Chapter Thirteen
An eerie silence haunts Marina’s neighborhood.
When I pull into her cul-de-sac, I see no cars in driveways. The vinyl siding on all the houses is worn and discolored, grass knee-high and sickly yellow. An overturned mailbox lies on a lawn, mouth open in an eternal scream.
Marina’s house, a two-story colonial painted a shade of blue that’s seen better days, is the only one that still looks lived in: green plants hanging on the porch, her car in the driveway, shades over the windows.
I think back to what Jess said about Marina being the lone holdout, preventing Solar Summit from paving over her neighborhood to build a resort hotel here.
It starts to make sense why Marina had insisted we meet at the Ryser Cares office today before heading out to lunch with Nancy.
I don’t think she wanted me to pick her up here and see the lonely state of her neighborhood.
Even after she agreed to let me come over, she tasked me with going to Top Slice for pizza and cheesy bread first. She said it was for efficiency’s sake, and that she’d be going to Food Lion for snacks and drinks.
But now, as I ring her doorbell with two pizza boxes in hand, I wonder if she was stalling.
“Hey,” Marina says, a little breathless when she answers the door. “I was just cleaning up.”
“You don’t have to clean for me.” Except I realize as I say it that it’s not really true. Close friends can see your place in any state, but that’s not what we are anymore.
“I can put those in the kitchen.” Marina takes the boxes from me. “I’m just setting up Lurv Plus on my TV and then I’ll be ready.”
“No worries.” I step inside, kicking off my shoes in the foyer. “I want to see your house anyway.” My toe presses into a hole of some kind, and I look down to see that the floorboard has a corner missing. Marina gives me a nervous glance but scurries off with the boxes before I can ask about it.
Marina’s house is…not what I expected. When I follow her into the kitchen, I see discolored rectangular outlines on the wall behind the oven, ghosts of the cabinets that must have once hung there.
The cabinets on the wall by the sink are intact, but they’re sagging a little, listing to the left.
Marina doesn’t offer any explanations as she sets the boxes on the counter and returns to entering Jen’s log-in information into the Lurv Plus app on the TV, so I don’t comment on it, either.
The living room has several gaping holes in the drywall.
In the corner, there’s an opening that I think might lead to the basement, but it’s covered in plastic sheeting.
“Just renovations,” Marina says, following my gaze.
“Right,” I say, as if I know anything about renovations.
I take another look around, searching for something I can compliment.
Past the kitchen is a doorway leading to a spacious dining room with a long, wooden table and mismatched vintage chairs.
An ornate gold chandelier hangs above it. “Your dining room’s beautiful.”
I start to move toward it, but Marina blurts out, “The chandelier flickers!” like she’s confessing to a crime.
I stop in my tracks. “Okay.” It’s only then that I notice how intently Marina is watching my every move, turning the remote over and over in her hands.
I’m reminded, then, of a time when the roles were reversed.
When we were eleven, and Marina spent the night, as she’d done many Fridays in the past. We were partway into a game of Monopoly when my parents’ angry voices sounded from downstairs.
My dad saying, You’re being selfish ; my mom saying, I can’t do this anymore, with unsettling finality.
Marina had stopped in the middle of rolling the dice when she heard them, but I’d kept my head down, pretending to count my money, imploring her not to draw attention to what was increasingly becoming my new normal.
Marina must have sensed it too, because she finished rolling the dice without a word, and we carried on with our game.
We never spoke of it, but it soon became understood that sleepovers would be at her house during that rocky phase at the end of my parents’ marriage.
I decide to extend Marina the same courtesy. If she’s self-conscious about her house, then I won’t comment on it. “Is there a bathroom I can use?” I ask instead.
Marina points toward the stairs. “Use the one upstairs. The downstairs bathroom is…scary.”
“Sure,” I say brightly, as though scary is a perfectly normal thing for a bathroom to be. I go up the stairs, which creak under my weight. I head toward the first door I see and push it open to find myself in Marina’s bedroom.
She probably wouldn’t want me in here if just seeing the downstairs had her on edge. But I can’t help myself from stepping inside, curious to see how adult Marina’s bedroom differs from the one she had as a kid, with the overflowing bookshelf and the row of stuffed animals that once lined her bed.
This Marina’s bedroom is fairly spacious.
Gauzy white curtains hang on either side of a large window that overlooks the dirt patch backyard and the trees lining the main road behind it.
A neatly made bed sits in the center of the room, a dresser and vanity on either side.
I can see touches of Marina sprinkled throughout.
On the vanity, there’s the Snow White jewelry box that used to sit on Marina’s desk.
There’s a bookshelf, still packed to the brim with books.
On one shelf sits a framed photo of Marina with her mom, dad, and two older sisters.
A keyboard lies on the bench at the foot of the bed, haphazardly balanced on the edge like she’d just put it down and gotten distracted.
It brings back memories of sitting in Marina’s room years and years ago, listening to her idly tinker with melodies.
On the dresser is a mess of cards and envelopes.
I have to do a double take when I catch sight of the card at the top of the stack.
It’s a photo of Marina and Jess. Marina wears a floral dress, Jess a pair of sharply tailored pants and a loose-fitting tweed blazer over a white shirt.
They’re holding hands and smiling at each other.
My eyes fall on the words Save the Date and December 6th in flowy white script.
Here’s something else to scribble on my sparse mental timeline of Marina’s life since our friendship ended.
We used to talk about being each other’s maids of honor, and now I don’t even make the list for a save-the-date.
Marina has never once mentioned being engaged.
Nothing about the way she and Jess talked to each other last week suggested they were wedding-bound.
Question marks spring up to surround this new entry in my Marina timeline.
“I’ve got the first episode cued up,” Marina calls, snapping me from my thoughts.
There’s a note of panic in her voice, like she’s also saying, You better not have found the swamp witch in my attic, or whatever inconceivable issues the upstairs level has.
Or maybe it’s this card right here in my hand that she doesn’t want me to find, this relic from a time when she and Jess were happy and in love.
“Be there in a sec!” I call back, setting the card down. I use the bathroom and remember my way back to the living room, that engagement picture still looming in my mind.
When I sink into the plush cushions of Marina’s beige couch, she hands me a plate and reaches for a slice of pizza from the box on the coffee table.
“You might actually like Top Slice’s crust,” she says.
Her voice is a little too perky, too eager to fill the silence, as if she’s realized that having our usual sleepover staples here doesn’t mean we suddenly know how to hang out together like we used to.
“They do this amazing garlic Parmesan thing.”
“Sounds good.” I cut a glance at her as I load up my plate. “And, um. I like crust now. So…I’m sure I will like it.”
“Oh.” Marina looks me over. I know she’s trying to reconcile this fact with her memories of all the times I’d toss my crust back in the box, ready to move on to the next slice of pizza.
Sometime in my early twenties, though, I came to appreciate the bready chew of a good pizza crust. But she’d have no way of knowing that.
There’s a lot we don’t know about each other, I’m learning.
My eyes zero in on her left ring finger: no ring. So she and Jess were engaged, set to be married this December, and then they broke it off.
But there’s something between them still. The way they looked at each other at the Chamber of Commerce meeting. Their easy banter at the mayor’s office. It doesn’t make sense, but I’ve lost the right to ask for the details. So, I take a slice of pizza and sit back while Marina presses Play.
Time passes in a glorious haze of bizarre reality-show sound effects and excessive snack consumption. Twenty-two-year-old Nancy on a dating show is a beautiful thing to behold. By the end of the first episode, two separate women have given confessionals declaring that Nancy is their archnemesis.
Wyatt, the man these women are supposed to be vying over, wears exclusively denim and plaid and speaks in horse metaphors.
The real fun is in seeing the women try to look interested as Wyatt brags about his barrel-racing rank.
And in watching Nancy dismiss Wyatt’s brag and tell him about coming in third in her high school talent show.