Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.

IREAD.

Lacey had always discouraged reading that was, as she put it, beneath us. We should spend our time on mind-expanding pursuits, she said. Our mission, and we were obligated to accept it, was an investigation into the nature of things. The fundamentals. Together we paged through Nietzsche and Kant, pretending to understand. We read Beckett aloud and waited for Godot. Lacey memorized the first six stanzas of “Howl” and shouted it over our lake, casting her voice into the wind. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness , she would scream, and then tell me that Allen Ginsberg was the oldest man she would be willing to fuck. I memorized the opening and closing lines of “The Hollow Men” for her, and I whispered it to myself when the dark closed in.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

It sounded like a promise.

Without Lacey, I slid backward. I tessered with Meg Murry; I crept through the wardrobe and nuzzled my face into Aslan’s fur. I swept the dust and warmed the fires in Howl’s moving castle; I turned half invisible with half magic, drank tea with the Mad Hatter, battled Captain Hook, even, occasionally, hugged the Velveteen Rabbit back to life. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an orphan, abandoned and found and saved, until I closed the book, and was lost all over again.

I read, and I wrote.

Dear Lacey , I wrote, sometimes, in letters I hid in an old Sears sweater box, just in case. In my terrible handwriting, with smearing ink, unstained by unfallen tears, I’m sorry , I wrote. I should have known better.

Please come home.

THE LAST SUNDAY IN JULY, I went outside. Just a ride around the block, on the bike my father had quietly collected from the postparty wreckage. The sun felt good. The air smelled good, like grass and summer. The wind sounded good, that thunder you could hear only when you were in motion. When I was a kid, bike riding was an adventure, bad guys on my tail and the wind rushing through a mountain pass, passageway to enchantment. The bike itself was magic back then, the only thing other than a book that could carry me away. But that was kid logic, the kind that ignored the simple physics of vectors. It didn’t matter how fast I pedaled if I was turning in circles. The bike always carried me home.

My father was smoking on the porch steps; he’d started in June, after. The cigarettes made the house smell like a stranger.

I dumped the bike on the lawn, and he stubbed the butt into the cement stair.

“Hannah,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just. . It’s good to see you out.”

“Don’t get used to it.” I said it with my best take-no-shit Lacey front.

He lit up another cigarette. Chain-smoking now. Home in the middle of the day. Probably only a matter of time before he got fired again, or maybe he already had and was afraid to admit it. That used to be the kind of secret we kept. It had seemed romantic, the Don Quixote of it all, his conviction that the present was just prologue to some star-spangled future, but these days he only seemed pathetic. Lacey would have said I was starting to sound like my mother.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I don’t think she’s coming back. Lacey. And I don’t want you thinking it’s about you, that she left.”

Lacey was gone, and he was still trying to claim a piece of her.

“Something happened at her house,” he said. When I asked what made him think that, he admitted — and it had the timbre of admission—“She came here, that night. Before she left.”

Everything went still.

“What did you say to her?

“She needed someone to talk to,” he said. “We talked sometimes.”

What the fuck , the old Dex, the Dex who had Lacey, would have said. What the fuck are you talking about, what the fuck is wrong with you, what the fuck have you done?

She is mine , that Dex would have said, and believed it.

“Your friend had some problems,” he said.

“Everyone has problems.”

“You didn’t know everything about her, kid.”

“What did you say to her?” I asked again. “What did you say that made her leave?”

“All I know is, something happened at home and it upset her. She didn’t want to go back there.”

“But you made her.” My voice was steady, my face blank; he couldn’t have known what he was doing. What was burning away between us.

“No—”

“You told her not to?”

“No. .”

“So what did you say ?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop her. A person has to want to be helped.”

“She didn’t belong to you.” There are things that shouldn’t have to be said.

“She didn’t belong to you, either, kid. But I know what she meant to you. I would never have made her go.”

“But you’re glad she’s gone.”

He shook his head. “She was good for you,” he said, then, sounding less certain, “wasn’t she?”

I wondered what he thought he knew. Who he thought I’d been before Lacey, and who he thought I’d become in her wake. Who he needed me to be: Daddy’s girl, sassy but not skanky, flirting with boys but never fucking them, breaking curfew, breaking laws, breaking everything but my precious hymen, trying to be more like Lacey and less like Lacey at the same time, rebelling, not against him but with him, giving the finger to the Man and to my mother but coming home in time to curl up on the couch and watch Jeopardy! I saw, then, what I hadn’t seen before, that I wasn’t Hannah or Dex for him; I was wholly Jimmy Dexter’s daughter, reflection of whatever he needed himself to be.

“We could go to the movies sometime, if you want. Just you and me, kid, like we used to?”

He wasn’t going to tell me what he’d said to her. Believe what you want , people always say. As if it’s that easy, as if belief and want could dovetail so effortlessly. As if I didn’t want to believe that my father loved me and my parents loved each other, that Lacey was coming home, that I would stop burning with humiliation every time I left the house, that life was fair, tomorrow was another day, Nikki Drummond would burn in hell. Why stop there? I wanted to believe in time travel and ESP and aliens and God, in a world that was more magical than it seemed and a future that beelined out of Battle Creek and into the event horizon. Lacey said believing was the hard part. If you could do that, everything else would follow,

“You’ll give yourself lung cancer,” I told my father, and stepped over him to get to the door.

LACEY HAD A THEORY THAT people have a finite capacity for the enjoyment of their favorite things. Songs, movies, books, food: We’re hardwired for specific quantities of pleasure, and once the amount is exceeded, good goes bad. The kicker is, there’s no warning when you’re approaching the limit; the dopamine just flips off like a switch, and there’s one more book for the fire.

Very rarely, Lacey said, you find something for which your brain has infinite capacity, and that, Lacey said, is the thing we call love.

I no longer believed in that. But I did believe in overdoses and disappointment, and I wasn’t about to risk either on my favorite books. The house wasn’t a safe space anymore — there were no safe spaces anymore — and that made it easier to leave. When I did, I only ever went to the library. I felt twelve again, fresh out of the kids’ section, stroking the spines in the grown-up stacks as if I could osmose their words through the bindings. I felt almost normal again.