Little Wrecks Read online

  “Well.” Ruth squints her eyes at Magda. “I guess you grew up in a Lakota camp on the move with twelve brothers, so you never learned to be domestic in the first place.”

  “As long as I can shoot and cure snakebite, I’m good.”

  The three of them lean forward with their elbows on their knees, imagining themselves in painted deserts and badlands, sitting on bedrolls under the stars. It’s like there’s a fire they’re all staring into together, even though they haven’t actually lit one yet.

  “So, Ruth,” Isabel says, “what did you bring?”

  Ruth reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a heavy, embossed piece of paper. It still smells like the cabinet she lifted it from, like chamomile and her mother’s patchouli. Magda grabs her hand and leans over to look at it.

  “You can’t burn your birth certificate, Ruth! You’re gonna need it when we get driver’s licenses. I’m not driving all the way to California myself while you lie back in the passenger seat spacing out.”

  “I don’t know,” Isabel says. “I kind of get it. I mean, why let them make you get a piece of paper to prove you were born? We’re here, aren’t we? What difference do the details make? They just want to keep pieces of us in filing cabinets.”

  “Read it,” Ruth says. “There are no details. In the place where there might be some useful information, it’s just blank. I mean, everyone already knows who my mother is and that I’m from Long Island. Those are both kind of annoyingly inescapable facts. The rest is blank space.”

  “You’re not the only one with a blank space where your father is supposed to be,” Isabel laughs. “I live in a house with my father. Trust me, it doesn’t make a difference.”

  “I don’t want to come from anywhere,” Ruth says. “I don’t want to be a collection of facts. I’m burning it. Deal. Your turn, Isabel.”

  “I’m burning this, but I’m not opening it.” Isabel holds some papers, folded and folded again, six or seven pages’ worth. “You just have to trust me.”

  “This is exactly why people don’t trust you,” Magdalene says. “Come on, ante up, O’Sullivan.”

  “We’re all pouring out our deepest shit here, Isabel. You’re supposed to throw in with us; otherwise it isn’t fair.”

  The imaginary fire has gone, leaving Ruth feeling naked and chilly. Alone again in a world full of people who don’t see what she sees.

  “I don’t care if it’s fair,” Isabel says. “Fair is not the point. Catharsis is the point. It’s like Mr. Driscoll said about Antigone.”

  “I think what Mr. Driscoll said was that telling the story together is what makes all the people better.” Magdalene reaches for the papers and Isabel rolls away onto the ground, clutching them underneath her.

  “Do you want me to stay or not?” she says. “If you want me in, I’m burning these without opening them. End of the story.”

  Ruth has never seen that look on Isabel’s face before. She shrugs and holds out her birth certificate.

  “Well, got a match, Magda?” she says.

  They all laugh because that is the magic incantation. They can say it whenever they need to, in school or at the beach with a bunch of ridiculous cheerleaders, or in the street when some construction worker offers them five bucks for a blow job. Got a match? And the thought of everything catching and burning will take whatever it is away. Fire makes them feel clean again, takes the wrongness of everything and the blindness of everyone around them away.

  The heavy paper of Ruth’s birth certificate makes a green-and-yellow flame. They use that to light the unknown papers, burning Isabel’s secrets in their folds. Over those, Magdalene holds open her father’s book, pages down so they will catch, until the flames come up and nearly light her sleeves. The cover takes ages to burn, and they have to use more matches and some paper bags from the garbage pail behind the bandstand.

  Turns out they don’t get caught. Either no one sees the fire behind the bushes at the back of the park, or no one cares. When they’re done, they climb the bank at the side, up through the bushes onto Baywater Avenue.

  Ruth leaves Isabel and Magdalene at the top of Seaview Road by the elementary school. The wind kicks up last year’s leaves along with the bottom of her lace dress and a lot of dust from around the goalposts. She turns her back to the water, and the wind blows her hair forward in front of her eyes. They all squint against the grit blowing off the football field, and Ruth shouts good-bye to the world and her friends flickering in and out of view. Magda and Isabel disappear into the dark. As soon as she’s alone it all comes back. The green-and-yellow flames of the bonfire are burning in her head, and the world drops away from under her feet. Minus the birth certificate, she feels lighter, cleaner, like someone’s cut her anchor and she might just lift up and away any minute, flying out over the houses and the sea.

  She turns down the hill towards the highway where Highbone divides, leaving behind the boats and the harbor and Baywater Avenue, where the man whose name is missing from her birth certificate lives. Over 25A and down into South Highbone, Ruth’s house sits in a dusty yard in front of a patch of trees. On a good day, it’s just her mother and herself in the little ranch house. On bad days, it could be anyone. There might be a dozen people getting stoned in the living room, excited that she’s home and acting desperate to hear what she thinks about everything. For Ruth’s mother and her friends, the secret to life is never thinking like an adult. They act like Ruth is some kind of guru, possessing the secret of anti-wisdom.

  Or there might be a boyfriend. They usually arrive without warning, or without warning Ruth, anyway. The first one was pretty harmless. He mowed lawns and played drums and thought being with Ruth’s mom was like winning the lottery. She dumped him. Then Stevie showed up. He started by slapping her mother’s ass and saying, “Who’s that?” in a stern voice whenever someone called on the phone. At the end, there was a lot of yelling and throwing things. For the last few weeks he was around, Ruth spent Saturday nights awake in her room, listening to things hit the walls. Then one Sunday morning, her mother was alone at the table wearing too much makeup, and Stevie was gone. He never came back and they didn’t talk about it. For a few weeks her mother’s friends came around a lot, checking on her. There were no boyfriends for so long after that, Ruth started to relax. They watched movies on Saturday nights, or went out to the beach together with her mother’s friends. The house went back to its good smell, like dust and patchouli and whatever it is they pack the bedspreads in when they ship them from India.

  When Danny Pavlich showed up, it took Ruth a few weeks to realize he was staying. Him and her mother laughed a lot in the stupid way people do right before they start sleeping together, and after a while he was there in the morning, smiling his goofy smile and offering Ruth tea in her own kitchen. But why? Her mother knows about what happened to Mrs. Warren, Magda’s mom. Jesus, she knows what it’s like to crouch in the corner trying to protect your face with your hands. She can pretend she doesn’t, but Ruth was there. Even after all that, does she really have some kind of fairy-tale blindness that makes her think things will stay like this, that Danny will stay like this? Didn’t she learn anything?

  The sudden sick clarity comes back while Ruth is heading down the hill into South Highbone. Looking down at the landscape of their lives, she knows everything in one sharp second. It all fits together, her and Isabel and Magdalene, her mother and Danny and the whole shape of the land around them. Like a saint from the middle ages, she can see fire and flood and angels descending.

  Worlds are grinding together tonight, ripping into each other. Separate circles, meshing and turning like gears. Maybe like a riptide. Ruth feels dizzy and clairvoyant. There is a change washing over everything, and only she can feel it. The sea wind blows something into her, a shiny new soul that was meant for her all along. She is a vengeful spirit, a protector, burning with a halo of green-and-yellow flame.

  Danny’s white Dodge is shining out of the dark in Ruth’s front y
ard when she gets home. Her mother will be in her room with him, music playing, and their voices underneath it, just a constant, rhythmic murmur without meaning, all night long.

  Somebody has to save her.

  Ruth goes through the house and into the kitchen to find one of the steak knives her grandmother gave them for Christmas. She doesn’t need to turn on any lights. Her body knows the house like it’s inside her own head, like inside and outside her head are no different anymore. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she goes out to smoke in the trees behind the brake repair shop, half-asleep. In between asleep and awake, she tries to walk into the world without her own body, feeling her way in the dark, trying to stay in her dreams and move through the world at the same time. It feels like that now.

  When she goes out the kitchen door into the backyard, the security lights from the brake repair shop shine through the trees, and she sidesteps them, staying in the shadow. She walks around the house to Danny Pavlich’s car and sticks the knife into a front tire. It’s harder than she thought it would be, but satisfying. She leans into it, and then falls suddenly forward as the air hisses out. The other three tires are easier. When she steps back, Danny’s Dodge slumps down onto its rims, first on one side and then the other. Ruth crumples down on the grass next to it.

  The air goes out of her, too, all at once. She settles back into her body and starts to feel a little sick. There is the earth again, solid underneath her. The sky has emptied out, leaving her sitting by herself in a world without visions or sense.

  three

  MAGDA LEAVES ISABEL and walks on up the hill to her house. It sits back on Sycamore Avenue behind two oak trees and a gravel driveway with a carriage house at the end of it. The porch light is broken, and the front windows all stare back at the night, reflecting nothing. In the yard, light shines onto the lawn from her father’s study. Magda comes through the back door and stops to take off her shoes so she doesn’t make noise on the kitchen tiles. She hangs her Swiss Army trench coat on the newel post. The coat is much bigger than Magda and has all kinds of inside pockets, in which she keeps paperback books and silver cigarette cases and bird feathers and things made of metal. She doesn’t go anywhere without the coat until the full heat of summer forces her to.

  Magda crosses the hall into the den, but she doesn’t turn the lamp on. She knows the order of all the books by heart, even though she can’t read the titles in the streetlight coming through the window. Mostly they’re New Modern Library editions that her parents collected in college, translations of French stuff and editions of James Joyce. But there are other books too, mystery novels and Tolkien, because everyone has those.

  Magda smiles with satisfaction at the hole where her father’s great opus used to be. She didn’t tell Ruth and Isabel that she can remember him throwing that very book at her mother. He was yelling at her while Magda stood in the doorway, thinking she was old enough now, maybe she should try to get in between them. He swung his arm with the book in it and her mother’s head snapped sideways. He went quiet then, and Magda’s mother opened the kitchen door and puked off the back porch. By the time Magda went to bed there was a lump on her mother’s forehead and the whole house had that sickening after-a-fight hush.

  Three days later Magda woke up with her little brother, Henry, standing over her. He was hungry, and Magda’s mother was gone.

  It’s been two years since Irene Warren left Magdalene alone in the house on Sycamore Avenue with her brother Henry and her father and the New Modern Library. People say she went to Mexico, but Magda never heard that from her father. He doesn’t talk about it. Since running off to the border like a fugitive cowgirl is obviously the most interesting thing anyone’s mother has done, it isn’t easy for Magdalene to hold it against her.

  She takes down a Dashiell Hammett and lifts it to her nose while she climbs the stairs, wondering if it smells like anyone or just like time and dust.

  “Magdalene!”

  “Hi, Dad,” she says to the top of the stairs without turning around.

  “Where were you? Henry had to go to bed by himself.”

  Well, no, he didn’t, did he? But she doesn’t say it out loud.

  “I was at Isabel’s. We have a math test on Monday.”

  “Next time, do it here.” He slams the door to the study and her body flinches without checking with her first. What’s the point of flinching? Whatever is coming comes anyway.

  On her bed there is a pile of paperbacks she got at a yard sale, some Asimov classics and a manual for a two-way radio. Magdalene doesn’t have a two-way radio and doesn’t plan on getting one. She has a lot of manuals for machines she’s never owned. There’s usually one in the pockets of her coat. There is a book for everything, and Magda likes to make things with moving parts. On her desk there’s something that’s kind of a cross between a reel-to-reel tape deck and a set of balance scales. Her dad thinks it’s art, but really she just likes little closed systems that do the same thing every time. They don’t need to have a purpose to make sense.

  In Henry’s room, everything is almost in the right place. He tried to pick up before he went to bed. She leans over to breathe in the smell of his six-year-old hair and then bends down to turn the nightlight off.

  “Magda?”

  It’s been over a year since Henry woke up in the night and said Mommy.

  “Hey, man.” Magda comes back to sit on the bed. “Having a dream?”

  “No. Sorry, Magda.”

  “It’s okay, little guy. You’ll have dreams someday. I promise. It’ll be good for you. Dreams clean your brain out.”

  Henry keeps all his little fears on the outside. Even though he’s only six, and Magda and Isabel and Ruth all look out for him, he still casts his eyes sideways in both directions whenever he walks into a room. You can see how jumpy he is all the time.

  The difference is at night when they’re both in bed. Magda spends lots of time staring wide-eyed at the dark, but whenever she looks in on Henry he’s curled up on his side with his eyes shut and his mouth open, his whole face relaxed. He never dreams. She asks him every morning while she makes his breakfast. Nada. He needs to dream. Buffer dumping, that’s what they call it. She read about it; it’s how you process and store away everything that happens all day. If anybody who’s six needs that shit, it’s Henry.

  “Will you stay till I’m asleep, Magda? Please?”

  “Lemme get my book, big guy. If you don’t care about the light, I can stay and read.”

  By the time Magdalene settles in under the blanket with Red Harvest, Henry is breathing happily into his hand, lost in his comfortable darkness, dreaming of nothing.

  Inland, at the mall up on Herman Road, Monday afternoon is stuffy and gray. Magdalene sits back-to-back with Charlie Ferguson on the base of a light pole in the parking lot, waiting for Isabel to make her way towards them through the maze of cars. Outdoors feels so close it seems like indoors, but made of metal.

  “So, where’s the little brother, Warren?” Charlie says.

  “Playing at his friend’s house. I try not to commit felonies when he’s here.”

  “Pretty sure shoplifting’s a misdemeanor,” Charlie says.

  “Oh, really? That’s cool. I’ll bring him next time. That’ll be a big hit with my dad.”

  “Unless it’s, like, a car. Or a bunch of diamond jewelry. That’s probably a felony.”

  “Got it, Charlie. Thanks.”

  Charlie is Isabel’s friend; Magda has nothing to say to him. Can’t he tell that, by the fact that she has her back to him? They’ve already been inside the mall, because it wasn’t like Magda was going to sit outside and make conversation with Charlie for an hour while they waited for Isabel to show up. So now Magda has a nine-volt battery with snap-on contacts and a brand-new crescent wrench in her coat pockets.

  Two people are yelling in one of the cars in the next row. Either they’re fighting or something worse is going on, something Magda doesn’t want to think about. So
she draws into herself and imagines the whole scene from above, from the sky. Magdalene learned to do that when she was as little as Henry. Gazing down on the world is kind of her specialty.

  Charlie is still talking.

  “So when we break into people’s cars, I think it’s still a felony. Even if all we’re doing is getting warm and having a smoke.”

  “Okay.”

  Magda can never tell whether Charlie is pretending. Someone is using fabric whitener on his clothes, and odds are it isn’t him. On the other hand, whoever washes his clothes didn’t stop him from getting those jail tattoos. They’re the kind you make with a sewing needle wrapped in black thread. It takes hours to do them and it’s got to hurt. Other kids have them, but not the ones who live on their side of the highway. Magdalene and Isabel’s side.

  And that is why Isabel is making her way towards Charlie now, like she’s lost and he’s magnetic north. She thinks he has a lifeline to something less boring than Castle Gloom, something dangerous from South Highbone.

  The voices coming from the car in the next row keep getting louder and higher, but the words aren’t clear. There is a sound of scraping metal and then a bang, as a car door opens and slams shut again. The woman’s voice goes up an octave.

  “What’s up with those people?” It’s Isabel, standing over Magda and craning her neck to see into the next row.

  “Whatever, Isabel. Leave me alone. I’m thinking.”

  “What do you mean, whatever? Is that woman okay? Is he hurting her?”

  “Probably. Why don’t you go check it out, Isabel? . . . No, of course not. So stop talking about it, then.”

  Everything Magda says comes out sounding like that. She can hear herself, but she can’t seem to stop it. She’s like Patty Hearst, everyone looking at a scary picture of her toting a machine gun, and all the time she’s actually wondering how the hell it got into her hands and whether someone’s going to shoot her because she’s holding it. Yep, Magda looks like the tough one. People don’t notice the flinching.