He looks down at it, then at me, his eyebrows furrowing, for a brief second, then straightening again. Is this the micro-expression he mentioned? Because what I saw there was confusion, for sure. Then something clicks in his head, and his shoulders relax for the first time. He puts the note in his back pocket.
“You should really talk to a therapist, lady,” he says. He turns back for a moment, and I’m pretty sure he winks at me. “Or your dad,” he adds, quietly. Then Tristan opens the door and disappears speedily down the hallway.
MASHA
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I take another one of the cigarettes and head out to the porch to smoke it. The interaction with Tristan has frazzled me to the core. I feel lost and triumphant at the same time, somehow. Was he trying to tell me to talk to my dad about Anna? Or did he think I was crazy and that I needed to talk to someone related to me? I’d spoken to my dad plenty. It’s my mom that I need to reach. But every time I call, her cell goes straight to voicemail, because this not answering the phone thing is some kind of genetic plague. Why did any of us even bother to get phones in the first place? I cannot help but wonder. We either hate them or cannot live without them or both.
Emily was probably right. I shouldn’t have stayed in an apartment with so many ghosts. Everywhere I look, I see June’s face, her giant eyelashes, the little mole on her cheek. I knew she was depressed. But I had no idea how much. I thought she was like everyone else in Riverwest, a standard mixture of high school angst with a dash of rebellion more superficial than not. She was a poet, so it wasn’t exactly unusual. She was a great poet actually. I still remember some of her poems, but especially the one that she wrote and printed on our tack board right before she died:
At the time, I thought she had written it about Liam, who I’d been dating for several months. He was a common topic of conversation in our house then. It was a wild animal, what we had; one day it was eating you alive, the next licking your wounds. It took me a while to learn that wasn’t what a relationship was supposed to be. I think June would have learned that too, had she stuck around. She had a thing for lost causes. I guess I did too, as we did briefly end up dating the same guy. Antonio. The beginning of the end. In a way it was my fault, for bringing him in the house. Of course I didn’t know at the time what would happen, that after he was done confusing me for two months, he would meet his match in emotional imprisonment.
Later, after the funeral and the wake and weeks of confusion, I looked at that poem again and I wondered: am I the other tiny brunette? Was the poem a message to me? Right before June died, after some fight with Liam, I’d hooked up with Antonio again; some silly drunken thing that meant nothing, I’d been over the guy for months. It’s easy to get over someone when you let them live with you for free and then they start dating your roommate. Especially when they’re bipolar and spend much of their time yelling at you. The problem was that Antonio was hot. And I was drinking too much at the time. No one went the committed route in Riverwest, so I didn’t have a clue that Antonio was cheating on her.
Sometimes I wonder if Antonio felt at all responsible—at times I definitely felt responsible, how could I not, when all my friends saw it that way? But I was pretty sure he wasn’t capable of taking responsibility for anything, let alone a person’s need to harm herself. I don’t really blame him, personally. Only a romance novel is about a romance, and our lives are not romance novels. In fact, they aren’t like novels at all. If anything, a life is a room filled with scattered pages. Sure, you could try to deconstruct and organize, but what’s the point? Discovering something isn’t the same as changing it. A feeling can be written about, can be painted, can be sung. The question is what to do about that feeling before it consumes you. How to stop having such feelings in the first place. This was never something June could figure out; any tiny little thing that went wrong would consume her for weeks on end. It wasn’t our fault, what happened, logically I know this. She was a troubled person from the start. She always said writing poetry was her therapy. I’d believed her because it was this way for me too. But she should probably have actually gone to treatment as well, instead of spending weeks on end re-watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the computer and drinking by herself when she got depressed.
You can’t get out of that deep a hole alone; that was one of the main metaphorical points I’d retrieved from watching season six with her. Buffy, I had to admit, was not only a great distraction but a pretty good motivation tool. Buffy was why I’d had the idea to try martial arts in the first place. Kickboxing, originally. Then Krav Maga once I got to Israel and learned enough Hebrew to follow directions. Somehow all the show did to June was make her more lethargic. It was like she didn’t want to get better. The only reason I could come up with when I occasionally tried to come up with a reason beyond laziness, was that part of her must have craved the sorrow, so ubiquitous it came to feel like a friend. To her, sadness was like a drug. And for whatever reason, June didn’t want to stop being sad. I never did find out why. As much time as she’d spent writing her feelings into words, she did not leave a suicide note. Just that poem.
I wipe my eyes, realizing they’re wet. As I said, I never think about June. There’s a reason for that. Weirdly, this is followed by an unquenchable need to talk to my mom, so I take out my phone and try calling her again for the third or fourth time since my arrival. In a few hours, the sun would fall, and it would be Shabbat, which meant I could no longer use my phone. If we are ever going to talk it has to be now.
A throat clearing, then a fuzzy “Hello?”
“Mama?”
“Masha? Is that you?”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Finally. I was starting to get worried,” I breathe. “I tried calling you a few times.”
“About what?” my mom asks, in Russian. Her voice sounds distant, muffled even. Like after she’s had too much wine, or woken up from a late nap. “Is everything OK? Whose phone number is this?”
“Yeah, it’s fine, I just… I haven’t talked to you since I got here and it feels weird—”
“Got here? Where?”
“Milwaukee,” I say, slowly. “Are you telling me that you didn’t know that?”
A pause from the other end of the phone. “I’m in New Jersey.”
A long breath of air escapes my mouth unexpectedly, and I have to close it before it turns into a cry. How extremely strange. My dad had definitely left that out when summoning me here. I had been so looking forward to seeing her. “What are you doing in New Jersey?”
“Oh… it’s a long story.”
“Can I hear this story?”
“Have you talked to your sister?”
“No, that’s kind of—” I pause, suddenly unsure if my mom even knows Anastasia is missing. There seems to be a lot of miscommunication going on here, and I don’t want to make things worse. And why hadn’t my dad mentioned to me that she was out of town?