I blink hard, until the tears are gone. When I laugh, shaking my head, she laughs too, and the horrible thing between us disappears, except for one indestructible sliver, mine forever. We grab the plastic bags of snacks from the backseat and trip down the path to the beach. Already I’m forgetting the feeling that seared me minutes before. Do it, just do it already, you bitch. She’s singing again, “California,” the part about kissing a sunset pig, the part about coming home. I chase her voice with mine.
Joni Mitchell songs fit Marlena. She was comfortable in higher registers, landing fast on each note, and she could perfectly mirror Joni’s trembling strength, the way she turned syllables into hard bells, ringing. That’s the last time I can remember hearing Marlena sing “California,” though it couldn’t have been. It was one of her favorites, and this was four months, at least, before she died. She drowned, technically. Though not in the way I’d feared that day, Ryder’s van, shooting through a guardrail. There was no great splash. No screams from the beach, no rushing lifeguard. She would have liked that better.
Marlena suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river, in the woods on the outskirts of downtown Kewaunee, a place she had no reason to be at twilight in November. She was wearing one of my old coats and a pair of chewed-up Keds that the police would make much of. The tote bag she carried was full of loose change that must have rattled, as she walked, against that prescription bottle, her pay-as-you-go flip phone. She struck her head neatly, brutally, on a river boulder, and, it is assumed, her body slid just so, unconscious, until mouth and nostrils were submerged in water.
Some of the details are facts, but very few—where she was found, what she wore and carried. She was last seen alive at 5:12 p.m., according to Jimmy, my older brother. His memory of those three numbers blinking on the car clock is distinct. Though, he told me later, frustrated, drunk, he could be remembering what the clock read in the minutes just after she got in the car. It’s possible, he said, that 5:12 p.m. was the time he left the house, before he even picked her up. I understand why it bothered him so much, not knowing the time line for sure. Neither of us really believes that what happened to her was pure accident.
*
At a little past one in the afternoon, almost twenty years after that day in the car, I received a phone call from a ghost. I was walking through a corridor of faceless skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue, congested with men in long wool coats who collectively bristled when I slowed and pulled my phone from my pocket. I had a hangover, a dull knot between my eyes, a flutter in my pulse. When I saw the area code, 231, I hit Ignore. I leaned against a deli window, my chest tightening. I had no business with anyone in northern Michigan anymore; Mom lived in Ann Arbor with Roger, who even after a decade I still thought of as her new husband; Jimmy was in the UP, working for a construction company that built overpriced vacation houses.
The caller left a voicemail.
Hi, the voice said, a man, a nasal tilt to his vowels that reminded me of home. I’m sorry, he said, and then said it again. This is weird. Is this the phone for the Cat, the Catherine, from Silver Lake? This is Sal.
I saw Sal the boy, the landline’s cord corkscrewing around his fingers, speaking, as if by magic, with a grown man’s voice. It almost made me laugh. Sal Joyner. I’m in New York. He stopped for a second and then said, drawing out the words, The Big Apple, as if to prove to whoever was listening that he meant it, that it was both incredible and real. You probably don’t even remember me, he said, and then I did laugh, something like a laugh at least, a sharp intake of breath that curved up at the end, a not-unhappy sound. I hope it’s okay that I called. I’m wondering if you might have some—an hour or whatever, to meet. To talk to me about my sister.
And it all came back, of course, the edges sharper, clearer, than the city around me, the city that had seemed to blur and then fall away as soon as Sal said his name. Though it was there already, wasn’t it? A period of my life so brief it was over almost as soon as it started, and still there’s something I want to know, a question ticking in the deep, a live mine.
231. For a second I had thought it was her.
Michigan
The first time I saw Marlena Joyner, Jimmy and I were unloading a U-Haul. We’d driven it five hours from our old house near the thumb of Michigan, all the way to the top of the state’s ring finger. It was early December and snowing wet, sleety flakes. Marlena weaved through her front yard, between the soggy and overturned packing crates, the tin barrels and busted engines and miscellaneous scraps of metal, until she was right beside me, sizing up the boxes in the truck. She wore a white T-shirt with the collar scissored off, and a pair of Spider-Man snow boots. The details of her in my memory are so big and clear they almost can’t quite be true. Her arms were slicked with snowmelt and pimpled from the cold; her hair gave off a burnt-wood smell when she shook it out of her face, the way she often did before she spoke.
“You’re the new people.”
“So it would seem,” said Jimmy. He hoisted Mom’s rocking chair over his shoulders and disappeared into our garage without looking back, which is how I knew he thought she was beautiful.
Though it was an unremarkable meeting, the start of a familiar story, in the coming months we’d go over and over the details until they took on a mythical radiance. Marlena lived less than twenty paces away, in a renovated barn coated in layers of lilac paint that was sticky to the touch. The building sagged into the ground. Her living situation disturbed me then, but really, it wasn’t so different from ours. We’d bought a ranch-style modular on a grubby half-acre of land in Silver Lake. It was a prefab three bedroom, still new—the kind of place that had been assembled in a lot and dropped off by truck. It reminded me of a Monopoly house. Mom said she was attracted to its efficient lack of stairs, to the big backyard. She didn’t say what Jimmy and I knew: that a modular was a step up from a trailer, and that without Dad we were full-blown poor.
Marlena lifted her hair off her neck and twisted it into a damp rope. Pounds of hair, waist-length and alien pale, bangs angled across her forehead—a style I’d tried at the end of middle school, with crap results. She was alarmingly pretty—sly, feline face, all cheekbone and blink—and if I am honest, that was the first reason I wanted to become friends. At fifteen, I was somehow fat and skinny at the same time. My ears stuck straight out of my head. Still, I believed that any second I might become beautiful; I was crazy about girls who already were.
“I’m Marlena,” she said.
“Cat,” I answered. To my family I was Catherine or Cathy, but I’d decided I couldn’t be that girl here.
“Well, we don’t seem to have much choice.” She smiled, her eyes blue and giant. I couldn’t tell if it was nice or what.
Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don’t move. But we will. We always do. The clock’s already running.