Little Wrecks Read online

  Her mother doesn’t say “She’s my daughter” this time. She says, “Can I make you boys some coffee?” Christ.

  They sit down and ask her father about a lawyer for Isabel.

  Isabel looks at the lamp by the couch, turned off now because it’s still light outside. She looks at the empty depression next to it, where her mother usually sits, her mother who is in the kitchen now with the one in the uniform, acting hysterical about coffees.

  “Dad?”

  He isn’t listening.

  “Dad!”

  “Isabel.” He tries to pitch his voice lower than it is. Not for her, just because there are strangers here with uniforms.

  “You have to let Ruth and Magda in my room. You have to let them go through my stuff. Let them take whatever they want.”

  The baby social worker sits on the footstool by Isabel’s chair, working hard to look concerned about her. Give him a few years, he won’t even bother with that. Some girl will get arrested for doing what the cops won’t bother to do and he’ll stand there thinking about his model airplanes while they read her rights. They’ll swallow him up in the end.

  Someone is asking if she understands.

  “Will there be books? Will there be pencils and paper?”

  They don’t even answer that.

  eleven

  “SIT DOWN, MAGDALENE,” her father says.

  Why are they in the kitchen? No one but Henry ever uses the kitchen table. Magda and her father eat in their rooms, or in front of the TV. It’s coming, of course. This is it, the reckoning. Whatever it’s going to be is here now. She stares straight into his eyes. It seems important to do that. Henry is watching Gumby; she can hear Pokey’s swallowed words coming from the television in the den.

  “I’ve been talking to Uncle Tony.”

  “What for? You don’t even like him.”

  “But you do, don’t you?”

  “He’s all right.”

  Where is he going with this? Does he actually think she’s more scared of Uncle Tony than she is of him? She looks down at a box of kitchen stuff under the window by the side of the table, a set of oven dishes and a copy of Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit. Does it qualify as belonging to her mother because it’s for the kitchen? Doesn’t anything in this place belong to all of them? Held in common?

  “You’re obsessed with dividing things up, Dad. Some stuff is just everybody’s, you know.”

  “Don’t change the subject, and don’t talk to me like that!” He takes a menacing step closer, but it might as well be happening to someone else. She’s trying to care, trying to make her body feel like protecting itself, but it just won’t.

  “How will you throw out the wallpaper? Are you gonna cut the carpets in half?”

  “You’re going to live with Uncle Tony.”

  The whole sentence just drops into space. The dust that’s floating in the light coming through the window stops moving. The sounds follow each other but they don’t make sense.

  “Did you hear me, Magdalene? I’ve decided it’s better if you live with Uncle Tony.”

  “So, not the wallpaper, your children? You gonna put us in a box and chuck us in the carriage house till Uncle Tony comes to clear us out?”

  If she had any sense of self-preservation, she’d stop now. She just doesn’t care anymore. What’s the worst thing he can do?

  “Not us, Magdalene. You. The best thing for everyone is if you go out to Tony’s. The schools are excellent and Tony will know what to do with you. Henry and I will stay here.”

  “Dad, why didn’t you guys give me a middle name? You couldn’t even be bothered to think one up, or what?”

  “Magdalene! Did you hear what I said? You’ll finish this year and go when school’s over.”

  “Even you wouldn’t do that, Dad. So, seriously, why just the two names for me? Henry got a middle name.”

  “I’ve done it, Magdalene. Tony’s doing up a room for you and we called the school out there already. The guidance office here will send your grades over the summer.”

  “You can’t do that! There’s a law, Dad. There must be a law that says you have to take care of me. There’s a law that says I wasn’t allowed to leave till I was sixteen. What about you? You can’t do that. Henry needs me.”

  “Law? You’re talking to me about law, Magdalene Warren? You left Henry at the mercy of deviant street people, and your best friend has just been accused of murder.”

  “Isabel is not my best friend, Dad. Ruth is my best friend. Pay attention.”

  “Oh yes, Ruth. The one whose mother used to clean our toilets. That’s better, then.”

  “Play that over in your head, Dad. You actually just said that, you complete snob. Anyway, they said attempted murder, which it wasn’t. She was defending herself.”

  “I don’t think that’s how the police would tell it.”

  “She was defending herself from people like you!”

  He doesn’t hit her, even then. He found something worse to do to her.

  “The fact is, Magdalene, you take after your mother. You belong with Tony. You’re a Buonvicino. Henry and I are Warrens. He needs better influences.”

  “How the hell are you gonna take care of him?!” She’s screaming and the look on his face is full of satisfaction. See, she’s hysterical, it says. But she can’t stop. Something is boiling up in the middle of her, something made out of anger and fear and blood and poetry. It’s pushing up out of her throat and after it comes out she’ll be clean and empty and she won’t have to feel anything.

  “What’s his favorite book? How do you get him to stay in bed when he isn’t sleepy? What do you have to do to get him to sit still at the barber? Where do his fucking socks go? You can’t take care of him. Anyway, he won’t let you. It won’t work.”

  “He’s young, Magdalene. How much do you remember about when you were six? The time to do this is now. I can’t help you. It’s too late, but I can raise Henry like a Warren. I can keep him off the street.”

  Magda looks down at the box of oven dishes and then up at the curtains her mother made on her fancy new Singer. The sewing machine is in the carriage house, but he hasn’t taken the curtains down. Maybe he doesn’t remember her putting them up and laughing at herself, saying, Susie Homemaker, that’s me! This is what it’s come to.

  “I’m starting to look like her, aren’t I? You’re throwing me away because you can’t stop my face from reminding you.”

  That is when he hits her.

  twelve

  ISABEL LAUGHS UP at the window by the bed. She had imagined a tiny one with bars, high up in a big cement wall. Something from The Man in the Iron Mask, basically. This is like a regular window, except you can’t open it more than an inch, and there’s wire mesh inside the glass. The door is just a regular door too, but the ones at the end of the hallway are locked.

  She can only get two books a week, but the shitty TV in the common room is pretty much unlimited. There’s supposed to be someone else in the bed across from her, but that potential girl hasn’t been caught for whatever it is they’ll catch her for yet. Give it time; they’ll fill the place up. No shortage of anger out there. It’s exciting, being in a building full of kids who refused to just sit back and take the crap that gets handed to them. It was always going to be this, wasn’t it? This or the nuthouse. It was never gonna be a houseboat. Didn’t everybody see that? They were always mad at her just for trying to pretend there was another future.

  The baby social worker comes to visit. He said they’ll send her schoolwork right away. She still has to do it in here; how ridiculous is that? Mr. Hazlett, the baby social worker, has her brother’s name, Kevin. He looked confused when she asked him about his model airplanes. There’s a girl who draws on the wall next to her bed with her own shit, and another one who cuts people up if they let her near anything sharp. She’ll just go for anyone who walks by. You have to give her a wide berth and smile at her a lot from across the room.

  Isabel w
rote a letter to Mr. Lipsky at the store and asked him if he could maybe send her a book. Anything. She’d read the Divine Comedy if he still wanted her to, she said. Plenty of time in here. Enough time to think about all of it. She had to ask Kevin Hazlett to mail the letter. She has to trust a lot of people now who she knows can’t be trusted. No other option. In the letter, she tried to explain to Mr. Lipsky. Turns out she cares what he thinks more than she cares what her parents think. Mr. Lipsky was at least paying attention.

  She measures out two hours every day for going over it all, in between the group sessions and dinner. So far she hasn’t found anything she regrets. Every hit of acid, every stolen thing, every minute spent under the water at the beach and in the air on top of the water tower, looking down on Highbone, every time they walked past and shouted “sucker!” at a wedding party getting their pictures taken on the bandstand. Every cut and every blow. She can live off all that for the rest of her life if she has to. Not quite seventeen and she’s lived enough for a whole life. There are a lot of people who’ve never felt as scared as her, as high as her, never noticed the beautiful and the sublime and the terrible. Never held the power of retribution in their hands.

  It’s okay. It’s enough.

  thirteen

  IT’S JUST RUTH and Magda now, like before, like always. When they get to the water tower, Ruth walks into the middle and lies on the grass. It’s Thursday night; no one is out. No cars full of kids blasting Led Zeppelin and throwing Jack Daniel’s bottles onto the road, no PTA moms driving their kids home from soccer games. Even the bikers, she hasn’t seen since last Saturday.

  No Doris, with her boyfriend’s trike and her tattoo and her overly optimistic advice. There are worse things than being Doris, that’s for sure.

  The girders of the water tower are like a metal web around her, a spaceship or an alien creature with giant, mechanical legs. When Magda starts climbing, her coat falls out behind her like a cape.

  “You look like the human fly,” Ruth shouts.

  “Shhh! You coming up, or what?” Magda stage-whispers down over her shoulder.

  Ruth is second up the ladder, and second to make the leap from the ladder cage onto the platform. Second place for Miss Carter, Virgil Mackie said. For a suspended moment when she throws her leg over the railing, there’s nothing beneath her, like in her dream, a world of lights and empty space. It feels perfect. Up here in the sky, everything is right again. The air holds her up and things below them are small enough not to matter. They are angels, come back to the sky, the two of them above everything, where they belong.

  “Magda, do you miss Isabel?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. She’s us, Ruth. She just is.”

  “I guess. Will they keep her in that juvenile detention place, or send her to real jail?”

  “You have to visit. If you don’t, it’ll just fade and then you won’t want to and then everything will fall apart. Nothing means anything unless we make it.”

  “So, what’s the point of that?”

  “I really don’t know, Ruth. I’m not the one who knows anymore. You need to figure stuff out yourself.”

  Well, she kind of knew that already anyway, but it would have been nice if Magda had let her say it. They sit with their backs to the tank for a long time, mostly silent, just breathing and smoking. It’s been a month since they all sat at the back of the park burning the worst parts of their world, trying to get control of things by destroying them. Nothing they burned then even matters now.

  “Nothing we believed was true, Magda. It’s not like we failed; it’s like the whole time we were playing the wrong game, moving the wrong pieces around.”

  “Yeah, robbing Matt was wrong. It turned everything upside down. You said that at first, and you were right, see? You should be the one deciding stuff. For yourself.”

  “Matt might as well be us. That’s all I was trying to tell you guys.”

  “I get it. I got it then, even. I just didn’t care. I thought we were invincible or some shit. I thought what we needed mattered more than everything else. I was stupid.”

  “Magdalene Warren, you have never been stupid in your entire life. I’ve been sitting right here watching for most of it, so you can trust me on that.”

  “I keep trying to imagine what it was like the other day.” Magdalene uses her middle finger to flick her cigarette butt up and out and over the trees. They both smile tired smiles at the firework sparks, but neither of them shouts. “Did they come for Isabel with sirens, or just briefcases? Did she scream and try to get away, or just look guilty and stare at her feet? I feel like I need to know, like it’s the only thing left I need to know.”

  The lights below illuminate silent driveways and empty porches, turning pockets of the dead world a sickly yellow. Up here in the dark blue before dawn, it feels like another time zone, like they’re outside of the rhythms of sleeping and waking and driving in and out of driveways to school and work and hairdressers.

  “I’m gonna make the rounds,” Ruth says. “I need to survey my queendom.”

  She begins the circle of the tower, counterclockwise with her right hand on the rail like it’s a balcony. To the west, the harbor is hidden behind a downward slope of trees. North and a little east, the LILCO stacks rise up with their red and white colors showing in the safety lights that keep planes from flying into them. Over on the hill, Henry is safe in his room sleeping.

  So, there were the things they thought mattered and then the real things that were there all along. Not exactly under the surface, but no one was looking at them. There’s time and no time. No time is the same as forever. Every once in a while, one kind of time stabs its way through the other, and it’s either a revelation or a wound. Or both. That’s where they’ve all been, stuck at that intersection, skewered like insects in a case or Christ on the cross. Now everything is burned clean, pulled free.

  And Danny, of all people, told Ruth if she can get into that art school in the East Village there’s no tuition. If she’s good enough to be accepted, she can go there for nothing. She’ll still have to be able to live in Manhattan. She asked Vicky about a job so she can save up. Vicky said the manager at Dunkin’ Donuts would give her afternoon shifts as soon as her sixteenth birthday comes. She put her hands on Ruth’s shoulders, looked her in the eye and said, “He’ll take it out of you, honey, but don’t worry. I’ll be here, too.” Then she laughed, and it wasn’t bitter. It was just, that’s how it is and it’s no big deal, actually it’s kind of funny. Ruth still can’t figure out if that’s crazy. She can hear Vicky’s laugh now, woven into the layers of sky around her. It blends with Mrs. O’Sullivan’s laugh and Old Mr. Lipsky’s. Even Doris’s scraping bark. They were all her angels, her guides. Right now she could rise up on their laughter and take off into the atmosphere. No gravity, no friction. No sparks.

  She lifts up onto her toes and shouts around the curve of the tank.

  “Hey, we should get down before some little wifey wakes up and sees us.” Her voice flutters out of her, lighter than it’s been for a long time.

  But when she comes around the bend Magdalene is standing on the railing, holding the side of the cage with one hand and looking out over the elementary school field.

  “Get the hell down, Magda! You’re gonna fall.” And the voice has gone right back out of her, no air in her stomach to fill it. It comes out a squeaky whisper.

  “I’m not coming down that way, hon. You have to decide stuff for yourself now. I’ve been watching; you can totally do it. You’re ready.”

  “Yeah, right. What about Henry? Can he figure stuff out himself? Get a grip, Magdalene. Get the fuck down.”

  “Henry isn’t mine anymore. I told you guys that, but you didn’t believe me. You weren’t listening.”

  Magda’s Chuck Taylors are curved around the railing, and the bottom of her coat is hanging out farther than she is. Ruth can see the chain of her watch glinting, snaking from her pocket to the third buttonhole. Exactly like Ma
ckie’s.

  “Magda, tell me about Jeff. Just talk to me about it.”

  “What should I say? He goes to Stony Brook. He fixes my dad’s car. I liked him. Shit, Ruth! I acted like Isabel.”

  “Right, but you can stop now. Don’t take it out on yourself. Take it out on him.”

  “I think we tried that, Ruth. Look what happened.”

  “Someone hurt you and I didn’t know, Magda. You were standing right next to me the whole time, and it was invisible. No, it wasn’t even invisible. I knew. I tried to tell Isabel, but I never thought it was that.”

  “I could hardly stand up. I could hardly move. How ridiculous is that?”

  “Yeah, but we all just keep going. We’re just ghosts; it only seems like things touch us. Really, you can just carry on no matter what, just like the guys in the park.”

  Magda laughs. “I don’t want to be the guys in the park, Ruth. I don’t want to be me. I’m the one who watches Henry. I’m the one who tells you what to do. I am not the one who misses some guy who backhands her and fucks her and leaves her bleeding on the mulch under the birch trees. I caught the wrong train. I went straight past the person I was supposed to be and got in the middle of someone else’s life. This isn’t me. I lost Henry.”

  “You didn’t lose Henry. Your mom and dad lost Henry, Magda. Anyway, in ten years he’ll be sixteen. You think he won’t figure your dad out by then? Come on, you just have to wait it out.”

  “I don’t actually miss him. Jeff, I mean. I miss the idea of him. The thing I thought he was before he did that. I miss me. And I will not hang around to miss Henry. I refuse to do that.”

  “Look, while we’re sharing, the whole concept of guys totally escapes me. Why would any woman do what Isabel does? I’m never gonna do that. I need to figure what to do with my life that isn’t that. You need to get down and help me.”