Thin Space (22 page)

If Chuck hadn’t pulled me off, I could’ve kept going. I would’ve. I picture that for a few minutes: me slamming Sam. His face swims in front of me. My hand blurs, striking him again and again until he’s just pieces of eyes, nose, lips. And then it’s
my
eyes, nose, lips that I’m bashing in.

My stomach lurches. When I clutch it, my knuckles flame up.

“Marsh,” my mother says. It sounds like she’s right outside the door.

I have no idea what I’m supposed to say. I don’t know this script. I don’t know my character.

“Marsh,” she says again. “Dinner’s ready.”

I clear my throat. “Be down in a minute.”

The washcloth burns my skin. One eye is swollen shut and plumped out like an egg. I’m not going to be able to hide this.

When I head downstairs, I pass my old room. My mother’s been on a cleaning rampage. My lone uninjured eye takes it in. No more stuff from the memorial site. The boxes from the other day are gone. She stripped the sheets off the damn bed too. What the hell?

“Oh!” my mother gasps, as soon as I burst into the dining room. “What happened to your face?”

I ignore that question. “Where’d you put those boxes?”

My father bangs his glass against the table. “Don’t you dare talk to your mother like that.”

I ignore that too. “Where?”

“The basement,” my mother stutters. “Marsh, what happened?” She stands up, reaches her arms out.

But I shrug her away. “You were going to wait, you said. You were going to let me go through it first.”

“Marshall,” my father says, standing now too. “Did you get in another fight?”

My mother’s crying. It’s a quiet sob, where tears roll down her face and her shoulders heave up and down, but no noise comes out. What’s wrong with me? I’ve hurt my mother yet again and all I can think about is the way she’s crying.

I stumble out of the room, throw open the basement door. It’s musty, murky in the back corner where my mother’s stacked the boxes. I yank one of them down, tug at the flaps. She’s got them taped up, like she wants to pack this stuff away for good. I can’t get my fingers under the tape. I slap the top of the box, tear at the cardboard. My knuckles ache, but I don’t stop.

I was always the one who quit first. That time we were locked out of the house—it was last winter, now that I think about it—I huddled on the back porch and braced myself, resigned to wait it out in the cold.

My brother, though, he wasn’t the type of guy who took a locked door for something that’d keep you out. I watched him kick at the latch, his boot swinging out again and again, until he broke through, tore open the metal door, swung himself down into the basement. He was grinning the whole time too, when I followed him inside.

I’ve clawed open the box, plunged my hands into it. It’s just junk left at the accident scene. Why does it mean anything to me? I pull out a deflated football, cradle it against my chest.

I don’t know how long I sit there, my back pressed against the boxes. At some point, I stand up, flex the soreness out of my legs, chuck the football across the room.

Somehow I’ve forgotten my battered face, but that reality comes back to me when a burst of pain shoots across my eyeball. I head upstairs in search of an icepack, even though it’s probably too late to counteract the swelling. I settle for a package of frozen peas. My good eye spies a plate of cold food left out on the kitchen counter. A hunk of steak, potato wedges, congealing corn; fork, knife, and spoon lined up on a nice little folded up napkin. My mother never quits either.

Unless you count boxing up mementos.

I carry my dinner upstairs, sprawl out across my brother’s neatly made bed. While I chew my cold food, I keep my head tilted, the peas balancing on my eye, blink the other eyeball at the ceiling. The rocket ship on the poster never stops blasting off. Smoke never stops swirling out of the back end. I try to lose myself in the gray mist, but I can’t.

A thought nags at me: Is it quitting to
stop
looking for a thin space? Or is it quitting to
keep believing
you’ll find one?

At first I don’t know where I am or what time it is. Someone’s tapping on my door. Loud. Louder. My mother pokes her head in.

“Marsh,” she whispers.

I shift around on the bed, hear a fork plink on the floor.

“Someone’s downstairs to see you.”

I try to blink, but only one eye moves, and I let out a groan.

“A girl,” my mother says. “Maddie Rogers? She says it’s important.” She switches on the light, muffles a gasp. I can only guess what my face looks like now.

“Maddie?” I say. I squint at my brother’s alarm clock. Almost nine o’clock.

“It’s getting late. Do you want me to tell her you’re sleeping?”

I grunt out a laugh. “I’m not sleeping.” I heave out of the bed and realize I’m still holding a bag of peas, now thawed, in my hand.

“Marsh,” my mother says. She reaches for me but then pulls her hand back. “I’m sorry. About before. About packing up—”

“It’s okay.” I wave, get a flash of my bruised knuckles clutching the wet bag. “Tell her I’ll be right down.”

First though, I have to change out of my reeking shirt. It’s dusty from the basement and spattered with dried blood—mine or Sam’s, it’s hard to say. I grope under the bed, find my brother’s slippers, stuff my feet into them. I don’t bother to check my face in a mirror. Somehow I don’t think a clean shirt’s going to do much to help my appearance.

My mother’s left Maddie sitting in the living room. When I get downstairs, all I see are her shoulders hunched over. She’s practically swallowed up in our overstuffed couch.

“Your father and I are in the den watching TV,” my mother whispers, retreating down the hall, and Maddie jerks her head up.

“Oh,” is the first thing she says. It sounds like the beginning of a moan.

I brace myself in the doorway. “Maddie,” I start. I’m fumbling around for an explanation here, something along the lines of me being an idiot for beating up her brother, but before I can plunge into it, she stops me.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says. “I had to get out. I couldn’t stay there.” She has her knees pulled up to her chest, and she wraps her arms around them, rocking back and forth, shuddering out sobs.

She’s breaking down, it looks like, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. “Did Sam, did he say—?” I sputter for a few seconds because I can’t imagine anything Sam could say that would make Maddie freak out like this. It’s like she’s in shock or something. I’m finally unglued from the doorway, and I move toward her, kneel down in front of the couch. “Please, Maddie, tell me. What the hell happened?”

“I had to get out.” She says it again, still shaking.

I squint my lone working eyeball in the direction of the den. Not that I’m thrilled about seeing my parents right now, but maybe this situation is beyond what I can handle. “Maddie, you’re, uh, kind of scaring me here.” I reach one of my bruised hands out and carefully as possible, for both our sakes, I touch her knee. “What’s going on?”

She lifts her head and her eyes widen. “Mrs. Golden.”

Okay, I didn’t see that one coming. “Mrs. Golden?”

“My room . . . she’s in my room.” She goes back to rocking again, sobbing. Now I notice that she’s wearing slippers and
dressed only in sweats. Her hair’s out of its usual ponytail and spilling around her shoulders.

I grab an afghan off the back of the couch, drape it over her, even though it’s pretty warm in here. Then I perch next to her on the couch and pat her shoulder, because what else am I going to do?

She keeps crying. I keep patting her shoulder. I’m a little tense thinking one of my parents is going to pop in, wonder why the hell there’s a girl having a nervous breakdown in the living room. They’ve got to know something’s up, but for the time being maybe they want to avoid a confrontation.

Finally, it seems like Maddie’s winding down. She lets out a few more sobby breaths, tightens her arms around her knees. “It’s in my bedroom,” she says, and her trembling voice makes my stomach coil up. “The thin space.”

“What?”

“It’s in my room!” she wails. “All this time we’ve been looking in the wrong place. And I’ve been sleeping in there. Those nightmares . . . ” She stands and the blanket slips to the floor. “They were real. Those were real dead people coming through.”

“Maddie.” I shake my head because her words are tripping over each other. “Slow down. You’re not making any sense.”

She juts out her chin. “Mrs. Golden was in my room. I caught her sitting on my bed.”

“Mrs. Golden?” I’m still not following the logic of this conversation. “Why would she be in your room?”

She sinks back down next to me. “I was home, alone. Sam never came back after the movies. He texted he was at Brad’s, getting cleaned up. I guess his face is . . . kind of a mess too . . . ”

“I’m sorry about that,” I say, but she waves her hand.

“We forgot our mom wasn’t going to be home anyway. She has a date tonight, some guy she met online, I don’t know, whatever. She’s still out with him.”

I keep blinking one eye. “Mrs. Golden,” I remind her. “I don’t understand how—”

“She came over with more food, a plate of oatmeal cookies this time. I was so upset after the movies . . . I just wanted her to go away, but she kind of barged in with her cookies and sat down in the front room. I was thinking, okay, I guess she wants to visit with me, so I told her I’d get her a glass of milk, and she said a cup of tea would be better.”

“Maddie,” I say, because my head is spinning.

“I’m getting there,” she snaps. “So I made her tea, and when I carried the cup into the front room, she was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Right,” she draws out the word. “I thought she left, went home. And I was thinking, oh well, she’s kind of weird. I put the tea away and went upstairs to bed. It’s so cold up there. You remember me saying that?”

I nod. Stuff is churning in my mind now, but none of it’s fitting together.

“My room’s the coldest room in the house.” She shivers, grips her knees. “But I was tired. I just wanted to go to sleep. This day’s been so long . . . ”

True, I realize. Hard to believe it all started with Maddie and me sliding around the hospital, and that was before we even ended up at the movie theater and I spilled my guts out
to her, and then Logan and Sam and Chuck and—my head aches just thinking about it.

“But she hadn’t left. When I went up to my room, I found her.”

“Mrs. Golden?”

She shudders. “Yeah. She was sitting at the foot of my bed. With her back to me. Her whole body was shaking. I don’t know what I was thinking, that she was having a seizure or something, but when I stepped closer, I saw—”

“What?” I say, because I’m trying to picture it: Mrs. Golden at the edge of a bed, her yellow poufed-out hair, her eyes glazed behind her glasses.

“Her shoes,” Maddie whispers. “She had them on her lap. When I looked down, I saw that she had her bare feet on the floor.”

I grab two coats from the front closet, drape one around Maddie, yell down the hall to my parents. “I’m walking Maddie home. I might stay over there for a while.”

“It’s a school night,” I hear my mother say, but we’re out the door, tearing down the street.

It hits me that I’m still wearing my brother’s slippers. Maddie’s got slippers on too, and we skim along the icy sidewalk, clinging to each other, trying to keep from falling. The neighborhood’s quiet, cold. Some of the houses are already dark, even though it’s barely ten o’clock. Lots of old people around here. They turn in early.

“Do you think she’s still up there?” Maddie says.

“If she is, we’ll tell her it’s time to go home.” I feel my face twisting into a smile. Isn’t that what Mrs. Golden told me once?
Marsh Windsor, time to go home.
And who’s the crazy one now?

Mrs. Golden. Pushing her way into the house, welcoming Maddie’s family with pies, but really she wanted to sneak away, take off her shoes—

But this doesn’t make sense.

“Wait a minute.” We stop in Maddie’s driveway, and I squint one eyeball at the dark house. “How does Mrs. Golden know about thin spaces? Why would she even believe in something like that?”