When I was thirty, during that long year of trying and failing at sobriety, I got a raise and started making the kind of money my parents never did. I took Mom to Vegas—we were celebrating my engagement. I don’t know why I chose that place when I wasn’t drinking. Mom had been married to Roger for a while, and I sat next to her on a wide pool chair, our pale legs stretched out, and she told me that happiness, she finally knew, was having nothing to say when people ask you how you are but fine. We baked in the white sun, our bodies echoes of each other—mine softer, hers more frail, wrinkles crosshatched on the tops of her arms and thighs, on her lower belly. Just have a drink, honey, she said every night at dinner, holding the baseball-sized goblets of wine that I paid for. If you’re an alcoholic, what am I? And so I did, most of those nights, Vegas like a moonship, all stupid glitter, the two of us dropping buckets of coins into slots and getting sloppy off wine that tasted like sweet gas, like swallowing the light emitted by the city itself. We had fun, Mom and I. I didn’t count those drinks later, back in New York, at my meetings. Or when Liam asked. I was with my mom. How could I say no?
Never once, back in Silver Lake, did I think about how hard it must have been for her. The money problems. Being alone for the first time, young but still middle-aged, no degree, no job history, no real prospects. I was vicious. Mom would come home with men and shut the door, her music turned up loud, mixes with funky beats and romantic lyrics, and I remember feeling horrified by her sexuality, by the fact that she was doing it in our house, a disgust that lingered well after the men left and was far more pointed than the anger I’d felt at my dad for doing essentially the same thing. But when I tried to talk to Marlena about it, thinking she’d take my side, commiserate, she’d stop me. She always saw my mom as a woman. Finally, now, I do too.
*
Everyone has a secret life. But when you’re a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share. Those nights Marlena and I spent on the jungle gym, talking, talking. For just a little while, neither of us alone. Overlapping—bright, then dark—like a miniature eclipse.
We were already growing apart, in the weeks before she died—when I moved to New York, we almost certainly would have lost touch, become just another pair of girls who shared a brief and intense friendship that faded, as friendships usually do, with age and geography. But I believed every one of those old promises. I would have pitied any adult who told me that things would change. For you, I would have thought, but not for us. I was going to leave, yes, but she was supposed to come, too. And didn’t she? Those early days in New York, August, the city so hot I walked around drenched in its spit, she was with me all the time, in the things I did if not always in my thoughts. I got a job at a bar where all the waitstaff was Irish and wasn’t it her who made me louder when I needed to be, who made me brave at night, walking home with all that cash? She’s the way I swear and how I let men look at me or not, she’s the bit of steel at my center, either her, herself, or the loss of her. Before that year I was nothing but a soft, formless girl, waiting for someone to come along and tell me who to be.
I drank with her memory all over the city, drank myself into emergency rooms and the backseats of cabs and scenes I cannot remember but still regret, and yet here I am, alive, a grown woman, managing to keep it under some kind of control. But every time I stop after a drink or two or three that monster starts to roar, and that’s when I am closest to her again. Still, something has kept me from going too far. I used to think it was fear, but that gives her too much credit, because it’s not brave to do what she did. It’s not brave to drink until you’re blind, either.
She lied to me all the time—about Bolt, about Jimmy, about where she was and why, how many pills she’d taken. Was I really her best friend, or was I just a sidekick, humored because of the crush she had on my older brother?
Don’t be so insecure, I hear her say. I thought you’d grow out of that.
Michigan
Marlena’s body was found on a Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours after Jimmy last saw her. Facedown in Bear River, a half mile into the woods behind the Goldwater Pub. A hiker from Grosse Pointe, in town for a long weekend, spotted her coat through the pines, a little ways off the path, snagged between some river rocks. Cobalt, a color you notice in the woods. There’d been a thaw that week and it was unseasonably warm for November, though as she traveled that way, wearing her crappy, markered-up Keds, it probably would’ve been getting dark, the weather beginning to turn toward winter again, and so that’s why they said in the papers that she must’ve slipped on some new ice, her, a Michigan girl, grown in those forests, and hit her head hard enough to knock herself out. Nothing out there but more trees, so where in the hell was she going?
Her skin, the hiker said, looked like eggshell. Like you could put a crack in it.
If Marlena slipped, she didn’t slip because of ice.
Technically, the last time we were together was the day before the discovery of her body, a Sunday, just before she met up with Jimmy, but I refuse to let that be our ending. Marlena wouldn’t want it to be, either.
We were downtown, kicking around in the park in our springtime jackets, our eyeliner too thick, cigarettes tucked behind our ears, our skin spotty but so elastic and young I want to reach right back into my memory and shake us for how much we complained about it. Coffee smell trickling out of the corner bakery every time the door swung open, a wild turkey strutting like a boastful old man around the gazebo, cracking us up when we rushed at it with our arms outstretched, squawking, until it hobbled off. We settled on a bench and I started telling some story, but within minutes she vanished completely into her phone.
An ordinary Sunday, nothing much to do but variations on what we always did. After some texting, she informed me that Jimmy was going to pick her up on the corner near the courthouse, and that they were going to smoke a joint, kill a little time before his shift started.
“Come with us,” she said. “It’ll just be a couple hours, and then he’ll go to work and we can do whatever you want.”
“I’m really not in the mood to sit in the backseat while you guys bicker or like, weird passive-aggressive flirt.”
“C’mon, Cat. What are you even going to do instead.”
“Why can’t you find me after?”
The Blind Assassin was in my bag. I was thirty pages in. I had four dollars in cash plus some miscellaneous change, enough for a cup of coffee with endless refills and probably a lemon-poppyseed muffin.
“I’ll let you smoke all my cigarettes.”
“Just have Jimmy drop you off at Mulvie’s before he goes to work.”
“Fine. Be ready. I don’t want to go inside.” Since Marlena had been fired, she refused to even walk by the storefront. If she had to meet me at Mulvie’s, as she often did, she waited in the alley out back.
I walked with her through the park and toward the corner, where Jimmy was going to pick her up. She pulled the elastic from her ponytail and mussed her hair at the roots, so that it rose sloppily from her head. “Better?” she asked. Her hair was so fine and straight, in a few minutes it would be sleek again, no matter what she did to try and look sexy.
“Definitely,” I said. I left her when I saw Jimmy in Mom’s car, slowing at the stoplight outside Great Lakes Shoes. I didn’t even wait for him to pull up to the curb. No hug—though why would we have, planning, as we were, to meet up again so soon.