But that was a long time ago.
“It’s over,” I say. “You’d better leave.”
“Okay,” he says, standing up. He doesn’t seem surprised in the least. “But there’s something you should know.”
“What?” I ask. Whatever it is, I think, I won’t care. Phil looks dilapidated, shrugging on his plaid coat.
“Your father knows perfectly well where your mother is,” he says.
“Excuse me?” Sarcastic.
“You heard me.” He’s putting his boots on. Reptilian. They’re army green, prehistoric-looking. The slick boots of a swamp dinosaur. Waterproof. Fireproof. “He’s keeping her up his sleeve.”
I sigh and roll my eyes. Typical Phil, I think—mangling his clichйs up to the bitter end. I picture my father with my mother slipped into his shirt on a stage in a kind of vaudeville show—aping in a top hat, the whole audience guffawing at the absurdity of this joke.
“What do you mean?” I ask, impatient.
“Ask him,” Phil says, opening the front door, stepping through it. “Don’t ask me.”
I SIT IN THE LIVING ROOM IN ONE OF THE GREEN-WINGED chairs for a long time. My father has gone to work. Outside, a plow scrapes through the streets, throwing snow to the side of the road, and the snow sounds soft, physical, a solid wave lapping at the curb, tossed out of the way. I picture a cow standing on railroad tracks, the huge machine of a train on the way, and the muffled, vulnerable sound of that cow in its path.
And then I remember the sound of her voice, which was as much a part of my mother as her body, but disconnected from her, hovering around and above her, as voices do. She had a soft voice, though it was often edged with sarcasm, judgment, displeasure. I picture vowels, wrapped in light, rising from her in clouds, as if something tangible could be made out of sound. I think, If the phone rang now, if I picked it up, and my mother spoke to me through the receiver, would it mean she existed any more physically than she does already, living in my memory, in her silence?
“Have fun,” she’d said, here, in the living room, as I left through the front door with Phil on the night of the Winter Formal four years ago.
“Have fun.” I’d handed her the corsage box he’d brought with him when he’d come to pick me up. The rose that was in it, surrounded by its baby’s breath, was pinned above my breast, and the box was empty. When my mother took it out of my hands, I could see it was lighter than she’d thought it would be, and cold. Phil must have kept it in his refrigerator at home. As I left for my first date, in the living room my mother was still holding that cold emptiness in her hand.
Fun was the last thing she wanted me to have.
I go to the kitchen, and take a carton of milk out of the refrigerator.
MISSING, it says on the back, and there’s a grainy photo of a fat little girl right under the box where the calories are counted. On the side, there’s a boy in a striped shirt. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? he’s asking with a big lost smile on his face.
I pour myself a glass of milk and take a long sip of it before I again remember that two-year-old in the back of some college boy’s truck, his skin softened, turned to liquid.
The milk is cool and vaguely sour when I swallow it, gag, spit it into the sink.
When I look up, my father’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He hasn’t taken his boots off. There’s snow falling in soggy fractions onto the floor, and a trail of it melts behind him.
MICKEY’S ALREADY DRUNK WHEN SHE COMES OVER WITH two bottles of champagne in a brown grocery sack. My father lets her in, and I hear him upstairs introducing May—the sound of May’s singsong sweetness, and my father’s formal discomfort. Beth and I are in the basement, waiting, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the vinyl sofa. My mother’s birdcage hangs over Beth’s head. We’ve never taken it down—shining, brightly empty.
“The bird has flown,” Beth says, looking up at it.
When I called Mickey and Beth that afternoon to tell them I’d finally broken up with Phil, they both insisted on coming over to celebrate. Over the phone, Beth said, “God rest his soul.”
Mickey’s wearing a leather jacket, and when I hug her, I smell smoke and animal skin. She kisses Beth’s cheek as she slips her jacket off—casual, magnanimous, European. I haven’t seen her since August. Since then, her hair has grown longer, been styled into wisps around her jaw. She’s wearing a black turtleneck, and makeup—burgundy lipstick, black eye shadow, a pale-beige base. With the turtleneck, the makeup, and the hair, she looks less scarred than I’ve ever seen her, and no longer a cheerleader. Mickey looks like a painter now, or a poet. The energy that once secured her spot on the varsity squad despite her unloveliness—that energy has turned overnight into a kind of serious intensity that is, finally, darkly beautiful.
She smokes clove cigarettes.
She’s dating a music major—bassoon.
It sounds like a swan, she says. A very sexual instrument. Once, in his dorm room, she let him tie her to the bed. She’s asked him for a pair of handcuffs for her birthday. They might even move to New York. All this she told me when I called to tell her that Phil and I were a dead issue.
Tomorrow, Mickey goes back to Madison. The day after that, Beth leaves for Bloomington. And the next day, my dad and May will drive me to Ann Arbor. We’ve decided to spend tonight like old times, getting drunk in the basement and smoking and talking together in our old cocoon, while, above us, my father stomps around in slippers.
“Jesus,” Mickey says. “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t stand to be back here. It’s like purgatory. Purgatory, Ohio. Haven’t we done enough time here? I can’t fucking wait to get back to school.” She sits across from us on the basement floor, at the edge of the carpet remnant, lights up a clove cigarette, and the smell of the smoke as it fills the basement and our noses is like a garden fire. A burning bush. The smell of a flower arrangement, torched, or the Christmas lights, shorted, igniting the whole tree in a smoldering moment. Mickey’s not wearing a bra under her black turtleneck, and her breasts look autonomous and big.
Beth is wearing old jeans and a flannel shirt. She’s gained more weight since she went away. She likes to study, she says, but she hasn’t made any friends. A few times, on weekend nights, alone in her dorm room with her roommate gone, she’d thought about what it would be like to be dead, how easy it would be to buy a gun—a small one, with a mother-of-pearl handle. There were pawnshops all over town. She’d considered how hard or easy it might be to hold that gun to your temple, count to ten, just as an experiment, to see how close you were willing to get to death, what ten felt like when you said it: a teaspoon of lead on your tongue, or a brass key to the door you were ready to step through into the colored light, the jagged surprise of a geode when you smashed it, all crystal and amethyst and pretty points inside.
But she wasn’t sure she wanted to die, at least not yet.
“Get me the fuck out of here,” Mickey says.
“I know what you mean,” Beth says. “My mother told me to clean my room this morning, and I wanted to bludgeon her with a feather duster.”
Mickey pops the plastic cork on the first bottle of cheap champagne, and there’s the wind of foam and pressure and the seething of trapped, effervescent space unleashed. Then she pours a little for each of us into my parents’ wedding glasses.
“So, congrats, Kat.” Mickey raises the glass. “Phil’s out of the picture at last.”