Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  I knew all this. I knew it all, had known since forever, since I could first know anything. It was the answer I expected, even the answer I wanted to hear. But I didn’t think he could actually say it. To me. To any girl. I didn’t think it mattered.

  I stood there for what felt like forever but wasn’t. I wouldn’t think about anything. I thought about the blankness in my head.

  Penny coughed, and I opened my eyes and whirled around. She looked trampy in my skirt and those heels, rosy lipstick shellacked on and my black eyeliner circling her eyes, smudged like bruises. She clutched the doorjamb to balance in the shoes. It was disorienting; was this how people saw me?

  Penny said, “That was Jess’s fiancé.”

  “Ex-fiancé,” I said.

  “I heard everything,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Not much to hear.”

  “Even when you were whispering. ‘Why are we whispering?’ he said. ‘But am I pretty?’ you said.” After a moment she added, “He’s cute.”

  I never wanted to touch that pillow again, so I shook free the heavy blanket and draped it around my shoulders, pulling so the wool scratched my bare skin. Jess’s L.L.Bean blanket with the big stripes. It was like I owned nothing of my absolute own. Jess’s dad would be here any minute and I would be going to my first-ever funeral, where at least I could cry with no one asking why. “No,” I said. “You don’t understand.”

  “I think you still have that ring,” she said. “You could give it back to him.”

  I shook my head again, the only gesture I felt I could control. “I gave the ring to Jess. She has it. It’s locked up in her room.” As I spoke, I gained strength, believing my own story, so I barged forward, blanket trailing like a wedding dress train, and said, “I have to get ready. Can’t go to a funeral dressed like this, can I? Clara and Aunt Bea would really work the phones.”

  She laughed—forced and awkward—but pressed back out of my way as I passed, and I glanced sideways at her face, that combination of Jess and her own self, and reminded myself that she had no mother, had no one really, not me, and not even Jess’s dad, and so I stopped in front of her and said, “You look really pretty,” and she blushed and pushed at her hair with the palm of one hand, and I reached out and smoothed back some loose strands.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I smiled at her. I put everything into that smile.

  “You know I won’t say anything to anyone,” she half whispered, as she loosened her grip on the doorframe and tottered toward the table.

  “I know.” And finally I was safely in my own room, leaning up against the closed door, listening to my heart explode.

  It turned out that Jess’s dad could be late for a funeral and was, also that he could reek of alcohol on a Saturday morning, that just-swigged smell lurking under the whiff of mint gum, and the hovering, foggy stench of last night’s booze misting out of every pore, despite the elegant dark gray suit, despite no skin exposed beyond his face, neck, and hands, which gripped the steering wheel too hard. He wore aviator sunglasses. I had on a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers that I’d found by the vending machines in the library. Penny was the only one in the car with exposed eyes. I was sorry about that. It was a super-sunny day, hyper-blue. Lots of zippy bike riders, those people I imagined bouncing out of bed and staying busy all day, people who’d rather die than waste a pretty Saturday, racing from bikes to pancakes to leaf raking to grilling on their deck with friends to sitting up late telling funny stories, everyone tipsy on wine. I’d never be those people. We didn’t talk much on the drive. I let Penny have the front seat. If Jess’s dad thought her outfit was ridiculous, he didn’t say so. He hugged her for exactly one second and said, “Let’s bull through this,” which sounded like something he barked to the men who worked for him. Maybe he didn’t know another way. But also maybe Penny didn’t realize that. Her mouth stayed a tight line, like a horizon you gaze at and never understand. I was glad not to be her.

  There was no church service and nothing at the funeral home; we were going straight to the cemetery, which I didn’t know was a thing people could do, until I remembered that Jess’s dad could about do anything he wanted. What if it rained? I had worried when he explained the plans, until I realized that if it did, someone would be paid to set up a tent and find umbrellas and unroll carpet over soggy grass and shove the clouds over to Indiana. That kind of power, where things got taken care of.

  The cemetery was a maze of gravel roads winding through jutting gravestones, marble mausoleums, and towering obelisks. Pale angels and cherubs and lambs. Crosses. Greek columns. There were heft and age here, and an overlay of remembrance, attractive to ghosts, I imagined, if I believed in them. It was about as melancholy as the cemetery I had viewed from car windows at the line where Evanston slid into Chicago, before Sheridan Road became Lake Shore Drive with its promised silvery gleam of skyline. That cemetery was centered inside one very tight, angular curve of the road, so that driving into Chicago, hurtling too fast, too late at night, you might think ironic thoughts about the convenience of being found dead in a car wreck at the cemetery. The lake pressed close on the other side, the road a thin ribbon between two perils, and it seemed that there should be a poem about this juxtaposition. I missed my old poetry class and that poetry professor. At our final meeting, when he read my last set of poems, he told me he was giving me a B, which surprised me, and suggested I work on the undergrad literary journal, that he could get me an assistant-something slot on the staff if I wanted, and I said maybe, because I didn’t want him changing his mind about the B. He never said much of anything good about my poems, but possibly that was his way of teaching poetry, because he never did about anyone else’s either. But I didn’t want to work on the literary journal, judging people’s poems. Most we wrote for class were so bad, and none would end up in the Norton anthology, so why bother? Our bad poetry didn’t much matter.

  Jess’s dad whipped his car along the cemetery’s gravel roads. It seemed he was lost but didn’t want to admit it. The radio played a staticky newsy drone of AM interrupted by commercials for furniture sales and an upcoming monster truck show. I couldn’t see much of Penny from where I sat in the backseat, just her one arm overhanging the side of the bucket seat. Even with the ripples of the blouse that arm looked tense, like taut wire.

  I thought about my sister in Iowa, her skinny toothpick arms. I would catch sight of them during this past summer, when she was wearing a tank top or a bathing suit, and want to snap her arm in two, or bend it like a pipe cleaner, just to see if she would cry out. Not really. But sort of. Then her arm got broken for real and she had to wear a cast. But I didn’t want to think about her.

  Some of the gravestones looked very old: weathered, rough deep gray stone, the writing half erased and hard to make out from the car. Some names were easy to read, bannered across an archway or along the steps of a columned facade: HOYT, PINKERTON, CUMMINGS, PALMER. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe in being haunted. I wanted to believe that when you were gone you were gone, and that was it. I would definitely choose cremation, just to be sure.

  I wondered if this was the same cemetery where Linda was buried.

  Jess’s father spun a U-turn in the narrow road, slashing tire marks into the grass, gravel pinging noisily against the car. “Goddamn it,” he said. The outburst was startling, and I’d forgotten that he, too, would wrestle emotions today. I was the only person here who didn’t care, the only person coming because I’d been promised fifty bucks. A few more fast turns landed us in a section we hadn’t already seen, with fewer columns and simpler, smaller stones, more modern. I wondered if other Tylenol victims were in here, if their stones said TYLENOL VICTIM. Up ahead were a dull blue canopy and a few rows of folding chairs. Also cop cars and cops and FBI guys in rumpled suits and vans from TV stations and a dozen cars lining the road. Jess’s father guided his car to the end of that line and killed the engine. The car felt lonely with no radio voice. He kept bo
th hands on the wheel for a moment, maybe thinking about Penny’s mom or that last drink he’d had, the jigsaw pieces of his secret life. Penny sighed. He leaned toward the glove box but straightened right back up as a cop in a pressed uniform approached. Beyond the cop stood a band of reporters and men with cameras with those long, top-heavy lenses that got close-ups from far away. I imagined Penny’s raccoon eyes on the front page of the Sun-Times and the Trib tomorrow morning. I imagined her cutting out the pictures with scissors, saving copies of the newspaper, because that’s what people did when they made the paper.

  Suddenly Penny said, “I don’t want to do this.”

  “No one wants to,” said Jess’s dad.

  “Who are those people?” she asked.

  “I got it.” Jess’s dad jumped out of the car to go talk to the cop, the door clicking shut behind him. His keys dangled in the ignition, and I worried he might forget and lock them in the car, so I stretched into the front and yanked them out. The engine key was warm. There was a key on the ring for a hotel room, which seemed sad and permanent.

  Penny said, “I wish it was Jess’s mother who was dead right now.”

  She twisted in her seat, her smudgy eyes glowering. She had bitten off most of her lipstick, so faded magenta rimmed her lips and stained the edges of her teeth. She moved with such ease that I realized she hadn’t buckled her seat belt this whole time. Someone should have thought to make her. Me, I should have. She rolled her shoulder, shaking off my hand. “Stop acting like you care. You’re only being nice because he’s paying you to babysit me until he figures out how to ship me off to my nutty aunt. That’s what he does, pays for things.”

  “I’m not getting any money,” I said. The car had turned stuffy; sun pressed at my back, layered sweat under my sweater, on my forehead. He cares about you, is what I should have said. He loves you. You, his daughter.

  “Because I take it,” she said. “Every time I see him, he hands over cash I’m supposed to give you, but I keep it for myself.”

  He cares about you, I thought. He loves you. But what I said was “Let me guess. Your big plan is to run away.” Why couldn’t I say what I was supposed to? Because it wasn’t true? Because it was? He loves you. Like a church bell endlessly ringing. Daughter.

  “You can’t stop me,” she said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, and I hadn’t planned to say any of this or even known I had thought about it, though of course I had, because I knew there were lawyers and meetings and interested parties, and I knew how the world worked: there would be money, lots of it, at the end of all this. Johnson & Johnson, the company that made Tylenol, was crashing in the stock market right now, but they were worth bajillions, and they’d dump a fortune on Penny and every family member affected—and even if they didn’t want to, fancy lawyers would force them. A fortune. A fortune. This didn’t even count the money sent by the people who read sad stories in the newspaper and mailed checks; there was a fund, Jess’s dad had told me, that Penny would get a percentage of for her education, something people felt good about paying for. Doling out money helped shove away guilt, either guilt because the poison was crammed inside capsules from your factory, or guilt you felt over being happy someone else got the poison pill, not you, not your family—or maybe even guilt that you’d been living a secret life for like a thousand years. Penny had no clue how rich she would be, and yes, of course, her life was damaged—yes, yes, I got that, yeah, totally—but plenty of people—plenty of people—had damaged lives—just as damaged, just as terrible lives—and got nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only the wreckage of their life to haul around forever.

  “You can’t stop me,” she repeated, less defiant, no oomph in the words.

  “Do you have any idea how much money you’ll get someday?” I asked, my voice rising and furious. “From the company who makes Tylenol? They’ll hand over a bucket of money to you and the other families, or they’ll be sued. I bet lawyers are working phones and dictating documents right now, even on a Saturday.”

  “What?” she said. Her face went slack, mouth drooping open.

  “God, yes,” I said. “You lost your mother. That’s worth a fortune.”

  In the silence, I thought about how I should have shut up. How her mother was gone forever. “No one thinks about money the way you do” was the phrase buzzing inside. Everything I had done today was exactly wrong: saying this to Penny, letting her wear my slutty outfit, standing in front of Tommy half naked, aching to be in the library with him even after what he said. And more: Jess’s dad telling me those personal things and me listening. I didn’t even make Penny put on her seat belt, for God’s sake. All of it, my whole life, was wrong, including whatever I might do next. Whatever I was going to do next was already wrong.

  Penny opened the car door and scrambled out. I thought she’d run, but not in those shoes, and she hobbled her way to Jess’s dad standing with the cop. The ground was soft from yesterday’s downpour, so the spiky heels sank in, making her gait lurch, surely coating the shoe with mud I’d have to scrub off. The photographers lifted cameras, pinning her to this moment.

  It seemed I was jealous of her, a girl whose mother was dead; jealous of a girl who accidentally killed her own mother. What kind of terrible person was I? The keys were still in my fist, and I let them drop onto the front seat where Jess’s dad would see them. I couldn’t stay in the car. I would have to get out, too. Fifty bucks, fifty bucks.

  I watched Jess’s dad drape his arm around Penny’s shoulders as he and the cop talked. The cop gestured to the reporters; apparently there was some boundary they couldn’t cross, a designated place to stand. Probably I should join them, the pack of jackals, peddling papers off everyone’s misery, like Jess’s dad said. He was in the paper now or on the news, labeled “speaking for the Mitchell family,” offering statements like “The family is grateful for your prayers and good wishes. We hope the perpetrator of this horrific crime is apprehended, and we urge anyone with information about this crime to come forward and share what they know with the authorities or call the anonymous tip line. No further comment.” I imagined Jess and her mother switching channels in a huff or crumpling the paper into the trash. I imagined Jess’s mom secretly thinking, Those bags under his eyes... he’s not sleeping well.

  I got out of the car, careful not to accidentally press the door lock button. The cop had backed away, growling something at the cameraman from channel 9, and Jess’s dad caught my eye and waved me over. “Can’t keep the reporters away,” he called. “Goddamn it.” I glanced at them, and immediately cameras lifted, so I positioned my back to them the way he had. “We’ll pass by with Penny between us,” he said, “so they won’t get a clear shot of her. They’ve been warned because she’s a minor, but nothing shames those mercenary beasts.”

  “I don’t care,” Penny said.

  “Yes, you do,” Jess’s dad said. “And even if you don’t, I care on your behalf.” He hooked his sunglasses over Penny’s ears, balancing them on her nose. They were too big for her and crooked—I wanted to straighten them for her but didn’t dare get in the way as he roughly shuffled Penny at me. One of her feet twisted, and she clutched my arm so she wouldn’t fall, but he didn’t notice, saying, “Let’s go,” and he rushed us toward the canopy and the folding chairs, which were positioned on a section of rolled-out Astroturf. Up front, resting on a white-sheeted table, was a dark wooden casket with brass handles topped with a spray of pink flowers overflowing down the sides and, next to that, gigantic wreaths, most of them creamy white flowers, but one made of all red roses, like maybe a hundred or more, shaped like a heart, which I knew was his, not ordered by his secretary. MOTHER, said a ribbon on the biggest white wreath. There were at least two dozen leafy potted plants lined up on the grass in front of the casket. The foil wrapping the pots was dull silver. A murmur rose as black-clad people perched in the chairs turned and caught sight of Penny. Cameras clicked as we passed the reporters.

  Penny clung to my
arm, and it felt like dragging her, she could barely walk, and she accidentally stepped out of one shoe and would have fallen to the ground if I hadn’t caught hold of her. “Christ,” muttered Jess’s dad, but he paused, stared straight ahead while Penny fumbled her foot back into the shoe, but when she buckled a second time, she raised one foot after the other, so the shoes dropped off sideways into the grass, and she continued on in her (my) black tights. It had to be the saddest thing to see in the world, this girl wearing too much makeup in this thinks-she’s-so-sophisticated college-girl getup, stumbling stocking-footed across wet, muddy grass to a folding chair in the front row of her mother’s funeral. She was only a little girl. Anyone could see. And see that Jess’s dad and I were two strangers.

  There were people who seemed to know her, trying to make eye contact as they sniffled into tissues, but she kept her eyes fixed at the ground, and mostly I did, too. I wondered if her feet were cold. Maybe she didn’t notice. She’d probably run my tights, so I hoped this wasn’t a good pair. And that mud. I would have to do hand-wash tonight. Jess always asked to throw in something with my hand-wash because I did it more often than she did since I had fewer bras and hose and tights to rotate through. It was kind of a joke between us. “The soap’s in the sink anyway,” she’d say. She never reminded me that she bought the Woolite, but also I never forgot.

  Jess’s dad guided us to the front row, to seats cordoned off with white ribbon, not that they needed to be since nobody was brave enough even to sit in the second row. We would be a solitary island up front. I went three chairs in, and Penny plopped next to me, but he stayed standing in front of us as if he had something to say. Without sunglasses, his eyes blinked and squinted. Either they hurt from the light or from being bloodshot and hungover. I thought I should grab hold of his hand, or that Penny should, but she and I sat perfectly still. Suddenly, silently, he turned, and I twisted to watch him stride back down the aisle, pausing for a few murmured words to a thin man with a trim red beard and earnest eyes, and then he was gone, cameras clicking along the line of reporters, their muffled questions like birdcall and then silence, and it was impossible to miss the slam of the car door. I braced for the engine to start, but when it didn’t, I remembered the glove box, the bottle. He needed a drink. I thought of Linda and wondered if he sat with Jess and Jess’s mom in an island of three or if he had hidden in the car. He wasn’t coming back.