Borrowed

by Lucia DiStefano

  I swing my shaky legs around to the floor and stand up.

  “You’re right,” I whisper into the empty, crowded room. “I don’t own you.”

  Four hours later. I’ve managed to calm myself down. The image of the water’s edge, no matter how vivid, was just that: an image. I’m safe. And the scrawl on my arm?

  That’s harder to shove aside since I can still see faint traces of it, despite scrubbing with a soapy loofah ’til my skin turned raw.

  “Okay, woman,” Alma says to me as I throw my backpack into the back seat of her Jetta, “you know I don’t do well with cryptic texts. Start spilling.”

  When Daniel left last night, it was late. I didn’t want to text Jules and Alma. Or maybe I didn’t want to reduce the magic of the night to a teensy box on a tiny screen. Or maybe I wanted to have it all to myself for a little longer. But this morning, I couldn’t resist texting something when Alma asked what I did last night. Oh, the usual. Chatted up the dog walker.

  I buckle my seat belt and drop my water bottle into the empty cup holder.

  “You seem different.” She grabs my arm. “Oh my God. You had sex, didn’t you?”

  “What? No!” I swat at her arm to release her clutch on the sting sites.

  “Wait, what happened to your face?”

  “Gee, nice to see you, too.” I flip down the visor and flip up the mirror cover. Last I checked, I thought I looked almost normal. The swelling is pretty much gone, and I’ve got concealer over the few stings on my face. I punch the visor back up and, because he can’t glower back, I glower at the Mozart air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. (Before Alma corrected me, I thought it was Einstein with tidy hair.)

  “I don’t mean it in a bad way … you just look … puffy around the eyes. Wait, were you crying?”

  I reassure her with a smile and a pat on her hand. “Isn’t Fina waiting to interview me?” I ask. When she nods, I say, “Just drive. I’ll tell you everything.”

  Alma’s shaking her head as we pull into her driveway. “I can’t believe he walked in at the moment you were baring your tits to the world.”

  I laugh. “Not to the world, exactly.”

  “When are you seeing him again?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that,” I lie.

  “Did he text you this morning?” she asks as we walk around the house to go through the back.

  “We didn’t exchange numbers.” But that doesn’t mean anything … right? “He’s a neighbor. I can yell over the hedge.” I was hoping to just-happen-to-see him when Alma picked me up, but his house was quiet, his garage door shut.

  “Huh. That’s so old fashioned, it’s cute.” She tugs at my right sleeve. “So if that’s not a phone number, what is it, then?”

  So I didn’t tell Alma everything. Not the parts I want to forget.

  “Nothing.” I yank my sleeve to my knuckles.

  She bats her eyelashes at me. “Did you and Daniel give each other henna tattoos?”

  I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous that is. “It’s nothing. Something I scribbled when I was … uh … kind of sleepwalking.”

  “Oh, man. First smoking, now sleepwalking. Are you okay?” She peers into my face in such an intense, loving way that it makes me want to collapse into her. Instead, I open the back door and step into Alma’s sunny mudroom, which is a picture of life being lived: bright rain slickers on hooks, kid boots tripping over themselves, a backless wooden bench with gardening gloves on one end. I’m tackled by Renata when I walk into the kitchen.

  “Easy!” Alma says as her little sister hugs me. Alma’s ten-year-old fraternal twin sisters are flippin’ adorable. And I tell them that, often, because good thoughts are useless if the people who inspire them are in the dark. “Linnea’s sore. Bee stings. Lay off.”

  Renata peels herself off me and assesses me with wide eyes. “If you don’t bother bees, they won’t bother you.”

  “I learned that the hard way, kiddo. Where’s your sister? She’s got an assignment I’m supposed to help her with.”

  “And you’ve got a piano lesson,” Alma tells Renata.

  Renata groans. “I had one last week.”

  “Exactly,” Alma says, “it’s been a whole week!”

  Alma wants to major in music. Her parents want her to major in math and have music as a “hobby,” thanks to her guidance counselor telling them how gifted she is in math, how her test scores were the best in the district, how she could get into MIT without blinking. “Music theory is mathematical,” Alma told me once. “But that doesn’t mean I want to devote my life to numbers.” To be continued. Apparently her mom and dad aren’t easing up.

  Josefina pads into the kitchen on socked feet, mini tape recorder and clipboard in tow. She looks so serious. That’s one of the things I find most adorable about Alma’s sisters: how different they are. Fina can’t wait to grow up, and Renata doesn’t give a thought to tomorrow.

  “Thank you for agreeing to let me interview you, Linnea,” Fina says. “You’re quite welcome, Josefina.”

  I can tell Alma’s cracking up inside but maintains a straight face as she stacks cereal bowls in the sink.

  “Mommy’s still on her conference call upstairs,” Fina tells Alma. She checks the wall clock. “She’ll be done in one hour, fifteen minutes. She told us not to be loud.”

  “That means I shouldn’t have a piano lesson,” Renata tries.

  “Negative,” Alma says. “That’s not the kind of loud Mom means.”

  Fina and I take seats at the big pine table, and Alma leads her other sister out of the kitchen and to the piano room.

  “As I said in my e-mail,” Fina starts as she twists the cap off her pen, “my assignment is to find someone who does a job I’d like to do someday and to interview them.”

  I try not to smirk at the formal summation. “I’m honored you chose me.”

  She smiles, and I see the little kid underneath. “Do I have your permission to record you?”

  See what I mean? Adorable.

  “You do,” I say.

  We can hear the piano in the next room. At first, it sounds like Alma is playing the song to demonstrate for Renata. And then the sound of little fingers plunking it out, starting, stopping, starting again with a wrong note.

  Fina clicks the recorder on and glances at her clipboard. “So my first question is: what is the best part of being a pastry chef?”

  “Making people happy. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood if you’re eating a really great cupcake.”

  She nods. “And what’s the hardest part of your job?”

  “Hmm. On a good day, the hardest part is stopping myself from eating too much. But on not-as-good days, the hardest part is making something that you know isn’t your best. Putting in lots of time and ingredients and ending up with something that doesn’t taste quite right or look quite right.” I’ve had more than my share of those days over the last couple of weeks.

  The music stops. I hear Alma’s voice rise, but I can’t hear what she says. Renata hurtles into the kitchen and throws herself onto the chair next to me. “Alma is so mean!” Her eyes pool with tears.

  Sighing, Josefina clicks off the recorder. “I’m doing an interview here.”

  “You’re lucky,” Renata says.

  “I take lessons too,” Fina points out.

  Fina is a much more compliant student, Alma says.

  Alma’s in the kitchen now too. “Renata, I need to speak with you, please.”

  “I’m doing the interview too,” Renata mumbles.

  “You are not!” Alma and Fina say in unison.

  Even though part of her looks like she wants to strangle Renata, Alma kisses the top of her head. “We need to let Fina and Linnea work in here, but you and I need to recalibrate in the family room, okay? Nowhere near the piano for a few minutes. I promise.”

  Alma leads her sister out of the kitchen again, but it’s hard for me to reengage in Fina’s interview. The silen
ce from the piano room is too distracting. It taunts me. It dares me.

  “Fina,” I say, “I need to use the bathroom, okay?”

  She sighs again, probably thinking about how off-task everyone around her is, but she pauses the recorder.

  I go straight for the piano. It’s a baby grand, polished to a high gloss. Other than the piano, the room’s only furnished with two straight-backed leather chairs, a bookshelf, and two standing lamps.

  Alma has tried to teach me to play (many times) and concluded it was hopeless. “You’re tone deaf,” she announced sadly. “Make your music in the kitchen.”

  But today, I sit at the piano anyway. I get a strange feeling in my chest. A sudden tightness followed by a quick looseness. An expansiveness that makes me feel like my lungs can handle triple the amount of oxygen. I push my sleeves up higher on my forearms, the message’s scrubbed-faint residue looking on.

  Renata’s level one music book rests on the stand above the keys; this is the same book Alma tried to teach me from, but I couldn’t ever see the notes as anything other than blobs of ink. I close the book and set it aside.

  Flipping through the sheet music stacked on the edge of the piano, I choose a book that looks as far from level one as you can get. I open it to a page filled with tiny notes and sharps and flats. I prop it up and stretch my fingers wide.

  And suddenly the squiggles and circles and lines on the sheet music become clear, transforming themselves to instructions that somehow translate perfectly to my knowing fingers, and I recognize more than middle C and I play and play.

  I’m making music. Making music. Music that sounds good. It’s impossible. Am I the only one hearing it? I come to the end of the song on the page, but I’m playing another song now, one I don’t need sheet music for. It’s not a song my ears recognize, yet it’s a song I know by heart. My fingers keep moving, the piano keeps spilling the notes into the thirsty air, my heart keeps beating faster and louder.

  Alma is standing in the doorway. Staring at me. An astonished, wordless stare that grips me by the collar and yells WTF?

  I drop my hands into my lap. I look at them like they’re not mine.

  “Linnea,” Alma breathes. “Linnea?”

  Whoever just did that, she wasn’t Linnea.

  8

  MAXINE

  The next morning the boys are eating breakfast in the kitchen and I’m packing their backpacks for day camp when the doorbell rings. I feel that same blip of dread I always do at the sound of the bell. I open the door slowly. Ezra. Also known as Harper’s boyfriend. I assume someday he’ll go on to become someone else’s boyfriend. But to me, he’ll always be Harper’s. I want to tell him to go, and I want to pull him into the house and beg him to never leave.

  “I got a call,” he says. He holds his phone up like he needs a prop. He’s beautiful, Ezra is. I wouldn’t tell him that, but Harper has. And Harper reported that he’d laughed at that and said someone once told him he had the kind of face a sketch artist would draw if the witness was unsure whether the dude was white or black. Harper told me she loved his face of contradictions: sleepy lids hooding bright, watchful eyes; sharp cheekbones and full, rounded lips; a smile that’s tentative when it starts but certain when it stays.

  Race comes barreling out of the kitchen and hurls himself at Ezra. “You’re here!” Ezra torpedo-catches Race and flings him over his shoulder like he’s a bag of rice. Ezra’s over six feet tall, so that’s an impressive height for a five-year-old. Ezra flings Race upside down and gets a squeal out of my brother.

  “Maybe keep him upright so that he won’t give back his French toast sticks?” I say.

  “Ooh, my favorite,” Ezra says, setting Race on his feet and tickling his ribs.

  “You can have the rest of mine,” Race says, tugging at Ezra’s loose braided hemp bracelet.

  “Race,” I say, hating the edge in my voice but too exhausted to file it down, “you need to finish your breakfast.”

  Ezra squeezes Race’s upper arm and scowls. “That feels like a one-French-toast-stick muscle. You can do better than that.”

  Race strongman poses, maple-syrup-dotted shirt and all, and runs back toward the kitchen, the swinging door swallowing him up.

  “Hey,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “I told the boys to quit calling you.”

  Ezra winces softly. “They didn’t.”

  “Oh. Shit.” Then it was Mom. Calling from Harper’s cell. Imagine seeing your dead girlfriend’s number and forgetting reality for a fraction of a second. I tried to cancel Harper’s line, but my mother forbade me. I worried she’d slide even farther into the crazy pit if I did it anyway.

  “Sorry,” I say. A small word that can’t possibly capture everything it needs to.

  He reaches for my hand and threads his long slim fingers through mine. We’re entwined for a moment—a beautiful, horrible moment—before I yank my hand back.

  “Max, we should talk.”

  “Agreed. I need to tell you about an e-mail I got,” I say. He looks disappointed.

  “About Harper.”

  His face opens expectantly. “A lead?” he says, his voice taut.

  “Kind of the opposite. But maybe it’s okay.”

  There’s a crash from the kitchen. Followed by a yelp. I practically trip over myself to get there, visualizing one of the boys burned or choking. But I’m only greeted with a mess. The foil-lined cookie sheet with the French toast sticks on it has been upended, the food scattered on the floor. Shelby is squatting over it, scooping up the battered chunks.

  “Okay, what happened?” I ask all three of them, over Will’s and Race’s insistence that they didn’t do it.

  “Sorry … hip-checked it. Accidentally.” She pats her hip. “These things get me in enough trouble, but maybe someday they’ll make childbirth a snap. Hey, Ezra.”

  He says hi and moves to the table to sit between the boys. Will reads Ezra’s T-shirt aloud: “If you can read this, you’re too close.” Clearly Will doesn’t get it, but he laughs anyway.

  “When’d you get here?” I whisper to Shelby.

  “Two minutes ago.” She glances behind me toward Ezra. “I peeked in the living room, but it looked like you guys were having a discussion.”

  I help Shelby clean up while Ezra tries to convince the boys to appreciate their apple slices.

  Shelby whispers, “What happened out there?” but I shake my head. I’m not talking about Ezra in front of him. Besides, there’s nothing to talk about. He was Harper’s. He is Harper’s. And she didn’t give him up willingly. Even if she had grown sort of bored.

  Meal over, Shelby offers to take the boys to camp. Once they leave, Ezra goes up to check on Mom. I follow.

  He knocks. “Mrs. T.? It’s Ezra.”

  I lean against the wall, prepared to wait. But the door opens immediately.

  Her eyes are glazed, fevered. Her hair hangs in lanky, greasy strands. Her robe is ratty and stained. I fight back a wave of embarrassment. I don’t want Ezra to see her like that.

  “How you doing?” he says. Like talking to her is the easiest thing in the world. Not an ounce of judgment. Not an ounce of shame. Not even an ounce of pity.

  “Oh, Ezra,” she says, her voice raspy from underuse. She sags onto the bed. “Ezra. You’re here now.”

  I follow him into the room even though she doesn’t seem to notice me. My phone buzzes from inside my pocket. I ignore it.

  “It’s almost a year,” Mom says. “Tomorrow.”

  “I know.” Ezra sits on the bed beside Mom. I’m about to tell him to get up, but wonder of wonders, instead of flipping out like she did yesterday, she just leans over and plucks a puff of lint off the knee of his jeans.

  “I shouldn’t bother you,” she says. “I should let you get on with your life.”

  “It’s never a bother,” Ezra says. “Honest.”

  His eyes cut to mine. I don’t know what to do with his gaze, so I dro
p it. My phone starts up again. I slide it out of my pocket just enough to read the screen. Four texts from Chris. I slide it back in.

  “Maxine is doing the best she can,” Mom says. “But I didn’t know if you were okay. I had to be sure.”

  “I’m okay.” He reaches over and grabs Mom’s hand.

  She squeezes his fingers. “And I’m trying.”

  It’s the most direct, honest, noncrazy thing she’s said in weeks. And it’s fitting that Ezra is the conduit for it.

  “We know,” he says softly. “And all you can do is try.”

  My damn phone again. Ezra releases me with a gesture toward the door. Mom must be especially lucid, since even she picks up on it.

  “You can go, honey,” she says to me. “I’m sure you have plenty to do.”

  “I should do the breakfast dishes.” I don’t add that if I want any chance of getting my diploma, I have a shitload of homework (makeup and otherwise). So long honor roll, hello academic probation. Most seniors are in the coasting stage. Not me. And I don’t have college plans either. Shelby is going off to Seattle for school, a fact that makes my stomach turn over.

  I slip out and sit in the hallway cubby where the desktop computer lives.

  Hey, Chris texted fourteen minutes ago, let me know you’re OK pls?

  The sunlight struggling through the small window down the hall doesn’t reach me here. My phone’s screen is the only source of light as I hunch on the spindly wooden chair.

  If you can get a sitter, Chris wrote eleven minutes ago, lets go out tonite.

  And six minutes ago: Or if you wanna stay in, thats fine too.

  Four minutes ago: I know its a tough time for you.

  Three: Hope I’m not saying the wrong thing.

  Two: I want to help u get thru these next few days.

  He remembers. Even though I haven’t talked about Harper a whole lot with him. Not because I can’t talk about her, but because I don’t have to. He understands, and that understanding makes words unnecessary. His brother Henry died four years ago. Technically Henry was Chris’s cousin, but they were raised together most of their life because Henry’s parents died in a crash when he was young.