All We Left Behind (5 page)

“Hey,” I said, inching open the screen door.

I waited to see her face.

Lilith unfolded her arms to place a mason jar on the step next to her. It sparkled blue in the morning light with black bugs crawling and slipping along the glass insides.

It was my jar. I must have dropped it.

I sat down next to her and stared at the jar, tracing the star pattern on the lid with my finger.

“Where'd you find it?” I whispered, pretending I hadn't been anywhere near our field last night.

She didn't answer. She searched my face and waited for me to admit it. But I looked away and stared into the sun that exposed too much of the sky. Her shadow passed over me as she stood up. She put on one flip-flop, then the other, and went home.

Later that afternoon, she called me and we went swimming. We spent the rest of the summer at the beach, splashing and laughing, and I hid that firefly jar in the back of my closet. I left it there in the dark. I let the bugs roll over onto their backs and put their legs in the air, in the dark—

Where I couldn't see them.

Mornings before school are quiet.

The kitchen is pristine and everything shines, full of expensive appliances like in a magazine. There's a Saran-wrapped casserole in the fridge with a note from my father that says he's going to be working late. He's always gone long before sunrise to catch the train to the firm, and now he comes home late too. He's like a vampire who exists in the dark. I want to tell him that Boston's not that far away and he doesn't have to leave for work so early. He could stay for breakfast and drive his car into the city. But there's always some excuse: parking, gas prices, life.

I'm not his little princess anymore.

I unwrap the casserole and eat it for breakfast, cold, and right out of the dish.

Outside, the wind is ruthless. It tangles hair over my eyes, even twisting up the longest strands from the middle of my back, having not seen the glint of scissors in five years. But inside my car the air doesn't move. It makes my skin itch with stillness.

I release the brake and pull off the curb, heading to Lilith's house. I listen to the wind, winding down the road with me, past the Georgian houses and pine trees that separate each estate. I crack open the window and smell the Atlantic, salty and crisp. Smell the bit of Emerson mornings that makes this part of town quaint and colonial, rather than new.

At the bottom of the hill, I park outside Lilith's two-garage estate and pull my blond hair into a ponytail, wondering if my mother's hair was blond like mine. I can't remember. When I was three, she swam across the ocean to be with another man, and Dad threw all the pictures of her away. After she left, Dad became the perfect father. He used to take me to Willow Park to ride the unicorns on the carousel or to the seashore to build a castle. He'd tuck me into bed at night and tell me stories about princes and kisses and magic spells. And when my father twirled his fingers in my blond hair, I thought I was Rapunzel with a secret.

Everyone loved that hair. Even strangers. They all wanted to touch it, crossing streets to give my father compliments.

“So lovely.”

“So stunning.”

“If only my daughter had hair like yours.”

I liked it when people noticed, and Dad did too. I was his little princess with those long golden locks. It was powerful.

It could enchant.

That man tangled his fingers in my hair. That stranger who worked with my father.

It was a month before I found Lilith in our field. It was that same summer, the summer of fire. I had just turned twelve and the beach-rose bushes that lined the river grew rose hips as fat as cherries. Some were large like crab apples, weighing down the branches until the fruit touched the watery lip of the stream.

Before the fireworks, that man asked me to walk up the river with him, away from the company barbecue and the red-and-white paper plates. An hour before, he'd been my savior as I sat hunched over a burned hot dog listening to my father drone on and on about percentage points with his boss.

“D'you play horseshoes, Goldilocks?” he'd asked, holding out two rusty irons. There was dirt on his shirt, and the cuffs were rolled messily at the elbow. “Come on, Goldie, one game. It'll be fun.”

I shrugged and said nothing.

He turned to my father. “Harold, I'm stealing your daughter to play horseshoes.”

Dad looked up, nodded, and went back to his conversation.

“It's easy. All you do is—”

“I've played horseshoes before,” I said, standing up.

“Great. I knew you'd be brilliant, Goldie.” He dropped the two irons on the table in front of me. “You get the first throw.”

I beat him three times. Not because I'm any good. My horseshoes kept rolling into the bushes. He let me win.

I took off my flip-flops and dipped my toes into the stream.

The creek water was cold.

He sat on a log and watched me from a distance as I waded into the water with my yellow skirt collected at my knees. It wasn't until I sat down next to him that I realized we'd gone around the bend and out of sight of the barbecue. We sat there a long time, watching the rose hips dip in and out of the water, and my legs itched where the ends of my wet skirt clung to my calves. The tiny embroidered daisies were soaked through to the skin. I wanted him to say something, to tell a joke, to fill the silence.

Instead, he spread his fingers wide and threaded them through the silk of my hair.

“You're beautiful,” he whispered, his breath on my ear. “Golden.”

It was the hair.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

It was powerful.

His fingers tangled. “Just one kiss, Goldilocks.”

The air smelled sweet like beach peas and maple, with a light hint of smoke lolling down from the barbecue. His lips were round and smiling, his fingers soft and trapped against my skull.

He'd been enchanted.

In all the fairy tales, spells are broken with a kiss.

Just

one

kiss.

When Dad and I got home from the barbecue, I opened the medicine cabinet and found the scissors. The July heat made me sweat, and the evening was still damp with the smell of canary reeds and fire. But the scissors felt powerful in my hand.

The zip beside my ear was effortless. The cut was so soft and clean that my hair fell fast and quick. It fell like golden feathers in creek water—spilling its enchantments out, and off, and onto the floor.

Dad narrowed his eyes when he saw me, as if my lack of hair made me hard to find.

“What did you do?” he breathed, squinting, like the answer might be visible if he could only turn up the light.

“I, I—”

I almost told him.

But his eyes flicked away to the door.

“It's, well . . .” He picked up his papers, tapping them on the edge of his desk before walking up to me. “It's different.”

His free hand found a missed curl behind my ear and he rubbed it between his fingers as a shadow washed between us.

“At least it will grow back,” he said, forcing a smile as if that was all I deserved.

I became invisible then. Invisible without my hair.

Smoke hangs in the living
room, and Nick Drake's
Pink Moon
aches out of the record player. The song's from the seventies but it's timeless. Drake wasn't famous in his lifetime. He wasn't discovered till after he overdosed at twenty-six. Of course, with a story like that, it'd be just like Mom to adore him. Which she did.

The record's scratched. Drake's voice skips every few rotations, and I look for Dad. Two of his cigarettes lie in the ashtray, but that's all I see of him. Probably already passed out.

I love Drake, but this shit's too sad for the morning. I switch it off and get some OJ.

I'm drinking straight from the carton when the kitchen phone rings. Mom's phone. The one she bought at a yard sale. She loved that dangling cord, always twisting it over her fingers, around the index finger, past the palm, and back again. I stare at the cheap piece of plastic but don't touch it. Only one person calls that phone.

I wait for Dad to come rushing out of his bedroom to answer it. But he doesn't. Probably pulled a double shift and is out cold. It doesn't matter. Nothing he says makes her come home.

It's too loud, the ringing. I try to ignore it, but the yellow cord is swinging against my elbow before I realize I've picked the damn thing up.

“Daddy? Is that you?” Josie's voice is weak, barely loud enough to hear behind a hiss of static. It's the same half-coked-out voice that leaves messages on the machine, always asking for money, sometimes just crying. I almost hang up and pretend I never touched this thing, only—

“Kurt?”

Her voice hooks into me.

“Dad's asleep,” I say, starting to pace, only the cord chains me to this square of linoleum.

“Hey.” Her tone brightens and I imagine her sitting cross-legged on the bleachers at school before cheer practice, her brown hair pulled up in a ponytail. I imagine her smile, soft and easy. Easy in a way nothing about her is anymore.

“How's it going, little brother?”

That's not what she really says. What she really says comes out mean and angry.

“Shit, why don't you call me back?” she accuses, and I want to tell her it's not me she's ever asking for in those messages.

“What do you want?” I ask, and a car alarm goes off in the distance behind her. It makes me wonder where she is now, if she's still living in that crappy apartment behind Fenway. The one she let me visit after she dropped out of BU, back when she had a cell phone and a number that worked. The place was small, made of cement, with a mattress on the floor and a kitchen faucet that rattled like a jackhammer.

“I miss you,” she says softly, and I'm not sure if that's a trick. “D'you hear me? Kurt?”

Her voice sounds so much like Mom's I almost drop the phone.

“Are you okay?” I whisper, and she laughs.

It's a mean laugh.

“Do you think I'm okay?” she says, becoming full-fledged Josie again. “What the fuck do you care? Huh?”

She waits for me to say something, but this time I know it's a trap.

I look down and notice the cord wrapped over my hand. I've threaded it over the index finger, past the palm, and back again.

“Yeah, exactly,” Josie says, and the line goes dead.

I grip the phone so hard I want to break it. I'm pissed I answered it and let her get in my head. I almost tear it off the wall, but suddenly Dad's here, standing a few feet away.

“Is that—?” he asks quietly, hair disheveled, wearing sweats and a hollow expression. I clutch the phone, the
silence on the other end pressed to my ear, not sure what to say to him. But all I can see is Josie sitting on that dirty old mattress scratching her ankles. Scratching like there are bugs under her skin.

“Yeah,” I say finally, not looking at him when he takes the phone. I head for the door and let that silence set in.

“Kurt,” he calls after me, confused when she isn't there. But I can't look at him. I grab my practice bag and am out the door. “What'd she say?” He stumbles barefoot after me, but I'm already climbing into my car. “Kurt, what did Josie—?”

“She wasn't calling for me!” I interrupt, glaring at him. His lips purse together angrily, but I don't care. He can sit by the phone all day and wait for her to call back. Deserves as much. “It's your mess,” I snap. “You fix it!”

His face goes dark, but I peel out of the driveway and don't look back. I point my car toward Emerson High School, crank up the music, roll down the windows, and drive. The radio plays that metal shit Conner loves, left from the last time he was in my car. The song's a bunch of screaming assholes grinding the bass, but it drowns out the thought of Josie at the other end of that phone line. Josie having dropped out of BU. Josie living in that shitty apartment in Boston with some hookup she met at a bar. It makes me want to punch something or someone, or just knock out all the colonial rich-kid mailboxes I have to pass on my way to school.

I turn up the music and let it pound me instead.

*  *  *

At school I duck through the hallway and keep my head down. Conner is standing by my locker with some girl I don't know, and I don't want to deal with him. I slip down the west hallway and skip it.

I consider going to Coach's office for a pass, but halfway down the corridor I see her. Button-down shirt. Blond hair. Her hair is up now, not down like at the party. It suits her. It makes her easier not to notice.

My feet slow as I watch Marion pile her books up one by one, and it strikes me that she's not the kind of girl I would ever pay attention to. She's good-looking, sure, but smart. The kind of smart that outweighs the good-looking part. The kind of smart you can see in her posture and in the upturn of her chin. Like life is easy and she's better than you for it.