Bloodline(49)

Dr. Krause said I can have four a day.

I step into the backyard, moonlight settling like silk across my shoulders. The temperature is ten degrees cooler out here. I shove sweaty hair off my face and go to one of the Adirondack chairs.

It must be two in the morning.

Nighttime’s cloak is the closest thing I have to privacy in Lilydale.

I sink into the chair, feeling drowsier already. Maybe I could sleep outdoors tonight? I bring a cigarette to my mouth and light it. The smell instantly drops Ursula into my consciousness.

Joanie, she’s saying softly, you have to stop making up your stories. You spin everything better or worse than it is. You know what happened to Libby that night. After the party.

The orange ember at the end of my cigarette starts fluttering like a trapped insect. I bring it to my face but can’t find my mouth for the shaking.

You know what happened to Libby that night.

I begin to sweat with the effort of holding the snapshot image from Halloween: Libby, Ursula, and me, laughing, in our costumes at the end of the night.

That’s what happened! Laughter. Friendship.

But the cigarette smoke isn’t letting me hide, not when it smells like Ursula, not when it drifts like poison fog across the anxiety I’ve been swimming in, not when I can no longer keep all my stories straight.

Libby was a vivacious redhead with a laugh that lit up a room, and she reminded me of my mom the second I met her, though I don’t suppose it mattered as much then, when Mom was alive. The three of us—Ursula, Libby, and me—had been assigned to the same dorm floor, and we’d immediately grown as tight as a book, with Ursula the ink, me the paper, and Libby the glue.

That had been something for me.

My first real friends.

So many good memories. Ursula setting off the fire alarms in the dorms while teaching me and Libby to blow smoke rings in the bathroom. The three of us catching the Beatles at Metropolitan Stadium. Eating my first Chinese food with Ursula and Libby, gobbling down chow mein that was all salt and sweet and tender strips of pork. Smoking grass with them, stumbling home after parties with them, sharing my dreams and fears.

Laughing in that Halloween photo.

You know what happened to Libby that night.

I do, know even more than Ursula.

Ursula went home with her boyfriend after the Halloween party, which is probably why Libby sought me out, crying, resembling my mom more than ever. I’d tried my best to listen. She wanted to meet with the abortionist Ursula recommended, but she was Catholic, and terrified she’d go to hell, and what did I think?

I thought it would all look better in the morning.

That’s what I told her.

She killed herself that night. I found her body the next morning.

Joanie, you have to stop making up your stories. You spin everything better or worse than it is. You know what happened to Libby that night. After the party.

Suddenly, I can’t sit in this Adirondack chair another moment. I’m busting out of my own skin, too awful, too fragile to go on. It’s my fault Libby died. I didn’t say the right thing, wasn’t a good friend. I jump up and stab out my cigarette and walk the butt to the trash can. I slip the lighter into the pocket of my dressing gown. I tread across the wet grass, toward Dorothy and Stan’s home, the night’s dew gluing grass clippings to my feet.

If I don’t do something to calm myself, something I know I shouldn’t, I’m going to lose my mind.

I slink to the rear of the house, where I guess the kitchen to be.

I approach the door.

Unlocked.

I slip into Stan and Dorothy’s kitchen, my pulse thudding, the sharp yellow light of the moon revealing a floor plan identical to my own house. Which means—if the upstairs truly is no longer in use because of Stan and his wheelchair—there is only one main-floor room that can be used as the bedroom.

The slashes of moonlight I walk through brush against my skin like cobwebs, warning me back. It’s dangerous, what I’m doing, insane, and I can’t stop myself. I need Dorothy’s white enamel locket.

I need it.

I pad through the dining room, put my hand on the cool doorknob of what I believe is their bedroom. Every hair on my body has become a nerve, a feeler, a shivering caution.

I turn the knob. The door opens with a click. Soft snoring, the stale smell of sleeping bodies. I step into it.

The moonlight is weak, secondhand, on this side of the house, but I make out two forms in the bed, a wheelchair next to the larger. My heart sits in my throat, thick and wide, throbbing, and I’m not thinking about Libby at all, or Ursula or my mom or Lilydale. I’m seeing only the jewelry box on the dresser.

In the second before I open it, it occurs to me that it might be a music box.

But it’s too late.

I open it. Silence, except that one of the bodies in the bed turns and sighs, dropping me into a full-body ice bath. I dare not turn, do not have the muscles or eyes for anything except that white enamel lily locket, the shape and color of the Fathers and Mothers pin, surely holding a photo of Stanley.

It burns in my hand, burns deliciously, when I clasp it, and I taste something like relief. I can’t control anything in Lilydale, not who comes to my house for dinner, not whether I can drink in public, not anything except this. I have Dorothy Lily’s necklace, and when she comes over for dinner with the rest of the Fathers and Mothers, I will know something none of them do. I will have some power.