Thin Space (15 page)

I’m gripping the icepack so hard now I think it might split apart.

My mother turns to look at me. There’s a sharp intake of breath at the sight of my face. Then she slumps forward and I can hear her soft moaning.

“Mom,” I croak out. I can’t say anything else.

It’s never going away. This reality. I can see that. What I did back in August—that set something in motion, something that can’t be stopped.

My father puts the blinker on even though we’re just turning into the driveway and there’s no other car on this street. I shove my way out, suck in a breath of icy air, head into the house before I can say anything—do anything—worse to my parents.

They ground me. Not that it really matters. I have nowhere to go. First day of my suspension, Monday, I shut myself in his bedroom. If I hear my mother saying
Oh, Marsh
again, I might slam my fist through a wall.

She took the day off from work. I can hear her puttering around downstairs. Clattering dishes in the sink. Vacuuming. Once when I emerge to take a shower, I pass my room. I see
she’s picked up, removed the balled up sock from the floor and the clothes that were draped over the desk chair. There’s a couple empty boxes on the bed, ready and waiting to be filled.

Just looking at them makes my head pound.

Day two, I plow through all my schoolwork. Suspension technically means you get a bunch of zeroes for everything you miss, but the school is kind enough to let me make things up. Probably Mrs. Golden’s doing. Whatever. The work keeps my mind busy.

Day three, I can’t stop looking at my face in the mirror. My nose bulges out. A strange array of colors spreads across my cheeks. For the moment, I look like someone else.

Later, my parents take me to my therapy appointment. It’s one of the things the school suggested, that I get back into counseling. I know there’s no way it’s going to help, but I act like I’ll try it.

When we walk into the clinic, I have a major blast of déjà vu. Over three months have passed by, and here I am back in the same place. I’ve looped right around to where I started.

The counselor’s one of those ageless-looking guys. He could be thirty or sixty with his short blond hair, wire glasses, and loosened tie. I sink down in the same overstuffed chair I sat in the last time I was here. I notice he’s still got a tissue box prominently displayed in the center of the glass coffee table.

We shake hands, scroll through the initial small talk:
how are you, good to see you.
He plunks down across from me. “So, what’s the other guy’s face look like?” he says.

Ha ha. The guy’s such a jokester. Then he gets down to business, more déjà vu about opening up, expressing myself, letting it all out. Apparently, it’s his standard lecture.

I nod along. Because it’s good advice. Theoretically.

Now he’s channeling Mrs. Golden, exploring the guilt angle. “It was an accident,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

More nodding from me, even though the movement reminds me that I have a bashed-in nose.

“Did you feel connected to your brother? Did you feel like you were two halves of the same person? Because I’ve read that about twins, identical twins, especially. That they have a bond that goes beyond the normal sibling . . . ”

I fade out here and start thinking about Brad for some reason. What is it like to be Brad? To have no identical Ben or Bill wearing the same face? To be just a lone, solitary guy? People see you and meet you and talk to you, and you’re just Brad, the guy they meet, the guy they know.

What’s that like to never have someone blink at you and wonder who you are?

“—difficulty in moving beyond a loss,” the counselor is saying.

Because that’s what it was like for me and my brother every single day of our lives—people pausing and frowning.
Marsh?
they’d say.
Whoops! I mean Austin, sorry.
The teachers wrinkling their foreheads:
Twins, how cute. Now, which one of you is which?
Our friends, laughing,
MarshandAustin
, running the words together so it was one name, and they wouldn’t have to take a guess.

“—coping with the loss of a part of yourself—”

Who wouldn’t get tired of that? Who wouldn’t wish for one second that you could have people know you for
you
? Without that stupid pause, that intake of breath, while they thought,
Is it him, or is it the other one
?

“—learning to face a reality that includes only one—”

Honest to God, it was one second, one freaking second, that I wished it.

“Marsh,” the counselor says.

I can feel the vein pulsing in my head, my teeth grinding together. I grab the tissue box to give my hands something to do.

“I’m doing all the talking here.” Laugh. “It’s your turn now. Do you have something to say?”

“Uh. Not really.” I clear my throat. “Unless you have a time machine stashed somewhere in your office.”

Another laugh. “What I mean is that opening yourself up, letting things out—this can really—”

How many whack jobs have sat in this overstuffed chair and listened to this guy drone? Did any of them feel like crushing a tissue box? Did anyone ever want to bang his head through the glass coffee table?

I imagine that gruesome scenario for a minute, and it’s strangely enjoyable, then before I know it, my mind’s traveling down a familiar road.

Let’s say a guy couldn’t take any more of this blah blah express yourself crap. So he killed himself—took himself out of the world, right here, in this overstuffed chair. Unbeknownst to him, his mother once sat in the same space. She was messed up too, maybe worried about being pregnant,
who knows. So she was sitting here like, twenty years before, at the moment her baby’s soul came through.

Which made a thin space in this shrink’s office. Right here, where I’m sitting, pulverizing a tissue box.

I’m probably going to rip the damn thing to shreds. I can feel my fingers scraping against the cardboard, the tug in my knuckles as I pull. It’s like I’m possessed.
Stupid,
I tell myself.
You
are
alone now. You got what you wanted.

I chuck the tissue box down and my mind goes blank. Suddenly I find myself bending forward, reaching for my bootlaces. The movement is familiar, comforting, right. I’m slipping out of my boots, yanking off my socks.

I stand up. Press down.

It’s a long shot. A wild goose chase. A needle in a haystack. The chances that the same guy came through and went out—

Remote, I know.

But Mrs. Hansel—that day in her front room, when she looked at me . . . Even on her last day on earth, when she was about to pass through herself, she lifted her hand, pointed it right at me. She knew.

I’ll make a thin space.
That’s what she told me.
You can see your brother.

And I have to believe her.

D
ay four of my suspension, Thursday afternoon, and I’m waiting outside for Maddie. My parents are at work. Left me home alone with milk and sandwich meat in the fridge, a load of laundry to do, and trash to haul out to the curb. They’ve given up talking to me, and they’re barely speaking to each other. I know they’re losing it, floundering around with their own sadness and anger.

“Grief takes time,” the counselor said after I followed him out of his office, barefoot, swinging my brother’s boots by the laces. My parents stared at my feet, at each other, and at the counselor. He shrugged his shoulders. “Grief takes time.”

He’s wrong. A ticking clock isn’t going to change anything. The truth is I set this mess in motion and there is no other way to fix it.

Gray-white day. The clouds are swollen with a storm. According to the weather channel, a cold front’s supposed
to barrel through tonight. Tomorrow, Andover will be the arctic tundra.

The bus rumbles up to the corner, and I hang back, leaning against a pillar on my front porch. Lindsay and Heather step off first, huddle together before hiking off in the other direction.

Then Maddie stumbles down the bus stairs, her face down against the wind. I head across my yard toward her, tromping over the packed snow. “Hey,” I call out.

“Marsh,” she says, and my stomach twitches.

But I try to sound light, friendly. “I guess you know I got suspended. Today’s my last day.”

She nods. We’re standing at the foot of her driveway, facing each other. We both look down for a second. I’m checking to see if she’s wearing her boots—she is—and maybe she’s wondering the same about me—I am.

“I was waiting for you,” I say. The wind pushes between us like a wall. “I need to talk to you.”

Maddie turns toward her house. “You can’t come in,” she says.

“I know. Your brother, he doesn’t—”

“No,” she says, “
I
don’t want you to.”

I probably deserve that. The past few days I’ve been thinking about Maddie. When I stuffed her feet into her boots in the Goodfoods parking lot. When she trooped around the football field. When I saw her leaning over me in the cafeteria.

“I have to ask you something,” I say. But I stop because I’m not sure how to phrase it. The thing I’ve been thinking
about is this: What made Maddie cross the cafeteria that day? Was she just like every other face in the crowd, curious to watch a fight? Or did she want to see
me
?

I clear my throat. “Uh, when I got in that fight with Brad—”

“Brad’s a dumb jerk,” she says. “I’m not doing that carpool anymore.” She lowers her eyes, shudders. “Your face looks . . . really bad.”

“It’s just bruises. I’ve had worse.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Really. I hardly notice it.” I stare at her cheeks, how the red spreads out across her skin, and suddenly I know it. She did want to see me. She was worried. I’m feeling like this is an important point, but I’m not exactly sure why.

“Good.” She glances toward her house. “So, what’d you want to ask me?”

I switch gears here, because I don’t want to talk about the fight anymore. “I’ve been thinking about your idea, the obituaries you found online. I saw you on the football field last week, and I figured you must’ve read something on that site about it. Did a person die out there?”

“Yeah. A long time ago.” She juts out her chin. “You know what? I’m really cold. I’m going inside.” She starts to push past me.

“Wait. Are you mad about something?”

“Marsh,” she says, drawling out the word and sending another twitch to my stomach. “The last time we talked your . . . um . . . girlfriend was giving me a ride home.”

“Logan’s not my—”

She puts her hand up. “And the time before that, you told me you were using me to get inside my house.”

“I never said—”

“Plan A, to get into the front room of my house. That’s what you told me.”

“I wasn’t using—”

“Whatever. It’s okay. I don’t care.”

“I didn’t mean . . . It’s not what it . . . Really. I wasn’t—” I know I’m babbling like an idiot. I can’t remember where I was going with this. Talk to Maddie after school—that was the extent of my plan. “Listen. I’m sorry.” But she’s marching away, the wind whipping her ponytail. “Wait! You’re right.”

She flips her head around.

“It’s crazy, I know.” My words rush out before I can stop them. “It’s like I’ve been in a fog. Since I woke up in the hospital, and I found out about my brother . . . See, everything’s so messed up.” Big understatement of the year and I laugh a maniacal-sounding laugh.

“What?” she says.

“You’re right. I guess I was sorta using you. Which is not cool.”

She frowns. “It’s not.”

We stare at each other. Maddie’s wearing that same worthless jacket. Her ponytail is flicking around in the wind. Someone needs to buy her a hat or something. “I’m sorry,” I say again.

The frown’s still there, then her eyes widen and she smiles. “Hey,” she says, “did you ever try walking barefoot around a cemetery?”

“No”—I smile too—“because people don’t die in cemeteries. They’re just buried there.”

“Huh,” she says. “You’re right.”