Notes on an Execution(52)

Everything changed, when you saw her.

Jenny sat in the grass on the quad, the late-autumn light glowing everything orange. She wore a pair of nylon pants and tall white socks—her friends cheered as she did a confident backbend, hands planted in the grass. You watched from across the yawning lawn as Jenny’s belly button arched toward the sky, the curve of her like a monument to something holy.

Right then, you made the promise. You would be normal. You would be good. You took the memories of that summer, and you balled them up, shoving them deep into the crevasse of your unruly body. The sight of her arching back would dissolve those Girls, somehow erase them. You would offer yourself up to her sly, teasing grin, her soft fawn eyes—you would hand her the microscope.

You picked up your notebook, took the first step toward her. That was the great power of Jenny: not love at first sight, but some kind of un-haunting.

This would be it. Your last and only Girl.





Hazel





2011



The night before everything changed, Hazel woke to a squeezing in her chest.

The pain was searing, clenched like an angry fist beneath her ribs. She sat up, shrieking a gasp—it was a September midnight, the sort of humid that still felt like summer, and Hazel panted into the empty vacuum of the bedroom, clutching at her chest, the flame already fading.

“Hazel?”

Luis blinked up from the pillow. The room was lit only by the baby monitor crackling from her nightstand, and Luis’s breath was stale, like sour toothpaste and the garlic chicken she’d cooked for dinner. From the street, Hazel heard nothing—their cul-de-sac was still. She’d become used to the epic hush, but nights like this, the quiet inhabited a personality of its own. Nights like this, it mocked her.

“It’s nothing,” Hazel said, massaging her sternum. “Go back to sleep.”

The feeling had already gone. It did not leave a trace—not even a lingering spasm. It was a pain that could have been imagined, the tail of a dream flicking briefly as it whipped out of sight.

*

Hazel didn’t hear her phone, buzzing from the kitchen counter.

Alma had just come home from the bus stop, and she was singing softly to herself as she untied her shoes, the tune drowned out by the tantrum Mattie was throwing from his high chair. Hazel crouched on the floor, wiping a splat of applesauce with a paper towel.

“Mattie, honey,” she begged. “Please just eat your snack.”

But Mattie only shrieked, scattering a handful of saliva-damp Cheerios onto the floor, pudgy fists banging against the plastic tray. Alma plucked a wet Cheerio from the hardwood and popped it into her mouth, grinning as she sang the tune intended to help her adapt to the first grade. The song was so catchy, Hazel had caught Luis humming it that morning as he swiped shaving cream across his jaw. We love to learn, we love to play, that’s how we do it at Parkwood Day!

“Mama,” Alma whined. “Your phone is ringing.”

Hazel strained against Mattie’s hollering, listening for the vibration. When she finally found her phone, facedown next to the stove in a puddle of water, it was still buzzing. jenny, it blinked.

“Hey.” Hazel clamped the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she lifted Mattie by the armpits out of his high chair. Content on the floor, Mattie picked up Alma’s discarded shoe and lifted the dirty sole to his slobbering mouth.

“The job,” Jenny was saying.

“What? I can’t hear—”

“I got the job,” Jenny said. “I did it, Hazel. I left him. But it was bad, really bad. I didn’t have time to do any of the things we talked about. Ansel read my email, he woke me up late last night. I left, I checked into the hotel, but I don’t have any of my things. Can you come?”

Jenny was crying, choked through the speaker, a siren wailing vaguely in the background. Hazel looked down at Alma, always far too perceptive for her age, an expression of concern painted across her little fox face. Hazel wrapped her fingers in Alma’s silky hair and gazed out at the flat expanse of the neighborhood. It was placid as ever, the sky a blank autumn blue. The calm seemed unfair, nearly taunting.

She remembered only after she made the plan, hung up the phone. Late last night. The squeeze in her chest, that phantom fist. At thirty-nine years old, Hazel had experienced her first Summoning.

*

No one could tell Hazel, now, that she had nothing.

She had Barbie dolls and board books. Baby formula, playdates, macaroni art. She had rice pudding smeared into the carpet and sticky hands early in the morning. A tantrum in the shampoo aisle at Target, a tantrum at the Italian restaurant downtown, a tantrum at her parents’ anniversary party. In the rare moment she found time to reflect, Hazel tried to revel in the chaos and motion, the fierce existence of the world she had so deliberately created.

So when Jenny called with the news, Hazel hunched over the kitchen table, shaking with the calibration. A younger self came flooding in, an annihilating rush: she was eighteen years old again, and Jenny was the whitest sun, the sharpest sound. The refrain from those withering teenage years echoed suddenly back. Be happy for her. In the cave of Hazel’s head, the phrase took on an old wounded tone, the words limp and defeated.

Alma reached out, her face like a worried little psychiatrist—she stroked Hazel’s hair, tender, her palm covered in half-peeled Winnie the Pooh stickers.