by Megan Abbott
My voice shaking now. It seems so funny to say those words.
“Alex, listen, you can’t do this, okay? Call me.”
But he doesn’t call me at all.
THEN
This is what she told me.
She’d been living with him a month, less even.
It was all because her mom had asked her to move out, just for a little while, I swear, honey. There’d been that trouble with her mother’s boyfriend, now fiancé. He was a businessman her mother had met at a trade show. She never told him she was older than he was—only five years—because men didn’t like that. He’d been married once, but his ex and their son lived up in the Northwest somewhere so he didn’t see them much. And the minute he saw Diane’s mother, his heart went gazzom. She was so beautiful and surely a fashion model, an actress (and there was no way she had a teenage daughter).
Things started off with a bang, a weekend trip to the beach, tequila sunrises and soul confessions. Three months in, he invited her—and, of course, Diane too—to move into his new condo in Canyon Crest. It had three bedrooms, a Jacuzzi, marina views. Soon, he hoped, they’d all move together to Florida, which was where he really wanted to be.
But the arrangement didn’t work out. He was not a good person. Diane knew it right away. He had exactly one picture of his son in the whole condo, and what kind of person saw his child only once a year?
Then she found out some things about him and told her mother. Things that showed the kind of man he was.
The atmosphere in the condo was tense. He accused her of trying to poison her mother against him. The truth can’t be poison, she told her mother, who definitely did not agree.
For two nights, the boyfriend slept on his office couch while Diane’s mother locked herself in their bedroom, which overlooked the deep water slip where his boat—the Big Love—bobbed. Every time Diane came to the door, her mother started crying. She told Diane she had an ocular migraine, or maybe it was Lyme disease, or maybe a tumor, or MS.
Finally, the boyfriend called Diane’s father. Together, they made arrangements for Diane to move in with him.
Diane, honey, her father told her over the phone, that formal voice he always used with her, the same one he’d used her whole life, I’m happy to have you.
Diane’s mother claimed she wasn’t involved in the decision, but wasn’t it the best thing anyway? Wouldn’t it be wonderful for Diane to develop more of a relationship with her dad?
Diane hadn’t lived with her father since her parents divorced when she was seven years old. First, he’d relocated to Nevada, then to other places. Now he lived twenty miles away, but she saw him only once a month at most, a restaurant dinner, stiff napkins and Diane watching the waiter fill and refill her glass of Diet Coke. They never had anything to say.
But Mom needs me, she wanted to tell him. When there was trouble with a man or with work, or if they were facing one of her mom’s “big blues,” she needed Diane to do the shopping, the laundry, talk to the electric company about the overdue bill, to chat for hours in their pajamas about what went wrong. After a breakup, she sometimes took Diane out of school so they could drive to the mountains together, or out to Anchor Lake, and think about things. They’d sleep in the same bed, her mom talking all night in that singsong voice she got after too much Chablis and those big horse pills she took for cramps. Talking about all the ways her life needed to change.
You’re the only one I trust, her mom whispered. The only one who hasn’t let me down.
Once, the two of them walking together on Anchor Lake, her mother linking elbows with her, bending her head on Diane’s shoulder, a man asked if they were lovers. It was embarrassing, but people didn’t understand. Her mother had just always needed her. And now more than ever.
But it had been settled.
You’ll see, baby, her mother said. I just need some time with him, to bring it across, you know? It’ll go so fast and then we’ll bring you back and be one happy family.
The day came and her mother drove her to the bus station, wailing the whole way about how the two people she loved most were tearing her apart.
As the bus drove away, Diane received a text from her mother: One last thing! Promise me, honey, you’ll never love your dad half as much.
After three stops, Diane got off the bus and hitched a ride with a nice, round-faced lady in a minivan to Sacred Heart Academy. For four days, she managed it. After school, she’d go to the library. After the library closed, she’d sneak into the utility room until morning. Her dad called twice that first night, leaving messages wondering where she was, but no one called after that.
One morning, the custodian with the Bambi tattoo on his neck found her. He felt sorry for her. They talked about families and how complicated they could be. He told her a long story about how his father kicked him out of the house when he was seventeen for disrespecting the Lord, and yet, Diane, I tell you he never went a day without banging fifty-four milligrams of Dilaudid and what does the Lord have to do with that?
But he still turned her in. The principal called both her parents.
It didn’t start things off on the right foot with her dad.
I thought you wanted this, he said, picking her up at school, distracted in the middle of his workday, coffee stain on his shiny tie. Your mother said you wanted this.
When she arrived at his apartment, in the big complex with the SINGLES WELCOME! rental sign, she was surprised to see a paper banner drooping across the archway to greet her: HOME, SWEET HOME! He was trying, she knew.
It was a bachelor’s apartment. That’s what her mom would have called it. And it was only a one-bedroom so she slept on a groaning old rollaway. He promised her he was on the waiting list for a two-bedroom and it probably wouldn’t be long.
In the meantime, he said, we’ll make the best of it, okay?
In the kitchen drawers, there was a can opener, plastic takeout spoons, a pair of old steak knives. In the refrigerator, protein powder and a bag of sliced bread. He had only two towels. He’d never taken care of anyone before.
Her mom still called her every night. Diane hid in the laundry room to talk to her, to hear all about her grand romance, the trinkets the boyfriend was buying for her, the trips planned.
Diane tried to explain how uncomfortable she felt with her father, with whom she hadn’t spent more than a few hours in years. Her mother sighed and said she’d learned long ago not to expect too much from him and maybe Diane should learn that too.
When, Diane asked every night, do you think I can move back?
But her mom kept saying she hadn’t given it a chance. And that they hadn’t forgotten the trouble Diane had caused. Besides, she and her boyfriend were still getting to know each other, and that was easier without stress and complications.
The beginning of a relationship is always fragile, she’d told Diane. Just give me some time.
Diane didn’t know what to do with her thoughts. She was used to thinking about her mother all the time. Listening to her problems with her “beaus,” with her bosses, with the way she was treated by the cashier at Kroger’s. She’d never spent so much time alone before, getting tied up in her own thoughts. She wondered constantly about things she’d never considered before, like what she would do when her period came. The idea that her dad would see tampon wrappers, smell it somehow, see her bloated body, horrified her. She willed it not to come, and it didn’t.
Her dad worked a lot. He didn’t get home until nine o’clock some nights. He had sort of a girlfriend named Joann who lived on the fourth floor. Sometimes she made crockpot stews. From what Diane could tell, he mostly lived on Steak-umms and soggy takeout tacos, watching old TV shows on the bad cable. Weekend dinners were the hardest. He said he wasn’t used to talking at home. They sat across from each other at the plastic tulip table, forks scraping into tinned potpies. She tried to ask him questions about his job, which had something to do with travel insurance.
Your mom alway
s wished I was better at this, he told her, though he didn’t say what exactly “this” was.
After a week, she began to feel as though she weren’t real. Moving through the halls of Sacred Heart, where everyone knew she’d been found sleeping in the basement, she came to believe she might be invisible.
They didn’t have all the science classes her old school offered and, despite her protests, they’d stuck her in the same chemistry course she’d taken the year before. She tried studying advanced chem and microbiology on her own.
Coming home each night, arms aching from all her library books (there was no room for her own books in the apartment so they had to keep them in her father’s storage unit in the basement, a big metal cage), she felt like a ghost. By ten thirty or eleven, her father disappearing into his bedroom or to his girlfriend’s, Diane started to wonder if this was all a bad dream with no end.
Sleeping on the rollaway, the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the SINGLES WELCOME! pool, the laughter rising in the night, squeals and splashes and cooing and great squalls of laughter, she began to get ideas. One night, at nearly two o’clock, she heard a scream so piercing she was sure someone had been murdered. She waited several seconds, sheets pulled under her chin, the pool immediately silent. Finally, she crept across the room and peered through the tinkling vertical blinds, but she saw only an orange-bikinied woman, tanned as a roasting hot dog, being heaved into the pool by two men.
Don’t, she cried out, you’re killing me!
The scream came again as she hit the water. She looked so happy she could die.
Sweetie, just hold tight, her mom kept saying on the phone. Before you know it, things’ll settle here. And you can come back and show him you’re really sorry. I know you two are going to love each other, like each of you love me.
By the second week, a C+ on her first exam because she couldn’t bring herself to answer all the questions, a strange rash on her neck from her father’s bath towels, everything started to get crazy in her head. Some days, if her mom didn’t call, Diane didn’t talk to anyone. No one talked to her.
She had nightmares: her mother and the boyfriend had relocated to Tokyo without telling her; her father came out of his bedroom one night and folded up the rollaway while she was still in it (I forgot you were here, are you sure you’re here?). There was no getting out, no breathing at all.
She wondered how long she could take it. She began to have crazy thoughts about what she might do, and slowly the thoughts seemed less crazy.
Didi, her mother whispered on the phone one night. You should see the freshwater pearls he bought me. We’re going to Bimini for the holiday weekend. That’s in the Bahamas. I’ll bring you back water from the Fountain of Youth. If they let it on the plane.
The next day, while distilling acetates in class, she realized what she was meant to do. It was so obvious. Following the directions with care, she poured the dried barium acetate into one test tube, and the lead into the other.
As she worked, Mr. Keyes, a mordant, stone-faced man, talked to them about barium acetate being so soluble, how it decomposed on heating, how it had no odor.
Mr. K., the jock with the overbite shouted out, fingers in the white powder, can we snort it?
Bro, another added, don’t get high on your own supply.
That was when Mr. Keyes told the class that if you inhaled barium acetate, you would get very sick, and if you ingested it, you would likely die.
That was when she knew what she would do. After all, in so many ways, she was already gone.
Later, she wouldn’t even remember scraping the powder into the same envelope that held her report card, all As, not that anyone had asked to see it, and putting it in her backpack. None of it was real, anyway.
She kept it in her backpack for a week.
But what was it about the night that it happened, right before the long Thanksgiving weekend? Joann came over to invite them both to Thursday’s singles’ potluck turkey dinner in the apartment complex’s common room. She planned to make stuffing with chestnuts. Her dad declined. He wanted to take Diane out to dinner. He was sorry he and his daughter hadn’t spent much time with each other, and wasn’t Thanksgiving supposed to be for family? After all, he said, we’re in this together, Diane. Then, more quietly, At least until your mother burns through this fella too.
That night, he’d brought home takeout spaghetti from DaVinci’s. She watched him eat it, bent over the coffee table (they no longer bothered to eat at the squeaky tulip table), noodles slapping against his chin. She couldn’t even bear to open the lid on her own container, the smell so strong. The Pop-Tart yesterday morning was the last time she’d eaten.
The TV was playing that air-disasters show (Aloha 243, we are unpressurized!). Diane knew what she had to do. Her glass of Diet Rite fizzed on the coffee table. The fizz was so loud, louder than anything she’d ever heard. I won’t even taste it, she thought. I won’t feel anything.
She reached under the sofa for her backpack and unzipped it. He didn’t even notice that she removed an envelope. Or that her hands were shaking.
When he went into the kitchen to pour his Dr Pepper, she knew it was time. Hand on the envelope, she leaned over her glass. A cabinet door slammed in the kitchen. Hurry, hurry, she thought.
She could never explain it later. Her arm darted the wrong way; the powder disappeared into her father’s noodle-heaped plate, the red wormed mound at the center.
Did I really do that? she thought. Is that what I did? Is this happening?
But before she knew it, he’d returned, cold beverage in hand, and taken his seat. Unbuttoned his collar. Dug back into that wormy mound.
She felt her mouth open, then close again.
Because suddenly it seemed exactly right. Suddenly, it seemed that he was the one responsible for all this. For her banishment, her expulsion, her imprisonment. He was the author of all her misfortune.
Wasn’t he?
Something turned inside and her head jerked up. Had she really done that? Did that really happen?
She watched him hold his stomach and walk to the bathroom. He was in there a long time. For a few minutes, listening to the high, singing swoop of the cascading Aloha airlines flight on the TV, she thought he might never return.
When he did, his face purpled and a slick of vomit on his collar, she thought, Oh no.
Oh no, I’m going to have to get more.
But he looked at her woozily, his hands on his knees. He said his legs were stiff. He said it was like his whole body had turned wooden.
A few minutes later, he started to make a funny noise.
Where’s my phone? he said, his neck so red now, red as a firecracker. But Diane didn’t know.
Can you get Joann? A wheeze like a squeeze toy. Something’s not right. Can you get her for me?
She rose, nodding. She climbed the two flights to Joann’s floor and it was so strange. It was like none of it was real except the sound of her sneakers on the concrete, louder than the loudest noise in the world.
She stopped on the stairwell and stared up at the sizzling fluorescent light above.
Is this happening? she wondered. She had no idea. Did I do that?
Joann followed her down, asking a hundred questions and carrying a big bottle of Pepto-Bismol. When they walked inside the apartment, her dad was lying on the carpet, the TV tray on the floor, spaghetti stringing garishly across his ankles.
Oh God, Joann kept saying. Oh God.
There was this gurgling sound, and foam in a little curlicue in front of his mouth.
This was when she could no longer think, or speak. Because none of it was real.
Joann was already calling 911. Did he take anything? She kept repeating the operator’s questions. Is he on anything? Everyone had so many questions.
When the EMT people came, they couldn’t get the tube down his throat. It was completely closed.
She stood in the doorway and watched. Everyone moving around her, but s
he couldn’t move at all. Maybe she was made of wood too. A wooden girl.
Was it real? she asked herself. Did I do that?
He lay on the rug, dead, his eyes open. He was staring right at her. A big, empty stare, like, Who are you?
Which was how he always looked at her anyway, how both of her parents did. Who are you and what are you doing here?
This is what Diane told me.
And when she’d finished, she looked at me, her face changed, her features dark and soft. She looked at me and waited.
NOW
Saturday, just after seven a.m., I start thinking about calling Diane.
The PMDD literature sits on the coffee table, articles spread like a cardsharp’s fan. I graze my hand over it.
It’s you, Diane said last night. It’s both of us.
I think about the power she once had, a strange, drowsy, dark cloud around her that always drew me to her. That made me want to draw things out of her, to uncover her secrets. And how I fled from her the moment she offered them to me. Watch what you wish for, that’s what my dad always said. Every time he eloped or lost a bar bet.
Checking my voice mail again, I see Alex hasn’t called me back. But there’s a text from Diane, who must’ve gotten my number from the lab directory.
Call me if you want to talk, it says. And think about what I said.
A peculiar feeling flits through me. An old loyalty, something.
I fight off the impulse to type back, to warn her: I told Alex. Alex knows.
She’s here two days and, just like that, we’re back in it, together. Except this time maybe I’m the one who’s laid the dark bundle at her feet.
Hey, sorry about yesterday, I text Alex, fingers white. Can we talk?
The wait, phone in hand like a live thing.
Finally, six minutes later, having felt five phantom buzzes, his reply:
No worries. I’m at the lab now, though. Tonight?
