Little Wrecks Read online

The air in the back of the Mustang is full of adrenaline. There’s something gigantic going on and neither Ruth nor Isabel has any idea what it is. It has nothing to do with Matt Kerwin’s weed. Ruth wants to say something, but what would it be?

  “Hi,” she says, in case Magda wants her to be nice.

  “I love your car!” Isabel’s ready to lie down and take it, whatever it is.

  “So, what can I do you pretty ladies for?” He looks in the rearview at Ruth and smiles.

  “I think it’s the other way around.” Magda rolls down her window and lights a cigarette. “Like I said, we can maybe get a bunch of weed. We need somebody to pass it on to.”

  “Got it all figured out, eh, Magdalene Warren? Did you two know this girl can take apart a carburetor?” He’s smiling but he looks annoyed.

  “Hi, I’m Isabel.” Isabel leans up and reaches a hand over the seat.

  “Jeff,” he says, and shakes. “And you?”

  “Ruth. Hi.” She turns her head around to try to see if Mackie is still behind the bathrooms. The sun is sharp and all the shadows have gotten deeper. She can’t be sure.

  “So, do you think you might be able to sell it?” Magda says.

  “All business, eh?” He puts a hand behind Magda’s neck and pulls her closer to him. For a minute all the sound goes out of the world and Ruth feels sick.

  “We think we know where there’s a lot hidden,” Isabel says. “About a pound, maybe. Some people dumped it, and, um, we saw them. We could get it for you, if you think you can do something with it.” She sounds hysterical.

  “Dumped it, huh? Any idea who did that? How did you three find out?”

  “We just did.” Magda twists out from under Jeff’s arm and shifts over towards the door. “Do you want it?”

  “Tell you what, little Warren. Why don’t we drop these two wherever they want to go and then me and you can talk about it?”

  “It’s kind of urgent,” Isabel tries again. “Someone else might find it.”

  “Well, you know,” Jeff says, “your friend Magdalene can take care of business. She keeps telling me that. Why don’t you let us work it out? Where you two going tonight?”

  “I can get out here.” Ruth opens the door and almost falls after it.

  Isabel will stay in that car as long as they’ll let her. Watching some guy take over Magda’s body won’t even bother her. Ruth makes for the shadow behind the bathrooms like someone trapped underwater who forgot which way is up. The world is lurching sideways, trying to throw her off.

  “Little Carter,” Mackie says, and she falls against the shower tiles and slides down onto the drain.

  “What are you doing back here, Mackie? I mean, I’m really glad to see you. Something crazy is happening.”

  “Ain’t love crazy, eh?” He laughs like a crow.

  “Are you serious? Is that love?”

  “That’s what they call it.”

  Ruth has two Larks crumpled in her shirt pocket. Her hand trembles when she lights one. She lifts the other hand and shakes out the match, making it burn green for a second against the purple sky.

  “What about my mother? You think she calls it love? Pretty sure my father just called it a little fun. Or maybe relief, even. Isn’t that what businessmen pay thirty bucks for at the Island Court Motor Inn up on Herman Road? Relief?”

  “You could ask her.”

  “My mother? No, Mackie. I can’t. That’s the whole thing. The silence around that woman is like cement. Once it sets in, you can’t move or breathe. You just sink to the bottom. Now Magda’s doing it, just dumping us in the middle of her weird man shit so we can’t say anything. We can’t even ask her what the hell she did when we weren’t looking, because whoever she did it with is sitting right there.”

  “Let’s talk about you, then. What difference does Magdalene Warren make to you, anyway?”

  “All the difference, Mackie. I learned to talk from her. She is the thing that’s been in front of me my whole life. She’s the place I’m always trying to get to.”

  “Maybe not anymore. Maybe you’re going somewhere else now.”

  “If it turns out I hurt Danny, I don’t even know whether I’ll feel bad or not. Is that where I’m going?”

  This time, when the world pitches out from under her, she leans into Virgil Mackie. The cement under her legs has held on to the warmth of the sun, but the shower tiles are cold all down her back.

  “Tell me about tulips,” Virgil Mackie says.

  seven

  ISABEL’S ROOM HAS a pitched ceiling and a window that looks out over the wooded backyard of the rented house on the corner. Outside that window is a Thursday-evening sky with the branches going dark against it. She lies on her mattress under the eaves, reading René Char’s “The Library is on Fire,” torn out of a book and taped over her bed. Magda yelled at her for ripping a page out of a library book. Like anyone else in Highbone besides Isabel can appreciate René Char. After a while the grays of words and paper blend too close together to distinguish. The only color left in the room is the red flower Ruth has been drawing on the wall in the corner.

  She is imagining her houseboat when the doorbell rings. If it’s Ruth or Magda they’ll come straight up the stairs, and if it’s anyone else she won’t have to move anyway. There isn’t anyone else she wants to see.

  “Isabel?” First it’s her mother at the bottom of the stairs, speaking barely loud enough for Isabel to hear. After a minute her father shouts, but it sounds high-pitched and panicky. He couldn’t be scary if he tried.

  The cops in the living room don’t have uniforms, and they’re not from Highbone, either. They’re county. Her mother is curled up by the lamp with her legs underneath her, and her father sits at the opposite end of the couch with a dishtowel over his shoulder. He’s been making dinner. Isabel sinks into the dip in the middle, short and sandwiched in between them. The cops are pretending to talk to her mom and dad, but the questions are for her. They’re trying to trap her while they pretend to be protecting her. Cops always lie, even about the little stuff.

  “We were telling your parents there’s been a serious assault, Miss O’Sullivan. People have told us you might have been there.”

  “I don’t really understand,” her mother says.

  The cop who’s talking looks like a schoolteacher. He isn’t Dragnet sharp or NYPD sloppy with coffee down his shirt. Just a little cheap and disheveled. The other one sits perfectly straight and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look that much older than Isabel. Outside the window behind him, the setting sun has turned half the trunk of the maple tree gold. Isabel looks at it and listens to the blood rushing through her veins. She can feel the pressure in every artery, every valve.

  “Mr. Hazlett is from Social Services,” the cop says, waving a hand at the guy with the peach fuzz and the perfect posture. Isabel’s father nods and coughs and then seems to decide he doesn’t have anything useful to add. He looks at the carpet, and that’s when Isabel notices he doesn’t have shoes on. He’s talking to the cops in his socks.

  “Were you at the Dunkin’ Donuts on 25A last Friday night, Miss O’Sullivan?” Now he sounds like a cop on TV.

  “No.” It comes out sarcastic and she looks him straight in the eye. I wasn’t there, she thinks. I know what he’s talking about, but I don’t know why I know because I wasn’t there.

  “She’s my daughter,” Isabel’s mother says in her high, flat voice. As if that’s relevant. As if they don’t already know that. She pulls her feet in and makes herself smaller, like she’s just seen a mouse run under the couch. Or maybe she is the mouse, trembling in the corner and willing herself to be invisible. Great. Way useful quality in a mom.

  Mr. Lipsky is always saying Isabel’s mom is smart, that she taught him things and was a good friend. Isabel tries to picture her standing up straight, shouting, being excited, going anywhere at all. She tries to see her on a train to the city or on the Greenpoint Ferry. In a college class, admitting that she u
nderstands what people are saying. It’s impossible. Her mother is permanently folded inward. She never breathes deep enough to say anything out loud.

  The cop is standing now, handing his card to her father.

  “If your daughter remembers anything, call us.” His whole vocabulary is clichés.

  Isabel doesn’t realize they’re leaving until the door shuts behind them. She can’t see them making their way down the driveway, but she sees their long shadows rolling down the lawn to the road.

  The cop starts up his silver blue Ford and the roar of his engine brings back the orange sky over the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, the sound of cracking skull, the scratching of the branches in the woods behind the fence. As soon as they’re gone, it all spills over and the pictures come out into her head. She was there, of course. She pushes up one sleeve to see the whitening scratches on her arm. She plays the scene back to herself and the pressure in her veins lets up. The engine fades down the road while the blood rushing in Isabel’s ears falls back like an ebbing wave.

  eight

  SOME DAYS, MAGDALENE can see the morning shining through the back of her eyelids, but when she opens them it turns out she was dreaming and the room is still dark. Today she has her eyes wide open, grabbing at the light like a drowning person, but it isn’t helping. She almost wishes she had to go to school, but it’s Saturday. She tries to fill her mind up with the empty, meaningless details around her in the room, instead of with what happened.

  She should go quietly to the bathroom now, before her dad and Henry wake up. If she bumps into them, she won’t be able to say anything normal.

  In her memory, she can still see that afternoon in her driveway and the night at the firemen’s fair, shining like scenes from some other girl’s life. There is something there she still wants. She knows she’d fall for it again, if it was dressed up right. She could choke herself for that, but there’s no getting away from it.

  Wednesday night, after they left Ruth at the beach and dropped Isabel off, Jeff drove up to Jenny’s Head and parked. He put his hands inside her clothes while he whispered questions about the weed. She kept answering, just so he wouldn’t stop touching her. When the whole car seemed full of her exhaled breath, she reached behind her and opened the door. She needed to get back inside her body so she could think of what to say. He wasn’t gonna help them sell the weed, that was obvious. Looking back, Jeff has probably suspected all week what was up. That it was them who robbed Matt.

  When you stand on the cliff at Jenny’s Head the sand and the water are so far below, it’s like looking at a map. She could just make out the twisted curves of the beach in the dark. A breeze puffed up, and she put out her arms, wishing she could fall forward and lie down on the air. Just sleep on top of all that space. Then the breeze dropped, her stomach fell away, and she stepped back.

  When Jeff came up behind her and put his hand in her hair, she said, “We were wrong. Never mind. Sorry.”

  “What, you were seeing things? You just made it up?” He lifted up her shirt and put his hands on her skin.

  It’s hard now, to remember how it felt at the time. When she tries to think back past yesterday, her stomach heaves.

  “You don’t know Isabel.” Magda gasped while she said it. “She lives in dreamland. She probably heard something and then decided she was gonna turn it into some cowgirl adventure.”

  “Okay, little Warren. For now.” He was distracted, but not convinced.

  When he parked on the corner of her street he left the engine running and pulled her over onto him. Once she felt like she would never be able to stand up again, he whispered in her ear.

  “If you’re lying to me I’ll know, Magdalene Warren.” Then he reached over her and opened the passenger door.

  Now she looks down at the crotch of her underwear in the bathroom light and there’s another dark, wet spot. Men just seem to keep on leaking out of you for days. She goes to the kitchen to get a pan and put some water in it, puts the pan by her bed, then locks the bedroom door.

  She goes back to bed and the day just keeps moving forward. When the sun drops over the other side of the house, she realizes hours have passed and it’s afternoon. Will it feel different once it’s dark again?

  She is alone in the house when the doorbell rings. Because the ringing goes on and on and then is replaced by loud knocking, she knows it is Isabel, and probably Ruth, too. Her body goes rigid, like holding on tight enough will keep them from sneaking into the house to check for her. She can’t talk to them, not now. After a while, someone throws pebbles at the window. Magda holds her breath until it stops.

  After Wednesday Jeff didn’t call for two days, and she didn’t use the number he gave her either. Then yesterday morning he came to get her. When he knocked on the door she thought he must be mad about the weed, that he’d figured it out and was going to tell Matt. She had already got that he was the wrong person to have asked for help. But he didn’t even mention it.

  He just said, “Don’t go to school today. Drop Henry off and come out with me instead.”

  And Magda did exactly what stupid girls do, looking away past his shoulder because she couldn’t stand to look in his eyes. She was flattered and scared. Not scared of what was actually about to happen. She never imagined that. She was scared that he would stop paying attention to her.

  Her bedroom is full of shadows now. It’s seven fifteen. The mechanism she’s building is on her desk. Its moving parts are still, shining in places, catching the light from the clock. All of the objects in the room have lost their meaning. Her life has telescoped into one scene that won’t let the present come through. She just goes over and over it while her body stays frozen.

  She probably turned red, standing there at the door trying to catch her breath. Yep, she did everything stupid girls do, including dropping Henry off and going with Jeff. They cut through the football field behind the elementary school and Jeff said, “Let’s go through the woods so no one sees you.”

  Under the trees it still smelled like rotting leaves, but there was new green everywhere. They even saw some Indian pipes under a pine and Jeff stopped to tell her that meant something had died there. She didn’t even say that she already knew that.

  “Sorry about the weed,” she said. “We were wrong. It wasn’t there.”

  “Yeah, but it was good anyway, wasn’t it? Up at Jenny’s Head?”

  He went quiet, just waiting for that to sink into her softness.

  There were blue jays screeching in the tops of the trees. They made her think about when she was little, days when it would cloud over like that. The air would get soft and the birds would start screeching. Her mother would say, “Listen, Magdalene! The birds are screaming for rain.” Then she thought about how Jeff wanted to listen to her. Maybe she shouldn’t be so scared of how it felt when he touched her. Why was she so scared of losing control all the time? He wasn’t like Charlie, anyway. He came back.

  When he grabbed her arm so hard like that, she thought it was an accident.

  “Ouch! That hurts.” She turned around to him, laughing, when she said it. The look in his eyes was laughing too, but it was brittle. Something shattered when she saw it. She still has the bruise smeared across her skin from where she twisted away and he wouldn’t let go.

  At first, that just confused her. It took her half a minute to catch up with what was happening. Her brain couldn’t adjust to the way reality changed, so fast like that. Finally, she sort of woke up and felt panic shoot into her blood. Too late.

  “Fuck off!” She shouted it at him, and he hit her so hard she spun halfway around. Her arm flung out behind her with the force, so it was the side of her that hit the birch tree behind.

  She reaches under her T-shirt now and presses on the bruises. To make sure they’re there, to make it hurt so she can put it all back together from the map of her body. Her body is the representation of an event now. It isn’t somewhere she lives anymore. It isn’t the house of her.

/>   It’s not exactly true that time slowed down, like everyone says. Everything got really sharp and clear, though. Thinking about it now, she can see every leaf on the ground. She can see the blue jay that squawked while it flew over her head, the daddy longlegs crawling over a rock. She must have landed on that rock at some point. The side of her leg was bleeding when she got home.

  At the time she was thinking, Don’t look scared. It’ll be worse if you look scared. Where did that idea come from? She still doesn’t know. He didn’t seem that strong to look at, but no matter what she tried she couldn’t get her arms out of his grip. Every way she twisted he was already there. All the details of Jeff Snyder were sinking into her senses. He used to have an earring. She could see the healing-over hole. Like a close-up at the movies, he took up all of her vision with sick, specific detail. The tips of his fingers were yellow from cigarettes, and there was engine grease under his nails.

  Before the other night at the beach, she didn’t want to tell Ruth and Isabel about Jeff, because the things her body was doing confused her. And because of the way she knew he’d look at Ruth. And he did, of course, the minute he saw her. She didn’t want to tell them because he made her feel separate and definite, in the middle of her own life without them. Now it’s a different kind of secret. She’ll never be able to say his name to them again.

  All day, everything plays on a loop in her head, trying to add up to a reason for what happened. Trying to put herself back into that special definition, to make herself matter like she did in the Kennedys’ side yard. Now, though, that’s just a memory of someone else’s life. She gives up on trying to get back to it and throws up into the pan of water next to the bed.

  She will have to call Ruth and Isabel at some point. They’re looking for her, and if she doesn’t, they’ll know something’s wrong. If she waits until tomorrow, so much silence and memory will pile up she won’t be able to talk through it. Everything needs to be normal by tomorrow.

  Mrs. O’Sullivan answers at Castle Gloom and when Magda hears her own voice it sounds like it does every day. Mrs. O’Sullivan practically doesn’t exist. It’s not like talking to anyone at all.