she pushed me away.
I went back into my room, took the crumpled pages out of the wastebasket and ripped them into pieces and more pieces. Miserable confetti.
The next morning while she was sleeping, I got up the guts to phone my dad in Toronto. We hadn’t heard from him in months. I thought maybe if Sam knew how shitty things were, he would come and get us.
Sitting in the living room I filled him in as quietly as I could. “She threatened to stab herself in the stomach last night. Last week she swallowed a bottle of pills and then called the ambulance. Another time she said she was going to drown herself.” I had decided before I picked up the phone that there was not going to be any crying, but that went out the window as soon as I heard Sam’s voice. “I can’t stay here,” I said.
It was silent on his end. I waited for him to say something. Something about a plane ticket for me.
“I’m goin’ out of town,” he blurted. “You got friends you could stay with?”
Not much to talk about after that.
When I came home from school to pack my bag before going to stay with Jill, Marlene came into my bedroom and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, tears rolling.
“I just can’t—” She wiped her nose with a Kleenex. “I don’t know how to fill another day. It’s such a relief to go to sleep and so horrible when I wake up and know I have to drag through another one, like a thousand pounds of dead … until I can sleep again.”
I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my bedroom rug.
“I wanted you to know because—” She swallowed. “I always thought it was cruel when I heard a woman killed herself and let her kids find her like that. I didn’t want that.”
I said, “If you want help trying to get pills together, I’ll try. But, um, I have to go. I’m not going to watch.”
I couldn’t look at her. I kept tweetzing the sheet on my bed. Tweetzing is this thing I do where I rub a fold of the cotton between my fingers. Marlene says I’ve been doing it since I was a baby.
I nodded to myself. “I can’t be here for—” I lost the words then, as if I had already begun to seep away, long before I stood up to leave.
THREE
JILL’S LAST EXAM was earlier in the day so she was long gone by the time I got out.
Except for Jill, I don’t have a crowd at school. Part of the problem is, like my dad, I don’t drink or smoke. Sam says addicts are weak. People in this school don’t hold that opinion, though. The halls are full of alkies and heads who think the fact that I don’t drink or smoke weed means I’m a spineless little suck. A chick named Crystal Norris actually shoulder-checked me in the hall once and called me a suckhole. I didn’t do anything about it so maybe she had a point.
When I come through the front door, I hear Jill squeal, “She said what?” Jill’s front door opens into a tiny vestibule with a few coat hooks. Two steps forward and you’re in the living room.
Creeping onto the braided rug, I pause, listening as Jill and Ruby cackle in the kitchen. The hair on my arms prickles. They’re talking about Marlene. I know it. Laughing at her.
I keep still, listening as I glance around. There are two little paintings on the wall over the couch: a happy clown and a sad clown. I hate those clowns. Even the happy one looks miserable.
The furniture is old, but everything’s tidy. Clean. Maybe some dust on the TV screen but that’s about it. Marlene likes to say, “I don’t mind clutter but I hate dirt.” What a laugh that is. My stomach lurches when I think of what Ruby and Lou probably saw over there today. At least Jill wasn’t with them.
“She’s a piece of work all right,” I hear Ruby say.
“How did Dad react?”
It’s quiet a moment. Ruby calls, “Sammie? That you?”
Shit. “Yeah,” I yell through the wall at them.
When I come into the kitchen, Ruby and Jill are at the table, an ashtray and two cups of coffee between them. Smoke wafts out of Jill’s mouth.
“Hey,