer of enchanting hair.

  It was the summer of fire.

  It had been an unusually rainy spring, and the wet ground became nested with larvae. The mosquitoes born in June pricked and welted us until we were swollen. But the price of June was worth the gift of August. August held magic. August gave birth to fireflies and set the night to flame.

  There was a clearing behind Lilith’s house. We found it one afternoon following a trail of wild blackberries. You couldn’t see it from the road or even from Lilith’s backyard because the trees hid it. I loved it because the grass grew so tall it hit my elbows, and when the sun set, the August night blinked to life.

  It was our secret.

  Lying side by side in the towering grass, we’d stare into the purple of dusk and see a single wink of gold, and then another, and then ten, and two hundred as the night yawned and fireflies poked holes in the sky.

  Every night Lilith and I brought widemouthed jars to that clearing to harvest fire. I would wait in the weeds, catching each fly, one by one, in the palm of my hand. But not Lilith. Lilith would run. She’d dash, jar open, lid off, raking the glass through the air. More flies flew out of her jar than stayed, but she didn’t mind. For her it wasn’t about capturing the light, it was about falling through it.

  I found them in that field.

  Lilith and that high school boy.

  I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be at dinner with my aunt, but she’d gotten a flat tire. I’d run down the hill to the field, after my dad left to help his sister, cursing under his breath that it would probably be a while.

  The night was muggy, even with the sun down, but the fireflies were magic. When I got to the field, tiny lights covered every inch of grass and sky. There was no horizon. There was only gold and blinking starlight. But then I heard them, grunting, in the weeds. Saw them through the dark. Tangled, with him on top of her, Lilith’s paisley sundress bunched at her hip with the white of her thigh exposed against the shadow.

  I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t tell if she liked it. There was only panting and snapping reeds and fireflies swarming, fireflies blinking, fireflies rubbing against the night.

  I stepped forward and a branch cracked under my foot.

  “Oh shit,” I heard him say, rolling off her.

  I didn’t wait for them to see me. I ran and didn’t look back. Ran all the way home and locked myself in my room, in the dark, where I yanked at my short hair and told myself—

  It didn’t happen.

  In the morning, my father told me that Lilith was outside waiting. She sat crouched on the bottom step with her back to the door. I could see her flip-flops kicked off on the grass, and her bare toes curled tightly around the bottom step. Her arms were wrapped around the front of her, holding something I couldn’t see.

  “Hey,” I said, inching open the screen door.

  I waited to see her face.

  Lilith unfolded her arms to place a mason jar on the step next to her. It sparkled blue in the morning light with black bugs crawling and slipping along the glass insides.

  It was my jar. I must have dropped it.

  I sat down next to her and stared at the jar, tracing the star pattern on the lid with my finger.

  “Where’d you find it?” I whispered, pretending I h
adn’t been anywhere near our field last night.

  She didn’t answer. She searched my face and waited for me to admit it. But I looked away and stared into the sun that exposed too much of the sky. Her shadow passed over me as she stood up. She put on one flip-flop, then the other, and went home.

  Later that afternoon, she called me and we went swimming. We spent the rest of the summer at the beach, splashing and laughing, and I hid that firefly jar in the back of my closet. I left it there in the dark. I let the bugs roll over onto their backs and put their legs in the air, in the dark—

  Where I couldn’t see them.

  Marion

  Mornings before school are quiet.

  The kitchen is pristine and everything shines, full of expensive appliances like in a magazine. There’s a Saran-wrapped casserole in the fridge with a note from my father that says he’s going to be working late. He’s always gone long before sunrise to catch the train to the firm, and now he comes home late too. He’s like a vampire who exists in the dark. I want to tell him that Boston’s not that far away and he doesn’t have to leave for work so early. He could stay for breakfast and drive his car into the city. But there’s always some excuse: parking, gas prices, life.

  I’m not his little princess anymore.

  I unwrap the casserole and eat it for breakfast, cold, and right out of the dish.

  Outside, the wind is ruthless. It tangles hair over my eyes, even twisting up the longest strands from the middle of my back, having not seen the glint of scissors in five years. But inside my car the air doesn’t move. It makes my skin itch with stillness.

  I release the brake and pull off the curb, heading to Lilith’s house. I listen to the wind, winding down the road with me, past the Georgian houses and pine trees that separate each estate. I crack open the window and smell the Atlantic, salty and crisp. Smell the bit of Emerson mornings that makes this part of town quaint and colonial, rather than new.