You Must Not Miss

by Katrina Leno

  “It will be fun,” Clare insisted. “We could take my mom’s car; we’ll all fit.”

  “Nobody has to go if they don’t want to go,” Ben added, looking quickly at Magpie.

  “Oh, thank you, Ben, for excusing us,” Brianna said, rolling her eyes.

  Clare leaned over to Magpie as the rest of the table continued to debate the issue. “I’m not trying to pressure you,” she whispered. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and I do think it would be good for you to come. Just to show Allison you don’t give a shit what she says about you, you know? I mean—she wants you to sit at home being miserable. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t.”

  “Sure, maybe,” Magpie said. It was a good idea in theory, but she didn’t really buy it. There was no winning. Whether Magpie showed up to the party or didn’t—Allison had won six months ago.

  Clare pulled away to continue arguing with Brianna, and Ben leaned in close. “Don’t let Clare pressure you into anything,” he said. “We could always do something else that night. If you wanted to.”

  “Like what?” Magpie asked.

  “Like, we could go to… the movies.”

  Magpie tried to remember the last movie she had seen in the theaters, but she couldn’t. When Eryn was sixteen and Magpie was ten, they used to go to the movies together. Magpie found out much later that Eryn had been paid for this; it was essentially a babysitting job. Her sister would sit next to her and text through whatever new animated movie they’d gone to see. Magpie had felt very grown-up riding in the car with Eryn and hadn’t really minded her sister’s refusal to hold her hand or buy her popcorn or pay attention to the movie. Sometimes Eryn left halfway through and came back during the credits smelling of cigarettes and something dark and bitter that Magpie would later understand had been her sister’s boyfriend’s cologne.

  “What do you think?” Ben asked.

  Magpie struggled to return to the present. All she could see was the glow of Eryn’s cell phone in the darkened theater, the smell of boy and buttered popcorn, the dull pang of being short-term abandoned, a dozen movies Eryn had never actually been interested in seeing.

  “That sounds nice,” she managed finally, hoping her answer hadn’t come too late to sound sincere. Because it did sound nice.

  “All right, great!” Ben said. “We’ll ditch the party for the movies.”

  “Ex-squeeze me, you’ll do what?” Clare asked, leaning far over Magpie’s right side to stare down Ben.

  “We’re just exploring different options,” Ben said.

  “You better explore the option of going to the party, or else you better explore the option of finding a new best friend,” Clare retorted.

  Magpie thought she was probably kidding, but she had never been good at reading people, and she didn’t want to be the one to cause a fight between Ben and Clare. Before she could really give herself time to think about it, she said, “We can do both. Clare, we’ll come to the party for a little bit, and then we’ll go to the movies.”

  Clare narrowed her eyes. “I require at least an hour at the party.”

  “Deal,” Magpie said.

  Clare shifted her gaze to Ben.

  “Deal,” he said, smiling now.

  “Fine,” Clare said. “I hate you both, but fine.”

  Magpie spent Saturday morning on the pizza pool float after finally scrubbing her mother’s vomit off the carpet in the master bedroom and throwing her mother’s sick-covered clothes into the washing machine with the last scrapes of detergent they had.

  The hospital had called to say Ann Marie would be released on Monday.

  Magpie avoided looking at the garden shed. The light remained off, but it still left her with a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. As if there was something she couldn’t remember.

  She walked to the grocery store around eleven to put money on her phone and buy a box of cheap laundry detergent.

  She wrote Ben a text message in the parking lot.

  See you at one!

  And he texted her back.

  Sounds good!

  When she got home, she put another load of clothes into the washing machine, and she took the Amelia Earhart books out to the backyard. She had a little more than an hour to look over them before she’d have to leave to meet Ben. She sat on the pool deck and let her legs dangle over the side into the water, which was no longer green but still smelled of chlorine, which made her feel calm and happy.

  The pool was a normal pool. The backyard was a normal backyard. Everything was normal, even the garden shed, with its light off and its door shut and locked.

  She was early to the library; she waited out front on a bench because it was a nice day and she didn’t want to miss Ben—who arrived precisely at one o’clock, riding a pale-blue bicycle.

  Magpie always thought it was jarring to see people out of their firmly established settings, and she had only ever seen Ben in school. Here, outside the library, atop his bicycle, Ben looked almost like a stranger. He wore a bicycle helmet, for one thing, and when he removed it, his hair was a little sweaty and matted to his head. He waved to her, and she got off her bench and walked over to him as he locked up the bike at the bike rack.

  She wondered if she also looked a little bit like a stranger to him.

  She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top, which she wasn’t allowed to wear at school (shoulders were very slutty, apparently) and shorts, which she also wasn’t allowed to wear at school (because, when she held her arms at her sides, the shorts were higher than the tips of her fingers).

  At any rate, Ben had no trouble recognizing her, and he even made a movement like he was thinking about giving her a hug, but Magpie was thankful he decided against it and chose instead to readjust the straps of his backpack.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “It’s nice out, huh?”

  “Really nice.”

  “What have you been doing today?”

  “Not much. Some laundry. You?”

  “Helping my parents with yard work,” he said. “I think I got a little burned.” He held up his arms, which had indeed turned a pale shade of pink.

  “Aloe,” Magpie said. And then she spent a few moments wondering if, instead of the Amelia Earhart books, she should have read a manual on how to be a better conversationalist, because certainly the offering of aloe was not doing her any favors.

  “Well, should we go inside?” Ben asked.

  They found an open cubicle in the back of the library; Magpie took the Amelia Earhart books out of her bag and set them on the desk.

  “So where should we start?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know.” Magpie shrugged. “I think it’s kind of interesting that they still don’t know what happened to her. Even though they keep looking, you know? I mean, one week they think they’ve found her bones, the next week they think they’ve spotted her in an old photograph. But nobody knows yet.”

  “Isn’t that the saddest part?”

  “I don’t think so. Because it means she could have survived. She could have orchestrated the whole thing in order to disappear. Start a new life somewhere.”

  “Forgetting for a moment that your scenario is hugely unlikely,” Ben said, smiling, “why would she do that? She had a husband and everything.”

  “Everybody has a reason to want to change their lives,” Magpie said quietly.

  She hadn’t meant it to be so honest, so prickling and sharp, but there it was.

  Prickling and sharp and oh so honest.

  Ben looked at her for a moment as if he wanted to ask her something. But then he shook his head—almost imperceptibly—and said, “I think this could be our entire project. I mean, you’re right—lots of people have guesses about what happened to her, but nothing has been proved yet. We could research the major theories and maybe assign, like, a likelihood to each of them. A probability ratio or something.”

  “History is bad enough; now you want to bring math
into it?” Magpie joked.

  Ben laughed. “Probability is fascinating.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  They spent almost four hours at the library. Magpie hadn’t had lunch or breakfast, and her stomach turned painfully as she biked the two miles home. It was past five when she arrived, and she made herself dinner without turning on the kitchen overhead, enjoying the late light streaming in through the window from a sun almost ready to call it quits.

  She looked out the window as the pasta water boiled.

  Everything was still normal.

  The world was quiet and ordinary.

  After dinner, she would work on her essay for Mr. James. He wanted it next week, and she was determined to have it done early, to show him she was trying not to have to repeat sophomore year.

  She poured herself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher she’d left in the fridge, then added a few splashes of vodka to it.

  She made it weaker than she had the other night, just a hint of the burning vodka against the sweetness of the lemonade.

  Magpie ate her macaroni and cheese in the kitchen standing over the sink, her eyes darting every now and then to the backyard, just checking, just making sure.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  When she was done, she changed into her bathing suit and brought the drink outside to the pool.

  She liked the quiet numbness that the first few sips of the drink provided, the spreading of calm she could feel in her chest that moved ever outward to her fingers and toes. It was especially pleasant while lying on the pizza float, enjoying the last few bits of sunlight that filtered in through the trees lining the backyard.

  She took another long sip from her vodka lemonade, then rolled off the float and let herself be consumed by the water.

  That was the word for it—consumed—the way the water slipped over her head and buttoned itself back up again. It felt like silk as she ran her hands through it. She felt it tugging at the edges of her eyes, her mouth, filling up her ears, trying to get inside her.

  She surfaced after forty-eight beats measured by the thrum of her heart. She took a great gulp of the evening air and brushed her hands over her forehead, slicking back her wet hair.

  When she opened her eyes, she thought she was imagining things; she blinked rapidly to get the water off her lashes, and every time she blinked, she expected him to be gone, but every time she blinked, he was still there, stubbornly standing in the backyard with his arms hanging limply by his sides and his expression so confused, so many things: hurt and lost and lonely and unsure of how he had come to be there.

  “Dad?” she said, and the word bounced off the surface of the pool and was so much louder in the quiet than she had meant it to be.

  Her father didn’t respond right away. He just looked at her.

  Once, when Magpie was only a toddler, she’d opened the cabinet under the sink where her parents kept a plastic container of recycling. Her mother had forgotten to put the child lock back on the cabinet, and she’d gone into the other room for something, and Magpie had waddled immediately to the cabinet and pulled it open. She gazed at the tub of recycling as if it were a treasure chest filled with untouchable and priceless jewels. Laughing, she thrust her hands into the middle of it. Her laughter had turned into a squeal of betrayed pain as something sharp sliced into her finger. She pulled her hand out. Blood everywhere.

  It was her father who had run into the room first. He gathered Magpie in his arms and set her on the kitchen counter and examined the wound, a worried but determined look on his face.

  “You’re all right,” he murmured as Magpie wailed, throwing her head back and kicking her tiny feet against his stomach and chest. “You’re going to be just fine.”

  The little cut had bled a lot but wasn’t too deep. Her father cleaned it off with soap and water, and wrapped a bandage around her finger, and gave her ice pop.

  For one full year afterward, she showed everyone the “boo-boo” on her finger even when it had healed completely and you couldn’t see it anymore.

  Magpie’s heart twisted uncomfortably inside her. She remembered the sharp stab of pain on her finger as clearly as if it had happened a minute ago.

  “Magpie,” her father said.

  Everything looked pale in the evening light. Her father, the pool water, the backyard. Magpie felt as pale as a shadow; she was surprised he could even see her.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

  It seemed to her that she had split into two Magpies, that one Magpie was happy and swimming in her pool and drinking a vodka lemonade and making friends and the other Magpie was trapped in time, six months ago almost exactly, and when she looked at her father, all she could see was the dull pink of his naked body.

  The two Magpies raged inside her: the first Magpie was overjoyed to see her father again, wanted nothing more than to pull herself out of the pool and run to him dripping wet; the second Magpie felt as if she would never get a full breath of air again as long as she lived.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” he said.

  He took a step closer to the pool, and she moved farther away, keeping enough space between them, sending ripples of water spreading out around her. He looked a little wild, as if he hadn’t slept.

  “You’ve been gone for six months,” she said.

  “Your mother made it very clear that—”

  “Six months. And then you just show up like a stalker and think that’s going to make everything better?”

  “I’m not… I wasn’t… I’ve been calling.”

  “Right. For her. Did you forget I’m the one who actually walked in on you?”

  He winced exactly as if she’d crossed the distance between them and slapped him across his face. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t considered it. She just wasn’t ready to get that close.

  “Magpie, I made a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said.

  “They won’t even talk to us anymore. Did you know that? Nobody will talk to us anymore.”

  “Who…?”

  “She got to them first. Everybody somehow thinks we’re the bad guys. For Thanksgiving we watched TV and ate cranberry sauce out of the can. Nobody wanted us.”

  “Magpie, I had no idea.”

  “Do you know Eryn left? Do you know Mom’s in the hospital?”

  “Slow down,” he said, putting a hand over his eyes. “Slow down, Magpie.”

  Magpie climbed the ladder out of the pool. She looked around for her sister’s beach towel, but it wasn’t there. Where had she left it? She stood angry and dripping on the pool platform, looking down on him, feeling cold and vulnerable in only her swimsuit.

  “Your mother called me from the hospital,” he said. “She told me what happened. She doesn’t want you to be alone.”

  Get him where it hurts, a tiny voice said in the back of Magpie’s skull, a bright chirping voice that sounded almost like a bird’s.

  “I’m already alone,” she said. “I’ve always been alone, and I will always be alone. Don’t you see that?”

  Her father looked as if he were on the edge of something, as if he might either cry or run or spit or scream.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I did everything wrong. Please, Magpie, let me make it up to you. Please come home with me.”

  “Home? Where’s home for you now, Dad? A motel? A one-bedroom apartment?”

  “Please stop shouting,” he said, and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to do the right thing. Come with me, Magpie.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “I’m not leaving you here alone,” he said, and his voice was suddenly so stereotypically dadlike that Magpie half expected him to attach a young lady to the end of his sentence. “You are not staying in this house by yourself. You are underage and I am your father.”

  What could she do?

  She couldn’t go anywhere with him; she refused.

  So what could she do?
>
  What would Allison do?

  Allison always knew the exact right thing to say, the exact right flick of hair or roll of eyes to inflict the most emotional harm on whoever her victim of the moment was. Magpie tried to conjure her now, to summon that sense of courage and fearlessness.

  She laughed, and it was a strong laugh. A mean laugh. An Allison laugh.

  Her father looked wounded, unsure. As if he did not recognize his own daughter.

  “You’re my father? That’s a news flash. Since when, exactly?” she asked.

  “You can’t stay here by yourself,” he said again, but his voice was quieter now, and his shoulders had sagged just a little.

  Magpie could see the way in front of her clearly. The steps were easy and obvious.

  “I won’t be by myself,” she said, relaxing, rolling her eyes in an easy, light way. “Don’t be so dramatic. I have a friend coming over.”

  “Allison?” he asked.

  But Magpie had been prepared for that; hearing Allison’s name did not pierce into her heart like it could have. She smiled lightly.

  “No. My friend Clare. You haven’t met her. Her mom is out of town, and her dad isn’t around anymore, so we’re having a sleepover.”

  The carefully chosen word: sleepover. The carefully chosen vocal cadence: that of an innocent, tired daughter.

  “Clare,” her father repeated, as if he was thinking.

  “Dad, I can’t cancel on her now. We’ve already planned it. She has nowhere else to go.”

  The carefully chosen word—Dad—to evoke an emotional response from him.

  It worked.

  He softened.

  He nodded.

  “All right, I… I think that will be okay. As long as you’re not here alone. But I want to meet this girl, Magpie. I’m going to wait until she gets here, okay?”

  “Fine,” Magpie said, shrugging, as if she couldn’t care less. “But you can wait outside. You can’t come in. This house doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

  Magpie padded barefoot across the cooling grass and let herself in the back door. She could feel her father’s eyes burning holes into the back of her swimsuit, but she wasn’t worried about that anymore. Her feet left wet spots on the carpet. Her phone was on her bed. She picked it up and wrote a message to Clare.