Mari

IF YOU PLAY the death-thoughts game, it might suddenly come true. By accident. No, not by accident. It’s been half serious all along, half in earnest — when is the thought of death ever a light one, ever merely a game? Maybe it always has this side to it. Maybe she’s just been waiting for something to happen, something heavy enough, serious enough, something that will change the tone of the game and make it true. The death game itself waiting for a situation that will make it come true.

Now she has a reason. Suddenly her reality is heavy, her days have their full weight. The line is clearly drawn, right in front of her eyes. This is how it’s going to be. Maybe it’s inevitable that the game should turn heavy, come true.

She’s been living on this line, seeing everything turn into its opposite, her self gone and something empty taking its place, filling it like a disease. Tilting the balance against any compromise, any acceptance of the existence of a “me.”

EVERY DAY AT SIX, Mari sits on the edge of her bed and looks up a name in her phone, a name that has six letters. She first looks at the hideous reflection of her face in the window, the winter dark beyond it, cruel as ever. The face in the window is cruel, too — a ridiculous girl, a stupid girl. Is she really this girl, who wants to be someone else, to cease to exist?

She lets the phone ring seven times. Always seven times.

And Julian doesn’t answer. Ever.

She opens the text-message inbox. The first two messages are ones he sent her. She deleted the others so that his would always be the first on the list. She opens the second message, sent on the third of December, and reads it for the thousandth time: In my fantasies I’m making love to you night and day, fucking you in my dreams all the time.

Mari holds the phone tight in her hand, looks at her reflection in the window, the shape of a stranger.

I’ll give all my strength, all my power, to you. Draw my boundaries for me. Save me or I might as well just disappear. I might as well vanish completely. Kill me.

*

NOW IT’S MARCH. Everything on the edges has become meaningless. The emptiness is all that matters. Emptiness is sweet forgetting. Mari gets up in the morning, eats two slices of bread and cheese in the kitchen as always, drinks her cocoa. She washes her hair, makes the same cuts in her arm — the only thing that feels good all day. The wounds don’t scar over anymore. That feels good, too, having open wounds all the time.

Walking to school in the bright sunshine, she thinks that maybe this has been her truth all along. Maybe it was clear from the beginning that this would happen, that she would be walking here like this, a husk, booming hollow in the shadow of each step, acting out the inevitable.

She opens the door of the school and Tinka immediately comes to meet her. Tinka looks serious, worried. Mari can’t bring herself to care.

“Hi,” Tinka says, giving her the usual kiss on the cheek. The kiss is warm and wet. Mari feels like crying.

“Wanna go downtown after school?” Tinka says. “We could look for some new make-up. I want some green eyeshadow and some of that sparkly blush.”

“I dunno,” Mari says dully. “I have to study for the test.”

“You’ve been studying all week.”

Tinka looks at Mari. She comes closer and hugs her, not knowing that she’s pressing against the open cuts under Mari’s winter coat, making her flinch.

“What’s the matter with you? You’ve been looking just like a ghost lately. Do you even sleep at night?”

She strokes Mari’s hair. Mari can’t stop the tears from coming. They flow silently, the only sign that she’s alive. Mari turns her head away. The sun is shining outside, forming a wedge of light in the empty school corridor. Specks of dust dance in the beam of light.

“Is it because of Kanerva?”

“Ugh!” Mari says, not turning her head. “I can’t stand him anymore. He’s such a shithead now.”

“Kanerva’s a prick,” Tinka says affectionately, pressing her nose against Mari’s nose.

Draw my boundaries, fence off the fear, and protect me, Mari thinks.

Kill me.

*

OF COURSE it happens eventually. Half by accident, for a trivial reason, without warning. Her mother just gets it into her head to ask her about her coat all of a sudden. Mari has expected the question, has made up a somewhat lame explanation. But in spite of being prepared for it, she’s filled with anxiety when it comes. Her mother’s face is perfectly normal and the question perfectly innocent.

“Where’s your other winter coat? The one with the fur trim?”

It’s an expensive coat. Her mother bought it for her. Naturally she wants to know what’s happened to it.

Mari looks away as she answers. “I dunno. Maybe I lost it somewhere.”

Mari knows where the coat is. She brought two coats with her to the countryside in December. When they were getting ready to come back to town the weather changed, sleet started to fall, and she put on her lighter coat. The heavier one, the one with the fur trim, she forgot to bring home. She hasn’t had the courage to ask Julian about the coat. Maybe he’ll return it. She hopes he’ll call her about the coat. Call about the coat and then ask her out to coffee. She hopes he’ll call because he still wants her, wants her all the time.

“Where did you lose it?” her mother asks.

“I don’t know,” Mari answers curtly. “Wherever lost coats go. Maybe I forgot it someplace.”

“How can you forget your coat someplace? I saw you wearing it in December. Did you leave it at Tinka’s cabin?”

“What do you mean Tinka’s cabin?”

“Didn’t you spend a couple of days there? At Tinka’s family’s cabin?”

Mari remembers telling her mother this now. “Right, right. It must be there.”

“Well, could you call Tinka, then, and ask her about it?”

“Sure.”

“Or shall I?”

“No, that’s OK. I’ll do it.”

Her mother looks at the cell phone on the living-room table. Mari thinks she should rush to the phone, pick it up, and run away with it. Her mother is near the table, reaches for the phone. Mari looks at her in horror. Her mother sees the look on her face.

“What kind of secrets are you hiding in here?” she says teasingly, holding the phone up in the air. “Love letters?”

The dangling charm, the little smiling plastic bear, clacks against the phone’s case.

“Nothing,” Mari says. “Nothing at all.” She can hear her voice go thin, unrecognizable.

“Hey,” her mother says, surprised. “It’s OK for you to have a boyfriend. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.”

“I don’t have any boyfriend,” Mari says flatly.

“Then what are you …?”

Her mother looks at the phone again. Then she looks at Mari again. Mari looks at her. It’s there, in the phone, the first two messages in her inbox. In my fantasies I’m making love to you night and day, fucking you in my dreams all the time.

“Don’t, Mom. Really.”

Mari takes two steps, grabs hold of the phone. Her mother holds it tightly and won’t let go. “What are you doing?” she says, amused. “You don’t really think …”

Mari takes the phone. Her mother looks at her, bewildered.

Mari puts the phone down on the table.

Why? Why did she do that?

Why did she put the phone down where her mother can reach it? Why did she leave it there? Why didn’t she take it upstairs, lock it up in her desk drawer?

Maybe she wants her mother to know about Julian; maybe she wants her to put an end to all of it. Or maybe nothing matters anymore, not really. Maybe everything’s become so meaningless that she can leave the phone there in front of her mother. To tease her, to goad her.

Mari turns and walks out of the living room, walks away so she won’t have to look at her mother’s face. And then, from the kitchen doorway, she sees her mother blatantly, brazenly picking up the phone, without trying to hide what she’s doing. She holds the phone and looks at Mari. Everything is my business, her face says. Everything inside you belongs to me.

Or is it just worry? Has it just been worry all along? Not disrespect but worry that makes her pry into Mari’s life. Maybe Mari will be able to see that now. Maybe her mother could even be her lifesaver, if Mari would only agree to it, agree to see the worry. But she can’t grasp the idea, because everything has become meaningless. She’s drowning, surrendering to the arms of the cool water. Indifferent.

Suddenly Mari can see herself from the outside, her own feeble gestures. She takes two steps toward her mother, holding her hand out as if she might reach the phone from across the room. Then she freezes, lets her hand drop.

Her mother is reading the message.

Mari hears the silence, crackling at the edges like silk paper, a silence that hums and whistles. A moment that stretches out at the seams.

Mari registers two things. First, the sound of the dog’s toenails on the floorboards, a happy, oblivious click-click as the dog walks across the hallway to the place where he sleeps, turns around three times clockwise, and lies down. Second, the look on her mother’s face, a helpless, empty look, all amazement gone, leaving nothing but a pure, certain realization.

Mari also notices a few insignificant things.

She sees the tropical palm in the window, its verdant leaves reaching toward the light.

She sees a little bird in the flowerbed outside the window take two brisk hops, from one branch to the next and then to the ground.

The warm shimmer of the silk living-room curtains that promise no safety now, the clock that tick-tocks away the trivial seconds, the world that never seems to come to an end, the moment that never stops, the indifferent gleam of the floorboards and the knots in the Persian rug that knows no pity.

If there’s no other escape then at least there’s this: What does it matter? What does anything matter really? For a moment her mother doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move. At first her face is expressionless. She looks at Mari, pale, her lips trembling. The raised hand that still holds the phone is shaking, first slightly, then more, so that the plastic charm knocks against its case again. The phone drops to the floor. Her mother’s whole body is trembling now. The phone breaks into pieces as it hits the floor. The bear charm rolls under the couch. Mari watches it tumble eagerly to stand next to the sofa leg. The bear stops there, standing next to the leg of the sofa, smiling a happy toy’s smile, oblivious to the turn that events have taken.

Even after all this, in this soft vacuum of indifference, Mari makes an effort to lie. She can hear the panic in her own voice betraying her.

“It’s nothing. It’s really nothing. Just a joke. It’s just a joke.”

“J-Julian,” her mother stammers.

Ju-li-an. When her mother says it, the brief whispered syllables, it sounds strange, foreign.

“Is that your teacher?” she asks in a choked voice, and immediately answers her own question. “It’s your teacher.”

“No. No, it’s not,” Mari says in a whisper.

“It is. It’s your teacher.”

Mari doesn’t speak.

“What else have the two of you done? What other messages has he sent you?”

Mari can see that her mother wants her to say, Nothing. I didn’t do anything with him. Just text messages. She would like to hear Mari say it, but she knows it isn’t true.

And Mari doesn’t say it. She doesn’t have to, because her mother already knows.

Her mother sinks onto the sofa, puts her head in her hands. Mari stands there, looking at her. Then she turns and walks out of the room.

On the living-room threshold it occurs to her, for the first time, to tell the truth. To tell her mother that the thing that was a game has become real, floating in front of her, a fact.

She doesn’t seriously wish her mother dead, or Julian. It’s not their deaths she wishes for. Instead it’s herself — this girl, this young woman, betrayed and rejected — she’s the one who’s dying.

The thought is clearer than ever. There are girls who die. There are girls whose lives end, and those they leave behind grieve for them. There are girls like that. Girls that remain forever beautiful, their innocence guaranteed, almost like saints. What else can Mari do? How else can all this end except by descending into the beauty of a silence that covers her entire being?

Here on the threshold, her mother standing speechless in the living room, Mari takes hold of her own fate. That’s what’s going to happen to her. Exactly that. A shiver of pleasure passes through her. Her mother can’t prevent this. And Julian — he practically wants it to happen. This is what she has, the inevitable ending to her own story. There are girls who die. She takes hold of that thought and wraps herself up in it.