All We Left Behind

by Ingrid Sundberg

  When in doubt, call Lilith.

  “Hey,” I wheeze, but the words are pinecones in my throat. I don’t want to talk about Kurt, but I can’t imagine not telling her either. “I . . . um . . .”

  In front of me I see my initials, carved into the tree. A lump lodges in my throat and I remember hacking them out in quick, careful jabs, peeling back the bark till it exposed the flesh below. Only now the bark is a puckered black scar.

  “Marion? Hello? You there?”

  “Hey.” I try again, coughing and looking up at the sky, punctured with stars. “Did you DVR that new vampire show?” I manage. “Ours didn’t record it.”

  That does the trick. Lilith starts blabbing ten words a second about how stupid and awesome the show was, and I can breathe again. I press my feet into the bark and listen to the steady in her voice. It’s like a drug anchoring me in the fine and the normal, as if nothing happened today. As if all that exists is high school and homework and the ever-important debate between the hotness of vampires versus werewolves. And I wonder if she can hear the fact that I’m crying. If she can, she doesn’t stop and ask.

  * * *

  Later, I walk into the house and see a light on in Dad’s home office. I peek in the doorway to see him sitting behind his desk, rubbing his temples like the papers in front of him make no sense. The skin is loose around his eyes, showing off his wrinkles. He doesn’t seem that old to me, but then, I guess he is. His hair is peppered with gray and trimmed perfect, like everything else in this room, having its place.

  “Dad?” I inch into the doorway, not hiding my wet face, but he doesn’t look up. “Hey,” I say a little louder, and his eyes find me. He glances at the clock, but doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask where I was or with whom. He doesn’t ask why I’m not wearing my shoes.

  I grew back all my hair, but I’m still invisible.

  “I’m going to be up late,” he says, picking up his stack of papers and tapping them against his desk. It’s his way of showing me how much work is left to be done, and dismissing me. “There’s supper in the fridge.” He nods to the door. “If you could . . .”

  I reach for the silver knob and it feels as cold as those scissors in my little-girl hands, always shutting doors instead of opening them.

  Kurt

  Dad’s pickup is sitting in the driveway when I pull in. He should be at work. Not here. Not at this hour.

  The house is dark when I unlock the door, but I can smell fresh ash. The TV flickers and I see him on the couch, sucking on a cigarette with his back to me. For a second, I think we’ve put Mom’s box in the ground again, and he won’t move from that couch for days.

  “Where’ve you been?” he says, not looking up.

  “Out.”

  “Out?” He lifts the cigarette to his lips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I wasn’t here.”

  “Oh, you’re funny.” He looks at me, face in shadow, and all I can see is smoke streaming from his nostrils. “Fun-ny man.” He flicks his ash and turns back to the show.

  The only thing moving is a spray of hair next to his ear, caught in the light of the television. I decide he’s done with me.

  “Popcorn?” He holds up a plastic bowl. “It’s that kettle-corn shit you like.” He lowers it and nods for me to join him. “Sit down, they’re running that James Bond flick.”

  I don’t move. Popcorn makes me think of all those kernels spread out on the floor of my car. Under Marion’s feet.

  “Come on.” He pats the seat next to him. “I don’t ever see you. Sit down.”

  I don’t go near the couch. It smells like mildew and the left seat is busted on the inside, the springs twist wrong so they poke into you. I’ve learned not to sit there. I stay away from that couch. Dad’s couch after all.

  I take the recliner near the door.

  “How’s school?” he asks, handing me the bowl. “You passing math?”

  I scrunch a handful of the corn in my fist.

  “Sure.”

  I could fail math and he wouldn’t even blink.

  “What about soccer? How’s it looking for state?” He follows it with a string of others. Girls. Grades. Whatever he thinks a good parent is supposed to ask.

  “You ever think about going to get her? Josie,” I say, and he coughs—ash in his throat. He hacks, trying to clear it, as smoke billows against the ceiling. “I know where her apartment is.” Only that’s not really true. I visited her that one time, but she probably doesn’t live there anymore.

  “It’s not that simple,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette. “She’s nineteen. I can’t force her to do something she doesn’t want to.”

  I squeeze my fistful of popcorn.

  “Do you even call her back?”

  “Of course I do,” he snaps, glaring at me. “What kind of father do you think I am?”

  He doesn’t want to know the answer to that.

  “So, this—” I stand up and nod to the couch, throwing the corn in the trash. “Is this the new thing? Your schedule change?”

  He slumps back and starts flipping channels.

  “Maybe.” The word comes out deflated. “That going to be a problem?”

  He looks small. The TV flickers and I want to ask him what happened—if he got fired or whatever—but instead I head for my room.

  I flick on the overhead lights as I leave, flooding the space, and hoping he’ll yell at me.

  He doesn’t.

  I go into my room and flop onto my bed, annoyed that he shrugs everything off like it doesn’t matter, like if he pretends it doesn’t exist, it will go away. Only there’s a problem with wanting things to go away. Sometimes they do.

  The curtains blow over my head and a light from the street makes them glow. That image of Marion standing in those woods fills my head. Her staring at the dark like there’s something in that emptiness. I saw Mom look like that. On our back porch, gripping her guitar, drinking. Not playing. Like there wasn’t any music left.

  I heard the tires grinding the gravel of our driveway before I saw the lights—that morning—red and blue lights on my curtains. I almost laughed. I’d thought about calling the cops the night before, but I didn’t have the nerve. Yet here they were anyway.

  The steps against the gravel were steady. Slow. Cop footsteps. Not Mom’s.

  The door latch snapped open and there was a creak of hinges before those footsteps got out a single knock.

  “Officer?”

  It was Dad’s voice, and it was the only word I heard clearly. The rest came in a jumble, too low for me to understand. But I could imagine the lecture those footsteps were giving my Dad. Drunk driving. Jail cells. Threats about fines and reckless behavior and body bags.

  We’d done this before.

  The officer would tell Dad that Mom was in a cell at the station and he could pick her up. But Dad would leave her there for the rest of the day. He’d clean out the house, taking all the empty bottles to the firing range, where he’d explode them into the dirt. Once it got dark, once she was sober, he’d go and get her.

  I stood in the door frame waiting to hear the clank of glass, but Dad was empty-handed when he padded down the hallway.

  “You know she deserved it,” I said, imagining her in that station cell. Curled up. Hungover. I stepped into the hall. “You know that—”

  Crack!

  I was on the floor. Fire in my face. Erupting through my jaw.

  He shook out his wrist, like it hurt, but I couldn’t focus. There was too much pain to register.

  “Dad?”

  It wasn’t my voice. He’d slashed out my air.

  Josie’s foot came into view.

  “What did you do to him?”

  Stars danced in my vision.

  “God, you’re just as bad as sh—”

  “Don’t say something you’ll regret,” he spat, storming past her and slamming the door behind him.

  Josie pulled me into the bathroom and pre
ssed a cold washcloth to my cheek.

  “What’s his problem?” she asked, her eyes bloodshot.

  My face throbbed and I looked away from her, not wanting to think about her white-stripped eyes or what Josie might be coming down from. I nodded to the front door, where the officer had been. “They got Mom.”

  “Figures,” she said. “She was a mess. What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing that isn’t true.” A smile crept up my face. I didn’t know yet. “The truth hurts,” I joked, and she laughed, shaking her head.

  “No shit.”

  My cheek throbbed and I kicked myself for not finding those damn keys the night before. In the dirt. I kicked myself for not keeping her home.

  “I’m glad he hit me,” I said quietly, looking at Josie to see how she’d react. But she kept dabbing at my face with the cloth.

  “Better you than her,” she said finally.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She tossed the cloth in the sink and walked to the door.

  “It means you know how to take it.”

  Dad didn’t collect any bottles that day.

  He didn’t collect any bottles ever again.

  Marion

  I sit behind Lilith in English class. We’re supposed to be reading, but I can’t stop looking at the fallen strap of her tank top. It dangles over the curve of her shoulder like an invitation, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. To my left, Sean Cole presses the paper edge of his book against his bottom lip. He’s reading the freckles of her skin like they’re printed in ink.

  I want Lilith to explain it to me.

  How she does it.

  How she closes her eyes, takes off her clothes, and comes back intact.

  I want to tell her about Kurt, and understand how it’s possible for her to do what she does. How after, she can still be 100 percent Lilith—maybe even more Lilith than before.

  But I can’t ask.

  After the firefly field, a rumor started in middle school about an eighth grader who’d lost her virginity. Pretty quickly Lilith’s name started to circulate, and then she outright claimed it. It made her popular with the girls who wanted to know about sex and even more popular with the boys.

  At lunch the girls would crowd around Lilith and ask questions.

  “Did he tell you he loved you?”

  “Were you embarrassed taking off your clothes?”

  “What does it look like? You know, his thingy?”

  She held nothing back.

  “No, he didn’t tell me he loved me. That’s stupid.”

  “Go somewhere dark if you’re embarrassed. And trust me, you don’t have to take off all your clothes.”

  “It’s called a penis, not a thingy. And it looks like—”

  I plugged my ears. I didn’t want to hear her talk about what it looked like. What it felt like. I hummed to blot it all out and ignored the other girls’ faces flushing pink.

  “What about you, Marion?” Lilith turned to me one afternoon and asked point-blank. “What do you want to know?”

  I ran a hand through my chopped-off hair, and the other girls waited. In the distance I could hear the rush of creek water, and a hint of smoke filled my nostrils.

  I didn’t want to know anything.

  “Did it hurt?” one of the other girls asked, breaking the silence, and Lilith looked straight at me.

  “Of course it did,” she said, and my feet went cold. “It hurts more than you can imagine.”

  * * *

  At lunch Lilith drags me outside to the bleachers by the soccer field, where the metal is edged in frost. She hands me half of an uncooked Pop-Tart, and I pick at the frosting.

  The field is empty. Ice crystals hang on the grass and I kick a mud print of cleat marks, but the ground is frozen. Lilith flops down on the bench and I look at the chain link where I stood yesterday, before I got in his car. It makes me wonder if she deliberately brought us out here because this is the soccer field. Does Lilith have a sixth sense about this sort of thing? Can she look at me and just know?

  Of course she can’t. I cut off all my hair after the barbecue and she didn’t think that was abnormal, just like my father. And then there was the firefly field and the mason jars and the things we don’t talk about. A lie with Lilith isn’t really a lie. Not if it’s something no one brings up. If I don’t tell her about Kurt, it’s just an omission. It becomes the negative space between two rungs of a chair. I think that’s where our friendship lies. In that space where no one has to see the invisible parts of me.

  “What if I can’t do it?” I say quietly, scratching my nail into the tin grooves of the bleacher. “The whole boy sex thing.” I eye Lilith, thinking maybe I can get her to lay off this hookup business. “I mean, let’s face it . . .” I try to make this sound lighthearted, like a joke. “I’ll probably freak out and cry or something.”

  “God, I hope you don’t cry,” she says, dropping her Pop-Tart back on her plate, midchew. Her tone crawls through me, barbed with how disastrous that would be, and how miserably I’ve already failed at this.

  “Exactly, that’s my point,” I say, coughing to cover the quake in my voice. “I mean, it’s going to end badly anyway.”

  I toss the crumbs of my pastry onto the dirt and they fall into the tiny mud holes frozen into the ground.

  “No, it’s not,” Lilith says. “No, really, Marion. It’s not.” She touches the ridge of my ear, and her fingers are so warm I pull away.

  “I’m not you,” I say, my voice only a whisper.

  “I know that,” she says, dropping her hands to her knees. But I don’t think she gets it. Fire isn’t afraid of the fire. Fire thinks it’s easy to burn and spark and take control.

  “I just . . . I think we should drop it. That’s all.” I take a bite of the Pop-Tart but all the sweet crumbles feel like sand.

  “Okay,” she says quietly, and I don’t look at her because I can hear the reluctance in her voice. “But when you and Abe broke up,” she says, fidgeting with her bracelets, “it was because of this, right? Because he wanted to fool around and have sex?”

  My jaw tightens and I stare at the ground. I don’t know how to tell her that what happened with Kurt happened with Abe. That it all turns to mud. The chime of her bracelets tangles with the wind, and I wish she’d drop this and be on my side for once.

  “Look, I get that you’re not me,” she says, raising her hands quickly as if she can feel my annoyance. “And you don’t have to be me. You can wait as long as you want. But . . .”

  “What part of ‘drop it’ do you not understand?”

  She waves her hands like white flags. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just . . . I know you liked Abe. And hell, Marion, you still like him.”

  “I—”

  “You do, Marion! I saw that look in your eye when he was waiting for you after gym class. So . . .” Her shoulders raise to her ears like the solution is as plain as day, and I hate that everything feels so simple to her.

  “So what?”

  “So, forget the hookup and pick the guy you like. You’re never going to surprise yourself if you don’t try. And that’s the thing, Marion—” Her arms rise in excitement. “You are amazing. You’re beautiful and sensitive, and the second you try, the second you give this a real shot, you’re going to realize just how awesome you are. And then you’ll knock the socks off whatever guy you want to be with.”

  I shake my head and laugh. It’s a fast and hasty laugh that comes out my nostrils, because she doesn’t understand. She can fall into firefly fields and lift her skirt to the shadows. She can skip back to the light with stars drawn all over her thighs. There aren’t fingers of mud dragging her down.

  “I can’t wait till you realize you can do that,” Lilith says, ignoring my laugh, and I press my knuckles into the ice of the bench.

  “Yeah, me too,” I force out, knowing I can’t tell her about Kurt now. Because telling her one thing means telling her everything—Kurt, the c
reek, that man—and she thinks there is this other part of me, something solid that isn’t negative space, something that knows how to shine in a jar with no air, like all those fireflies. I can’t tell her I was half-naked and I freaked out. I can’t tell her I cried. Lilith doesn’t understand that it takes air to keep those fireflies alive. It takes air to kindle a fire. And somewhere in the middle of this conversation, I stopped breathing.

  Kurt

  There’s popcorn all over my car. Stupid fucking popcorn on top of everything.

  I swing open my door and start throwing kernels onto the driveway, crawling over the damn seats till every damn kernel is out. It makes me hate Marion. Hate her for making me feel like this. For making the ridge not okay, and my car not okay. And for existing. And I hate that too. That I want her not to exist, like my father doesn’t want me or Mom or Josie. And the last fucking thing I want to be is my father. Ignoring everything.

  But there’s nothing I can do. I can’t fix the fact that I took Marion up there. I can’t change the fact that I wanted her and that was supposed to be okay. And I don’t know why she got in my car in the first place if it wasn’t okay with her.

  But people get in cars all the time when they shouldn’t.

  People drive into the dark.

  * * *

  Josie’s eyes were always bloodshot after Mom died. Maybe they always were before. I don’t know. They were definitely bloodshot that night I took out the trash and found her sitting on the front porch waiting for someone. It was Friday, a date maybe. She looked nice. Short skirt. Hair down.

  “You going out?” I asked, sitting beside her on the stoop. It was her senior year, so it was a stupid question. She went out every weekend. She took a drag off her cigarette and handed it to me before nodding.

  “Yeah,” she said quiet, like it was something she didn’t want to talk about.

  “This one of Dad’s?” I asked, turning over the rolled paper. He was at work, like always.

  “He won’t miss it,” she said, wiping her eye, and I couldn’t tell if she had something in it or not. The porch light was burned out.