marked
by Lara Longo
The house phone rang at an odd hour and from the other side of the line Ann breathed my name into the receiver. They found Mary, she said, voice jumping. I braced for a torrent. They found Mary alive. She was alone. The tipster was wrong. The psychic was wrong. Mary’s hair wasn’t shorn. But she had gotten a tattoo. A fat black line the length of her outstretched arms. Objects ran the span of it like a timeline. It was awfully strange, Ann said, though she hadn’t seen it herself.
It had been weeks since Mary stopped showing up for school, for her shifts at the movie theater. George ran into her in Port Washington just before she disappeared. She was skinny, he said. And she was antiquing. She was going to buy the Huntington lighthouse at auction and fill it with the books and lamps and things that sat across the backseat of her car. She gave George an ornate candy dish as a gift.
Our phone lines choked with rumors. Mary had died a few times. But then, at the end of summer, Mary was alive, resurrected, pulled out of the sack, pulled from a jail cell. No. But yes, Elline said, you have to believe me. Each word was sharp edged, a challenge. Mary was in Toulouse, Elline repeated. When she was caught by the French cops, Mary told them it was too hot in Levittown.
I could not bear the thought of Elline, her eyes wide, her ghoulish revelry. Before I clapped the receiver on its hook, I asked how she knew. How she was so sure. Her mother’s credit cards, Elline said. I put the phone down and imagined a trail of francs like footprints over a map.
Mary had moved to the island when we were ten. She stood at the head of Miss Gartner’s class and delivered her introduction like some mini vaudevillian. She invited herself over and tore through the house with furious energy. Mary told jokes my father liked. He laughed and said she was a real hoot. But years later, she disappeared and my father said, That Mary, she’s a real kook.
After months of roiling gossip, the talk of Mary slowed to a simmer, then evaporated into nothing. But then I saw Mary at the A&P. She was staring into the deli case as her mother ordered cold cuts. From under her sleeve, an arrow stretched outward across her palm. It pointed to the ground under her feet.
Lara Longo is an Associate Director of Special Projects at The Atlantic and has an MA in Cultural Studies from King's College London. Her writing has been published in jmww, Peach Mag, Bodega, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.