All We Left Behind

by Ingrid Sundberg

  But I can’t.

  I fucked that up already, which is why none of this makes sense.

  I nibble on her bottom lip and I don’t stop kissing her. I should. I really should. This is going to be a mistake and not just because of my car. I shouldn’t want this so much. And I don’t know why I do.

  I feel drunk. But not the bad kind of drunk that numbs everything. It’s the good kind. The kind where I don’t want to be anywhere but right here, right now, and the world could end and I wouldn’t care. And it seems stupid to have spent so much time being numb, when I could feel like this.

  I should stop kissing her.

  I really should.

  But I don’t.

  Marion

  Kurt’s mouth is warm and soft and nothing like when we were in his car. The curve of the SUV behind me is cold, perfect with the heat of him against me. My mouth responds to his, listening to this melody blooming, his music in my ears. And I know he’s sharing something with me. This song. This secret.

  The music turns bold and I pull him close till our lips are snared between harmonies and breath. My hands buzz, running over the velvet of his chest, and I’m not sure if that’s his heart, beating, or the music, beating, or me—

  My fingers curl around the collar of him, pulling him closer, and I’m overwhelmed with the almostness of him. Drifting. Barely there. His fingers tease, like those guitar strings thrumming, and I want him. This. This power clenching in me, hot and damp. His breath on my chin, and my throat, and—

  Hands.

  Like the tide, it rips the current.

  Hands. Kurt’s hands.

  And my hair.

  I pull back, refusing to let that earthquake surface again. Not allowing it out and up. Not when his kiss is so kind, and this is so—

  Hands.

  Kurt presses against me. Hips and hard and I can’t breathe. I turn my head to the side so he’ll stop kissing me, and those two guitars ring in my ears. My mouth buzzes, and I’m dizzy from this heat. His breath fans against my neck, his pants coming in short hot bursts—like orange buds bobbing in and out of the stream.

  I don’t want this to be about—

  He steps away from me and the separation of him, the weight of him—off of me—makes my whole body ache with the suddenness of it.

  The weightlessness of it.

  “Marion, I, I—” He looks at me with that same fear from the ridge, like all this is broken. And I’m desperate to tell him it’s not like that.

  “Kurt, it’s . . . It’s—”

  But it is like that. It is creek water and cars and still wanting the nearness of him.

  I pull out the earbuds, needing the silence. I coil the wires into the shape of a small white nest, cradled in my palm, and that song, this moment, it all seems too precious and rare.

  I give it back to him.

  “The guitar, that music . . . ,” I say, placing the cord in his hands. “Was that you?”

  He nods, his fingertips curling over the wires, and I want to ask him about the second guitar. Who it was and why it sang so hauntingly. But I brush a strand of hair out of his face instead, allowing my fingers to land at the edge of his neck.

  “It was beautiful.”

  He nods, stuffing the player in his pocket, and I miss the weight of his lips. My thumb grazes the line of his chin. Barely a touch. Barely anything.

  He looks up. Tenderly. And I hate how much it scares me.

  Marion

  Orange tea warms my cup. Sunrise peeks through the mist covering the backyard oak and I’m not sure why I ever stopped climbing that tree. Dad opens the porch door and sits beside me, his own cup scented with orange steam.

  “Morning,” he says, glancing at the sequin shoes left on the bottom step. The soles edged in brown, dirty from the grass behind the pool house. Dad doesn’t ask where I was last night or who I’ve been kissing.

  Am I different now, because of that kiss? Does it make me more visible?

  Dad stirs his tea, pinching the paper square attached to the string, and I want to ask him about boys. Am I allowed to bring up sequins and kisses? Water and skin?

  One year after the barbecue, Dad and I stood on this porch lighting sparklers. Mine flamed gold against the purple sky, and the embers nicked my wrist as he lit the tip of his from mine. We stared at the looming oak, our sparklers burning down the metal straws toward our fingertips, like an hourglass counting the sand.

  “I’m sorry I had to work today,” he said, nodding to the burned hamburger on my paper plate. “I know we usually spend the Fourth of July together. . . .” He leaned against the porch railing and dangled his sparkler over his cup of apple juice. “You should have gone to Lilith’s. You didn’t have to stay here all day.”

  I moved my fingers closer to the sparkler’s needles of heat.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Next year go to Lilith’s,” he said. “You should be out having fun with your friends.”

  There was a sizzle, and he dropped his sparkler in his juice, drowning out the gold.

  Dad blows on his tea before sipping it, careful not to burn his lip, careful to only look at me from the edge of his eye, where I’m allowed to exist, in his periphery.

  I imagine myself saying, “I met a boy,” but the dawn is thin, the light hardly strong enough to cross this distance between us. If I had a mother, she’d ask me about this. Wouldn’t she? She’d care where I’d been. She’d know by instinct about the moths in my stomach, and the lingering salt of a kiss. She’d know what to do with the mud and how to clean those sequin shoes so they sparkled again. He sips his tea and I want to scream at him for thinking this is a conversation.

  “Lilith called,” Dad says, nodding to the landline in the kitchen. “She left you a bunch of messages, and mentioned your cell was off.”

  “This morning?” I ask.

  “No.” The steam stirs as he shakes his head. “Last night.”

  He eyes my muddy shoes.

  A woodpecker hammers the oak tree, poking out holes and fishing for bugs. Slurping down its wormy breakfast of mud. I can’t swallow. I wait for him to say something. To ask.

  “You should call her back,” he says, standing up and pouring his tea over the railing. “And please charge your battery. I want to know your cell phone works in case there’s ever an emergency.”

  “An emergency?” I press hot ceramic to my lip.

  “You never know,” he says.

  And I agree with that. You never ever know.

  Kurt

  I pull out my guitar and the weight of it feels good. I lean against my bed and play one single chord. The sound fills the whole damn room. Loud sound. Possible sound.

  The quiet settles back in and I remember being eleven and Mom’s footsteps padding into this room. Strappy thrift-store sandals hung from her hand as she stumbled down beside me smelling hot with eagle fire.

  “You gotta put your hand like this,” Mom said, taking my guitar and showing me where my fingers should be bent. A run split her stockings and a scratch of blood was dried where the hole began. I think she’d been at an open mic night at the pub. She’d gotten into the habit of going to those events when there weren’t paying gigs to play at.

  She held my guitar tight, like it was the only thing holding gravity in place, as if letting go meant there’d be nowhere left to land. She hit the strings and played nothing in particular. Chords, a string of noise, riffing her way through the morning till my little room of space opened up and sang.

  She stank of beer and stopped abruptly midsong. She wrapped her arms around me and put the guitar in my hands. Showed me where my fingers went.

  “Okay, now you,” she said, holding my fingers down. “You gotta learn this, Kurt. You gotta know how to play so you got something to hold on to. Got that? This is your anchor, when all the rest is shit.”

  I didn’t know what was shit exactly, or if that was the booze talking.

  “There’s always music.
Don’t forget that. Now play me something.”

  “I’m no good,” I said, but she covered my fingers with her hands. Breathing hard against my neck and trying to be patient. She showed me the chords. Again. Again. Then told me to strum.

  “That’s it,” she said. Nodding her head. Eagle on her breath. Me in her lap. “Just like that. Keep at it. It don’t matter if it’s no good. It’s just got to be real. Hear me? Whatever’s in you. Play that. Even if you don’t got the notes yet. You’ll find them.”

  She leaned back and stroked my head. Her short fingernails massaged my skull as stubby fingers swept through my hair. Eagle breath kissing my head.

  I tried. I played what I could, awkward, and plucked half-wrong. But she kept whispering, “Good, that’s it. You got it. There ain’t no note that’s bad. What you’re playing, right now, this is the most beautiful song.”

  It wasn’t a song. It was messy sound. Any sound. Filling my room so whatever she was chasing away had no space to come in. Her body started to shake behind me and I knew she was crying. She sniffed hard, rocking me with her sobs, and half humming as she stroked my hair. I played her a song, and somewhere in the middle of those awkward notes she told me that I was an angel. That God had sent me right on down from heaven to save her. And then her voice got strong as she wrapped her arms around me and she held me so tight I couldn’t breathe.

  “You’re the one thing keeping me here, Kurt,” she said, holding me. The weight of her arm was pinning me, and I could only play one chord, over and over. It filled the whole room. “You’re the one thing keeping me here. The one thing.”

  But there’s a box in the ground now, telling me different. There’s a box in the ground filled with whatever’s left of her. Maybe nothing. It was a closed casket. Maybe nothing is all she felt I deserved to have.

  Marion

  Lilith sits across from me at the Firehouse coffee shop. Her eyes dart through the ugly wall art as she nips her brownie.

  “Is that supposed to be a sunflower?” she says. “I mean, do they let anyone show artwork in here? Two hundred bucks for that piece of crap!”

  I cup both sides of my porcelain mug as she reapplies her lip gloss and pretends to play with her phone. She’s deliberately avoiding the topic of last night. Yes, she’s taken me to every party I’ve ever been to, and I should have returned the favor, but . . . How would I explain it? The invitation? Kurt?

  “So, there was this party last night . . .” I venture. “At—”

  “Carrie’s house,” she interrupts. “Yeah, I know.”

  She grabs a handful of sugar packets and tears them open, dumping them in her drink. I count six packets before she tosses the rest aside and takes a sip without stirring.

  “Look, I didn’t know if I could invite—”

  “I thought this was supposed to be our best year ever,” she interrupts again. “Remember? You and me.”

  “Yeah, I know . . .”

  “So?” She stares at me and I don’t know how to tell her that I wanted this for myself. That I needed the space. That this is one of those invisible places I’m not ready to show her.

  “You’re right, I should have . . .” But then I think of that kiss and Kurt, and I don’t want to apologize for making room for that. I roll my shoulders and try again. “I kissed Kurt,” I say, taking a sip of my drink and hoping that will satiate her.

  Lilith doesn’t react and coffee burns my tongue.

  She’s supposed to be excited about this. Wasn’t that the whole point of her pushing me to lose my virginity? So we could talk about these things?

  I drag my spoon across the table and punch my foam. “I like him,” I admit. But all I get is red fingernails wrapped around porcelain. “Or—” I backpedal. “Maybe I got caught up in . . . Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “Don’t do that,” she says, putting down her drink. “You’re allowed to like him.”

  My cup rattles against the saucer and I realize I want her permission. That telling her I kissed Kurt is a notch on my bedpost that I’ve been waiting to tell her I have. Thinking it might bring us closer, and make me more like her.

  Only, I really do like him.

  Lilith pulls my hand away from the rattling mug and flattens my palm against hers. It’s soft and soothing.

  “It’s good that you like him,” she says, tracing the lines of my palm like a fortune-teller, her fingers swirling. Waking the skin. Our eyes meet and her gaze is kind. I need this part of her. I need someone I can trust with this. “What was it like?” she asks, fingers tracing the belly of my wrist. “To kiss the Kurt Medford.”

  “Soft,” I whisper, trying to be brave and share this with her.

  “Did you like it?” A machine hisses beside us, exhaling froth and steam.

  I nod.

  “What did he taste like?”

  “Salt,” I whisper. “And skin.”

  I close my eyes and hear the music. Hear the guitar. His, and then that second one laying in on top of the first.

  “Did you want to touch him?”

  Lilith’s fingertips flutter like the wings of a firefly. Yawning open. Beating in. And in my mind I see her in the firefly field with that boy on top of her. Suddenly her hands on me feel too daring.

  “Lie with him? Open your le—”

  I pull away and her hand smacks against the table, her fingers curling up like the legs of a bug.

  “What?” She looks at me sharply.

  My eyes jet through the coffee shop, embarrassed that someone might be watching. Not sure what kind of voyeuristic stunt Lilith is pulling. There are things we don’t talk about and things we shouldn’t talk about.

  “What are you doing?” I pull my arms back, and she shakes her head.

  “Nothing,” she says defensively. “I do that shit all the time. When did touching you become a thing?”

  I stare at her, realizing how much she doesn’t know me. How much she’ll never know about me. How the space we don’t talk about defines us.

  “You weren’t just friendly touching me.” I try to keep my voice down. “You were touching me.”

  This weird smile crawls over Lilith, and suddenly I feel manipulated. Everything seems heightened somehow, that kiss in front of Abe, the one when we were young, every time she’s touched my hair.

  “Seriously?” she says, her eyes becoming dark slits. “You’ve been more than happy to let me be your surrogate boyfriend for the last four years. And what, now that you’ve actually kissed a boy, it’s a problem?”

  “You’ve been my surrogate what?”

  “Get over yourself, Marion! You think the way I touch you is something normal friends do?”

  Cold reeds though me, and this feels like a trap.

  “We’ve been friends for—”

  “Forever. Yeah, I know,” she says. “Why do you think I keep pushing this whole virginity thing? Because you’re in desperate need of affection.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looks at me boldly. “You like the way I touch you.”

  “What?”

  She shakes her head, a miffed laugh escaping from her throat. “Go ahead and deny it, Marion, like you deny everything. Be my guest. But don’t for a second pretend that you didn’t like it.”

  “Are you a lesbian or something?” I ask, and she shakes her head calmly.

  “No, but maybe you are.”

  “What?” I cough, my head buzzing. She isn’t actually saying this right now, is she? I grip my coffee mug, and hot liquid spills onto my fingers.

  “Or maybe you’re not,” Lilith says, raising her hands defensively. “All I know is nobody touches you, Marion. Nobody but me. I’m the only person you let do that.” She lowers her voice. “Look, touching isn’t an issue for me. But it is for you. Why else would you break up with Abe? You two were perfect for each other. If you wanted a nice, innocent romance, you could have had it, but you kicked him to the curb. Why do you think you did that?”

  �
��I, I . . .” My brain is spinning. “I wasn’t ready.”

  “Which is exactly why I do it, Marion. For you. So you can figure out how to be ready. Only it’s not some kinky sex thing for me, okay?” Her eyebrows pinch and she looks at me thoughtfully. “Though, it might be for you.”

  “Kinky what?”

  “It turns you on.”

  “No, it doesn’t!” I look around sharply. No one’s looking at us, but it feels like we’re under a microscope. “That doesn’t make any sense.” I lean in to whisper. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you need to be touched, Marion. We all do. I thought if you realized you could be turned on, you would go out and get it from a guy or whomever . . .”

  “I’m not into girls.”

  “Fine, you’re not into girls. I don’t care. The point is, eventually you’ve got to lose your virginity and get this from someone who isn’t me.”

  “I’m not like you, Lilith!”

  “You mean someone who can actually deal with her own sexuality? Yeah, I know that.”

  I glare at her, furious.

  “What were you doing just now?” I demand. “Asking me about Kurt?”

  Her lips stretch tight like she can’t believe she has to keep explaining this to me. “You want him, don’t you? You can tell me you don’t all you want, but your skin, your body, it wants him. Doesn’t it?”

  I can’t breathe. I feel like she’s thrown me inside my mason jar with the dead bugs and screwed the lid. Tight and suffocating.

  “That desire is in you!”

  “You kissed me in front of Abe and those—”

  “Because that gets boys hot, Marion. It got you hot too, but not because you were kissing me. Because you want to be kissing Abe.”

  That isn’t true! Only, it is. I did want to be kissing Abe. I’m so confused and I don’t know what to make of any of this.

  “That’s fucked-up,” I say finally.