“I’ve got to go,” she said into the phone, giving me a thumbs-up for being clever. “Someone’s at the door.” She untwisted herself and replaced the receiver with a gentle click.
Jess’s sister had died over the summer in a gruesome car accident with two other seventeen-year-old girls, who also died. They’d been at a Rush concert at Rosemont Horizon, and Linda was driving. There were headlines in the local papers, above a row of yearbook photos of the girls, who were all pretty, all smiling with straightened teeth and shiny dark hair and neat turtleneck sweaters. Mary-Louise Donohue, from down the hall freshman year, clipped and mailed me the articles, because she lived in the same suburb as Jess and read about what happened, and good thing she did, because Jess never called to tell me herself. It was a whole folder of clippings, as if Mary-Louise had thought I wouldn’t believe just one article.
Of course I called up Jess right away, of course, though that meant long-distance charges I’d catch it over with my parents. Our conversation was awkward and bizarre, like being trapped in an elevator with someone’s grandpa. I waited for Jess to bawl and for me to say, “There, there,” or “Everything will be okay,” but she didn’t cry, which meant I didn’t know what to say. “It must be awful,” I said, or “You must be so sad,” or dumb things like that. “Yeah,” she said, or things like that. Finally: “Should I be at the funeral?” I had asked, and she said, “Why? It’s too late. Over. Done,” then told me she had to hang up, that someone needed the phone. It was that “why” that I didn’t understand—or want to understand. She shouldn’t be afraid of needing me, her best friend. Secretly I was worried something would happen with the apartment and our plan to move in together, that she’d back out—hers was the name on the lease—but she called a week after the awkward conversation, excited because an aunt was moving, meaning she was giving Jess a bookcase, a dresser set, and a bunch of kitchen stuff, including a blender that was almost brand new and a toaster oven. I knew exactly what to say to that: “Great!”
I barely knew Linda, just that Jess called her a snotty brat and hated how she was the favorite. Jess’s parents had visited campus and taken us out to dinner sometimes on weekends, but only once Linda had been there. Or the times when Linda was with them, I wasn’t invited or had to study or was working one of my jobs. When I was with Jess and her parents, we talked about the weather and Jess’s classes and maybe my classes and Jess’s boyfriends, especially after she got engaged, and Chicago trivia and sights, since I wasn’t from the area and they all were, and sometimes Chicago politics if her dad was in the right mood. Basically, he thought everyone from the mayor on down was a crook. The only good politician was Ronnie Reagan, and Washington would wreck him if he didn’t watch out. There was a lot of talking; the meals were almost all talking it seemed, always someone asking something or telling a story prefaced with “Here’s one that will really make you laugh, lovey,” or, if it was a sad story, “Here’s one that will about make you cry, lovey.” They called each other “lovey” in closed-off, private voices and gave tons of cues so everyone at the table knew how to react, exactly how to feel about this particular issue, whether it was all the rain we were getting or the new exhibit at the Art Institute or whatever donkey thing the mayor was up to. It was all a cinch. Jess acted like a talk show host, rolling through topics as if she’d jotted them down ahead of time on index cards; her parents were like guests, waiting for her direction. Like if she weren’t there, there’d be only empty silence between the two of them. I mostly sat there, answering questions that bounced my way, mentally reminding myself to eat slowly and not look piggish.
My own sister was much younger than me—ten years younger—and after I got the folder with the newspaper clippings, I stared at her often, tucked up in the battered fake-leather recliner in the unfinished basement, an afghan heaped on top because even in summer it was frigid down there. She was working her way through my old Nancy Drew books a second time, trying to stay in exact order, lining up each completed yellow-spined book on her bookshelf like a trophy. She was so quiet sometimes I had to remind myself of her name: Grace. I brought to school several framed snapshots of her, which I right away set up on Jess’s aunt’s hand-me-down dresser in my bedroom. But they made me feel guilty, so I shoved them into a drawer and filled the empty space with bottles of nail polish. I hadn’t said good-bye to her when I left for school this time. Grace just woke up and I was gone. Maybe my mother concocted some baloney story about why, or not. Probably not. I had to believe this would be okay. I had to. When I stopped feeling so awful I’d pull Grace’s pictures out of the drawer and arrange them nicely. I’d send her a surprise gift or something. I’d do something. Jess didn’t know. I couldn’t talk about my sister when hers was dead, when hers was a snotty brat. I barely mentioned Grace anyway. Jess probably couldn’t remember her name.
Now.
Now. Back at the kitchen table with its mismatched set of chairs (the “semifurnished” part of the rental, along with two saggy twin beds, a couch with an ugly mustard slipcover, a tweedy brown La-Z-Boy, a coffee table stained with water rings, and three wobbly floor lamps), Jess said, “My mom says to come home because she heard all these news reports about people dying from poisoned Tylenol.”
“Why are people eating Tylenol if it’s poisoned?” I asked.
She laughed. “You sweet dope, they don’t know it’s poisoned. They have a headache, and next thing you know, they’re dead.” She laughed again, a bark this time. She had bunches of different laughs, which also reminded me of a talk show host. Like there were different kinds of funny, so you always had to match up the right laugh to the right joke.
“Who’s poisoning the Tylenol?” I asked.
“They don’t know,” she said.
She rested her hands palms down on the kitchen table. There was a faint white line across her ring finger, from the engagement ring, which had a diamond so big it looked fake, a diamond big enough to cast a shadow. She still had the ring, though the fiancé’s lawyer-dad sent a certified letter on fancy stationery demanding it be returned. We weren’t supposed to say the fiancé’s name out loud anymore.
“My mom says we should throw away our Tylenol if they’re capsules,” she said. “If they’re extra strength.”
“What if we get a headache?”
“Suffer through it, I guess. Endure the pain.” She shook her hands as if she’d known I was staring at them, then stood and walked into the bathroom we shared. I heard her wrestle with the sticky sliding mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. “Aha!” she exclaimed, and she returned to the kitchen, cupping two plastic bottles in her hand. On paper and back-to-back, we were the exact same height, except that she felt taller. Her eyes were blue and mine were muddy and brown. She had sunlit wavy hair, lush like a doll’s hair. My hair was too soft, too limp—like mouse fur—not quite blond, not quite brown. A color you’d forget immediately, even if you were staring straight at it. Most times I felt like a shadow standing next to Jess, but other times I felt like she was my real sister, my only true family.
She plunked the pill bottles on the kitchen table. One of them rattled slightly. The other, I knew, was brand new, with cotton stuffed inside. I had bought it yesterday at the drugstore, because I didn’t come from the kind of family where you could grab things from home to take to college.
“They look incredibly dangerous,” I said.
She nodded. “Totally.”
“We’re lucky we’re still alive.” Immediately I wished I had kept my mouth shut. It seemed like a bad thing to say, knowing what had happened to her sister this summer. But Jess laughed. She unscrewed the top of the open bottle and dumped out about ten capsules. With one finger she rolled them into two rows of five, then into three rows of three and flicked the extra so it spun for a fast moment. The capsules looked set up as if they were pieces in a game with complicated rules and scoring.
“The other bottle is full,” I said. “I bought it yesterday at Osco.”
“Mine is from Osco,” I said. “Right here in Evanston.”
Jess unscrewed the cap and tugged out the lump of cotton wadding. Then she dumped out those capsules at once, fast, so they tumbled and rolled along the table, caught by Jess’s fingers, guided back to the center of the table with the others. She lazily circled one finger through them, swirling and combining the contents of the two bottles. I panicked to see that many pills on the table. What if Jess’s mom was right? What if they were poisoned? What if I had taken one yesterday or this morning? A psychosomatic headache immediately pressed into my temples.
Jess lifted one capsule, barely as long as her pinkie nail, pinching it between her finger and thumb, peering at the seam between the red half and the white half. “Seems easy to pop it open and then dump in the poison,” she said.
“People don’t do that,” I said. “Who does that?”
“One Halloween my sister found a razor blade in a Snickers after trick-or-treating.”
She’d never told me this. It seemed like a story that might have come up. “I didn’t think that really happened,” I said. “I thought adults say this to scare kids so they can’t have fun.”
“My sister slashed up the roof of her mouth and tongue,” she said. “They drove her to the emergency room and it was on the news.”
“One of your neighbors did that?” I said. “Did they catch the guy?”
She shook her head, still staring at the Tylenol as if mesmerized, either by the capsules or this memory. “Tons of people hand out Snickers. Plus, my sister said she swapped with her friends for more Snickers bars. She’s so stupid and picky about food, and that’s about the only candy she likes. She was out for hours, all over town, and got a pillowcase-full of stuff.”
“But the police—”
“Never found the guy,” she said. “Did nothing.”
There was a silence. Jess’s sister seemed incredibly unlucky to me.
The phone rang again.
“Don’t answer,” Jess said.
I counted ten rings as I imagined Jess’s mother in their house in Oak Lawn, sitting at a kitchen table much nicer than this one, where the chairs all matched, worrying that her remaining daughter was going to die after swallowing an extra-strength Tylenol capsule laced with poison. I imagined her sneaking a cigarette, a sweaty glass of white wine nearby. Maybe there was an untouched turkey sandwich on a plate in front of her, the bread hardening slightly, the smear of mayo stiff and congealed. I imagined the tinny burr of an unanswered phone echoing in her ear. I imagined a daughter who wasn’t able to talk about her sister’s car accident, a mother who laughed on cue. Here’s a story, I imagined her saying, this one will scare the crap out of you.
I jumped up and grabbed the phone, but no one was there. The dial tone felt lonely.
Jess said, “For a while they suspected my dad, because nothing happened to any other kids in the neighborhood. Everyone else’s candy was fine. They x-rayed everything. Only my sister. That one candy bar. So maybe it wasn’t random.”
“My god,” I said. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine a family where a thing like that would happen, because I could, because I knew for absolute fact that families did plenty of bad things. Just not Jess’s family. I thought about a muttering old man at his workbench, grubby fingers sliding a razor blade deep into a Snickers bar and nestling it into a plastic pumpkin with the rest, offering his candy to witches and clowns. A man who might be any man.
“They questioned my mom,” she said. “Privately, away from him, and you know what she said? She said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he did.’ I was on the stairs, listening, and she flat-out said that. To cops.”
“Wow.”
“What I always wanted to know then is, so why’d she stay with him? I mean, if she thought he would do something like that?” Her voice turned dreamily singsong, as if she were a child reciting a familiar story.
“Yes, why?” I singsonged back. I stood and moved to the window. The leaves on the maple tree in the yard next to ours were tinged yellowy red. It was amazing the tree knew to change color every year, year after year, until it died or got chopped down. It felt so impossible, though it was an obvious fact of nature. We read a poem last year in one of my literature classes, about a girl named Margaret who was bummed out about a tree turning colors, and it ended up that what she was really bummed out about was the fact that she would die eventually. The professor told us she wrote her dissertation on that poet, so she dumped her lecture notes and started talking all fiery and almost cried when she read one of the lines. We were embarrassed, but I also liked seeing that someone could care deeply about a poem.
“You should call her,” I said, still looking at the tree. “Just tell her you’re throwing out the pills.” I had a way of staring that made things blur and fuzz, get sort of prettied up around the edges, and I was doing that. It could last for ten minutes sometimes, my ability to stare. People didn’t know when I was doing it, even if they were speaking straight at me, even if they were yelling. No matter what was happening in the now, I had this trick of staring and being blank.
“She wants me to go back home and I’m not,” Jess said. “She didn’t want me to come back to school this fall. Because of my sister. She’s crazy, turning crazier by the day. I’m the only sane one there. It’s like without me, nothing there is normal. It’s a nuthouse.”
“She’s worried,” I said. “She cares about you.” That comforting blur, condensing everything into nothing, into static. I kept up the same singsong voice Jess did, as if we agreed the things we were saying—why? why stay?—didn’t much matter.
“What she cares about is...” but Jess didn’t finish the sentence, and I didn’t ask her to.
We hadn’t spoken this way for ages, probably not since those freshman-year nights in the dorm, at four in the morning, after all the pizza was eaten, even the nibbled-down crusts rattling in the box, sitting side by side on my twin bed, looking across at the Monet posters taped to the cinder block walls, my pretentious roommate somewhere with her boyfriend-with-a-car, the flexible desk lamp bent into a glowing U, and I felt cradled by deep darkness and the sense that the world was asleep, that maybe I was far enough away to let up, if only for these few moments. Jess would pose questions, and we’d wrestle out answers and laugh and then drop into dead-serious whispers, then laugh again, because everything felt hilarious or dead serious. My breath scraped my throat when I thought about the two of us talking across entire nights like it was something so normal, until finally I had to ask, desperate to sound casual, “Why do you even talk to me?” but the sentence burbled out on a wave of neediness and stupidity, and I crushed a pillow over my face. She laughed like I was hilarious, not dead serious, and declared, “There are people who listen to the words and then people who listen.” I couldn’t admit not knowing which group I was supposed to want to be in, but I relished the warm relief of being sorted into the right one.
It would never be me breaking the spell; it was always her saying, “Guess I should get some sleep or something,” and she’d wander back to her own room, pulling open the door to a slash of bright hallway light that stabbed my eyes. Last year, she had her boyfriend, so the late nights were with him. This year would be like a reunion, I figured, I hoped.
Now, I knew I should listen to her talk about her dead sister and find out if she really was a snotty brat, if her parents really liked her best. I should want to find out what was going on in a family that actually wasn’t perfectly normal like I’d thought, where the mom believed the dad might slide razor blades into kids’ candy bars, or where that’s what the mom might tell the cops, or where she or Jess or possibly even the sister might lie about the whole entire thing. Jess had lied plenty when we first met, about things that didn’t matter, like her shoe size and what the cute guy in sociology said to her after class, but I hadn’t minded. It
made her more interesting. Because lots of people lie. Lots of people lie all the time. Recently she had caught her fiancé—Tommy; she wasn’t saying his name anymore—in a big fat lie, about the thing you’d expect—being with another girl, his ex-girlfriend, actually—and that’s when it was finally over and the whole ring fight started. No one really needed that ring; sure, it was a lot of money, but both Jess and the fiancé had tons of money, and I mean tons of money. For me, throwing out an entire bottle of Tylenol that I’d paid full price for, not on sale, was kind of a big deal, but those two bled money. If the ring disappeared entirely, neither of them would starve. I thought a ring was a dumb thing to spend so much money on, but weren’t people always spending money on dumb things? Recently, I’d started getting a lot of headaches, and extra-strength Tylenol worked the best. Or so I thought. I’d learned about the placebo effect in a psych class. The ring was in an envelope under her mattress, she’d told me. Like the princess and the pea, I said, but the effect was ruined when I had to explain the story.
Possibly Jess was lying about the razor blade in the Snickers bar or her mother was lying about the Tylenol. It was possible the fiancé wasn’t in love with his ex-girlfriend. The tree looked like lace in my eyes. Or like a fast pencil sketch. My sister, Grace, liked to draw. That’s the other way she spent her time, drawing. She was either reading or drawing. Two silent activities, done alone. She wasn’t all that great at drawing, but she sure liked it. Lots of pictures of animals, of horses. Before Nancy Drew, she read my horse books. That was something about my family, that no one complained about space for books. She’d probably find my Agatha Christie mysteries next. Boxes of those library-sale paperbacks with ripped covers were stacked in the basement. Also, she still liked stories I imagined just for her, about the Silver Girl. I told a thousand stories last summer, a big fat blur of the Silver Girl. We sat together in the kitchen at night, only the two of us, and I’d spin out sentences, and she wasn’t like a kid who ever acted bouncy happy, but she sure liked these stories and not being alone. What I could do was type up a Silver Girl story and send it to her, once a week or now and then. I imagined her folding up the pages in half, in half again, hiding them inside a Nancy Drew. I’d be careful about big words, because she was too embarrassed to look things up when she didn’t know; she just skipped ahead. When I told her that was kind of a bad habit, she asked if I was mad at her.
Silver Girl Page 2
