Fly Away (41 page)

Marah picked up the magazine, called the hotline number, and said,
I’m Marah Ryan, Tully Hart’s goddaughter. How much would you pay for a story about
her drug problem?
Even as she asked the question, she felt sick. Some things, some choices, you just
knew were wrong.

“Marah? Check this out.”

She heard her name as if from far away. She came to slowly, remembering where she
was: kneeling in Tully’s closet.

Her godmother was in the hospital, in a coma. Marah had come here to find the iPod
that held all of Tully’s favorite songs so that maybe—just maybe—the music could reach
through the darkness and help Tully to wake up.

Marah turned slowly, saw Paxton holding a half-eaten hamburger in one hand while he
pawed through Tully’s jewelry box with the other. She got slowly to her feet.

“Pax—”

“No, really. Check it out.” He held up a single diamond stud earring nearly the size
of a pencil eraser. It flashed colored light, even in the dark closet.

“Put it back, Paxton,” she said tiredly.

He gave her his best smile. “Oh, come on. Your godmother wouldn’t even notice if this
went missing. Think of it, Marah. We could go to San Francisco, like we’ve been dreaming
of. You know how stuck I’ve been in my poetry. It’s because of our money and how we
don’t have any. How can I be creative when you’re gone all day, working?” He moved
toward her. Reaching out, he pulled her close to him, pressed his hips into hers,
moving suggestively. His hands slid down her back and settled on her butt, then tugged
hard. “This could be our future, Mar.” The intensity in his black-rimmed eyes scared
her just a little.

She pulled out of his arms and stepped back. For the first time, she noticed the selfishness
in his gaze, the thin rebellion in his mouth, the pale hands that were softened by
laziness, the vanity in his dress.

He took the silver and black skull earring out of his earlobe and put Tully’s diamond
in its place. “Let’s go.”

He was so sure of her, so certain she would fold her will into his own. And why wouldn’t
he be? That was what she’d done from the beginning. In Dr. Bloom’s office she’d seen
a gorgeous, troubled, wrist-slashed poet who’d promised her a way through her pain.
He’d let her cry in his arms and told her that song lyrics and poems could change
her life. He’d told her it was okay to cut herself—more than okay, he said; it was
beautiful. She’d dyed her hair and cut it with a razor blade and painted her face
white in grief. Then she’d followed him into the underbelly of the world she’d known
and let its darkness seduce and conceal her.

“Why do you love me, Pax?”

He looked at her.

It felt as if her heart were hanging from a thin, silver hook.

“You’re my muse. You know that.” He gave her a lazy smile and went back to pawing
through the jewelry box.

“But you hardly write anymore.”

He turned to her. She saw the anger flash in his eyes. “What do you know about it?”

And there went her heart, tearing free, falling. She couldn’t help thinking about
the love she’d grown up around. The way her parents loved each other and their kids.
She took a step forward, feeling strangely as if she were both breaking free and growing
up at the same time. She imagined the view from the living room, of Bainbridge Island,
and suddenly she ached for the life she once had, for the girl she’d once been. It
was all still there for her, just across the bay.

She let out a deep breath and said his name.

He looked over at her, impatience etched in his jaw, darkening his eyes. She knew
how much he hated it when she questioned his art. Come to think of it, he hated to
be questioned about anything. He loved her most when she was quiet and broken and
cutting herself. What kind of love was that? “Yeah?”

“Kiss me, Pax,” she said, moving close enough for him to take her in his arms.

He kissed her quickly; she held on to him, pulled him close, waited for his kiss to
consume her as it always had.

It didn’t.

She learned then that some relationships ended without fireworks or tears or regret.
They ended in silence. It scared her, this unexpected choice, showed her the depth
of her loneliness. No wonder she’d been running from it for years.

She knew how wounded he had been by his sister’s death and his parents’ abandonment.
She knew that he sometimes cried in his sleep and that certain songs could turn his
mood as black as ink. She knew that just saying his sister’s name—Emma—could unsteady
his hand. There was more to him than the poet or the goth or even the thief. Or, someday,
there could be more. But he wasn’t enough for her now.

“I loved you,” she said.

“And I love you.” He took her hand and led her out of the condo.

Marah wondered if love—or the end of it—would always hurt like this.

“I forgot something,” she said at the front door, tugging free, coming to a stop.
“Meet me at the elevator.”

“Sure.” He walked over to the elevator, pushed the button.

Marah backed into the condo, closing the door behind her. She hesitated a second,
no more than that, and then she locked the door.

He came running back for her, banging on the door, screaming and shouting. Tears stung
her eyes and she let them fall until he yelled, “Screw you, then, you fake bitch,”
and stomped away. Even after that, she sat there, slumped on the floor, her back pressed
against the door. As the sound of his footsteps faded away, she pushed up her sleeve
and counted the tiny white scars on the inside of her arms, wondering what in the
hell she was going to do now.

*   *   *

Marah found the iPod and packed it in a shopping bag with its portable docking station.
Afterward, she moved through the condominium slowly, allowing herself to remember
a thousand small moments with Tully. She found her mom’s journal, too, and packed
that in the bag. For someday.

When she couldn’t stand it anymore—couldn’t stand the oppressive silence of this place
without Tully’s easy laughter and endless talking—she left the condo and went down
to the ferry terminal. Boarding the next boat, she took a seat in one of the booths
and pulled out the iPod. She put the tiny buds in her ears and hit play. Elton John
sang to her.
Goodbye … yellow brick ro … ad …

She turned her head and stared out at the black Sound, watching the tiny golden lights
of Bainbridge Island appear. When the ferry docked, she put the iPod back in the box
and walked out to the terminal, where she caught a bus and rode it out to the turnoff
to her road.

She saw her house for the first time in more than a year, and the sight of it stopped
her in her tracks. The cedar shingles, stained the color of homemade caramel, looked
dark on this cool night; the snow-white trim practically glowed in the golden light
that shone from within.

On the porch, she paused, expecting for just a second to hear her mother’s voice.
Hey, baby girl, how was your day?

She opened the door and went inside. The house welcomed her in the way it had since
she’d first come home from kindergarten, with light and sound and comfortable, overstuffed
furniture. Before she could even think of what to say, she heard a door
whack
open upstairs.

“She’s here! Move it or lose it, Skywalker!”

Her brothers careened out of their upstairs bedroom and came thundering down the stairs
in tandem. They were both dressed in football sweats and wore identical skater-boy
haircuts and had silver braces on their teeth. Wills’s face was ruddy and clear and
showed the first sprouts of a mustache. Lucas’s face was red with acne.

They pushed each other out of the way and came together to pick her up. They laughed
at her feeble efforts to get free. When she’d last seen them they’d been
boys
; now they were almost twelve, but they hugged her with the fierceness of little boys
who’d missed their big sister. And she had missed them, too. She hadn’t known how
much until right now.

“Where’s Paxton?” Wills asked when they finally let her go.

“Gone,” she said quietly. “It’s just me.”

“Excellent,” Wills said in his best stoner-boy voice, nodding his mop of hair. “That
kid was a douchebag.”

Marah couldn’t help laughing at that.

“We missed you, Mar,” Lucas said earnestly. “It was a boner move to run away.”

She pulled them into another hug, this one so tight they squealed and wiggled free.

“How’s Tully?” Lucas said when he drew back. “Did you see her? Dad says we can go
tomorrow. She’ll be awake by then, right?”

Marah’s mouth went dry. She didn’t know what to say, so she gave a little smile and
a shrug. “Sure. Yeah.”

“Cool,” Wills said.

Within moments they were thundering up the stairs again, calling dibs on something.

Marah picked up the shopping bag and climbed the stairs to her old room, opening the
door slowly.

Inside, nothing had changed. Her camp pictures were still on the dresser, her yearbooks
were stacked alongside her Harry Potter books. She tossed the bag on the bed and walked
over to her desk. She wasn’t surprised to find that her hands were shaking as she
picked up her old, tattered, often-read copy of
The Hobbit
. The book Mom had given her so many years ago.

I don’t think you’re quite ready for
The Hobbit
yet, but someday soon, maybe in a few years, something will happen to hurt your feelings
again. Maybe you’ll feel alone with your sadness, not ready to share it with me or
Daddy, and if that happens, you’ll remember this book in your nightstand. You can
read it then, let it take you away. It sounds silly, but it really helped me when
I was thirteen.

“I love you, Mommy,” Marah had said, and her mom had laughed and said, “I just hope
you remember that when you’re a teenager.”

But Marah had forgotten. How?

She traced the embossed gold lettering with her fingertips.
Maybe you’ll feel alone with your sadness.

Marah felt a surge of loss so keen it brought tears to her eyes and thought:
She knew me
.

Twenty-four

I am back in my make-believe world, my once-upon-a-time world, with my best friend
beside me. I can’t picture where exactly, but I am lying in grass, staring up at a
starlit sky. I hear strains of a song. I think it’s Pat Benatar, reminding me that
love is a battlefield. I don’t know how it’s possible, all this coming and going,
but theology was never my strong suit. Pretty much everything I know about religion
comes from
Jesus Christ Superstar
.

My pain is gone; the memory of it remains, though, like a remembered melody, distant,
quiet, but there, in the back of your mind.

“Katie, how can it be raining?”

I feel drops, soft as the brush of a butterfly wing against my cheek, and for no reason
that makes sense, I feel sad. This world around me—as strange as it is—made sense
before. Now something is changing and I don’t like it. I don’t feel safe anymore.
Something essential and important is wrong.

It’s not raining.

Her voice has a gentleness I haven’t heard before. Another change.

It’s your mother. She’s crying. Look
.

Were my eyes closed?

I open them slowly. The blackness fades unevenly; images drizzle down, drawing light
into them. Tiny grains of darkness are drawn together like metal shavings and form
themselves into shapes. Light appears suddenly, and I see where I am.

The hospital room. Of course. I’m always here; it is the other places that are mirages.
This is real. I can see my banged-up body in the bed; my chest rises and falls in
time to the bedside machine that makes a
whiz-thunk
sound at every exhalation. A graph shows the mountainous green line that is my heartbeat.
Up and down, up and down.

My mother is beside the bed. She is smaller than I remember, thinner, and her shoulders
sag as if she has spent a lifetime carrying a heavy burden. She is still dressed for
another era—that time of Flower Power and Maui Wowie and Woodstock. She is wearing
white socks and Birkenstock sandals. But none of that is what matters.

She is crying. For me.

I don’t know how to believe in her, but I don’t know how to let go, either. She’s
my mother. After all of it, all the times she’s held on to me and all the times she’s
let me go, she’s still woven through me, a part of the fabric of my soul, and it means
something, that she’s here.

I feel myself straining forward, listening for her voice. It seems loud in the quiet
of this room. I can tell that it is the middle of the night. Beyond the windows, it
is jet-black outside.

“I’ve never seen you in pain,” she says to my body. Her voice is almost a whisper.
“I never saw you fall down the stairs or scrape your knee or fall off a bike.” Tears
are falling from her eyes.

“I’ll tell you everything. How I became Cloud, how I tried to be good enough for you
and failed. How I survived all those bad years. I’ll tell you everything you want
to know, but I can’t do any of it if you don’t wake up.” She leans over the bed, looks
down at me.

“I’m so proud of you,” my mother says. “I never told you that, did I?”

She doesn’t wipe her tears away. They fall onto my face. Leaning closer, she is almost
close enough to kiss my cheek. A thing I can’t ever remember her doing. “I love you,
Tully.” On this, her voice breaks. “Maybe you don’t care, and maybe I’m too late,
but I love you.”

I have waited my whole life to hear those words from my mother.

Tul?

I turn to Kate, see her glowing face and her beautiful green eyes. In them, I see
my whole life. Everything I’ve ever been, and ever wanted to be. That’s what your
best friend is: a mirror.

It’s time,
she says, and I understand at last. I have been coasting with Kate, drifting lazily
down the river of my life with her beside me, but there are rapids up ahead.