Thin Space (26 page)

Of course this is the million dollar question. Why the hell didn’t I tell anyone the truth?

“Maddie. I don’t know.” I think I might be sobbing. “I was so confused. In pain. Crazy, I guess, with grief. I started thinking it was my punishment. For talking Marsh into switching places. For hating being a twin. For wishing
I wasn’t. Everyone thought Austin was dead, and I was thinking—well, yeah, I
am
dead, in a way.”

I shove my hands under my legs to stop them flailing. “I was a mess for a few weeks. I couldn’t even get out of bed. I’ve been sleeping in Marsh’s room because I was supposed to be him. But that was a punishment for me too, to be surrounded by all his things. My parents tried to give me space. They wouldn’t really look at me. Even when my face healed, they wouldn’t really look at me. Nobody does, Maddie. Nobody ever looks at me.”

“I look at you,” Maddie says in a small voice. For some reason she’s crying now, and I feel like I should comfort her, but when I lean closer to touch her, she shakes her head. “What about the thin space?” she says. “When did you start to look for it?”

“About a month after the accident I found out Mrs. Hansel was dying. I went to visit her that last time, and here’s the craziest thing of all: she knew me. There she was, in her bed downstairs, one step away from death, but she looked right at me and called me Austin. No one had called me by name in weeks, and I practically fell over on the floor.

“Mrs. Golden was there, listening. She didn’t catch what Mrs. Hansel said, or who knows, maybe she just thought Mrs. Hansel was confused, tired. She told me to leave, and I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how Mrs. Hansel looked at me. Like she knew everything, and if I just listened to her, did what she said, all my problems would be solved. The second I walked out of the house, I took off my shoes. I thought it was the answer. I thought I could fix everything
if I could find a thin space. I didn’t want to switch places with my brother; I wanted to switch
back
. I wanted him to get to be Marsh again, and I wanted to die because everyone already believed Austin was dead anyway.”

I have to stop here. I’m shivering so violently I’m afraid I might be sick again. I press a trembling hand against my mouth, take a few shallow breaths, and then manage a deeper one.

“Maddie,” I stutter, afraid to look at her. “I’m sorry. I lied to you. I lied to—”

“Austin.”

Oh God, I like hearing her say my name.

“It’s okay,” she says. It’s the same thing Marsh just said to me.

It’s a dumb phrase, really, when you think about it. In some ways it means nothing. Hearing Maddie say it now, though, I don’t know. I can’t help it. I choke out another sob. She hugs me. I guess she doesn’t care what a mess I am, how I’ve practically just had a nervous breakdown in her bedroom.

“It’s okay,” she whispers again.

It reminds me of the story Mrs. Hansel told. How when she was a little girl she found a thin space in that abandoned old house. It’s like what her father told her. Something occurs to me. I don’t know what happened to Maddie out there. I want to hear it. I want to know.

“Maddie, did you see your father?”

I feel her shudder against me. “Yeah,” she says. “He looked so sick. I was scared at first, but he kept smiling at me. It was
so unbelievable to be with him again, to talk to him.” She tilts her head back. “Thank you for letting me come with you. Thank you for everything, for telling me about the thin space, Mar—Austin.” Her face flushes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. Because it is. Because it has to be.

I don’t know how long we hold each other. I could stay here forever. I want to. Finally she lets go, stands up.

“It’s getting late.” She tugs my hands, leads me across the cold room. “Austin,” she says.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say your name. Get used to it, you know?”

God help me if I start crying again. I suck in my breath, open the door, take a step into the hall, and find myself face to face with Sam.

H
e’s holding his lacrosse stick, his black and blue face twisted with rage. “You? What the hell are you doing in my house, in my sister’s room?”

Somehow I don’t think he’ll believe the truth. It doesn’t matter. What he really wants to know is if I’ve hurt Maddie. “Sam,” I say, keeping my voice steady. “Nothing happened. We were just—”

But he doesn’t let me finish. He jabs the stick at me. I jump back but not far enough. It stabs my hip, the force of it knocking me into the wall. The stick pulls back, streaks toward me again.

Maybe there’s a part of me that wants this to happen, that thinks I deserve this for all the pain I’ve put people through. Because I let him hit me twice more before I lunge forward, rip the thing out of his hands.

We’re both breathing hard when Maddie pushes herself between us. “Stop,” she says. “You can’t do this, Sam. I told
you. It’s not your job. I can handle myself.”

“Madison, listen,” Sam starts to say, but Maddie cuts him off.

“No. You listen. Maybe I look like Mom, but I’m not her. And I know you want to protect me and I know how much you hate it. When she brings guys home. When she acts like she doesn’t care about herself. But it’s not me. Okay. It’s not. And I’m sick of you—”

“Madison—”

“And don’t call me that. I’m Maddie. That’s my name. That’s what Daddy used to call me.”

“Daddy?” Sam says, in that strange high voice again. He leans against the wall, still trying to catch his breath. “What’s he got to do—”

The front door bangs open. All three of us whip our heads in that direction. Not so funny thing, it’s their mother whirling, laughing into the house.

“Oh!” Her voice echoes in the entryway. “Y’all are still up?” There’s a man behind her, laughing too. “Tad.” She giggles. “I mean Todd, these are my kids, Sam and Madison, and—” She takes a staggering step toward the stairs. “And some other boy I don’t know. Hello there.” She flutters her fingers toward me.

I’m afraid to look at Sam and Maddie. Their bright faces flash out of the corner of my eye.

“Tom,” their mother’s date grunts out.

“What? You know that boy?”

“No.
My
name is Tom.”

Across from me, Sam sags against the wall. I can see we’ve got something in common, Sam and me. Besides the
fact that we’ve both got bashed in faces, courtesy of each other, there’s a part of us that halfway likes being hit with a stick, if only because it gives us a break from our secret pathetic realities.

Maybe Sam knows what I’m thinking. He grabs the lacrosse stick away from me, and I have a quick thought that I’ll let him hit me with it again if he wants to. Instead, he throws an anguished look at Maddie, and then he stalks into his room and shuts the door.

I notice Maddie eyeing her bedroom. She’s thinking about escaping too. Maybe she’s imagining herself stepping back into the thin space and disappearing. I know that because I realize it’s what I’ve been doing all this time, shuffling around barefoot instead of dealing with reality.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say to her. To myself. It’s stupid, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I take Maddie’s hand, squeeze it, tug her away from the icy doorway.

We pass them on the stairs. Maddie’s mother and her date are still whooping it up, laughing, as they stumble by us.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, sweetie,” her mother slurs.

“Hey, what’s wrong with that kid’s face?” the guy says.

We can hear them groping around on the landing, her mother’s shoes clicking against the hardwood floor.

When a door slams upstairs, Maddie shakes off my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I am full of clichés lately, but sometimes there’s nothing else to fall back on. I hear a blur of voices in my head, the day I came back to school after the accident, all those meaningless platitudes. “I’m sorry,” I say again.

There’s a sleeping bag rolled out across the couch in the front room. Maddie sinks down on top of it. “I guess I’m going to sleep down here tonight,” she says. “Maybe every night from now on.”

I stride into the room, feeling the tilt of the floor as I walk toward the fireplace where Mrs. Hansel once lay, toward the couch where Maddie sits shivering.

“Your mother—”

But she holds her hand up. “I know.”

I sit down next to her, start channeling Mrs. Golden and my doofball therapist, start telling Maddie that she’s got to open up, express herself, let it all out.

She just says, “Austin.”

Why does hearing my name make my heart swell up?

“Sam and I have lived with this for a long time,” she says. “It’s the way things are. We can’t do anything about it. We can’t change it.”

What do I say to her? Something thumps upstairs and we both look at the ceiling. Maddie’s face glows beside me. A part of me wants to lift her up, run her out the front door, take her away from here. Be like Sam, I guess, and try to protect her. Another part of me knows I can’t do that, that it’s her pathetic reality to deal with herself—that all I can do is be with her, squeeze her hand, whisper that it’ll be okay.

So I do that for a while. We sit next to each other in the dark, slanted room. I hug her too. Because I want to. Because it keeps me here with her. For a few minutes, there is nothing else but this.

“Austin,” she whispers, and I smile. “It’s getting late.”

I squint at the ceiling.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll be all right.”

“Are you sure?”

She pulls away, yawns. “This was a long day.”

No kidding.

She leans back against the arm of the couch, tugs at the sleeping bag, yawns again. I start to lean toward her, but she presses her hand against my chest. “You should probably go.”

“I don’t want to.”

She raises her eyebrow. “I know. But I just told Sam I could take care of myself.”

“So you’re kicking me out?”

She smiles, kisses my cheek quickly. “Thank you for telling me about your brother, what really happened.”

I force myself to stand up. “Now I remember why I don’t want to leave.”

“Just so you know, I won’t tell anyone. I know you’ll tell people when you’re ready.”

When I’m ready. The phrase almost makes me laugh. When I’m ready.

The truth is, I’ll never be ready. My parents. Kate. Logan. Chuck. The people at school. How do I tell them all?

But somehow I’ve told Maddie. And the world didn’t split apart. I look at her now, the heart shape of her face, her hair flipping up around her shoulders. It’s not fair really, that she likes me. That I like her. That I get to be here, alive, gazing at her, while my brother, Marsh—

I understand it now, why he’s stuck in the thin space, how I’ve hurt him. It’s not what I thought before—my stupid
idea to switch places, my slow reflexes driving the car that night.

It’s lying to everyone, like Mrs. Hansel said. It’s lying to myself.

“Tomorrow,” Maddie says. “We’ll see each other tomorrow. Okay, Austin?” I lean down and kiss her forehead. I grab a blanket off the back of the couch, tuck it over the sleeping bag, because it’s really cold in this room. Then I tell her good-bye and walk back up the slanted floor.

It’s cold where my brother is too. And I can’t make him wait anymore.

The street’s dark, quiet, when I slip toward home. The snow’s stopped. There’s a full moon hole-punched in the black sky. I’m the only one out here, breathing mist in and out, pushing myself forward.

How many times have I shuffled back and forth on this sidewalk these past few months, barefoot, looking for a way out?

I’ve been an idiot. I know the answer. I’ve always known it. It’s got nothing to do with taking off my shoes. It’s got nothing to do with searching for doorways out of this world.

Tell, tell, tell,
says my brother’s low voice.

I smirk at the black sky. Easy for him to say. What the hell is going to happen when I do? When my parents find out they’ve buried the wrong son and etched the wrong name on his tombstone? When Logan learns that her boyfriend’s been dead since August? When Kate finds out the love of her life has been alive all this time? When Chuck—

When Brad—

When Sam—

When Mrs. Golden—

When the doctors—

When my teachers—

When—

But now I’ve made it home.

My brother’s dead. And I’m alive. This is the truth and I’m the only one who can tell it.

I open the door. I’ve got one foot in the house when I hear my mother’s voice.

“Is that you, Marsh?”

I heave out a sigh. Steady myself. My face flashes back at me in the hallway mirror. I know my line of course.

“Marsh,” she says again. “Is that you?”

There is so much I have to say, but I start by answering the question.

“No.”

I love reading acknowledgment pages. For years when I was plodding along, figuring out how to break into print, I read the acknowledgments of my favorite books as a way to chart out who’s who in the mysterious publishing industry and to get a glimpse into the lives of “real” writers. Now it’s time for me to return the favor. It IS true what they say: no book is what it is without the help and support of a whole lot of people. Here are some of mine: