The Half Life of Molly Pierce (19 page)

One by one I take the pictures down and I put them back into the shoe box. I lay the letter on top and I close the box and I slide it under my bed. Hardly a ceremonious burial, but I don’t know what else to do with them.

All I keep thinking—the one image that keeps replaying over and over in my head—is me in the warehouse. I can feel Mabel then, I can feel her like a spring, quivering and watching me like—Molly, please don’t do it. Please, please, please don’t do it. I can see the handful of pills in my hand and I can feel this moment. I can identify the exact moment before I do it—before I
will
do it—and that is the moment Mabel takes over and it is the first time she has done it like this. She has been around forever but this is the first time she has done something so purposefully. She has decorated a Christmas tree with my family and she has watched TV with Hazel and she has ridden a bike in our driveway, but she has always kept quiet. She has always gone unnoticed.

I can feel her now. I remember. I remember her decision. She saved my life and in return she took a year away from me and now she’s gone and I want to bring her back.

This is too hard. This is too much. I never wanted this and besides—

You were so much better at it.

You were happier; you were prettier; you were taller. The way you held your shoulders and the way you wrote my name.

Wednesday morning I’m early to school; Erie and Luka are waiting for me at my locker.

Erie scowls when she sees me.

I’ve been avoiding them.

Monday and Tuesday I actually pretended to be sick. I pretended to have a sore throat just so I wouldn’t have to talk to them.

But now Erie is scowling and Luka is smirking and I have to say to myself—These are your friends, Molly. These are your friends. You have to talk to them now.

“Hey,” Luka says when I get close enough.

Erie scowls more.

Do I know how many text messages she sent me yesterday, Molly?

Do I need a lesson in how to work a phone, Molly?

Because she’d be happy to show me. Really. It’s no problem at all.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Luka steps behind me and puts his arms around my shoulders. He rests his chin on my head.

“You seem weird,” he says. “Are you weird?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Obviously you’re not fine,” Erie says.

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Don’t you even want to know what was so important?” she says.

“What was so important with what?”

“With
me
, Molly. What was so important with
me
.”

“Yes. Definitely. What was so important with you?”

“I only wanted to tell you I broke up with Paul.”

“Paul?” I say. “Who the hell is Paul?”

She leans in closer. Like a secret, she whispers it into my ear.

“Carbon,” she says.

“I knew that wasn’t his name,” Luka says. “Molly, didn’t I say that? Didn’t I say that wasn’t his name?”

“He was a little off,” Erie says. Then she remembers she’s supposed to be scowling and she looks at me and says, “To be honest, I could have used a friend, but somebody doesn’t know how to work a cell phone.”

“I know how to use a cell phone,” Luka says.

“Not you, Luka,” she says, rolling her eyes.

I find it. I dig around in my backpack until I feel my cell phone and I pull it out and I hold it up so she can see.

Dead. I am triumphant. It is dead.

Erie shakes her head sadly, rendered speechless. How anyone could let their phone die, she will never know.

Luka pulls away. He leans against my locker. He puts his hand on Erie’s shoulder.

“There, there,” he says. “Look on the bright side.”

“Now you don’t have to find a girlfriend?” Erie guesses.

“Exactly.”

“What about you?” Erie asks, turning back to me. “What about Sayer?”

I’m about to answer when she stops me. She puts her hand on my cheek. She pokes me with her index finger. Luka looks at her and then looks at me and then looks back at her and then looks at me, and then something changes in his face.

“What?” I say. “What is it?”

“Luka’s right; you look weird. Something’s different,” Erie says.

Oh.

“Oh?”

“You do. I told you,” Luka confirms.

“Like—how?” I ask.

“Oh, Molly,” Erie says.

“What?” I say.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Erie says.

“Oh,” I say.

Erie shrugs. Luka puts his hand on the top of my head and the bell rings and they leave me standing alone because, I don’t know—maybe they can tell. Maybe they know she’s gone. Or maybe they just know that sometimes I want to be alone. Sometimes it’s just—

Sometimes it’s impossible.

Talking to people is impossible.

Mabel was always better at that than I was.

I lean against my locker.

The hallways empty.

And when I see him near the water fountain, I get it.

I live in a small town. Everyone knows everyone. That’s why I know that four years ago Chris Jennings hooked a hose to the gas pipe of his car and ran it into his taped-up window.

Bret’s brother.

He was in his first year of college.

I’ve never thought about him before but I always knew—

I always knew he looked at me strangely. Bret. I always knew I felt weird around him.

I’ve never given his brother a second thought. I was in middle school when it happened.

We all have our reasons to be sad.

They’re different but they’re also the same.

Bret gets a drink of water from the fountain and when he stands up I’m right behind him.

“Molly, hey,” he says.

“Hey, Bret,” I say.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. Thanks. Listen—I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your brother. It’s been a long time, I know. But I don’t think I’ve ever said it.”

I could have slapped him. His face drains of color and refills blotchily and he doesn’t breathe for forty seconds. I count.

But then he hugs me.

It’s a real hug.

He hugs me in the hallway; and when he pulls away, he looks at me like I’m something special, I guess. Something to be celebrated. I don’t know if that’s true but it’s a nice feeling anyway.

“I’ve heard things,” he says. “I don’t know how much is true.”

“Probably all of it,” I say, smiling.

“Is there anything I can do? Anything, ever? I mean, are you . . .”

The unsaid word is
okay
.

Are you okay, Molly?

Are you still sad, Molly?

Do you still sometimes wish it would all just mercilessly, painlessly, easily, go away?

I laugh and it fills up the hallway with sound. “I’m here,” I say.

That’s sort of all I’m certain of. I’m here. I’m alive. I did not take a handful of pills in a dirty, empty warehouse. I will never know how long it would have taken me to die. I will never know if it would have hurt. I’m here.

“That’s good,” he says. And he says it so earnestly that I feel myself blush—a long, slow blush that sets my face on fire. Bret touches my hand and I smile and then I shrug.

And then I say, “See you around.”

And he says, “Sure, yeah,” and he squeezes my hand, and he walks away and I watch him go until he turns a corner and disappears. And then I watch the space he used to fill and I can’t imagine not being here. I can’t imagine not standing here. Sometimes I wish I had never been born, sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe, sometimes I cry for no reason, and sometimes I can’t fall asleep, but sometimes—now, now, here—I can’t imagine ever being anything but grateful.

In the parking lot of Alex’s building, I sit in my car and I wonder what I will say.

What will I say to him?

I imagine him in session with someone else, taking notes or sitting on his desk with his hands folded in his lap.

“I’ve never really been honest with you,” I’ll say. That’s what I’ll say.

“Honest about what?”

Honest about anything. Honest about what I’m feeling, about how hopeless everything seems, about how my parents have to hide the migraine pills just so I won’t take too many. I’ll tell him Mabel’s gone and he’ll ask me how my body feels without her. Is there more room now? Do I feel like two separate pieces of my personality have fused together? Do you feel any different, Molly? Any different at all?

Fuck, Alex. I don’t know.

In the waiting room, I leaf through magazines until the man before me gets out of his session. His eyes are rimmed with red; he doesn’t look at me.

I wait the five minutes until Alex pokes his head out of his office. He smiles at me.

“Hi, Molly,” he says.

“Hey, Alex.”

In his office he lowers the blinds halfway and I wait until he’s sitting before I talk. He sits on the edge of his desk and then he looks at me and I wait for him to say it. I know he’s going to say it because he looks at me for too long with his eyes almost squinted like he’s trying to figure it out.

“Is she . . .”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. I reconsider. “No.” I reconsider again. “Sort of.”

He smiles. “Want to talk about it?”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“What don’t you understand, Molly?”

It’s like.

Sometimes you’re watching TV and suddenly you can’t watch TV anymore. Suddenly you can’t do anything except go to your room and shut the door and sit on the carpet with the lights off, your hands over your face so your sister can’t hear you crying.

Sometimes it is unbearable. Impossible.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

He nods. He says, “Tell me about that day.”

“What day?” I ask.

But I know what day. Of course I know what day.

So I say, “I was going to do it.”

And he says, “I know.”

“I mean—I was really going to do it. I wanted to do it. Still, sometimes . . .”

“Sometimes you wish—”

“That I had. Yeah. Sometimes I wish I had.”

“But not all the time?”

“Not all the time.”

“How about now?” he asks. “How do you feel now?”

“Now?” I pause.

How do I feel now? I know how I felt a few minutes ago and I know how I felt when I talked to Bret, but I don’t know if I know how I feel now.

Or maybe I do. Maybe I feel—

“I feel lonely,” I say. “Without her. I feel lonely without her.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because she . . .”

Because she saved my life. She didn’t let me do it. She gave the pills away.

Alex leans forward. He touches my knee. I look up at him.

“You do know—you do realize, Molly—that you made her. You created her. Do you understand what that means?”

I understand what it means but I want to hear him say it, so I shake my head. I shake my head and I wait for him.

“It means—you don’t have to feel lonely. She hasn’t really gone anywhere. And it means—”

“It means somewhere, I’m okay,” I interrupt.

It means somewhere inside me, I’m not sad. Somewhere, I am fixed. Somewhere, I am happy.

It’s hidden. It’s lost. I just have to find it. I don’t know how I will find it, but at least I know it’s real. It is inside me, somewhere.

I just have to figure it out.

I just have to know where to look.

He’s leaning against my car again, minus the umbrella and plus a stack of spiral-bound notebooks he’s clutching with both his hands. Mabel’s notebooks. He holds them out to me when I get close enough, and I take them and I unlock the car and put them into the backseat.

“You have this creepy habit of showing up in parking lots,” I say.

Sayer laughs. He shrugs his shoulders. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.

He takes my hand and we start down the road, leaving our cars outside Alex’s building.

We walk down the road toward the beach, winding our way down the twisting path until we reach the white shore.

It’s cold here. The breeze from the water blows my hair around my face and I pull it back into a ponytail. Sayer watches me. He’s still watching me for signs of her.

But she’s gone.

She has to be gone because this was the only time I could feel her.

Being with Sayer. I could feel her reaching for him. The magnet feeling I couldn’t explain. I think Sayer was the only person she ever really loved.

And he must have loved her, too, because he’s searching my face for her and he takes my hand in his hand like he’ll find her in my fingers.

“What does it feel like?” he asks. Everyone wants to know what it feels like, but it doesn’t feel like anything. She was here and she is gone and she was never really here and she will never really be gone. She was me—just a part of me I refused to acknowledge, a part of me I didn’t know how to reach.

I shrug. “I miss Lyle.”

I don’t know what makes me think of him. Except they look so similar, the brothers, and in the fading light of the beach, if I squint my eyes and make them go blurry, Sayer could be Lyle. Lyle could be alive.

“Yeah,” Sayer says. “Me, too.”

I woke up in my car and I didn’t know how I got there but I was driving and he was following me. In my rearview mirror I watched him swerve in and out of traffic and I watched him run a red light and I watched the car hit his back tire and I lost him over my roof and then he was there again, in front of me. And something made me pull his helmet off, something made me hold his head in my lap, something made me hold him while he bled and died and he asked me to pretend.

“At least pretend,” he’d said. “I need you to pretend.”

Something made me stay with him, even then, when I didn’t know who he was.

“Hey,” Sayer says. We walk along the water’s edge. It’s cold and it’s windy and I lean into him. He puts his arm around my shoulder.

“Hey,” I say.

“I don’t want . . . ,” he says, but then he stops. I pull away from him and he doesn’t look at me. He looks somewhere past me, out over the water.

“What?” I ask.

“I don’t want to lose you again.”

And I’m about to say—but that wasn’t me. She wasn’t me. I’m not her—but then there’s a voice in my head and it’s not mine. It sounds like me and anyone else in the world, they would mistake it for me. They would think it was me.