of Mabel’s finger had caught in the door, and she’d pulled it out to hold her hand shaking before her. Her mouth was open wide, her jaw shivering, readying for the worst shriek of pain Lily would ever hear.
Though their mother lifted Mabel into her arms and seated the violently kicking girl in the front seat of the car, though she sped her to the emergency room for a few minutes of wrapping and splinting then brought her back to the shop to put her to bed and to lie beside her, nothing had changed her intentions. She slipped away for good after Mabel cried herself to sleep.
“You’ve been a mess yourself from time to time,” Lily said, leaning back from the table. She took the lacy handkerchief that Mabel offered. Lily dried her cheeks, then held the hanky in her lap, running her finger along the cursive of the name of its original owner, “Penelope,” embroidered at the edge.
“Lily,” Mabel said, “why do you even want to see her? She doesn’t care about us. She hasn’t even called us in years. Did she even send me a birthday card? Does she even remember that it’s my birthday?”
“So you mean to tell me,” Lily said, “that you don’t have the least bit of interest in seeing her again? Ever? There’s nothing you want to know about her? Nothing you want to ask her?”
Mabel picked off a little corner of the birthday cake and ate it. “You’re not going to learn anything. She’s not going to tell you anything useful.”
Lily tore off a bit of cake for herself. “You don’t have to hate her so much. Our lives aren’t ruined or anything. There’s nothing wrong with us.”
“There’s nothing wrong, I know,” Mabel repeated, almost beneath her breath.
“I think she meant to come back, don’t you?” Lily didn’t wait to let Mabel disagree. “I just think time may have passed differently for her. What seemed like forever to us, probably went very quickly for her. And, you know,” Lily said, tearing off another edge of the cake, excited to be at her mother’s defense, “it could be that she’s been waiting for us to come find her.”
“What the fuck were we supposed to do?” Mabel said, raising her voice. “Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases? With our grade-school watercolors . . . or our, you know, our fucking macaroni pictures for her to put on her fucking refrigerator? We were babies.”
Lily was so relieved to hear Mabel’s voice shake, to hear her sigh and cuss and to see her twisting her hair. Lily cocked her head with Mabel’s gesture of concern and reached across the table to touch at her elbow.
“Shouldn’t I at least go with you?” Mabel said, but she didn’t wait for Lily to reject the offer. “Shouldn’t we at least call her first?”
“We don’t have her phone number.”
“We could find it,” Mabel said, “or we could send a telegram. But you don’t want to do that, do you? You don’t want to give her any warning.”
Lily felt sorry for Mabel when she thought of her sitting alone in the house waiting for Jordan and Lily to come back. Mabel didn’t really have any friends, and she’d never had a good boyfriend. “Just let me do this, Mabel,” Lily nearly whispered. She took Mabel’s hand to scratch affectionately at the chipped green polish of her fingernails. “I’m only going for a few days. I just want to introduce her to Jordan. Just take a walk with her. I just want to know her a little bit. I just want to get to know her.”
Mabel pulled her hand away and stood from the table, brushing cake crumbs from the front of her dress. Silent, she walked toward the door of the bus. “Mabel,” Lily said. “Mabel, don’t be like that.” Lily didn’t go after her because she knew Mabel only ever needed a little bit of time. Mabel didn’t like to cause worry for anything more than an hour or two. But when Lily saw that the Joan Armatrading album lay, still wrapped, beside the cake, she felt miserable for always disappointing poor Mabel. Lily tore off the tissue paper; she’d wrap it again later. She felt like hearing “Cool Blue Stole My Heart,” so she unplugged the Christmas lights from the extension cord and plugged in the portable record player. In the near dark, she squinted at the turning record, looking for the right groove that started the song. As she set the needle down with a thump, Lily heard tiny stones tossed against the glass of the bus windows.
“Are you through being an asshole?” Jordan said, when Lily came to the window. Lily nodded, as pleased as always with Jordan’s ease. She reached out the window for his cigarette, and he handed it up to her. She took a puff and handed it back. “Is Mabel mad?” he said.
“Yes,” Lily said. “I want to go soon, Jordan.” But she didn’t trust that Starkweather’s Packard would make it anywhere near Mexico.
Jordan reached up again and took Lily’s hand. “We’ll get the Packard tuned up,” Jordan said, “then I’ll take you to see your mother.” Lily closed her eyes, liking the sound of that. Jordan, though skinny and wounded, could look after her very well if he set his mind to it. Feeling a buzz from the Manhattan and from the sugar of the cake, Lily was ready to believe in whatever Jordan told her.
“Come inside,” Lily said.
Jordan returned to Lily’s side at the table, and they ate some more cake with their fingers, ignoring the plastic forks and paper plates. “I ruined Mabel’s birthday,” Lily said.
“She’ll be lonely when we’re gone,” Jordan said.
“Mabel will be fine,” Lily said, and she really believed it. It would be best for the both of them to have some time apart. “We’ve always been fine. We’ve been lucky, really. We’ve always had a roof over our head.” Jordan glanced up to the ceiling of the school bus with a skeptical half grin. “You know what I mean,” Lily said.
Jordan leaned toward Lily to lick the frosting from the edge of her lips, then went back to sit on the bed to pull off his boots. Still at the table, her back to Jordan, Lily decided to finally ask him some questions she’d been avoiding. The questions, the most obvious ones, seemed like things she should have asked months before, on the third or fourth date or something. But it had been much easier not to, to let his steps toward suicide remain nothing more serious than a vague mystery.
“Did you hope to die that day?” Lily said, just said it, sitting in the dark not looking at him. “When you cut your wrist?” He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Lily wondered if he was looking down at his scar, touching at it gently with his fingertip, tapping at it, uncertain it was his.
“Did I hope to die? Did I hope?” He said it snide, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “No. No, I didn’t hope to die. No. Fuck no.” When Lily didn’t say anything, Jordan continued, less peevish. “I was really young,” he said, though the slashing of his wrist had only been a year or so before. “Everything seemed like a little more trouble than it was worth.”
“You loved that girl,” Lily said. “Kate.” Lily wasn’t bothered by Kate or by the creased picture of her he still kept tucked in a pocket of his wallet. In the photo, Kate sat in a bay window in an outdated white dress that had to have been hand-me-down. The black braid of her hair lay across her shoulder, and her silver heart-shaped locket was open at her throat. Lily had never met Kate, but she respected her as part of Jordan’s heartbreak, part of why he was the way he was.
“When she said it was over,” Jordan said, “I thought about dying and thought about how if I died, I’d at least be something important in her life. It would change her forever, wouldn’t it?
