by Katrina Leno
But then Clare’s words echoed through her brain: It’s not like you killed anyone.
So Magpie ignored the other voice.
She did the right thing.
She cried her address into the phone and waited for the ambulance on the front steps like on the night she had watched Eryn drive away.
She heard the sirens and hoped they would find her.
Then hoped they would not find her.
Then she just waited, without much hope at all.
Magpie settled into the sick glow of the waiting room at night, a particular kind of light that is not found anywhere else on the entire planet.
She had ridden in the back of the ambulance with her mother. The paramedics worked very quickly, sticking things into Ann Marie’s skin and cutting away the remainder of her clothes with big sharp scissors. Magpie pressed herself against the back doors and made herself as small as she could, and Ann Marie sometimes breathed and sometimes did not, but she didn’t die.
Now, in the waiting room, Magpie took a seat in the corner again, always in the back corner, always as far from the front as she could manage. She shivered against the metal of the chair. She had brought her backpack with her, and she removed the yellow notebook now and wrote in its pages.
I am always warm.
Then she put it away again.
The doctors hadn’t told her much—nobody had told her much—but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Ann Marie had finally done it. She’d finally drunk enough to land herself in the hospital. Magpie imagined a long, strong clear tube inserted in her mother’s mouth, the slop of all that poison in her stomach suctioned out by a great machine, a pumping sound like a new mother filling a bottle with milk. Magpie’s eyes had tears in them, but she didn’t think she was crying. It was only that the pale blue of her mother’s exposed breast was a little too much for her mind to wrap itself around.
She’d hung up on the 911 operator even after she had asked Magpie to stay on the phone. But the 911 operator had sounded so calm, so peaceful, so serene, and that was not what Magpie needed. Magpie needed someone to scream, someone to match the rising tumult in her brain with a sound loud enough to drown it out. The beat of her heart sounded to her like a steady drum of fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She wanted to call Allison. She wouldn’t.
She wanted to call Eryn. She couldn’t.
She wanted to call her father.
She let herself imagine, for one moment, her father walking into the hospital waiting room.
Magpie rises up to meet him. Her father, already crying, runs to embrace her. There are no more people; it is just the two of them. There are no chairs, no TVs, no beeps from hospital machinery. The walls melt away and Magpie and her father are standing on a cloud and it is suddenly six months ago and her father did not sleep with her aunt and Eryn did not leave and her mother did not start drinking again and Magpie did not do anything to upset Allison and the world is too small to contain all the happiness now bursting from the tips of Magpie’s fingers, the heels of her feet.
She decided not to call her father.
She felt fatigue as if it were a cold, heavy hand on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and leaned into it.
The doctor came out a little while later. The waiting room had thinned out. An elderly woman in a blue housecoat had left wailing. Magpie’s eyes were like dinner plates, watching her, terrified. The distinct horror of being witness to another person’s tragedy.
The doctor was a short woman with neat black hair. She introduced herself as Dr. Cho. Magpie stood up to meet her.
“Margaret,” Magpie said.
“I wanted to tell you that your mother is stable,” Dr. Cho said. “And to ask you a few questions, maybe, if you are up for it?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know if your mother took any pills tonight? Anything other than alcohol? Any drugs? I’m sure the paramedics asked you; I just wanted to see if you had remembered anything between then and now.”
“I don’t think she took anything else, no. I only saw a bottle of vodka.”
“I see,” the doctor said. “Tell me, Margaret… Has anything like this ever happened before? Does your mother drink to excess often?”
Magpie was sixteen; if this doctor wanted to get Child Protective Services involved, they would force her to go live with her father. They wouldn’t care about what he had done, because in the scale of evils, his was surely the lesser of blackout drunk and almost dead.
“Never,” Magpie said. “Honestly, she rarely drinks. I think this must have been a terrible mistake. She would never have meant for something like this to happen.”
“We rarely mean for things like this to happen,” Dr. Cho said quietly. She looked around, maybe confirming that Magpie was alone. “Do you have anyone you can call, Margaret? Your father, a family member…?”
“My father is on his way. He was out of town for a business meeting. He should be here any minute,” Magpie assured her.
“Would you like to see your mother now?”
“I’ll wait for him.”
Dr. Cho nodded. She arranged her glasses on the bridge of her nose and took a seat in the closest chair. She gestured for Magpie to do the same. Magpie did.
“Margaret… Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” Dr. Cho asked.
“Like about…”
“About anything. Your mother’s drinking, where your father is. Life at home. Anything.”
“I told you, my father is on his way. He was out of town for a business meeting.”
“What town?”
“I don’t know; I don’t memorize his schedule,” Magpie snapped. Her eyes burned. She pressed her palms into them. “I’m sorry. I’m didn’t mean to… I’m just worried about my mom. I would like to go see her, okay? I’ve changed my mind.”
She did not actually want to see her mother; she only wanted Dr. Cho to go away as quickly as possible. Surely she must have other patients; surely she couldn’t spend too much time prying into Magpie’s personal life.
Magpie stood up again, concentrating only on smiling and not running full speed out the front door of the hospital. She tried to look eighteen, to look legal, to look appropriately worried while also self-assured and honest. And when that didn’t work, when Dr. Cho stood up and eyed her suspiciously before leading her to her mother’s room, Magpie let her shoulders slump and resigned herself to appearing exactly as she was: a sixteen-year-old liar who didn’t particularly care if her mother lived or died.
Dr. Cho led Magpie down a series of identical hallways, then stopped outside a door indistinguishable from the ones on either side of it.
“She’ll be moved later tonight,” Dr. Cho said. “Anyone at the front desk will be able to tell you where she is once they assign her a room.” She dug around in her white coat pocket and pulled out a business card. “In case you need someone to talk to,” she added, and handed the card to Magpie.
“Thanks. For all you did for my mom. I really appreciate it.”
Dr. Cho nodded. Magpie watched her walk down the hallway and turn a corner, then Magpie hauled ass in the opposite direction, following the welcome glow of the bright red exit signs until she hit the warm night air.
At home Magpie opened a fresh bottle of vodka and made herself a pitcher of lemonade.
She hadn’t had anything to drink since the night of the party, six months ago, but something about seeing her own mother lying lifeless on the floor of her bedroom had stirred an itch in the pit of her belly. Maybe more than anything, she wanted to prove that it was possible to have a drink without having seven or eight immediately after it. Maybe more than anything, she just wanted to feel a little numb.
Magpie poured herself a tall glass of lemonade, added the vodka, then she sat down at the kitchen table with her yellow notebook and opened it up to the first blank page and wrote.
Only I will be able to get there. And anyone else I decide to let in.
And
I will know the way like I have been waiting for it all of my life. Like it’s been waiting for ME all of my life.
Because it has. And it wants me to come home now.
And before she really realized it, she had begun to cry.
She watched one fat, round tear splatter onto the page, blurring the word it landed on—ME—and she stood up angrily, wiping at her cheeks.
And then she stripped naked in the living room and pulled on her bathing suit and walked outside and dunked herself into the pool, which was blissfully chilly and made her break out in goose bumps.
“Are you having a crisis?” Magpie asked herself out loud, liking the way her voice lit up the quiet of the night. She was thinking about many things: about what a long day it had been, about Clare Brown wanting to be her friend, about Ben maybe liking her, about her mother almost killing herself, about Teddy Brown growing up without a father and wanting to be called Ringo. She thought about Linda’s stew and how warm it had made her feel. She thought about Mr. Brown driving home and pulling his car into the family’s garage and shutting the door behind him and shooting himself in the temple with a small handgun they kept locked in the tool cabinet. She thought about the car: Who had cleaned it? Who owned it now? Did they know what had happened in it? Was the used-car salesman required by law to disclose that information?
Magpie floated on her back and looked up at the perfect darkness of the sky, the mess of stars, a brighter dot she thought might be Mars or Venus, a very faint speck of light that moved impossibly slow: a satellite. She counted three planes. She counted twelve spots of blackness on the surface of her heart. She tried to name them all, but it was hard to tell, sometimes, where dark heart spots came from.
She righted herself in the pool and drank half the glass of vodka lemonade, then threw it violently across the yard. It came to rest on the grass halfway between the pool and the garden shed.
It did not shatter, only bounced once and was still. But stranger than that was…
The garden shed, with its light on and blazing.
The quick jolt of vodka had warmed Magpie’s stomach, but now she felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air or the cool water. She pulled herself out of the pool and wrapped herself in a threadbare beach towel embroidered in one corner with her sister’s initials: ERL. She stood dripping on the pool platform.
The shed’s light did not go out.
Magpie climbed carefully down to the lawn.
She took a step toward the shed, the light like a beacon, casting a circle of yellow on the grass around it.
Magpie felt her heart was like a fluttering thing, like a bird.
She was close enough now to touch the shed, and she did, letting her hand fall upon the padlock, which was locked one moment and lying open in her hand the next though she didn’t have the key, though she hadn’t even tried to open it.
She let the padlock fall to the ground.
She let the shed door open; she let the light pour over her.
The light was a tangible thing, a warm, soft blanket. She could wrap herself up in it; she could let it protect her.
She took a step into the shed, and it was as if the shed had split into two distinct places, one on top of the other. The lawn mower, the skis, the treadmill her father had bought and never used. All those things were here, and she could see them, and yet there was something else. There was another place, and it was all around her, opening up in front of her.
She looked out into it.
She was at the top of a green, green hill.
The grass spread out all around her, sloping downward gently. There were dandelions growing here and there. Crisp white daisies with bright-yellow centers. Patches of buttercups.
In front of her, down the hill, was a little town. She could see the tops of the houses, the buildings. Cars parked in driveways. A white picket fence encircling everything.
She felt warm looking at it.
She felt safe.
She felt that fence around her heart, protecting it, keeping it away from anything that might want to get in and hurt her.
Oh, and it was beautiful.
It was like nothing in her life at all.
And she could step through; she could see that. It would be the easiest thing just to step through from one place to another.
So she did.
She stepped through.
And she let the towel slip away and fall to the grass.
And she was swallowed up into light.
And it was exactly like going home.
THREE FOR A GIRL
Here is what Magpie could remember when she woke up the next morning in her own bed, unsure of how she got there.
The light. Spreading through her entire body; seeping into her skin, her bones; moving through her veins, through her lungs, through her stomach.
A gentle feeling of peace.
A warm summer breeze.
A rolling expanse of green, perhaps a grassy knoll or hillside.
Grass so green it was almost lime.
She felt underneath her pillow for her yellow notebook and pulled it out, holding it to her chest the way a young child might clutch a teddy bear.
She let herself stay in bed for long minutes, let herself enjoy the feelings rolling through her: feelings of safety, of being full, of being light.
Her memories of last night were even now fading away.
Had she dreamed of something warm? Why did she feel so nice, so calm?
She could see the shed through her bedroom window, and it looked as ordinary as it ever had. It was just a standard, run-of-the-mill garden shed, sitting unused and neglected right at the back edge of their property.
But there was something there. A dream about the garden shed? The cut of sunshine through the darkness of a New England night?
The more she tried to remember, the more it slipped away. It must have been a dream. But a dream that had left her feeling so happy. So full.
But then she remembered her mother, and all the good feelings inside her were replaced by guilt. Her mother, alone in a hospital room. A cup of wiggling Jell-O.
“It’s just ground-up cow bones, sugar, and a little bit of food coloring. That’s all it is,” Ann Marie had said of Jell-O once when Magpie was younger and wanted a little plastic cup of her own to unwrap in the school cafeteria.
She would have to go see her today before school. It would look suspicious if she didn’t.
She took her time showering, getting dressed, her own small silent protest. It was not her fault that Ann Marie had drunk herself straight into an ambulance.
She rode her bike to the hospital.
She stood for a long time in front of the gift shop and wondered if she should use her mother’s credit card to buy a small bouquet of flowers. And because her goal was to arouse as little suspicion as possible about her situation, she decided that she should.
She picked out the most inexpensive gathering of flowers, then she asked the man at the front desk what room Ann Marie Lewis was in.
Her mother was on the third floor. The walls were pale blue. The tile was white with flecks of dark gray. She found the right door and didn’t let herself pause before she walked inside because she had enough foresight to understand that the pause would be eternal, a trap from which she would never be able to free herself.
Her mother was in a double room, but there was no one in the other bed.
Ann Marie was sleeping, mouth open, a thick line of drool running down the right side of her chin. There were tubes still plugged into her skin. She looked pale, no longer blue but a sickly grayish color. She looked exactly like you’d imagine someone who drank a bottle of vodka the night before might look.
Magpie gently set the flowers on Ann Marie’s nightstand, not bothering to find a vase, not bothering to put them in water. Then she wrote her mother a note and left it on top of the flowers.
Hi, Mom. I stayed for a long time, but you didn’t wake up. I hope you’re feeli
ng better. I’ll come back later after school if I can. x, Magpie
She did not wait one single second more. She was in and out in less than a minute.
The lunch table had shifted to allow Clare to sit on one side of Magpie and Ben on the other.
“This is disorienting,” Luke complained. “I don’t know who’s who anymore.”
“Ditto,” Brianna added. “I never bothered to remember your names, just where you sat.”
“Clare’s the cute one, I think,” Luke replied. “Mags is the dark, mysterious one. Ben’s the one who still won’t let me dress him.”
“No offense, but you’re wearing a shirt with ice cream cones on it,” Ben said.
Luke feigned indignation. Brianna, to his left now, pretended to lick the ice cream cones. Everyone settled into the idea of a new seating chart.
“Are you guys, like, best friends forever now?” Brianna asked Clare and Magpie. “Did you buy matching charm bracelets?”
“Yes,” Clare said. “To both of those, yes.”
“That’s sweet,” Brianna said. “Okay, Mags, I forgive you for not wanting to sit next to me anymore. If you still want to give me your leftovers, though, that would be totally cool with me.”
“Of course,” Magpie said. “Unless Clare wants them. That’s part of the charm-bracelet pact we made.”
Everybody laughed except Luke, who looked a little shocked. “I think…” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. “Mags, I think that might be the first time I’ve ever heard you make a joke.”
Magpie smiled. “I’ve been practicing in the mirror.”
The subject of Brandon Phipp’s party was resurrected shortly after that, with a very clear line of who wanted to go and who didn’t. On the didn’t side: Brianna and Magpie. On the did side: Clare, Luke, and, surprisingly, Ben.
“I dunno. I like parties,” Ben explained, opening his lunch to reveal celery sticks instead of carrots. He frowned at them momentarily before biting one in half. “Parties are fun.”
“Excellent point,” Brianna said. “I’ve changed my mind entirely. Parties are fun. Is someone writing this down?”
