Marrow (24 page)

Loaf of bread and peanut butter: $4.76

Socks and shampoo: $7.40

Toilet wand: $3.49

Coffee: $5.60

Aspirin and milk: $6.89

This week I spent 137.50. Try to spend less next week!
I write in the margin of the notebook.

I think of the places I’d take Judah if he were with me: to the market, and across the Sound on a ferry, a stroll on Bainbridge Island, a lunch at my favorite oyster bar. I call him once, but hang up when I hear his voice. I don’t know what to say to him, and I’m afraid he doesn’t miss me. When the day arrives for me to pick up my keys, I carry myself into the rental office, sure something will happen. They will decide I’m not good enough to live there, they’ll find out I killed a woman and burned her body, they’ll know what I am and send me to prison instead. When the landlord sees me, he exclaims, “It looks like you’re here to identify a body, not pick up your keys!” I laugh at the irony and relax. If he’s in this good of a mood, he’s not prepping to tell me that I won’t be moving in today. In the end, the landlord hands me my keys and shakes my hand, congratulating me on my new home.

I carry my garbage bags of possessions up to the fourth floor and deposit them in my living room before I wander around. It’s beautiful. It’s mine. I want Judah to be here. I want my mother to be proud. I wipe both of those thoughts away quickly and pack my few possessions into the closet.
A job,
I think.
A job, and Doyle, and life.

I buy things: a chair, plates, knives and forks, a blowup mattress, and a blanket with a large, black crow on it. A coffee maker. During the day, I walk the streets, looking in store windows for HELP WANTED signs, and speaking to bums who assume I’m one of them. I take that as a bad sign and buy some new clothes, the type of things that may get me hired. I practice facial expressions in the small mirror in my bathroom. I smile, laugh politely, and keep my voice even and demure. I try to be the type of person someone would want to hire.

And, then, on an unusually sunny day, I am eating a small lunch of salad and soup at an all night diner in Capitol Hill, when the manager jokingly asks if I am looking for a job.

The diner is called Myrrh, and serves everything from waffles to crab legs. They let me work the graveyard shift because I am one of the few who is willing to do it. I start my shift at nine when the dinner crowd is thinning, and the servers who have worked all day are moody and short tempered, eager to go home for the night. I help them wrap their silverware in napkins, and sweep their sections, just as eager to see them gone. There is another girl who works the late shift. A pretty Asian girl named Kady Flowers. She keeps to herself, and so do I. We work together seamlessly, communicating with painfully short sentences:
Refills for table five. Ran your food for twenty-three. Taking bathroom break.
It works well for both of us. I sometimes wonder what Kady is hiding. Did she kill someone, too, or did someone kill her?

My shift ends at five, right as the sun is coming up. There is something both deeply demeaning and deeply satisfying about waiting tables. The jostling in the dining room, the blank-eyed stares that make you feel like an intruder when you’re just refilling a water glass, the yelled-out orders, minus the thank you. You are just a face, a nametag. It gives me the anonymity that I need, and an emptiness that I perhaps deserve. Mornings, when my shift ends, I walk to my tiny apartment and make myself tea with bags I steal from Myrrh. I sit at the window and think about Judah, and Nevaeh, and Little Mo. I think about my mother too—the way she used to be when she loved me. I am bone deep lonely.

When I have lived my new life for six months, I fill out the application and have my transcripts sent to University of Washington. I start with two classes a semester: Psychology 101, Comparative Animal Behavior, and then Behavior Disorders, and Human Development. I ask plenty of questions in class, my hand shooting up twice as much as any of the other students. My professors favor me, as they mistake my self-exploration as a hunger for the business. They think I’ll go far. They suggest master’s programs, they offer to write letters of recommendation, and invite me to sit in on their other, more advanced classes. I play along, because who knows?

I take long walks, and eventually long runs. Before, when I lived in the Bone, I lost weight. Now, I build muscle. It juts out of my body in hard, ugly cords. When I look in the mirror, I can almost see what I’m made of—the tightly pulled muscle, the bone, the marrow that Judah so often spoke about. There are days when I miss the Bone, and that is when I think about my marrow the most—the who I am, the what I am. You can leave, but it never leaves you.

I write letters to Judah, but he seldom writes back, and when he does, it’s just a page of scrawled words I have to work hard to decipher. He’s busy with class … life. I get it. So am I, right?

I sleep little—four hours a day, or night, depending on my work schedule. My eyes resemble darkly bruised moons. I often catch Kady looking at me strangely, like she’s wondering the same thing I wonder about her. One night she slips a tube of something into my hand and then walks away. When I go into the bathroom to examine it, I find that she has given me under eye concealer. Something to wipe away the look of exhaustion. I use it, and it makes a difference. I feel less dead. My customers must think so too, because I get better tips. After a few more weeks, Kady slips a tube of lipstick into my apron pocket. I put it on in the bathroom. It makes me look … alive. When the lipstick and the eye concealer run out, I ask Kady where to buy more. It’s the longest conversation we’ve ever had.

“Where can I buy the makeup you brought me? I couldn’t find it at the pharmacy.”

“I’ll bring you more … my mother sells it.”

Kady Flowers becomes my makeup dealer; concealer and lipstick first, then blush and mascara. She will not let me pay for anything; instead, she lets me roll her share of the silverware. When she suggests one night that I let her cut my hair, I shake my head. “I’ve never cut it,” I say. Her look is one of such grave disappointment that I immediately agree to have her come to my flat the next day. She arrives on what happens to be my twenty-first birthday with a little black backpack in her hand that makes her look like an old fashioned doctor. She takes a cursory look around my four hundred square feet, before setting me in front of the window in my only chair, and pulling out a sequined pouch that holds her tools.

“I go to the beauty school in the city,” she says quietly. “Just in case you’re wondering if I know what I’m doing.” I hadn’t wondered, of course. If someone wants to cut my hair, who am I to stand in their way?

“Is that why you work nights?” I ask.

Kady nods, then says, “You take classes. At UW.”

When I look at her with question in my eyes, she rushes on, “I saw you there once. While I was visiting a friend. You were coming out of a lecture hall I think.”

We are both quiet for a while, soaking in these new details. Kady is touching my hair, lifting it in places like she’s sizing it up.

“Take it all off,” I say suddenly. “As short as you like.” I suddenly feel emboldened by my twenty-one years. The fact that I made it this long without anyone helping me. I might as well have new hair to go with my new face and body. I’ve been here a year, in this city, in this culture.

I close my eyes.

I am not the Margo of the Bone. I am a new, tightly shaped Margo of Seattle, my white lashes painted dark like spider legs, and my iridescent skin blushed. I wonder if my mother would still find me ugly if she saw me now. I should look like a boy with my short hair, but the makeup softens me. Makes me feel tough and feminine all at the same time.

EARLY ONE MORNING
, as the fog rushes in from the Sound, I am walking home from work an hour earlier than usual since the restaurant was dead, when I spot a scuffle down an alley. I linger along the street, wondering if I should do something. There is no one around to call to for help. Sometimes there are fights among the homeless—a strong possibility right now. It’s four in the morning; the late night drinkers have long stumbled home, and the working class has not yet risen. I strain to see the struggle, my breath fogging the air around me. I am cold. I want to wash the restaurant off my skin and crawl into bed. I should leave them to it, and I’m about to when I hear a woman’s scream. Short, like it was cut off before it could gain volume.

I start down the alley, my hesitation trimmed away by the sharp cry for help. I run on my toes—long, quiet strides. He doesn’t hear when I approach from behind, his back to me. A strong, broad man in a leather jacket. Pinned against the wall is a girl younger than I am. Her eyes are bleary and unfocused as she wriggles from side to side. Her attempts are futile. He is three times her size.

One hand is clamped over her mouth, the weight of his shoulder holding her against the wall, and, with his free hand, he is struggling with his pants, urging them down over his thick hips. I watch for a moment, my rage building. It’s a slow boil, but I let it climb—wanting the full force of my anger to be intact before I act.

In my mind I have already killed him. I’ve ripped him off her and slit his throat with the knife I keep strapped to my ankle. But I know I can’t kill him. There is a witness, there would be police, a long day answering questions, and eyes. I don’t want them to know I exist.

I have to be careful; he’s bigger than me. I wait until he’s slipped his pants lower. They hang mid-thigh. He’s taken the time to rip his belt free of the loops and toss it aside. I bend to retrieve it, grabbing one end and dragging it toward me, never taking my eyes from his back. The girl has spotted me. Her eyes are on my face as I approach. I lift a finger to my lips, signaling her to be quiet. It just takes a second—my arms lifting, the belt around his neck. His yelp of surprise is cut short as I pull the belt tight.

“Run,” I say to the girl, before he pushes me backward. His pants restrict his movement, something I was counting on. I do not loosen my hold on the belt, but pull tighter as he repeatedly slams me into the wall. His fingers pull against the belt, but my boot finds leverage against a large metal dumpster, and I wedge it there and hold on tight. I can barely feel the brick bite into my skin, the adrenaline coating my nerves like a nice, rubber sealant. I manage to loop the belt. I hold it with one hand as I reach down for my knife. He almost knocks it from my hand, and, in the process, I slice open his thigh, which causes him to buck more wildly than before. I lose my grip on the belt, and he stumbles free, hissing and gasping for air. He uses his seconds to pull the belt from around his neck. I use my seconds to plow him into the wall, bending at my waist and rushing forward like I’d seen football players on television do. He hits me once, in the face, and I think I’m going to throw up from the pain. He grabs my arm and pulls it behind my back. I think he’s going to rip it from the socket when I swing my free hand up and slash with the knife at his cheek. He lets me go, and I clutch his face. I swing around and press the blade to the soft spot on his neck. His hands come up in surrender, though I know they won’t stay there. Another few seconds, and I’ll be in the weaker position. That’s the thing women don’t get; if you want to keep the upper hand, you have to act faster than they do. So I stab him. Press the blade through his skin until his blood warms my fingers. I didn’t intend to kill, but I did.

Three lives,
I tell myself. I stumble back as he collapses into a pile at my feet. That’s when I see the girl. She ran, but not far enough. She waited to see what would happen, or perhaps she stayed to help. She doesn’t really look committed to any one thing, even her socks—which are pulled up over her tights—don’t match. We lock eyes, hers considerably less bleary than when I’d last looked into them.

“You killed him,” she said.

I wipe a hand across my forehead, unsure of what to do next.

“Who is he?” I ask.

She’s staring at the body, and I have to repeat my question.

“Who
was
he,” she corrects me. “He’s dead.”

She’s a little thing. Not even legal. I eye her too-sexy clothes: a leather mini skirt and a tight sweater, and want to change my question to ‘who are
you
?’ But we are running out of time. Things must be decided. My fingerprints are all over this man. She’s seen my face. We can’t just walk away anymore. Someone might have already seen or heard us and called the police.

“Jonas. I met him online,” she says, in a flat, bored voice. “He told me he was eighteen. We were meeting for the first time tonight. I even snuck out.” Her last sentence she says with surprise.

“How old are you?” I ask. If I can get her to go home now, maybe she’d never talk. I could wipe down the area…

“Sixteen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mary,” she says.

“We have two choices, Mary,” I tell her. “We can call the police—”

“They’ll tell my parents,” she rushes. “They’ll be so pissed.” She wrings her hands, and I notice the smudge of mascara under her eyes.