has not loved or touched Marie since you. Every time he waters the lawn he imagines that the darting streams are his tears. He imagines you there, living in the soil, your small young hands reaching up to caress his aging ankles.
Most of all, though, you write to him because you want him to stop you from ruining his life.
The Captain is down to one amber quarter inch in the glass. You imagine a little man waving from the bottom of the glass, giving you a tiny thumbs-up. You close your eyes as you hit Send. Then you go into your Sent mailbox to see it, to look at the email after it’s been glazed like the Thinker, and impossible to unmake.
I have questions I want answered. I’ve grown up and gained a new perspective on what happened. It would be in your best interest to prove me wrong.
Sometimes you want so badly for someone to call you back. To admit you exist. You have to light a fire at the mouth of the snake hole. Anyhow your psychiatrist has been telling you that what happened means you are a victim and not a spurned lover. Everyone seems to know this but you. The girls that night on Sammy’s speakerphone. Even the boys you have dated. At first they’re afraid of you and then they don’t take their shoes off when you fuck.
Sammy and Maggie go to see their friend Addison, who’s a tattoo artist. Aaron has not replied to the latest email. Addison doesn’t know the story. She says, Why this tattoo? The tattoo is I open at the close, and the o in open is a golden snitch, from the Harry Potter books. Maggie is not merely a fan. One night she slept in a tent in the freezing cold to get tickets for the fifth movie. She and Sammy went to use a coffee shop’s washroom to warm their hands under the hot water spout. It’s more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family. With Twilight, it was different. Twilight was not about family, but about feeling as if she was bitten.
I open at the close means Maggie is ready to move forward. She is finally going to let him go, all of him, including the smell of him in her book. Even if she were a victim, it’s in the past. She’s going to shut it down.
I don’t understand, Addison says.
Maggie exhales and decides that she will tell the story one last time. It’s a going-away party for the girl who fell in love with a vampire. The three girls sit down. Addison works while Maggie talks. The needle hurts like thousands of tiny men stabbing her in the arm with miniature pitchforks. It’s both worse and less painful than she expected.
Holy shit, Addison says. What a fucking scumbag.
A week later he still hasn’t replied to her email. Maggie watches a Dr. Phil episode about a girl whose father lets his friends rape her. She doesn’t remember if he took money from them or not. Maggie thinks about something else that Addison said to her. She was swabbing the tattoo and admiring her work and brushing hair out of Maggie’s face. What Addison said was something Maggie had thought, something that her therapist had intimated. But somehow it had never really sunk in. Maybe it was the pain from the needle.
There’s no way you’re the first, Addison said, which means there’s no way you’ll be the last.
Now Maggie looks at her tattoo. The skin around the ink is raw and it doesn’t look beautiful yet but she was told that it will eventually. Anyway, she couldn’t complain about it, because the person who put it there was a friend.
That night Maggie approaches her mother in the kitchen. Tears streaming. Arlene looks up. She has short hair and a responsible face. She drinks but you wouldn’t know it when she doesn’t.
Arlene panics. What? What is it?
She thinks something has happened to one of the children.
Get Dad, says Maggie. We need to talk. I have something to tell you.
Her father comes up from the basement. Unlike Arlene, he looks as though he wants something that’s not in the room. He acts out of desperation in small ways that cast terminal impact. The sofa is old and the light is dim. The first thing Maggie does is lay down some ground rules.