No, she said. I think that’s a pretty twisted way to think, actually.
Tabitha closed her eyes, chewed a lingonberry, violently shook her head.
Don’t give me that, she said, and suddenly her eyes opened right on Julie, the eyeliner dark and storming. You’re closer to me than anyone in the world. You have to know what I’m thinking. You have to.
She took a bite of the pancakes, her cigarette burning away to ash in her hand.
Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m thinking, she said.
Julie watched Tabitha eat. She waited six bites, then reached out for the pack of Camels on the table. Tabitha stabbed down at her hand with a buttery fork; Julie yelped and pulled her hand away.
Don’t you dare, Tabitha said.
I just wanted to hold one, Julie said. God.
If you don’t start something, said Tabitha, you don’t have to quit something. I really believe that.
Julie sulked in her chair.
Earlier you said there was no point in doing anything that you didn’t have to quit eventually, she said.
I really believe that too, Tabitha said, licking lingonberry sauce off of her lips.
Julie kept quiet as Tabitha ate all of the pancakes and drank three glasses of water, then started to talk about Ira, how they’d met and how he was always talking about publishing this terrible zine and how he was a huge board game geek and everything. She stayed quiet as Tabitha paid and drove her home, quiet as Tabitha dropped her off in front of the house and waved to her over the steering wheel, Pumpkins blaring, then drove off, Julie guessed to Ira’s house, where hopefully the door was unlocked and the bed was half empty, or half full. Julie watched her sister’s taillights fade, then walked back across the lawn, dew from the approaching morning collecting on the fires at her cuffs. Linda was snoring down the hallway. The blue light of the TV mixed with the blue light of the coming dawn.
She wore the pants three times to school after that until she tore a huge hole in the knee and had to retire them. On the day after her seventeenth birthday—her long hair long gone, cropped and tortured into a Wendy O. Williams cut—the police told her that they’d confirmed it, that Tabitha was really dead, and so she wore the pants one last time. Then she cut them into pieces with scissors and shoved the scraps to the bottom of the trash can in the kitchen.
2
There hadn’t been a funeral. There had been a cremation, and Linda’s boyfriend Michael had brought the ashes home. They were sitting on a shelf in the garage. Linda would deal with them later—everyone would deal with them later. No one had notified Tabitha and Julie’s father—nobody really knew how they’d go about notifying him, in the first place. It was fine with Julie; she hadn’t been so much into the idea of going through with a funeral anyway. Funerals were about wallowing, not about moving on.
Tabitha’s bedroom had become Julie’s bedroom. Madeleine L’Engle and star chart books lay stacked in cardboard boxes, filling up Julie’s former closet where her clothes had once been. She moved everything into Tabitha’s room, let it all lay in a leaf pile on the floor. No one else wanted to touch Tabitha’s things, not Linda, not Michael. She sat there, nights, wrapped herself in Tabitha’s paisley quilts, brought in meals on Tabitha’s paper plates, played Tabitha’s CDs as loud as she could.
The walls sagged with push-pinned photographs of Tabitha and other girls, never the same set of friends twice. Between the photographs were Lisa Frank posters in which unicorns chased dolphins in blueberry chrome spirals, and a ladybug-red sheet hung over the window, choking off the cracks of light let in by the Venetian blinds. In the corner sat the bookshelves, two high, mostly unoccupied.
Tabitha’s boyfriends had stayed away from this room. Linda stayed out as well, holed up with her Joni Mitchell records and American Spirits or went to work, paralegal to some disreputable real estate type. She’d explained what she did all day many times and neither Tabitha nor Julie had managed to care about it, and Linda hadn’t seemed to care if they cared. Linda smoked and got ash in the peppered mashed potatoes Tabitha made while Tabitha scrubbed the dinner dishes and Julie counted the sweeps of the clock hand until she could excuse herself to do her homework, which she usually didn’t do. And later she would lie tucked in her bed, under her rainforest sheets, while springs knocked against the wall she shared with Tabitha. Old men—twenty-four, twenty-five!—would grunt through one wall, and Linda’s television and record player would sneak down the hallway:
Help me—I think I’m falling
And when it got quiet, Julie would close her eyes and imagine her sister: sprawled, those last two years, Shirley Manson or Beth Orton or Gitane Demone on the stereo, roach in her hand burning blue smoke in the light of her purple and yellow lava lamp, someone beside her who didn’t matter in the end to anyone.
Julie was going through Tabitha’s things. She paced and she sipped the coffee she’d made, separating everything into piles, one to keep, one to fill the box of black garbage bags she’d brought from under the sink. Get it over with, she decided. She’s dead; doesn’t mean you have to stop moving.
The clothes she had seen before. Tabitha was good at mixing and matching and she owned surprisingly few clothes. Julie inspected every seam and ran the fabric over her arms and her face. They smelled like dryer sheets, scratched her face with clasps and creases and sometimes a safety pin. She sorted them out according to how often she’d seen Tabitha wearing them. There were clothes Tabitha had never worn and there were clothes she’d worn every day, for stretches of multiple days. She kept the latter and folded the former neatly in a pile. When she’d finished, she drew a dollar sign on a sheet of notebook paper and stacked it on top.
Tabitha’s books: cookbooks, restaurant menus, DIY hint guides for Tabitha’s various crafting phases, vague but well-illustrated volumes on the Tarot. There was one thick one, its spine cracked, must have been something like 900 pages; she pulled it out. The cover showed a picture of the world exploding into meaty chunks, and the title was all in gold letters in raised type:
THE DREAM AND THE REALITY OF TIME TRAVEL
On the flyleaf Tabitha had written:
Julie—
Ira and I got drunk and both went in for concentration tests, and they said I was a crazy bitch with self-destructive tendencies ( :( :( :( !!!! ), and they also gave me this free book. They told me that it would help me overcome obstacles in my life. So I’m giving it to you, for your thirteenth birthday! If you actually apply any of the advice in this book I swear to God Julie I will murder you. No joke.
Love / kisses / infinite well-wishes,
Tabs
She’d never seen the book before; Tabitha had forgotten to give it to her. There was an orange price sticker on it: CLRNCE 2/$1.
She let the cover flip shut and sniffed the exposed edges of the pages. It was impossible to smell anything under the reek of the incense. She hated incense. She put the book into the keep pile along with everything but the cookbooks, which were probably worth something.
She flipped back the pages of Tabitha’s old wall calendars. She’d tacked every new wall calendar she got over every old one: 100 Adorable Kittens, Great Hunting Disasters, Churches of Charlemagne. Appointments, dinners, Julie’s sixteenth birthday party which Tabitha had missed. Tabitha’s twenty-first birthday was marked somewhere in the clean pages, she knew; Tabitha marked it every year, first thing, and she would burn through the pages until she reached it. Julie didn’t look for it.
There were two old photo albums, covers done in weird burgundy fake leather. Julie herself at four, smiling in a park somewhere, their long-vanished father teaching a miniature Tabitha to play the mandolin with a big smile on his jaw. His jaw was larger than she remembered; his hair was already gray. Tabitha at fifteen, just entering the eighth grade, her arm around some unknown boy and RUDIMENTARY PENI written in Sharpie across a forehead made ugly by acne and a flash. Then Tabitha writhing in the blue bedsheets of a linoleum-grimy dorm so
mewhere; then Tabitha with three men in a poorly-lit kitchen, their hands on her rear. Tabitha wrapped in a blanket, her eyes raccoon-ringed and her face radiating upward at the lens of some forgotten lover’s camera. Julie closed the photo albums and tossed them into one of the black garbage bags.
Did she keep everything, this bimbo dead sister of hers? Julie tore through old shopping lists, pay stubs, supermarket coupons, receipts, worksheets from middle school with 30s and 40s and frowny faces written in red felt pen, all of it shoved into the drawers of the little white work desk in the corner. She lifted the rugs and searched beneath the mattress.
She found nothing else to distract her from the jewelry box sitting on the corner of the bed.
The box had carved chicken feet and a brass plate on the top, TT scratched into it with a nail or something. It wasn’t like the box was unfamiliar territory; Julie had swiped her share of bags, always the cheaper stuff, basically powdered sugar, just to get through a tedious history assignment or whatever. She would hum and work and look at herself in the mirror and think: I do not look fucked up at all, and she would giggle. This time she took out all of the bags and set them on the paisley quilt. There weren’t many left. The felt bottom of the box lay empty, fallen seeds and stems and grains in the cracks between felt and wood. She pressed her finger against the bottom, and it gave.
Tabitha kept a flathead screwdriver in her bedside table. Julie had found it earlier, along with her condoms, her lighters, her fake IDs and her purple speckled vibrator. She pried up the edges of the stash box with the screwdriver. It gave easily, wellused to opening.
She lifted out the bags one by one. White crosses, pink pastilles, long-ago-dried mushrooms, keys with white grains stuck in their ends. She set all of it aside, leaving nothing in the box but an index card and a Lisa Frank pocketbook, huddled together. The index card was noisily headlined FOR A GOOD TIME CALL in blue glitter pen. Below it were a dozen phone numbers, all but the most recentlywritten crossed out. No names were attached to the numbers. Julie recognized none of them.
The Lisa Frank notebook would be the diary.
First she chopped an earthworm of coke on Tabitha’s Carole King CD case. She had no idea if she was even doing it right, but she got it all into her nose anyway. After that she felt calm and she threw the other bags and the index cards in with the garbage, only toying briefly with the idea of throwing it in with the garage sale things. She took the jewelry box to the window and shook out the last crushed grains and strands into the wind. It all blew away into the summer air; she imagined it landing between the blades of grass, where ants would eat it and see God.
She sat back against Tabitha’s bed, her face numbing, and she stared at the wall. The psychedelic-painted CD player was silent and she let it stay that way.
You cunt, she said to the silent walls. You have the messiest room I’ve ever seen.
The Lisa Frank diary had a little padlock on it that she smashed easily with the screwdriver. The back of the cardboard cover was filled with lipstick blots, one per day for a week, MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY written underneath. And each page, save ten or fifteen at the back, had a date written on it. The dates began sometime last November. Beneath every date Tabitha had written:
GET THROUGH TODAY
Every day, fifteen lines of it. Every day was the same.
She made herself pronounce it over and over in her head until it stopped meaning anything to her. She closed the book and set it down on the quilt, then she folded one of the corners over it. She could feel it, lying there, only feet away from her while she lay on the bed.
Eventually the feeling came back to her face; by that point she had taken a lighter to the notebook. She masturbated with Tabitha’s purple speckled vibrator and she fell asleep again on the floor, curled in the blanket.
Once they stayed up late in Tabitha’s room listening to the Buzzcocks and the Smashing Pumpkins while Tabitha smoked two bowls of marijuana, and Julie talked about all the possible situations a veterinarian might have to deal with on a given day; she wanted to care for animals back then, and Tabitha smiled, lazy and slow like a cat, and she dug her hips deeper into the mattress. Julie finally stopped talking and she turned to look at Tabitha; Tabitha’s eyes were closed; her head burrowed into her watermelon pillows. Soft mucus hissed in her nose as she breathed and dreamed. Julie pulled the blanket over both of them and sat up with her knees at her chest and the blanket pressed to her chin. The green smell of pot lingered in the fabric. Julie sat smelling it until she felt tired and she took the short walk down the hall to her own tiny bedroom, her kitten slippers kissing the carpet. And in the morning Tabitha’s hand touching her cheek, just two little hours before school: wake me up before you go-go.
Julie woke up in her regular place on the floor. It was still dark outside and she was still alone and the smell of smoke under the door was beginning to fade, and in the closet were a stack of things she seriously had thought she could sell.
Help me, I think I’m falling came from Linda’s bedroom, where the ashes had long since settled into the sheets.
3
The morning of her seventeenth birthday, Julie knocked on the bathroom door for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—her mother had long ago left for work.
Jesus Christ, she moaned. I’m going to die of a burst bladder on my birthday, you bitch, open the goddamned door—
Then Tabitha finally pulled back the inside bolt; Julie came inside. She was on her side on the matted burgundy bathroom rug, beginning to lie down. A pile of shampoo and conditioner bottles lay scattered around her, their contents oozing against their plastic sides as they rolled against the tile.
Julie, said Tabitha. Happy birthday. Happy birthday.
She tried to lift her head, smiled, tried to lift her arm. Slowly, slowly her arm reached toward her sister’s face.
You have to go to the doctor, said Julie, her voice shaking.
I’ll be fine, said Tabitha. Just fine.
She wiggled her legs and made herself sit up. Her energy gone, she sat there breathing on the bathroom floor while Julie watched. Then she pulled herself into a standing position against the counter. She’d never been this fucked up before.
Just fine, she said again. Her eyes closed and her head lolled forward.
Julie caught her and helped her to bed. She could carry her sister all of a sudden.
Linda and Michael came home, ready to take them all to dinner. She told them they’d have to wait. Tabitha slept all day and the next day besides. Julie stayed away from school the whole time. She sat with her sister, played Hole and Garbage on the psychedelic-painted stereo, and she cut out the newspaper comics and pasted them into her composition book. It was a habit she had, something that relaxed her. You could paste the panels in order, keep the plots the same, or you could mix things up, make members of the Patterson family flame out in terrifying traffic accidents involving Crankshaft’s bus, send bears from Mark Trail’s refuge into Montoli’s Pizza. She cut and cut and let the word balloons bubble up through her head as Tabitha shifted and sometimes moaned.
She called into Einstein’s Arcade, pretending to be Tabitha, and she told them that she had a fever and that she couldn’t work that night.
Yeah, I’ll bet you have a fever, cackled the manager.
Julie gripped the phone receiver with both hands and held it until she felt like she could speak without shouting.
Thanks, she finally said, see you soon.
She put the receiver down and she started the Hole album over again.
Linda and Michael talked her into going out to dinner that night. She’ll be fine, they told her; she just needs to sleep it off. The flu, it must have been.
You can go wherever you like, Michael said. Sky’s the limit.
I want to go to IHOP, she said. The one you can smoke at.
Michael looked at her.
I’m fine with it, Linda said.
She picked at her lingonberry pancakes; she hated these t
hings, actually.
If you tell them to sing to me, she said, I’ll grow up to be stunted and hateful.
Too late, coughed Linda.
We’d never do that, said Michael. True to their word, they didn’t.
They got home to find Tabitha gone.
She’d called her boyfriend, one of them; he’d known her in high school. He’d always loved to watch her smoking by the parking lots before one day she wasn’t there anymore. He’d met her again at the arcade just after moving on campus; he thought she was still so beautiful, even if her eyes always looked tired, from staring at all those video screens, he guessed. He picked her up in his graduation SUV and took her to his dorm room. His roommate was there; he was one of those creeps who wanted to learn to play the guitar now that he was in college; he kept playing parts of the solo from “Little Wing” over and over and over while they smoked on the bed with towels stuffed under the door and dropped broad hints. Tabitha kept insisting and insisting. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, how she was talking. She was talking like she didn’t make sense, like things weren’t connecting. He should never have agreed with her to leave the dorm. He’d just felt so good—the legendary Tabitha Thatch, his at last.
They left the dorm, though, and they drove into Hyde Park, into a cul-de-sac where there were no streetlights. They put back the front seats of his graduation SUV.
She said something weird while they were, you know—just one of the weird things she said, actually. She said it was her sister’s birthday today, and that he should, you know, do her harder in honor of this. We’re all getting older, she said, older and smaller every single day.
They finished; he was resting. They had the air conditioner on full. It was already the end of May; it was already sweltering.
The Dream of Doctor Bantam Page 2
