by Amber Smith
I took a deep breath, blew it out slowly.
Isobel was right, I needed to relax, and maybe even have fun. That’s why I came to Carson. And that’s why I was standing outside this store.
“Fuck it,” I whispered to myself, and finally stepped through the sliding glass doors.
The store was lit with a fluorescent glow, the kind that always makes my head hurt, and it smelled like floor cleaner. It was set up like your typical big box department store. There were signs hanging from the ceiling with arrows pointing in every direction—Household Goods, Furniture, Shoes, Health & Beauty. The store hummed with a mix of dated music coming from aged speakers and the constant beeping of items being scanned at the registers.
I always hated these kinds of places; they made me feel claustrophobic. But I was on a mission. Be brave, I told myself as I wandered the mazelike aisles.
I’d circled the store twice and still hadn’t seen her—every time an employee looked at me suspiciously, I picked up an item I didn’t need. I was about to give up when I finally spotted her. She was standing at a table, folding girls’ T-shirts very slowly and unenthusiastically, not even bothering to separate out the various colors. She didn’t see me as I approached her. She didn’t even notice when I was standing directly next to her.
“Maia?” She looked up at me like I’d just woken her from a dream.
“Oh” was all she said as she stared at me.
“It’s Chris,” I offered.
“No, I—I remember.”
When she didn’t say anything else, I stupidly volunteered, “I just had to pick up a few things I forgot to bring with me.” But then we both looked down at what I was holding in my hand.
“So, you had an urgent need for erasers, shoelaces . . . and lobster claw oven mitts?” she asked, the shape of her mouth quivering slightly, like she was having trouble keeping a straight face.
I felt my cheeks getting hot as I looked down at these ridiculous items. I wondered if I was wearing one of those goofy grins again. But I decided to just go with it.
“Yeah, it was kind of an emergency,” I finally said.
She let a breath escape, not quite an actual laugh, but more like a Ha. There was something in her smile that made me wonder, for just a second, if she could tell that I’d made the trip just to see her. Because, of course, nobody forgets to pack erasers and shoelaces and oven mitts; nobody actually needs erasers and shoelaces and oven mitts.
As we stood there in the girls’ clothing department—a scene like so many of my terrible childhood moments—I saw an opportunity.
“Hey, so I just ran into some guy outside—he actually never told me his name, now that I think about it—but he invited me to a party on Friday. At Bowman’s, whoever that is?” I paused, and then asked, “You wanna go?”
“Was he about this tall?” She held her hand up above her head, exaggeratingly high. “Slicked-back hair, stupid look on his face?”
“I . . . guess so.”
“That’s Neil.” She said his name like the word tasted bad in her mouth. “Pass.” She balled up the shirt she had been folding and refolding. “I have no desire to party with helmet head Neil and the pretty people.”
“Helmet Head Neil and the Pretty People?” I repeated. “That sounds like a really bad band name.”
She did another one of those Ha laughs.
“So I take it you’re not friends with Neil?” I asked.
“ ‘Not friends’ would be an understatement.”
“Okay,” I relented, hoping I didn’t look too deflated by her decline. “Well, you’re working, so . . . I just saw you over here and wanted to say hi. So, hi.”
“Hi,” she replied, holding her hand up to wave good-bye.
I started taking small steps away from her, and as soon as I turned my back, she said “Wait. Chris?” I turned around so quickly, the sound of my name in her voice echoing in my mind. “Bowman’s isn’t a who. It’s a where. That old burned-down house. You know, where we were the other day? That’s Bowman’s.”
“Oh. Okay, thanks.” I waved again, and I knew I was smiling too much, but I couldn’t help it. Once I was far enough away from her, I ditched the erasers, shoelaces, and oven mitts in some random spot in the snack aisle on my way out of the store.
Back in the station wagon, I turned up the music and took the long way home.
MAIA
I WAS STANDING AT THE stove, making myself a box of mac and cheese—the orange-powdered kind—when Dad came up from the basement holding his sad microwave dinner.
“She gone?” he asked me, lurking in the doorway of the kitchen.
Mom had just left for her weekly Friday night dinner and drinks with the women’s group she had met online. It was supposed to be some kind of support group, either for losing a child or for cheating husbands, I was never sure.
“Coast is clear,” I called over my shoulder, doubting he heard the sarcasm behind my words, doubting he got that I thought he was being ridiculous, hiding from his ex-wife, sneaking around his own house, trying to make me his lookout.
With his back to me, he stood in front of the microwave, carefully ripping open the cardboard box, pulling back the corner of the plastic. I turned back around as he hit the start button. I could feel him looking at me, wanting me to turn toward him and say something, anything. He needed me to constantly assuage his guilt, every moment of every day.
Sometimes I could do it; other times it made me resent him almost as much as Mom did. Because he gets to have his basement purgatory where he can be both victim and villain, and get away with feeling shitty all the time. And Mom gets her women’s group and her alcohol and self-righteous indignation, and she’s also allowed to feel shitty all the time. Me, I get to supervise them both, sitting here in the kitchen so they can talk at me and not each other, so their cold war can continue into eternity. Didn’t they think I’d like to have permission to feel shitty all the time too? Couldn’t they give me a day where I could sulk around and behave like a child and let go in front of them, and they both would be stuck mediating my mess?
I focused all my attention on stirring macaroni noodles—I’m not open for business, Dad. So we stood in silence for the full four minutes and thirty seconds it took for his dinner to cook. He used the bottom of his shirt to bring his steaming plastic tray to the table and sat down, the odor of artificially processed Salisbury steak, and mashed potatoes and gravy, wafting through the kitchen while I drained my pasta and stirred in the cheese mix and butter, along with a splash of Mom’s fat-free half-and-half.
I knew he was waiting for me to sit down with him at the table, so I took my bowl to the living room and turned on the TV. I only got in a few bites before I realized that the whole encounter with Dad had made me lose my appetite.
I looked at the wooden clock on the mantel. It was one of those vintage mechanical clocks that you have to wind up once a week—that’s been my “job” for as long as I could remember. I wondered what would happen if I just stopped doing it, if Mom and Dad would even notice, or if they would just let time stand still forever.
It was just after seven thirty.
I ran back into the kitchen and dumped my mac and cheese into a plastic container and stashed it in the fridge. I glanced at my dad and said, already walking away, “I’m heading out.”
The gray wooden barn sat in the shade of the tree line like a secret. I made my way along the side of the house, stepping on the circular paver stones Mom put in because Mallory had kept tracking a path from the house to the barn that was killing the grass.
The door creaked as it opened easily beneath my hands, the wooden handle worn and soft from a century of oily fingers and palms. I flipped the light switch, and one by one the grid of fluorescent lights that hung down from the ceiling flickered to life, illuminating the giant, open room. Her old wooden worktable in the center was just the way she’d left it—papers and pencils and markers and erasers and sticky notes and even a ceramic mug who
se contents had long dried up scattering the surface. I walked the walls lined with photos pinned up like haphazard, chaotic wallpaper.
I was looking for one photo in particular—I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t remember where it was. After three laps around the barn, I finally saw it—the corner of it was tucked right under the graffiti picture, directly in the center of the wall.
I knew exactly when and where she’d taken it.
• • •
I got there first. I hid my bike farther down the road, buried under the cover of leaves and branches, where it wouldn’t be seen. I knew everyone would be arriving soon, so I hurried down the familiar overgrown path. I stepped up onto the concrete foundation, walked over to the chimney, and pressed my palms against the soot-stained bricks. I swore I felt a pulse, like a heartbeat, under my hands. But I guess that had to have just been mine rebounding off the old masonry.
A car door slammed. Then another. Voices. Footsteps.
I hopped down and quickly tried to guess which tree Mallory must’ve been in when she took that picture. Then I carefully climbed the rungs of low branches, up into one of the nearby trees, and waited. I looked down at the lot. The first partygoers had begun to assemble with supplies: wood and cardboard for the fire, cases of beer, ice, coolers full of probably more beer, and plastic Bargain Mart bags full of snacks.
The sun was going down, and from up here I could hear so clearly, as more and more cars pulled off into the grass along the side of the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing, but then I imagined Mallory sitting with me, waiting, and I remembered how she’d once said that the most important thing about being a photographer isn’t the camera or skill or genius ideas; sometimes it is just being there at the right time.
How would I know the right time when it came?
All the people from my school I never talk to and who never talk to me filed into what was left of the Bowman House in droves. Someone started building a fire near the fireplace, dousing the logs and crumpled newspaper with lighter fluid. They cheered as it roared to life.
I smelled the weed before I saw who had it—that unmistakable sticky, sweet, earthy scent I had come to know so well. I closed my eyes and pictured Mallory in her bedroom, kneeling in a nest of pillows on the floor by the window, her elbows perched on the ledge of her windowsill, blowing a long, thin stream of smoke outside.
Mallory still had a spell on me back then—I was only thirteen, fourteen, maybe. She seemed so much older than me, so much wiser. So when she’d drag me into her bedroom, and tell me to talk to her, tell me she didn’t like to be alone while she smoked, I was more than happy to oblige. Except she knew I never had anything worthwhile to say, so I was her perfect captive audience.
I could close my eyes now and see her face so clearly, the way the drug would relax her into this lazy way of speaking. She’d tell me all kinds of deep thoughts and dark secrets I’m sure she’d never have shared otherwise, like her philosophies about art and how she couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and leave this all behind. I felt special when she would let me in, like I was worth something. But then we would always fall asleep, and in the morning she’d kick me out of her bedroom and it was like those conversations never happened.
Eventually I wised up and realized she didn’t actually need me. I could’ve been anyone. And I finally stopped coming when she called—that was the most radical thing I’d ever done in my life. Up until now, anyway. I guess that’s when she replaced me with Neil, whom she’d always referred to as “helmet head Neil” before they became real friends, back when he was just the guy who supplied her with pot. Neil was someone who could keep up with Mallory, offer her the unwavering adoration she craved, someone who would come every time she called and constantly remind her how much of a fucking genius she was.
He managed to stick around long enough to become her best friend, despite the fact that everyone knew he wanted it to be something more. I think she liked leaving people wanting more. Maybe that’s why she stopped liking me—I didn’t want anything from her. Except that wasn’t the whole truth. I did want something from her: I wanted her to go back to the way she was when we were younger, when we were best friends, when our parents were just our parents and hadn’t become flawed, broken, angry, sad people.
Almost as if he could tell I’d been thinking about her, Neil arrived onto the scene—we had never been friends, real or fake.
The last time we spoke was at a party over spring break, the one I’d only been invited to out of pity. He sidled up to me, brought me a drink—something real and strong, not the cheapo beer everyone around us had. He said we were drinking to Mallory and that deserved the good stuff. We tapped our red plastic cups, and the brown liquid sloshed around, the toxic smell burning my nostrils and the back of my throat as I brought the cup to my lips. He said “To Mallory,” and I repeated “To Mallory” and took a sip.
I coughed and choked as I tried to swallow it down, and he laughed but told me everyone does that at first. We sat down on a couch that I sank into like quicksand and pretended to make small talk—people had been wanting to talk to me so much after Mallory died, I was starting to get the hang of it: Keep things on the surface, never say anything you mean. I took tiny sips at first—this stuff was floor cleaner, I was convinced. But the warmth that was spreading through me was unlike anything I’d ever felt, like butterflies in my stomach, except it was butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in every cell of my body.
He built up to it in stages, working up the nerve to speak the question he had been waiting to ask for the three months since she’d died. First he just said he wanted to come over sometime—he kept it casual, innocent. My sips grew longer, and the butterflies stopped batting their wings so fast.
“To the barn,” he added.
I took another and another, and thought, hey, maybe these people were onto something with the whole getting wasted thing, because I was starting to feel pretty good.
“To look through Mallory’s photographs.”
I finished off my drink. He wanted to take some of them—he knew which ones were her favorites; he knew the most important ones. And as he refilled the empty cup between my hands, I was feeling both powerless and powerful all at the same time. That was when he said the words that twisted into my heart like a corkscrew and flipped some kind of switch inside me:
“It’s what Mallory would’ve wanted.”
Now I looked down from my spot high above the partygoers and molded my back into the crook of the tree—its branches and trunk cradling me. I let my legs dangle on either side as I sat, watching, listening. The sound of the bonfire hissed and crackled like whispered secrets, its sweet smoke rising up into the canopy of trees. The laughter and shouting and pounding music was somehow amplified as it rose above all the sound-absorbing things on the ground.
I had to stop thinking about that night. I brought the camera up and looked through it. I was here to do what Mallory had done, to find the hidden stories between the lines—at least, that seemed like something Mallory would say—but all I saw was that the kids from my school were the same as they’d always been. Last year’s party was nearly interchangeable with this year’s. The same faces, the same fire, but the picture wasn’t the same. Mallory’s picture had mystery, like it was something ritualistic and meaningful, and not just a bunch of drunk kids from Bumfuck Nowhere with nothing better to do on a Friday night.
There were no hidden stories to see; I already knew all of theirs, just like they knew mine.
But then I saw Chris. I watched his face as he stood there in the crowd. From here I couldn’t really see the crooked smile or the dimple at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t fully let go of me for days. Neil offered Chris the little glass pipe that he was holding between his fingers, and I couldn’t hear what Chris said, but he smiled and looked down, shaking his head. And just like that, he was absorbed by the crowd.
After the first hour, the party was in full
force and everyone was deteriorating, getting rowdier and sloppier. That’s when I began to watch Chris more closely—that’s when he began to stand out; he had slowly become the calm point in all the chaos.
I knew everyone’s stories except for his. And then I thought about the three-pack of erasers and the shoelaces and the lobster claw oven mitts. How I’d found them in a pile, hiding in the cookies and crackers, when I was straightening at the end of my shift earlier this week.
He sat with the others around the fire, not drinking or smoking, seeming neither interested nor bored. He did a lot of polite smiling and nodding, a lot of gazing into the fire. He didn’t say much to anyone. I was beginning to think maybe he was watching too, like I was, but in a different way.
After a while, he stood and picked up a broken tree branch that was on the ground. He kept stoking the fire with it, moving the logs and random tinder, sending the sparks flying upward. I was scared the glowing embers would catch the leaves on the low branches or that someone might look up and follow the embers’ path as they ascended toward me.
If things were different, maybe I’d climb down and go talk to him, do a little flirting, or maybe we’d even have a drink together, share a laugh—all those normal, sweet little moments. But things weren’t different.
I brought Mallory’s camera to my eye, twisting the lens so I could see him more clearly, look at him more closely. “Hold still.” I breathed the words my sister was always saying, to people, to objects, to animals, to places. I moved my whole body, shifted just half an inch to the right, cropping everyone else out of the frame. Sure to keep my arms and hands and fingers exactly as they were. I could imagine her in this very spot, doing all of these same things. The tip of my index finger slid against the button, wanting to press down.
Looking through the camera made me dizzy, like I was that night at the party over spring break. I moved my left hand cautiously, my fingers against the tree bark, and I tried to brace myself as I lowered the camera from my face, its weight tugging at the strap around my neck like an anchor trying to drag me down.
