Then again, everything depressed her. She wasn’t supposed to look to the future; she
was supposed to accept the present. That was what the shrink had told her years ago,
the shark-eyed woman in a plaid suit who’d lied to Marah about almost everything.
Dr. Harriet Bloom.
Time heals all wounds
.
It will get better
.
Give yourself permission to grieve
.
Whatever you feel is okay
.
Horseshit piled upon horseshit. It did no good to look away from the pain in your
soul. Quite the opposite was true.
Examination was the only solace. Instead of looking away from heartache, you needed
to crawl inside of it, wear it like a warm coat on a cold day. There was peace in
loss, beauty in death, freedom in regret. She had learned that the hard way.
She finished counting the skull candles and left her tally sheet in the bookcase.
She was pretty sure she’d forget where it was, but who cared? It was time for her
break. Well, she was early, but rules like that didn’t matter around here.
“I’m going to lunch, Star,” she called out.
From somewhere, she heard, “All right. Tell the coven I said hello.”
Marah rolled her eyes. No matter how often she told her boss that she wasn’t a witch
and that her friends weren’t a coven, Starla never believed her. “What-ever,” she
said, and walked through the shadowy bookstore to the cash register, where she retrieved
her phone from the drawerful of junk. One of the few enforced store rules was no cell
phones at work. Starla said that nothing broke a buying spell like a chirping phone.
Marah grabbed her phone and walked out of the store. As the door opened, a cat’s screech
sounded—the store’s version of a welcome bell. Ignoring it, she stepped out into the
light. Literally.
A text notice blipped on her phone. She looked down at it. Her dad had called four
times in the last two hours.
Marah shoved her phone in her back pocket and started walking.
It was a gorgeous September day in downtown Portland. Sunlight bathed this historic
section of the city, made the squatty brick buildings look well kept. She tucked her
chin in close. She’d learned a long time ago not to make eye contact with “normal”
people when she walked. They dismissed kids like her in a sour glance. There weren’t
really “normal” people anyway. Most were like her on the inside, fruit slowly going
bad.
As she walked toward her apartment, the view degenerated around her. Only a few blocks
in, the city became uglier, darker. Garbage collected in gutters and posters for lost
kids were hammered onto wooden poles and taped in dirty windows. In the park across
the street, homeless teens slept beneath trees, in faded sleeping bags, their dogs
beside them. In this part of town, you couldn’t go five feet without a homeless kid
begging you for money.
Not that they asked her.
“Hey, Marah,” some kid in all black said. He was sitting in a doorway, smoking a cigarette,
feeding M&M’s to a scrawny Doberman.
“Hey, Adam.” She went a few more blocks and paused, glancing left to right.
No one was watching her. She stepped up the concrete riser and went into the Light
of God Mission.
The quiet was unnerving, given the number of people in the place. Marah kept her gaze
down, moved through the maze of check-in, and went into the main space.
Homeless people sat together on long benches, their arms coiled protectively around
the yellow plastic food trays in front of them. There were rows and rows of people
seated at Formica tables, dressed in layers, even on this nice day. Knit caps, most
sporting holes, covered dirty hair.
There were more young people in here than usual. Must be the economy. Marah felt sorry
for them. At twenty, she already knew about carrying everything you owned into a gas
station bathroom because, even as little as it was, it was all you had.
She got into the slow-moving line, listening idly to the shuffle of feet around her.
The breakfast they served her was a watery oatmeal, with a piece of dry toast. As
tasteless as it was, it filled her up and she was grateful for it. Her roommates hated
it when she came here. Paxton called it takin’ from The Man—but she was hungry. Sometimes
you had to choose between food and rent; especially lately. She took her empty bowl
and spoon to the window, where she set it in the gray rubber bin that was already
overflowing with dirty bowls and spoons—no knives—and cups.
She hurried out of the mission and turned onto the street. Climbing the hill slowly,
she went to the sagging old brick building with the cracked windows and lopsided stoop.
Dirty sheets hung as drapes in several of the windows.
Home.
Marah picked her way around an overflowing garbage can and past a motley-looking cat.
Inside, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. The bulb in the hallway’s
light fixture had gone out two months ago and no one had the money to replace it.
The so-called super couldn’t care less.
She climbed four flights of stairs. On the front door of the apartment, half of an
eviction notice hung from a rusty nail. She ripped the rest of it away and tossed
it to the floor, and then opened the door. The small studio apartment, with its sloping,
water-damaged floors and putty-colored walls, was thick with smoke and smelled of
marijuana and clove cigarettes. Her roommates sat in mismatched chairs and on the
floor, most of them sprawled comfortably. Leif was strumming his guitar in a half-assed,
high kind of way, and dreadlocked Sabrina was smoking dope from a bong. The boy who
called himself Mouse was asleep on a mound of sleeping bags. Paxton sat in the La-Z-Boy
chair she’d rescued from the trash near her work.
As usual, he was dressed all in black—skinny jeans, unlaced antique-looking boots,
and a ripped Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. The pallor of his skin was emphasized by shoulder-length
blue-streaked black hair and whiskey-colored eyes.
She stepped over clothes and pizza boxes and Leif’s old shoes. Paxton looked up at
her, gave her a stoned smile. He showed her a piece of paper with scribbles written
across it. She could tell by the handwriting how high he was.
“My latest,” he said.
She read the poem aloud, in a voice too quiet for anyone else to hear. “It is us …
we two … alone in the dark, waiting, knowing … love is our salvation and our demise …
no one sees us save each other.”
“Get it?” he said, smiling languidly. “It’s a double meaning.”
His romanticism spoke to her damaged soul. She took the piece of paper from him, studying
the words as she had once studied Shakespeare in high school lit class, a lifetime
ago. As he reached up, she saw the beautiful white scars on his wrist. He was the
only person she’d ever met who understood her pain; he’d shown her how to transform
it, to cherish it, to become one with it. Each of the people in this room knew about
the fine lines a knife could leave behind.
On the floor, Sabrina lolled sideways, holding out the still-smoking bong. “Hey, Mar.
You want a hit?”
“Yeah, sure.” She needed to draw the sweet smoke into her lungs and let it do its
magic, but before she could cross the room, her cell phone bleated.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the small purple Motorola Razr she’d had
for years.
“My dad’s calling,” she said. “Again.”
“It drives him crazy that you’re your own person. Of course he’s going to check up
on you,” Leif said. “It’s why he keeps payin’ your phone bill.”
Paxton stared up at her. “Hey, Sabrina, pass me the bong. The princess is getting
a call.”
Marah immediately felt ashamed of the way she’d grown up, the luxuries that she’d
been given. Pax was right; she had been like a princess until the queen’s death. Then
the whole fairy tale had collapsed. The bleating stopped. Immediately a text came
in. It read:
Emergency. Call me
. She frowned. She hadn’t spoken to her father in, what? A year?
No. That wasn’t right. She knew precisely when she’d spoken to him last. How could
she forget?
December 2009. Nine months ago.
She knew he missed her, and that he regretted their last conversation. The trail of
his messages and texts attested to his regret. How many times had he left messages
begging for her to come home?
But he’d never claimed that there was an emergency. He’d never tried to trick her
into calling.
She picked her way over Sabrina and around Leif, who had passed out with his guitar
on his chest, and went into a kitchen that smelled of slowly rotting wood and mildew.
There, she called her dad’s cell. He answered so quickly, she knew he’d been waiting.
“Marah, it’s Dad,” he said.
“Yeah. I got that.” She went into the corner of the kitchen, where a broken stove
and rusted sink bookended a 1960s green fridge.
“How are you, Munchkin?”
“Don’t call me that.” She leaned against the fridge, blaming it for her sudden cold.
He sighed. “Are you ready to tell me where you are yet? I didn’t know even what time
zone to count on. Dr. Bloom says this phase—”
“It’s not a phase, Dad. It’s my life.” She pulled away from the fridge. Behind her,
in the main room, she could hear the bong bubbling and Pax and Sabrina laughing. The
sweet smoke drifted her way. “I’m aging, Dad. What’s the emergency?”
“Tully has been in a car accident,” he said. “It’s bad. We don’t know if she’s going
to make it.”
Marah drew in a small, desperate breath.
Not Tully, too.
“Oh, my God…”
“Where are you? I could come get you—”
“Portland,” she said quietly.
“Oregon? I’ll get you a plane ticket.” There was a pause. “There are flights every
hour. I can have an open ticket waiting for you at the Alaska counter.”
“Two tickets,” she said.
He paused again. “Fine. Two. What flight—”
She snapped the phone shut without saying goodbye.
Paxton strolled into the kitchen. “What’s up? You look freaked.”
“My godmother might be dying,” she said.
“We’re all dying, Marah.”
“I need to see her.”
“After what she did?”
“Come with me. Please? I can’t go alone,” she said. “
Please
.”
His gaze narrowed; she felt sliced by the sharpness of it. Exposed.
He tucked his long hair behind one silver-beaded ear. “It’s a bad idea.”
“We won’t stay long. Please, Pax. I’ll get some money from my dad.”
“Sure,” he said finally. “I’ll go.”
* * *
Marah felt people staring at her and Pax as they walked through the small Portland
airport.
She liked that so-called normal people were offended by Pax’s goth look and the safety
pins in his ears and the tattoo on his neck and collarbone. They didn’t see the beauty
of the scrollwork around the tattooed words or the ironic humor.
Marah boarded the plane, took her seat in the back, and connected her seat belt.
She stared into the window, seeing a shadowy reflection of her pale face: heavily
lined brown eyes, purplish lips, and spiked pink hair.
A
ping
sounded through the aircraft and they were off, rocketing down the runway, rising
into the cloudless sky.
She closed her eyes. Memories tapped on her consciousness like the raven from Pax’s
favorite poem. Tap. Tap. Tap.
She didn’t want to remember the past, not ever. For years she had buried all of it—the
diagnosis, the cancer, the goodbyes, the funeral, and the long gray months that followed—but
it was all coming up again, clawing its way to the surface.
She closed her eyes and saw herself as she’d been on the last ordinary day: a fifteen-year-old
girl on her way to school.
“
Surely you don’t think you’re wearing that to school?” Mom said, coming into the kitchen.
Across the breakfast table, the twins went suddenly silent and stared at Marah like
a pair of bobbleheads.
“Uh-oh,” Wills said.
Lucas nodded so fast his mop of hair shimmied.
“There’s
nothing
wrong with my clothes.” Marah got up from the table. “This is
fashion,
Mom.” She let her gaze sweep her mom’s outfit—cheap, pilly flannel pajamas, tired
hair, out-of-date slippers—and frowned. “You should trust me on this.”
“Your outfit is perfect for Pioneer Square at midnight with your pimp. Unfortunately,
it’s a Tuesday morning in November and you’re a sophomore in high school, not a guest
on
Jerry Springer.
Let me be more specific: that jean skirt is so short I can see your underwear—pink
with flowers—and the T-shirt clearly came from the toddler department. You are not
showing your stomach at school.”
Marah stomped her foot in frustration. This was
exactly
what she wanted Tyler to see her in today. He would look at her and think
cool
instead of
young.
Mom reached for the chair in front of her and clutched it as if she were an old, old
lady. With a sigh, she sat down. Then she picked up her coffee cup—the one that said
WORLD’S BEST MOM
—
and held it in both of her hands, as if she needed to be warmed. “I don’t feel good
enough to fight with you today, Marah. Please.”
“So don’t.”
“Exactly. I’m not fighting. You are not going to high school looking like Britney
Spears on crack. Or showing your crack. Period. The cool thing is that I’m your mother.
That makes me the CEO of this house. Or the warden. Point is, my house, my rules.
Change your clothes or face the consequences. Consequences, I might add, which begin
with being late for school and losing your precious new phone, and go downhill from
there.” Mom put down her coffee cup.
“You’re
trying
to ruin my life.”