Suicide's Girlfriend (14 page)

Her chin wobbled. All my life, I've been unable to watch another person cry without beginning to cry myself. Quick, I dropped down on my knees in front of Heather's chair. “Mugs!” I said. “Come on, Mugs, your hair's fine!”

Mugs was what Heather used to call me when she thought I was angry with her. Laughing, and, in a gangland accent, she'd plead, “Mugsie! Don't kill me, Mugs! You know I didn't mean nuttin'!”

“Here, Mugs. Here you go.” I picked the candy dish up off the kitchen table and started to pass it back and forth like smelling salts beneath Heather's nose, but she jumped out of her chair, knocking me onto my heels.

“Everybody but you believes I'm a witch, Jenny! Everybody!” She started toward the stairs, then held out a hand to stop me from following. “Just . . . wait here,” she said.

In the old days, not wanting to waste a minute of our time together, Heather and I had even accompanied each other on trips to the bathroom. I felt sad, alone in the kitchen, and so I assigned myself a bit of business: found the appropriate bag in the cupboard, refilled the candy dish, though my tongue was already sore from the lemon drops' sugary grit.

“Look.” Heather stood in the kitchen doorway. In one hand she held her coat, in the other a naked Ken doll. The doll's legs had been sawed off at the knees, and several nails hammered inexpertly through its bare chest, but I recognized it immediately as one of the dolls that Heather and I had sworn to save for our children—who, we had assumed, would also be best friends.

Heather ran her thumb over the worn flocking on the doll's head.
“The Middlemists helped me make it for Mike Lichtenberg. We'll leave it on his doorstep on our way back.”

I knew Heather had been hanging around with the Middlemists, a pair of giggly twins. I was surprised, however, that she knew Mike Lichtenberg well enough to make him a voodoo doll. I had once tried to fall for Mike: tall, handsome, with the sort of black glasses moviemakers always stick on a male face to suggest intelligence. Mike Lichtenberg was not intelligent. Mike was simple as a soft drink ad. No. Simpler. Simple as the soft drink itself. The only time I really cared for him was when he caught me in a lie and repentance added a whiff of complexity to a few of our encounters.

“Why Mike Lichtenberg?” I asked.

With little upward yanks—pop, pop—Heather removed the doll's arms from their sockets. “Why Mr. Spit-in-Your-Mouth-When-He-Kisses-You?” she asked, then tossed what remained of the doll on the table.

I laughed, raised the doll to my eye as if it were a telescope; through its hollow middle, I watched as Heather deposited the arms in the trash basket under the sink, then rummaged through a pile of folded-up grocery sacks, all the while complaining because each sack featured the market's smiling, freckled Jack and Jill, and how could she deliver a voodoo doll in something so absurd?

The truth: the idea of Heather's kissing a boy I had once kissed bothered me. I have to admit that I was distressed by the notion that it might signal her catching up to me in the world of romance. Also: Why hadn't she told me about it? Did she like Mike Lichtenberg? Had she hoped he would call back and he hadn't?

Heather was not saying.

By that point in my life, of course, I understood love could be shameful, force all kinds of words underground. Just a few minutes later, as Heather and I drove across the snowy town—the streets empty, white, quiet as dawn—we passed right by the Lighthouse Motel and I didn't mention to Heather that it had been at the Lighthouse that I'd gotten my heart broken by Andy Rainier.

On and on, that heartbreaker Andy had talked: we couldn't see each other anymore, I was too intense, he didn't even know if he'd come back to the college next quarter. While he talked, I plucked at the meaty edge of the motel's chenille bedspread. I stared at the painting of a canal scene that hung on the motel wall. An earlier guest had enriched the painting with stick figures toting flamethrowers and machine guns. Other stick figures, burning, fell through the Venetian sky. Tiny balloons attached to the figures contained the words “Help, help!” and “I'm on fire!”

Such a pretty boy, with his golden brown hair and cocker spaniel eyes, his laugh that rang out in yelps and groans. A complete stranger, Andy Rainier had walked right up to Heather and me the day we attended his college's little winter festival. He poured a shot of rum into the cup of cocoa in my hand and said to Heather, “I'm in love with your friend, here.” He loved me without even knowing me, which, at the time, seemed miraculous; and then, a year later, he knew me and didn't love me, and what could be worse than that?

Heather said, “Stay on Lake Shore Drive, Jen. There'll be a road between the marina and the trailer courts that's supposed to be the fastest way to the spot where the car went off.”

I nodded. I tried not to be glum. My mother's Buick felt nice and warm, didn't it? Heather and I were together again. Between us sat an unopened bag of lemon drops and the rest of the bottle of vodka, insurance against the lonely night.

“Listen, Heather,” I said, and, then—suddenly shy—invented a little itch on my neck that I paused to scratch. “I wasn't going to tell anybody this, but, you know, because of what you told me . . . well, I guess I have powers, too. I may be a witch, too.”

Heather turned to stare at me. “You can't be a witch, too, Jenny.” She shook her head, hard. “I bet this has something to do with Andy, doesn't it?”

“No,” I said. “He's just . . . the proof, that's all. See, I never
told
anyone, but I've been doing this thing, at night, where I send him, you know—”

I stopped. To my surprise, I was ashamed to say “love” in front of Heather, afraid she'd scoff at the word.

“I send him messages,” I said. “Like, I imagine a beam of light carrying a message to him, and when I ran into him at that tire place—I told you? Last week?”

She nodded without looking my way.

“He said he
knew
what I was doing, Heather.”

Face covered by a ski mask that had made him appear both preposterous and scary, almost amphibious, the beautiful Andy Rainier had zoomed his motorcycle into the lot of General Tire, right up to the bay where I stood waiting for someone to work on my father's car. I couldn't speak right away. I'd had a queer sensation of invisibility ever since Andy's good-bye, and seeing him again made me feel even stranger, as if I'd resumed some sort of form, but too fast. There he was in that crazy mask—which was just as well since I'd never been able to locate the wellspring of my love for him anywhere more precisely than in his face. Through the orange and black lips of the ski mask he said, “All right, Jenny. I don't know what you're up to, so you tell me. You've been . . . calling to me or something, right? At night? Sending me messages or something?”

From her perch in the passenger's seat, Heather groaned at my account: “Oh, well!” She tucked her legs up beneath her as if she were at home on a couch, then turned to stare out her window.

I felt stung by the dismissal and so didn't tell the rest of my story: How, in that parking lot, I had said, “All it is, is that I love you, Andy,” because maybe I had powers, and maybe I didn't, and if they couldn't make him love me, forever and ever, then they weren't worth any more to me than the sparks that flew up when I straightened my covers in the night.

And what did Andy Rainier say to me in closing—this boy with his lovely face covered by terrible red and purple zigzags, orange arrows, the kind of multiple eyes savages have been known to don to keep the devils away? “Knock it off, Jenny. You understand? You got to knock it off, right now.”

At the time, it struck me as extraordinary that a young man who could be disappointed that his girlfriend didn't produce noisier orgasms—communicate her relish through back-raking and bites—that this young man could remain unimpressed by the fact that he could hear that same girlfriend's voice over miles and miles of empty space. Now, of course, I understand. We had different wants. Also, maybe my voice in the night was a little scary. I had not, after all, meant for him to hear me calling. I had hoped that he would imagine that he thought of me all on his own.

The snow grew deeper as Heather and I drove farther away from town. The banks were higher than I could ever remember having seen them; eight, ten feet in some places, on and on, deep and pure and beautiful as canals cut in white stone. We could have been driving in a riverbed on the face of the moon.

One of several letters I composed in my head as I drove that night, never sent:

Heather had turned around in her seat again by the time we were halfway to the trailer courts. “Maybe we shouldn't drive out there, after all, Jen. Maybe the roads are just too awful.”

I shrugged as if I'd hardly noticed the roads. “Why don't you open those lemon drops?” I said. “Let's have a drink.”

Heather tore open the candy bag for me, then leaned it up against the side of my leg. “I don't want anything, though,” she said. She closed her eyes and set her chin on the dash, the way a big dog does sometimes—a shepherd, a retriever. “That's the worst part of you and Andy breaking up: no more dope.”

“Nice,” I said. “Thanks.”

She didn't open her eyes when she responded. “Oh, please, Jen. How do you expect me to feel about you guys breaking up? I mean, it's not like you ever even
tried
to call to me, did you? Like you called to him?”

I was startled to a ridiculous degree—you would have thought she'd asked if I'd ever wanted to make love to her—but before I could think of an answer, she said, all in a rush:

“It's too bad you didn't, because if you had—if you'd gotten through, then I'd know whether to believe whether you have powers or not.”

Feebly, I offered, “I could try now, if you want.”

“God!
No
. Anyway, we've talked about it, it wouldn't count.”

I knew I had been a lousy friend. Again and again, I had canceled plans with Heather if Andy Rainier called at the last minute for a movie, a dance, even an ice cream cone. Still, just then I was feeling more anger than remorse. All I really wanted to do was point out that I had better proof of my powers than Heather had of hers; that accidents happened day in, day out—

Instead, I just drove faster, scarcely slowing at all to turn onto the little road carved out between the marina and the trailer court.

Heather yelped—maybe I did too—as the Buick made some dreamy swerve, knocking a load of powder off a bank before I got us straightened out again.

“Jen,” Heather gasped, “God, we can't drive up this road!”

I grinned and shoved the bag of candy across the seat. “You should try these. They're the best yet: sweet and sour and salty, too.”

“Stop!” Heather's hands gripped the dash so hard she looked as if she might tear it off, throw it at me. “Are you crazy? Turn around.”

My stomach fluttered—she was better than I at showing anger outright—but I managed to smile, say, “No place
to
turn around.”

The big snowbanks swallowed the trailer court in an instant. We passed a boarded-up hatchery, and then the backside of a series of greenhouses—one of them lit up, revealing a tremendous plant, leaves
large as platters pressing against the glass roof. It was the greenhouses that made me realize I had been out that way in the past. During the years before he left for college, my big brother Max had loved to suddenly turn off a main road and drive me down deserted lanes, terrify me with his immediate transformation into a variety of freaks. He did this frequently, but I never seemed to be able to prepare myself for the moment; whenever he started in, it seemed absolutely possible that a person might be your brother one moment and a drooling madman the next.

A terrible, low growling—that was one way Max began. The two of us would be coming home from the skating rink, say, or maybe he'd picked me up at Girl Scouts. I'd hear the growl, or realize that Max now bobbed his head in a frantic, broken-necked sort of way as the car weaved back and forth across the road. “Jenny,” Max whispered. “Oh, my god, Jenny! I think . . . I think . . . I think I'm losing my mind!” Something like that. Pretending to be spastic, retarded, possessed. He leered, he rolled his eyes. Ropes of spit hung from his lips. He never stopped until I started to cry.

“Jenny,” Heather said, making her voice as flat as possible. “I'm
waiting
for you to turn around.”

Wall-eyed, slack-jawed, drooling, I tipped my head toward her shoulder and I mumbled, “Wha? Who you? What you do in my car, li'l girl?”

I was not, however, my brother. I was a drunk girl driving fifty-nine miles an hour on a road no wider than a back alley, a girl who wanted, simultaneously, to win back and punish her friend, and when Heather Pierce looked my way, then lowered her head to her knees and began to shriek in what I immediately recognized as real terror, “Stop! Stop the car!” I did.