The shadows outside her room disappeared and the moths circling her overhead light heaved a sigh of a relief.
“Mom?” a girl on the other end was saying.
Cali didn’t respond at first. She’d expected a boy. A gruff, horny boy sneaking around the detention facility after lights-out, hoping to find a little company on the other end of a random phone number in the middle of the night.
“Ma?” the high voice came again. She sounded like a little kid, Cali thought. A scared little kid.
“Who is this?” Cali finally said.
“Don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up.” The girl’s words came out in a tinkling rush, like glass shattering against the floor. There was no sound after that, and Cali thought the girl must be holding her breath. The absence of voice and air jabbed at Cali’s insides, sent a passing tingle from the base of her spine to her scalp.
“Who is this?” Cali asked again. In the background, there was a muffled echo, an intercom system of some sort. If the robot voice on the phone hadn’t announced the caller’s location first, Cali might wonder if she was in the hospital or maybe the airport. Coming or going. Staying or leaving. “Hello?”
“It’s . . . Mom, it’s me.” The girl added that me part at the end, her voice cracking into a whisper. She said it like a question, like she wasn’t even certain herself.
Cali lifted her crayon from the paper. She hadn’t realized she’d been doodling. Beneath her pathetic scrawl and strikeouts was an asymmetrical spiderweb, a moth ensnared in its silky, Mango Tango threads.
Now she’d definitely have to start over. Once she figured out the rest of what she wanted to say. Absently, she went back to her words.
other path. disappear.
there are things you don’t know and
“It’s me,” the girl was saying again, more forcefully now. “Your—”
“Wrong number.” Cali didn’t know why she’d accepted the charges. Desperate for a momentary connection, maybe. Curiosity, that was part of it, too. But her parents were in their room now and the baby was tucked away and the monitor’s red light blinked from her beanbag chair and Cali had work to do. Solitary, important work.
She pulled the phone away from her ear to hang up, but the girl persisted, screeching across the wires. Her voice had somehow strengthened. Clarified.
“Fine. Okay,” Cali told the girl. The letter stared up at her from the desk, messy and incomplete, littered with her absentminded drawing, and she didn’t know what else to say. The girl was crying now, sniffling and trying to hide it and act tough or whatever you were supposed to do in those situations, which, like lots of things, Cali had read about somewhere but didn’t actually know.
“Thank you,” the girl said. She kept sniffling and Cali pictured her wiping her nose on the part of her hand where palm met wrist. She looked at her own wrist again, turned the silvery scar back and forth in the light.
“I don’t know what else to do,” the girl said quietly. “I need to find her.”
“Your mother?”
“Do you know her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Her name is Laura Zelnick. Unless she got married again. Maybe she got married again.” The girl’s voice was giving out on her, the momentary strength of it spent. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, Cali figured, and she sounded so broken, so lost. How could you not know if your own mother was married or what her phone number was, even?
Cali dragged the crayon across her letter, hovering in loops and swirls in the bottom left corner. Her hand wanted to draw a flower, a heart, a bird. She forced it into other shapes.
“I don’t know,” Cali said again. “I’ve had this number a few years. Sorry,” she added at the end. And she kind of was.
There was a sigh on the other end. Then the squeaky, muffled sound of a receiver shifting from one ear to the other. “You were my one phone call.”
The one phone call. Cali had read enough crime novels to know what that meant.
“It’s the only number I have,” the girl whispered. “I mean, it used to be . . . it’s the one I remember.”
things that maybe are
different in your memories.
memories always lie. there are
other things,
too, but
“What did you do, anyway?” Cali wanted to know. Her crayon pressed against the paper, still scribbling, alternating between her words and the drawing that crept along the bottom.
“Oh, you know. Whatever.” The girl laughed, but not in a funny way. It was more like a dry cough. “What did you do?”
I
about that night and
“I cut my wrist.” The response was automatic, Cali’s lips and tongue conditioned to form the words after all those weeks in group. My name is Calista. I’m here because I cut my wrist. I cut my wrist because I thought I wanted to die. I thought I wanted to die because—
“I’m . . . shit. Sorry.”
Cali sighed. They were both just there, connected by wires and waves, breathing into the phone and adding things at the end that you were supposed to say but didn’t really mean.
it’s not your fault, so
don’t blame yourself.
I need it not to
hurt anymore and I know
it
everyone thinks
“It’s fine,” Cali said. The tip of her Mango Tango crayon had snapped on the last word, and she flipped the Crayola box around to the back. The built-in sharpener had been pried out, even though it was only a plastic one, too narrow for even her pinkie finger.
She selected another color at random. Outer Space, this one was called. She got back to work, scribbled messy words and long, wispy strokes like the trees outside her window, bending and blowing and almost black.
“What will you do?” Cali asked the girl. “About your mom, I mean.” She wanted to ask again about how the girl had landed at the facility. She wondered what someone had to do to end up so alone, stuck in a messed-up place like Eastport with no one to call but a total stranger in the middle of the night. For a second she imagined what it might be like if the two traded places—if Cali could be left alone there, finally forgotten, and this girl could surround herself with parents and a baby and crayons and nosy next-door neighbors who liked cats and got involved in all the wrong things. Maybe their separate lives weren’t so bad as far as lives went. Maybe they were just being lived by the wrong girls.
Anyway, whatever this girl did, Cali thought it must’ve been pretty bad. And now it was after midnight, and Cali had things to do. Soon she’d be somewhere else. Something else. Dust, maybe. Way to go. Mission accomplished. This girl and her mother and her sad story would go on without her and there was nothing she could do, even if she wanted to help. Which she really didn’t.
Plus she still had to figure out her note.
“I don’t know,” the girl said after a while.
There was another long pause, dead air, the intercom beeping and echoing. It sounded like the girl was in a small room with the door open. Cali imagined the gray-green walls, the busy hallways, and file cabinets full of records. It probably looked a lot like the center. She wondered if Dr. Berg visited Eastport. Talked to the girls about their mistakes, their attention-seeking behavior, their delicate recovery process.
“Do you know what’s gonna happen to you after this?” Cali asked.
“No idea,” the girl said. “But what about . . . I mean, do you know what you’re gonna do?”