Cuts Like a Knife

by Darlene Ryan

  “Daniel, something is clearly, clearly wrong. All I’m trying to do is help you. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your life. I’m not even trying to tell you what to do, because I don’t know what the heck the problem is. I just want to help.”

  She put her hand on my arm, and I twisted away from her. It struck me that all the time I’d spent here in the kitchen talking to her had just been time wasted when I could have been looking for Mac. Suddenly I couldn’t stand there one more second. I had to get out. I had to look for Mac.

  I just turned and walked away from Mom toward the back door.

  “Where are you going?” she said. She came behind me and grabbed the back of my sweatshirt, knocking me off balance for a moment.

  I didn’t have time for her. I pulled both arms out of the shirt and kept going.

  “Daniel!” she called.

  “Leave me alone,” I shouted. I never yelled at her, but I had to get away and find Mac. I ran across the driveway. I was out of breath, and my nose was running. I looked all around, and I knew there was no way I’d be able to get away with the car, but there was that old bicycle I’d brought up from the basement to give away. I swiped a hand across my face, grabbed the bike and started pedaling down the driveway. My mother ran after me but couldn’t catch me. I heard her yell my name a couple of times, but I didn’t answer. I just pedaled like crazy and I didn’t look back.

  Chapter Eleven

  I don’t know how far I went before I stopped. My chest burned, and it felt like it was packed full of sand. I hung over the handlebars, wheezing until I got my breath.

  Okay. Okay, so what did I do now? I figured there was pretty much no chance that Mac was going to answer her phone, but I tried her again anyway and like all the times before I got her voice mail. I didn’t leave a message this time either. What would I say anyway? Hey, Mac, it’s Daniel and you’re scaring the crap out of me because I’m afraid you’re taking off and never coming back so call me and tell me I’m crazy. Okay?

  The only thing I could think of was to find her. Maybe she wasn’t gone yet. Maybe somebody knew where she was heading. The only place I could think of to start was with the last two people that I knew had seen Mac. Ren and Alex.

  It was Saturday night, and I knew where they had to be, where they always were. At the late movie at the Empire. Ren had a thing for old, old movies, and Alex had a thing for Ren, so that’s what they did on Saturday nights. They went to the Empire. One week they’d show weepy romantic films, and the next it would be some teenagers-getting-chopped-up- with-an-ax marathon.

  I took off in the direction of the old theater. The tires were soft and I hadn’t been on a bike in a while, so I was kind of all over the place on the pavement. A car rolled by me and the driver yelled, “Get off the road asshole,” out the side window.

  My hands were shaking so bad, I stopped at the next intersection. I thought for a second I was going to puke on the street. Was this stupid? Was I going to find Mac and she’d be okay and just laugh at me? Right now I’d take that. Right now that would sound so good.

  I made it the rest of the way to the Empire. Ren and Alex were in the middle of the line, and I was happy that I didn’t have to buy a ticket and try to have this conversation inside.

  I walked up to them and touched Ren on the shoulder. I could see Mac’s green beaded earring caught in Ren’s hair like a little green light, and somehow that gave me courage.

  “Do you know where Mac’s going?” I said.

  Ren turned to look at me. “Hey, Daniel,” she said.

  Alex was in front of her, and he swung around at the same time, and for the second time that night I thought about how big he was and how easily he could and probably would pound me into sand in a minute. He was a couple of inches taller for sure, and even his muscles had muscles.

  Then Mac’s earring winked at me again and I pushed the thought away. “Look, I won’t tell her you told me,” I said, hating how desperate I sounded. “I just really need to talk to her.”

  Ren sighed and shook her hair back from her face. “Daniel, you just have to leave Mac alone for now.”

  “I only want to talk to her for a minute, just a minute,” I said. “Please, Ren.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” she said. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” She shrugged and turned away from me.

  I lost it. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back around to face me, knowing that in about five seconds Alex was going to have me flat on the sidewalk using my head for a punching bag. “Just tell me where she is,” I said, my face pressed close to Ren’s.

  A second later, Alex was shoving me back against the wall of the old movie theater. My head banged against the bricks, and explosions of light went off behind my eyelids.

  Alex had one huge hand on my chest and the other pressed against my face so I could only breathe through one corner of my mouth. He caught a fistful of hair and was about to smash my head against the wall again when an air horn went off against his right ear.

  His arm went up over the side of his head. He took a couple of staggering steps backward and made a sound like there was something stuck in his throat and he was about to puke it out. My mother was standing there with the air horn in her hand.

  Chapter Twelve

  I straightened up, and she shot me a look. “You all right?” she asked. I gave a small nod, which set the fireworks off again. I saw her free hand move as though she was going to reach up and check the back of my head, but something in my face stopped her. It was bad enough that I’d just had my butt saved by my mother.

  Mom looked from Alex, who I knew was really going to kill me the next time he saw me, to Ren. Her gaze settled on Ren. “Daniel asked you a question,” she said. There was no anger in her voice. She could have been Mrs. Henderson asking us to solve 3x + y.

  Ren looked back at my mom. She wasn’t scared. That was the thing about being the smartest person in the room all the time—you didn’t worry about other people. She shrugged. “You’re not my mother,” she said. “I don’t have to talk to you. And I’m not.” She went back to the line—a couple of people in it were staring at us—and Alex followed her, smacking the palm of one hand with his other fist and glaring at me. I tried not to think about how the next time he did that with his fist, it would probably be my face on the other end.

  I started after Ren, and Mom’s arm shot out. “She isn’t going to tell you anything,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to argue, but I knew she was right. I watched Ren and Alex buy their tickets and go inside. Neither one of them looked back even once.

  “Car’s over there,” Mom said, pointing.

  I walked across the street with her—what the hell else could I do?—and got in the passenger side. Mom put the air horn on the backseat. “Let me see your head,” she said. When I hesitated, she tipped her own head toward the backseat. “Don’t make me use that again.”

  I leaned forward, and she ran her fingers over my scalp. I winced when she touched the spot where I’d made contact with the wall.

  She laid her hand against the side of my face for a moment and then sat back in her seat. “There’s no blood,” she said. “Can you see okay?”

  “Yeah, you always have two heads, right?”

  “You’re so funny,” she said. “But you need to be checked out by a doctor.”

  “Jeez, Mom,” I said. “I just scraped my head against the wall. Swear to God. Alex was about to beat my head into spaghetti, but he didn’t get the chance.” I looked over my shoulder into the backseat. “Where did you get that thing anyway?”

  “Hockey game,” she said.

  “You took an air horn to a hockey game?”

  The same piece of hair kept falling into her face, and she tucked it back behind her ear again. “No. The guy sitting behind me took it to the game. I just convinced him it was a better idea to give it to me.”

  Maybe there was stuff about me that my mother didn’t know, but it see
med like there was stuff I didn’t know about her either.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Mom asked. “You’re looking for someone named Mac?”

  I stared out the windshield for a minute. “Uh-huh,” I finally said.

  “And she’s friends with those two?”

  I pushed my hair back off my face. “Ren and Alex. Yeah.”

  “Wren? Like the bird?”

  I shook my head. It still hurt, but I didn’t want Mom to see that, or I’d be on my way to the emergency room. “No, R-E-N. It’s short for Renata.”

  “Who’s Mac and why are you looking for her?”

  The minute she said the words, I could feel the lump pressing again in my stomach. I couldn’t look at her. I stared out the side window. If I said the words, would it make them true?

  She waited, and the silence stretched between us, like a rubber band pulling tighter and tighter and thinner and thinner.

  And then I said it. “She’s my friend, and I think she’s going to kill herself.” Because that’s what I was really afraid of, that’s what had been buzzing in the back of my head since I’d seen Mr. Hanson with that old record album. Not that Mac was going to run off from this life and never come back, but that she was going to end her life, forever, because it was one thing to give stuff to her friends, but giving that album to a teacher, a teacher, that was different.

  I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Shannon had been right about Mac hurting herself. Maybe the rest of us had been wrong. Maybe Mac had lied. Maybe things seemed a lot darker to her than I knew.

  Mom sucked in a breath. She laid her hand on mine, and I felt her warmth sink into me. “Why do you think that?” she asked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I swallowed, trying to get rid of the sour, burning taste at the back of my throat, but I couldn’t.

  I told Mom everything then, even about sex with Mac. I told her about Mac’s grandmother, about the little green house, about the ceiling covered with Mac’s poetry and songs. I told her about Shannon, how she’d tried to help Mac and how Mac—and the rest of us—had treated her like a fink.

  I told her about Mac running away the two other times that I knew about, and how she’d given me the dancing chicken the last time, and that this time she’d given Ren her earrings and Mr. Hanson her Baldry album. She already knew what Mac had given me. I even told her what had happened at the dance.

  “It’s different this time,” I said. “This time she didn’t just give people presents, she gave away the things that mattered to her the most.”

  “Mac lives with her uncle?” Mom asked.

  I nodded. “I don’t know where he lives and I don’t know his name. Mac just calls him The Asshole.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, pulling out her phone.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m calling Jeff Hanson, your music teacher. We need to find out if Mac is home.”

  “You think I’m right,” I said. I could hardly get out the words.

  “I think we need to know,” she said.

  I don’t know if there is a God or not. My parents went to church, and a few times a year I went with them, mostly because it made my mom happy. But now, while she talked to Mr. Hanson, I prayed. I looked up at the stars through the car windshield and I prayed that Mac was home with The Asshole and his wife and that tomorrow she’d be pissed as hell at me because I freaked.

  Finally Mom snapped her phone shut. “He’s going to call me back,” she said. She put her hand on top of mine again.

  “Tell me about Mac,” she said.

  I wasn’t really sure what to say. I told her about the lyrics Mac wrote, how they were poetry, really. I told her how Mac’s face looked when she was working on a math problem. I told her about the first day she’d showed up in our class and how I’d been walking home through the park after school and found Mac at the old merry-go-round. I told how when Mac smiled at me, I sometimes couldn’t breathe.

  Mom’s phone rang then, and as she answered I found myself making wild promises to God in my head. When she closed the phone and looked at me, I knew they hadn’t worked.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said. “She’s not home.”

  I dropped my head to my chest, both arms folded over it like I was in a cocoon. “Mac’s uncle—his name is Devin McCauley—and Mr. Hanson are on their way over to Mac’s grandmother’s house, to see if she’s there. Mrs. Robinson is calling her other friends.”

  “She doesn’t have any other friends,” I snapped, my voice partly muffled against my chest. “She has me and Ren and Alex. That’s it.”

  For a moment, Mom’s hand stayed on mine, warm and steady. Then she reached up and pulled my arms away from my head. “Okay then,” she said, “you’re it. You’re just going to have to figure out where she is.”

  “I don’t know,” I shouted. My nose was running again, and I wiped it with my sleeve. My cheeks were wet. I didn’t even know I was crying. “She already went to all of her favorite places—the park, her grandmother’s house, Frankie and Johnnie’s, the music room at school.”

  And then I knew.

  “What?” Mom said. She must have seen something in my face.

  I swiped my sleeve across my face again. “The merry-go-round, you know, the one I told you about where I saw Mac that first day. She loved that thing. When they took it out, she tried to get a petition going to bring it back. Didn’t work.”

  “The city was worried about liability,” Mom said, more to herself than me.

  “When we were at the house earlier, she said something about the day we met at the merry-go-round.” I was shaking. I looked at Mom. “She’s there. Not at the park, I mean wherever they took it. She’s there.”

  Mom was already pulling out her phone. “First we have to find out where there is.”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Someone from church who works for the planning department.”

  “It’s almost midnight,” I said.

  She put the phone to her ear and reached into the backseat with her other hand to grab the sweatshirt I’d left in the kitchen. “Good,” she said. “That means he’ll probably be home.”

  My hands were shaking so bad, I could barely get the shirt on and zippered. By the time I did, Mom was off the phone, starting the car and doing up her seatbelt all in one blur of motion.

  “Buckle up,” she said to me, and she put the car in gear and did a tight U-turn in the middle of the street.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “City garage.” Her eyes were fixed on the road. At the corner she looked both ways and then ran the red light.

  My thoughts were falling all over themselves. What if Mac was at the merry-go-round? What if she wasn’t? What if we couldn’t find her? What if… what if I was right and it was already too late? I closed my eyes and sent up one more prayer: Please, God, let me be wrong.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The car tires squealed as we whipped into the parking area of the city garage. Mom shot across the pavement, stopping with a spray of gravel, nose in the far corner of the lot.

  The fenced storage space was down an embankment. Mom slammed the car into park and was out the door before I even had my seatbelt off. We half slid, half fell down the hill. I looked at my watch. I saw that it was almost midnight. Almost tomorrow.

  What had Mac said? Tomorrow everything would be gone. Did she mean herself too?

  I looked at the fence in front of me. “Boost me up,” I said.

  Mom laced her fingers together, and I put my foot on her hands. She was stronger than she looked. She grunted, pushing up with both arms, and I managed to grab the top metal edge of the fence. I reached one arm down, and she pulled herself up.

  “Go,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”

  I swung myself over and jumped, landing on the other side. The whole space was full of crap, everything from bulldozer tires to old truck beds and broken park benches. It wa
sn’t a garage. It was a dump.

  I looked for the old merry-go-round, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. There was a stack of three oversized tires, maybe four or five feet high, and I scrambled up on top of them and scanned the lot.

  Where are you, Mac? was the only thought running through my head. Mom climbed down the fence, wiped her hands on her jeans and looked around.

  And then I saw it. I jumped off the tires, and one leg twisted and almost gave way underneath me, but I managed to stay upright.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I yelled, and then I started to run. I didn’t look to see if she was doing it or if she’d even heard me. I just ran. Chest heaving, arms pumping, legs flying, I weaved around piles of junk, keeping my eyes locked on that merry-go-round at the far end of the fenced lot. Everything else blurred out of focus.

  My lungs were burning, I’d never moved so fast. I didn’t know I could. I banged against some jagged-edged metal thing. My shirt tore and I felt the metal slice my skin, but I kept running. Behind me I could hear my mother pounding over the pavement, running too, breathing hard and heavy.

  My mouth hung open as I tried to suck in air, and then we moved into an open space and…Oh God, I saw Mac, I saw Mac hanging by a rope from the top bar of the old merry-go-round.

  Hanging by her neck.

  “No!” I screamed. I stumbled and almost went down, but somehow I got my legs working again. I tore across the broken pavement and threw myself at the bottom half of Mac’s body, hugging her legs, pushing up to make the rope looser around her neck.

  She was warm. She was warm.

  Tears ran down my face. “Take her!” I shouted at my mother. “Take her! She’s not dead.”

  Mom wrapped her arms around Mac’s legs and lifted up to keep the pressure off the rope. She clenched her teeth, breathing hard, and I could see the veins in her neck pulsing against her skin.