WINDOWS

 

Gretchen brings over cookies because she doesn’t know what else to do. She knows its probably not polite to come bearing home-baked snacks like she’s a neighbor or even a close friend, like chocolate chips will make up for their loss, but she can’t help it. She wants to know them, this family whose pain and bewilderment seem to match her own, this family in a house that she’s dreamt about.

She knocks on the door and the mother answers. Mrs. Darko. It’s hard to look at her, in her pink bathrobe with her tired eyes and rumpled hair. There’s a cigarette burning between her fingers but it looks to be mostly ash. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. I mean, hello. My name is Gretchen Ross.” She stutters, but not as much as she was afraid she would. It’s the new name that trips her up—she’s still not used to being Gretchen Ross yet. “Um, I brought you these cookies.” She offers them up and tries to smile.

The woman in the doorway tries to smile back. Neither of them really succeeds. “Oh, how kind of you. Come in, come in.” She opens the door and ushers Gretchen in, taking the plate of cookies from her. “My name is Rose, but I know teenagers don’t like to call adults by their first names.”

Gretchen follows Mrs. Darko (Rose) through the house. She does her best not to stare at the destroyed room off to the side, the dust and debris on the floor, but its difficult. The kitchen is much more comforting, filled with plastic-wrapped food, cookies and brownies and the fridge is probably full of dinner foods. Mrs. Darko sets Gretchen’s cookies on some spare space on the counter and turns around. “Well. I don’t remember seeing you before. Were you…one of Donnie’s friends?”

“No...” Gretchen suddenly feels like an intruder on this woman’s pain, like maybe they aren’t so alike after all. Gretchen’s mom is still alive, scarred and medicated but alive, and this woman’s son is dead. “No, not exactly. I just…I’m new in town, and I wanted to pay my regards.” Pay her regards, like a girl in a nineteenth-century novel.

“Oh.” The slight smile on Mrs. Darko’s face wavers. “Well…thank you. For paying your regards. If you’ll excuse me, I need to make some phone calls. It was very nice meeting you, Gretchen.” She shakes Gretchen’s hand and leaves the room, trailing a cloud of smoke behind her.

Gretchen stands for a moment in the silence of the kitchen. “Shit.” Mrs. Darko clearly thinks Gretchen is some sort of voyeur, there to gape at her family’s pain, and the worst part is, maybe she’s a little bit right. Gretchen wants to see what its like to lose someone, wants to see what her eyes would be like if her stepdad’s knife had gone a little bit deeper, had hit some major organ or artery. She wants to see someone who hurts just a little bit more than she does, someone who knows what the blood of their family looks like.

Most of all, though, she wants to know these people. The family in this ruined house, the mother with her fragile beauty and unwavering dignity, the father with his smile that he can’t quite get rid of, the little sister with the dreamy eyes, and the older sister with the hopeful face. And Donnie, Donnie whose face adorns the walls of Gretchen’s new school in a thousand ‘In Memory of’ pinups. Donnie who Gretchen will never know, with his big soulful eyes and his wicked grin.

The older sister looks almost exactly like him. The curves of their faces are the same, the tilt of their eyebrows, their lips. They have their mother’s lips, their father’s eyes. The little sister will probably look just like them when she grows up, too.

Gretchen hates to admit that she’s been studying them, riding her bike past their house to see the father taking out the trash, the older sister talking to a boy in a bright red car, the little sister playing with a stuffed unicorn in the front yard. She even took an ‘In Memory of Donnie’ picture home, tried to sketch his face in her notebook. It kept looking more like his sister, though, smaller and more feminine, prettier.

Gretchen is just about to leave when she comes into the kitchen. The sister, that is. Elizabeth, in jeans and a t-shirt, too big for her, that probably belonged to her brother. When she sees Gretchen she starts, pressing her hand to her chest. “Oh, my god. I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

“No, I’m sorry. I was just leaving.”

She tries to, but Elizabeth stops her at the doorway. “Don’t be silly. I’m Elizabeth.” Her voice is sweet, younger than her face. Far younger than her eyes.

“Gretchen. Gretchen Ross. I was just dropping off some cookies, but then your mom…” Gretchen feels so young in the face of this girl’s eyes, her politeness, her kindness.

“Yeah, she’s been really distracted lately. Don’t take it personally.” Elizabeth twines her fingers together, looks down at the floor. “So, um, did you know Donnie?”

An intruder again. Gretchen looks at the floor, too. Yellow linoleum, just like the kitchen at her old house. Yellow covered in red, the night when It happened. She flinches and says, “No. I just…go to his school. I’m new in town and I heard about what happened, so… I brought you some cookies.”

“Oh. Chocolate chip?” Elizabeth says brightly. Gretchen looks up, and Elizabeth is smiling, just a little. Her lips curl up at the corners like a cupid’s bow. Gretchen nods small, and Elizabeth says, “Oh, thank god. These little old ladies keep bringing over sugar cookies and carrot cake.”

That makes both of them laugh, and Gretchen feels immediately close to this girl, this girl who smiles at strangers. “I’m really sorry. I think your mom thought I was…spying or something,” Gretchen confesses.

Elizabeth waves her off. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve had so many people stopping in, looking at the damage.” Her mouth curls even more at that, ruefully this time, like she knows that she’s part of the damage.

“I know how you feel,” slips out of Gretchen’s mouth before she can stop it. “I mean…not exactly, of course. But after my mom’s accident, people kept coming to the hospital, trying to give me clothes and food and stuff.”

“Your mom had an accident?” Elizabeth sits down at the kitchen table, gestures for Gretchen to join her.

She does. “Well, not exactly an accident.” Gretchen feels her own mouth curl. She feels like baring her teeth and growling at the memory. “My stepdad stabbed her seven times.”

Elizabeth draws in a breath. “Shit. Were you there?”

“No. I found her. After, I mean.”

“Did she…?”

“Live?” Gretchen nods. “Yeah. She takes a lot of pills now, though. She’s not awake half the time. We had to move and change our names, too. I chose Gretchen Ross.” Gretchen Ross. It sounded like the name of a girl with a home, a family, a real life. It didn’t sound made up, even though it was. Darko sounded like a made up name, a Witness Protection Program name.

“Its pretty,” Elizabeth says softly. She says everything softly, like her voice is wrapped in velvet. “Why’d you move here?”

Gretchen shrugs. She’d chosen the town, too. The state. “I liked the name. And it has a good private school, good economy. Not a huge murder record.”

Elizabeth laughs. “Yeah. Middlesex, where no one gets shot but jet engines fall out of the sky.” And then, with no warning at all, she starts to cry.

Gretchen just sits respectfully for a few minutes, but then she gets up to kneel next to Elizabeth’s chair. She puts her arms around the other girl and hugs as tight as she can. No on ever did this for her when she was crying in the waiting room at the hospital, pacing the floors and waiting to hear if her mom would live. Everyone just watched her cry until she felt empty, resentful of all those staring eyes and limp arms. Elizabeth squeezes back, and cries until Gretchen’s hair is damp.

After a few minutes her tears dry up, and she pushes Gretchen away gently, so she can get up and wipe her face on some paper towels. She sits back down and Gretchen goes back to her own chair, smelling a strange scent on her clothes. A boy scent, secretive and somehow familiar. Elizabeth dabs at the wet corners of her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “Its just that it doesn’t make any sense. A fucking jet engine just falls out of the sky, and no one can figure out where it came from. No one. It killed my brother, and I’m not even supposed to talk about it.”

“Its okay,” Gretchen says quietly. “I’m not supposed to tell people who I really am, either.”

“And even the normal part of it, the part where he’s dead…nobody can talk about that, either. Dad keeps telling stories about Donnie when he was a little boy, and Mom won’t talk about him at all, and she won’t cry. And Samantha keeps writing stories about Donnie like he’s a superhero in a comic book, and my fucking boyfriend is cracking up…” Elizabeth laughs and rests her head in her hands. “He keeps telling me about these dreams he’s been having, about his Halloween costume and about Donnie…” She shakes her head and whispers, “None of this makes any sense.”

“Dreams?” Elizabeth’s looks up blankly, and Gretchen is pretty sure she had forgotten all about her. “What kind of dreams?”

“Weird ones. Donnie never died and Frank did, and something about a countdown…I don’t know. He saw the engine come down. I think it kind of fucked him up.”

“Did he have one the night that it fell?” Gretchen can hear her voice rise and fall at strange points, like a boy going through puberty.

“No, he was in the driveway. The dreams happened after, I think. Why?” Elizabeth looks so hurt, so confused, that Gretchen almost can’t say it.

She has to, though. She has to know if there’s any connection. “Because I had one, too. The night the engine fell on your house. That’s what made me ride my bike over here the morning after.”

“That’s right, I remember you.” She smiles a little, face still wet with tears. “You waved at my mom.”

“And she waved back at me.”

“What was your dream about?”

Gretchen folds her hands on top of the table, looking down at her small fingers, perfect fingernails. Blood under them, the night that It happened. She can’t look at Elizabeth. “I don’t know. It was mostly snatches of things. A movie theater…Halloween, my stepdad coming back…a red car. And this one, perfect kiss.”

“From who?” Elizabeth whispers, but its like she already knows.

“From Donnie.” Gretchen looks up, and feels like crying. Crying for the boy in her dream who kissed her at the perfect time, who tried to save her. The boy who died while Gretchen lives, scarred but alive.

Elizabeth just nods, eyes closed. She looks so much like Donnie, but with her own inner fire, an aura of pure sweetness and calm that Donnie, at least in Gretchen’s dream, never had. He was like a natural disaster, fire and water and air.

“I don’t know what it means,” Gretchen says, trying to explain, “any of it. It could be nothing.”

“No,” Elizabeth says. “I don’t know what it means either. But it’s not nothing.” Her eyes are so, so sad.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen says. She stands up, feeling strange, like she’s violated something, changed something she shouldn’t have. “I should go.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says quietly. “You should.” She stands up too, and Gretchen feels her heart sink into her stomach. She’s ruined everything.

Elizabeth is taller than Gretchen, almost as tall as Donnie was. She has to dip her head down to kiss her. And she does, one perfect kiss at the perfect time, at the time when the whole world feels wrong. At the time when only that kiss can make it beautiful again.

“You should come back, though,” Elizabeth says. She looks scared and confused, but happy, and Gretchen smells it again on her t-shirt, that boy smell. That Donnie smell.

“Okay,” Gretchen says quietly. “When?”

“How about after school tomorrow. And the day after that.”

“Yes,” Gretchen says. She can’t help smiling. “Yes.”

Elizabeth smiles too, and sits back down at the table; Gretchen goes through the living room and out the front door. This time it’s easy to ignore the shattered beams in the ceiling, the room full of debris. This is Elizabeth’s damage, the thing that left her scarred but alive.

Gretchen thinks about that thing that people say, about God not shutting a door without opening a window. She’s not sure if she believes in God, or in doors. But she believes in windows.

 

End

For Mary.

 

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