Marceline
She witnessed a crime, but can she stop it from happening again?
Marceline is nine. She loves to sit on her porch on summer evenings, when the clouds look like the rainbows in her cereal milk after she has pulled a fork through them, creating strands of ROYGBIV that turn hairy and soft at the ends. Sometimes, from her stoop, she observes the thick-lined man she’s spent the afternoon filling in her entire driveway with, his stretched body an exercise in perfectly imperfect proportions. This is of those nights. She perches on the edge of the concrete step, sucking on a lime popsicle and observing the white chalk outline.
“Whatcha doing, sweetheart?” Mom squeaks the screen door open and peeks out at Marceline. She runs her eyes over her growing child, who consumes chicken fingers and corn at a rate rarely documented in speed-eating competitions. Marceline’s hair is long, wavy, and shadowy blonde. She slouches against her bent knees in a way that’s less an indication of poor posture than total ease with oneself.
Her mother wonders, for a brief moment, what that’s like, not to suck in one’s stomach or care at all about bodily presentation. Kids are wild in that way, she muses, rolling her neck to the side to stretch out a kink. Natural.
Marceline can feel her mom’s eyes on her. She minds, a little, because this is her porch, and her brother, Toby, is in his room playing Fortnite online with his school bros, so there’s no one else to bug her. Mom means well, but she’s ruining it, that focus that only happens when Marceline can sit alone on the stoop and just watch, without anyone telling her to pick up her socks or put her plate in the sink. No coach saying “watch, eyes on the ball.” No math teacher telling her to pay attention to the parenthesis first before the addition and subtraction symbols. Her mind can weave in and out, unbidden.
“Oh, nothing, mom. Just enjoying this ice pop.” Marceline offers up a smile that she thinks her mom wants, all teeth, no eyes. Her mother covers her mouth, reining in a giggle at Marceline’s put-on grin. When do we learn to fake social interactions convincingly? Not at nine, she muses, and thank God.
“Good, honey, I’m glad.” Mom slides back inside, letting the screen door knock gently shut. Good. Marceline returns to the quiet that she’s cultivated and slurps an errant run of juice from the side of her popsicle. A bee hums in its throat over Mom’s potted hibiscus, a flower that looks too tropical not to get sucked on by bees, red and open like a yawning umbrella pulled inside itself. Weird, to think of a bee having a throat, but it must. Everything alive must have some kind of throat.
Back to driveway man. She can’t see his torso or head, because Dad has parked his big honkin’ black SUV over them, but Marceline imagines his ears, round and parallel on either side, and his grin, full of square teeth. The teeth had been the hard part, getting them to fit in the mouth she had drawn and still look like a smile, not like a piano keys shoved in a gaping hole. Tomorrow, she will sharpen them, maybe turn them into a jagged monster’s grille, since that’s the way they arelooking anyway. Go with the flow, that’s her motto.
Across the street, a jazzy red car zips into the driveway. Weird. No one lives there except an old lady who gives out dinner mints on Halloween, whom Marceline and Toby call Mrs. Apple because she has a gnarled apple tree in her yard that drops blemished, uneaten fruit every spring. It’s kind of a joke, because those apples look gross. Marceline feels a little bad for them, growing up just to rot.
The lady’s actual name was Mrs. Cleary, but when Marceline was five, she assumed that names were fluid, changeable, like the truth, or the way her fish tank looked if you peered in from the side longways, versus looking at it straight on and seeing just a rectangular box of water and fake, sunk pirate ships and brown guppies, one of whom was always fat pregnant.
It was a nice car, the kind Marceline decides she would like to drive one day when she knows how. The wheels aren’t too big and the sides look smooth, like the wind would slide right off them when she drives fast near the beach. It doesn’t look like Mrs. Apple’s car, though. Does she have a grown-up kid? Marceline has never seen anyone with a car like that drop by, and she’s been stoop-sitting since spring started, which was at least two months ago.
“Mom, I’m gonna toss the ball in the hoop.” Marceline’s voice is loud and carries. Mom pokes her head out again, “okay, Sweets,” and the screen pops back into place. The basketball hoop is nailed hard into a tree toward the end of the driveway. “It’s too close to the road,” Mom noted when they first moved in a few years back. But Dad pointed out that the street was so quiet, and there were so many other things to do besides move the hoop, like unpack. Now, Marceline and Toby are nine and 12 and know better than to get hit by a car on account of a stupid basketball.
She swivels the ball between her two index fingers and walks slowly, on purpose, but without looking too invested, toward the end of the driveway. Dribble once, dribble twice, hop, flick the wrist, swish. A little shiver of satisfaction runs up Marceline’s arms, raising hairs.
Mrs. Apple’s house is large and has a blue shiny door, evidence that someone, at some point, cared about the place. If it had been Mrs. Apple, that was a long time ago, as she stoops when she walks and seems to drag her small, round body along a few seconds behind each step. If she did care, she would need someone else to help her do anything about it.
Yet Marcline had never seen anyone visit Mrs. Apple, other than the daytime support nurse that comes weekly in a white medical vehicle. Toby always erupts in giggles and says, “She’s finally gone and died. Look.” This fooled Marceline once, maybe twice, but never more than that. “Idiot,” she murmurs, and returns to her post at the window, checking, just in case, for a stretcher or flashing lights.
As Marceline swishes a few baskets, the corner of her left eye is keeping a watch out for movement. You can tell what’s happening just by sensing it, she knows, trusting the edge of her vision and her spider sense to catch any action. This reminds her, briefly, of her Opa’s glaucoma, and how last time they visited, Mom said that Marceline needed to stand directly in front of him when she spoke; otherwise he couldn’t see her. “It sucks to get old,” Marceline murmurs now, something dad says whenever Opa came up in conversation. She swishes another basket.
Nothing is moving across the street, but that doesn’t mean anything. Real spies look at what’s underneath and don’t take homeostasis for granted. Marceline had learned that word in science class and felt pleased that she could use it in her mind in this specific situation.
Still, the only way to get a better view is to cross the street and do a little on-site sleuthing. Mom wouldn’t like that. She was always telling Marceline to stay out of neighbor’s yards. Just yesterday, Marceline was clipping Sassafras just over the property line next door to use in a potion she planned to create based on a recipe she wrote in her Secret Witch Notebook. She would then rewrite the recipe in lemon juice on parchment paper and bind with needle and thread before burning the original. Not just anyone should have access to these special medicines. Anyway, she wasn’t able to harvest what she needed because Mom came barreling out and whistled at her.
“M, c’mon, that’s the Fitz’s space. We have a whole yard back here.” But who owns the earth, anyway? It wasn’t like they were using that Sassafras. Mr. Fitz had mowed some down just days earlier. Marceline saw him do it and knew immediately that she needed to get some of this sweet-smelling herb before it was all gone. And now Mom was up her butt about it. She’d have to find another way.
These plans slide to the back of her mind as she steps over the grassy edge of her yard and into the gravel street between her property and Mrs. Apple’s. Ball still in hand, she casually flips it and lets it go, adding a hidden push to ensure that it launches diagonally into Mrs. Apple’s yard. Now she’d needs to go get it.
The house is ground level, so Marceline can see into the living room, where the couch is propped up against a large window, edged outside with orange daylillies. They are predictably closing up for the evening, as if averting their faces from whatever might be going on inside. Marceline follows the ball to the center of the narrow yard, then bends to pick it up and nudges it with her foot, so it rolls through the leafy base of the Lilly bed and into the soil-dark area under the ledge. She stops and peers behind, feeling a slight prickle on the back of her scalp. Someone is watching, but her mother is a loud watcher and always hollers within seconds of the prickle.
No sound now but the wind in the tall oaks and the soft creaking of the twisted apple tree behind her. It looks like a bent hand waving her forward. Do what I can’t do, it seems to say. See what I see but can’t do anything about. Even as the screen door whines and Marceline’s mother scolds her for yet again crossing property lines, Marceline sees what the tree sees and whispers, I will.
Making good on promises to trees is something Marceline takes seriously. But it’s summer, and there’s a lot to do during the day. She wakes up the next morning with her long curls in a sweaty tangle and helps herself to a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and whole milk before yanking on stretch shorts and a “Friendship is my Favorite Color” t-shirt and hopping into the car with mom, who is running late for her job at the lab and needs to drop her off at the middle school curb for camp. “Have such a good day, Baby,” she says, smoothing Marceline’s hair behind her ear. Her own hair is blown out and sprayed stiff and fragrant, in a sweet, chemical way that Marceline likes.
The boys at camp are stupid and Marceline doesn’t really have time for them. One in particular, Charlie, likes to crack his knuckles in front of her, interlocking his fingers and slowly stiffening his arms, then holding his elbows in and flexing what he probably thinks are impressive bicep muscles. Marceline watches for a moment, then flexes her own tan, firm bicep and hops off to the playground, whistling.
Her friend Mel is a welcome diversion. The two like to pick dandelion puffs and, instead of blowing all the seeds away like that dummy Amsel, who thinks that she can tell how many babies she’ll have by how many seeds are left, they pocket them. Each day when she gets home, Marceline tucks the fluff into a small drawstring bag that she keeps in her jewelry box and adds small pinches of the seed and fluff to her fairy-summoning or booger-reducing potions, as needed.
Anyway, Mel — with her cat-eye glasses rimmed in electric blue plastic — she gets it. Even still, Marceline hesitates to share the question pressing hard on her brain. The two are nestled under the red covered slide, listening to the thump of feet drumming up the play structure steps and butts squeaking down the plastic tube, when she feels spunky enough to ask.
“Have you ever seen someone steal?”
Mel continues to wrap the birch bark she has peeled from a nearby tree around her Barbie; she is fashioning a gown and has told Marceline that she plans to use moss for the fringe when she finds some. She flicks her eyes at Marceline over her electric blue rims, then returns to her wrapping.
“My brother stole a pocket knife from his scout leader once, but I didn’t see it.”
Marceline squirms. “Yeah, okay, but have you ever seen anyone actually doing it? Like, stealing, or something, like in someone’s house.”
Mel pauses. She holds a thin, fringey piece of bark between her hands, pinches a rip at the top, and begins tearing it into strips.
“No.”
“Well, I think I did. I mean, I saw someone somewhere that I don’t think they should be, but I’m not sure.”
“What are you going to do about it?” This is why Marceline loves Mel. She doesn’t doubt her, like Toby does. Toby would have said “right, whatever,” before she even explained why she thought it. Or her mom, who would have said “looks can sometimes be deceiving” and “everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.” Mel just believes and asked the right questions.
“Well, I made a promise, so I have to check it out, that’s for sure. I’ll probably look into it more extensively tonight.” Her dad uses the word “extensively” when he rolls out drafting maps on the kitchen table and points to the spaces where street signs and buildings will go. It’s one of those times when she feels like he’s trying to teach her something, even though he’s usually talking on the phone with the boss when she crawls under his armpit to eavesdrop.
Mel is wrapping the doll’s shiny, rigid arms in soft ribbons from shoulder to wrist, leaving the joint seam exposed, where the arm connects to the torso. Laser focused on her work, she murmurs, “Just be sure you know what you’re looking at before you make a move.” She looks up at Marceline, who feels little goosebump prickles running along her bare arms, even in this heat. Then Mel flashes a gap-toothed smile. “My dad tells me that all the time.”
The sky is thick and churned up, like fluffy cake frosting, when Marceline’s mom picks her up from camp. A few spits of rain tickle her arm as she opens the car door. She tugs a towel from her day pack and holds it high above her head like a superhero cape, stumbling inside in that goofy, loose-legged way that never fails to make Mom giggle. Inside, the thick scent of red peppers sizzling in hot oil (Dad’s favorite) and warm tomato paste wake her stomach. Spaghetti night. Yum.
Plunking her bag down on the shoe pile near the door, she hops over to the couch and peers out the front window. Clouds grumble through breaks in the tall trees overhead, but there’s no rain yet. Across the street at Mrs. Apple’s house, Marceline confirms the absence of the red sports car and the presence of Mrs. Apple’s matte gold Sedan, parked toward the back of the driveway where it was when she left this morning. Maybe the red car was done. Maybe the skinny man in the gray tank top that she saw exiting Mrs. Apple’s downstairs bathroom yesterday, backlit by the yellow glow of a light in an otherwise dark house, was fixing her toilet, or unplugging her drain as she napped on the sofa, unaware and unafraid.
Marceline tries really hard to believe that this is true, and the effort curdles the spaghetti she piles into her belly at dinner.
Lying on her bed later, doing her best full starfish and relaxing her eyes open until they feel like jelly, Marceline jumps when Toby bursts in without knocking.
“You can’t just come in here,” she says flatly.
“I just did. Wanna play Fortnite? We lost Jake and I need an extra player.”
She sighs heavily, hoping he’ll pick up on her tone so she won’t have to say anything. He doesn’t.
“You in or what?”
“No. I’ve got things on my mind. Leave me alone.”
“What, like what’s happening over in Mrs. Apple’s house?”
She jolts upright, squishing the murky spaghetti in her gut. “What do you know about that?”
“Just mom said you were poking your nose over there yesterday. And I just saw a random red car pull up. Pretty nice,” Toby added, pretending to file his nails on his shoulder. Weirdo.
Marceline blows past Toby and runs to the front window. Red car, 12 o’clock.
“Mom, I left my flip flops outside! I’m gonna go get them.” Marcline hollers, yanking on her sneakers and reaching for the front door. Toby slams his palm on the door, pressing it shut even as she twists the handle.
“Get off!”
“I’m going too.”
“No. You’re not subtle, you’re not that smart, and you’re gonna mess everything up. Just no.”
Toby knits his brows the way he does when he feels hurt but wants to look mad. Marceline softens. She hates to see him look sad, especially when he feels like he needs to cover it up, which means he’s even more upset.
“Look, this is a solo job. No offense. You’re smart,” she offers.
“I’ll just watch your back. I don’t like whatever’s going on with that car. It doesn’t look normal.”
Marceline is impressed. Since Toby entered middle school, they haven’t played army or gone on spy expeditions in the backyard as much, if at all. She’d forgotten how observant he could be.
Still, she rolls her eyes. “Okay, fine. But remember — this is my expedition.”
Toby nods.
Outside, rain looms inevitable, but the sky glows in patches, as if the sun is poking literal holes in the clouds’ cover strategy. Marceline points right and presses her flat palm down, to indicate that Toby needs to crouch behind Dad’s truck and keep watch. She is going on ahead. He settles in, sealing his lips with his index finger, a sign they used as little kids creeping up on Grandpa when he smoked his one cigarette in the garage. Maybe Grandma knew, maybe she didn’t, but it all felt very secretive when he came inside smelling like smoke and shrugged a little when she asked if he found what he was looking for out there.
Marceline crosses the street, feeling an electric surge run up her leg as she steps off the gravel road and onto Mrs. Apple’s lawn.
Wet drops hit Marceline’s cheek. She creeps under the overhang to the right of the window, shadowed dark except for the orange lamplight.
At first she thinks it’s a cat, the soft, mouse-brown mound in the window. Then she realizes, that’s Mrs. Apple’s head. It’s pressed against the window and tilted sideways, so she must be asleep on the couch. Still, the living room lamp burns dimly, but for what? No T.V. on that Marceline can see. She feels cold creep down her neck then. Is Mrs. Apple dead?
“Pst.” Marceline’s entire body recoils, like a cat poked with a fork.
“Dammit, Toby!” She hisses. He is behind her, crouching, eyes wide.
“You’re in enemy territory. I saw the guy.”
“What, where? I didn’t see anyone, and I’ve been right here in the window.”
Toby points. “Driveway. He was in his car the whole time. Luckily, he was parked on the back side, so he didn’t see you.”
“Or you,” Marceline snorts. Leave it to her brother to clobber his way into a high-stakes spy mission. He’s a scout, he should know better. Then again, he brought good information. Accidentally.
“Just stay down. This is my stakeout. And don’t wake Mrs. Apple. She’s right there.”
“Fine,” Toby whispers, sounding hurt. Then, “She’s not moving. You think she’s dead?”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Mom’ll love to hear your new vocabulary word. Fourth grade. Hooooo-weee.”
“Shut your dirty mouth!”
A slam from within the house snaps their focus back to the window. A shadow throws the unfiltered yellow light from the bathroom across the door, which hangs open as if tossed that way, not gently placed as Mrs. Apple would have done, leaning a tissue paper palm on the wall for balance. Old people, Marceline has noticed, often seemed afraid of falling over, like age brings not wisdom but instability.
She fears that, she realizes. Not dying, but feeling like she can’t stand on her own two feet. Learning to walk was bad enough. Marceline remembers not being able to walk as a baby. She is the only person she knows who can say that about themselves. She vividly recalls stepping from foot to foot, and the surge of excitement when she finally pressed one set of toes, then the other, into the carpet and wobbled without toppling. Toby didn’t believe her when she whispered this to him when they were camping last year, wrapped under a thick comforter, though it was balmy and sticky out. He called her a liar, then shoved a marshmallow in his mouth and chewed, revealing the white goo between his teeth with a slow, grotesque grin.
She’s never brought it up to anyone again, but holds the truth close, a glimmering source of pride.
The shadows shake for a few seconds, and Marceline and Toby stare at them, transfixed.
“Someone’s in there,” Toby whispers. He always needs to sound like he has a plan.
“Duh.” She can minimize it all she wants, but the idea of someone moving around in there, while Mrs. Apple sleeps, chills her body to the core. She’s long outgrown nightmares, at least the kind that wake you up suddenly, but the idea of an invader still sneaks into her consciousness after she watches an episode of Cops with Dad or hears the trees wheeze and whine outside her window on a cold night. Shadows, even those from her parents’ footsteps on their way to the bathroom, remind her of dark searchlights in a scary movie where some kid is lost and loved ones have already cried those tears that prove the truth: that something awful has happened; that the child is gone.
“But maybe it’s, like, her nephew or something. Grandson.”
“But think about it, Toby. When we’re at grandma’s house, she knows we’re there. She’s awake, making pancakes or spaghetti and asking us about school. Mrs. Apple would know her grandson was coming over and would plan to be awake so she could see him.”
“I guess so. We can’t be hasty.” He got that one from dad. Hasty is running out to play baseball without putting your dish in the sink, or doing your homework too fast and making stupid mistakes when you know better. Marceline lets the point drop.
A metallic crash from inside sends the two spies scrambling below the lip of the window. A shadow momentarily blocks the light, as if someone were running through the only stream of illumination in the room. Marceline’s heart slams against the cloth of her t-shirt. Before thoughts can interfere, she takes off toward the edge of the house where the garage door spills out into the driveway. If the intruder is making moves to escape, this is where he’d go.
“Marceline! Stop!” Toby whisper-shouts after her, his squat breaking into a run.
“Shut up!” Marceline whips her head back to get her brother off her tail, only to turn around and mash face first into the white shirted torso of The Guy. She tumbles backward, taking in his height, his gangly frame and sideways cap, and the clutch of pill bottles in his wiry fingers. He reminds her of the stick man she’d made once on a camping trip, spindly and thin and suddenly on fire.
Target identified, the words shoot from her mouth like torpedoes, “Hey! What do you mean going into Mrs. Apple’s house? She needs those pills. She’s sick.” She gasps, then, as if she could suck the words back into her mouth; not wanting to.
The guy’s eyes, she sees now, hover wide and scared, like those of the barn cat they’d adopted once who never let her get close and hissed when she approached with dishes of food and water. He was too wild to thrive in a house, with a family, and they’d had to let him go, back to a farm where he could mouse and sleep in barn rafters and avoid human contact at all costs.
The pills ricochet in the bottles, tiny taps against other pills and their orange plastic container. Marceline thinks she can hear the granules in the clear capsules trembling against one another.
“Give us those bottles and we won’t call the police.” Toby’s voice booms with an authority she’s never heard before. He sounds grown up. He sounds like Dad. Toby reaches one hand down and yanks Marceline up off the ground.
“Those kids know what they’re talking about,” utters a weary voice from the garage. Mrs. Apple stands, a round silhouette, backlit by a bare bulb.
“You know him?” Marceline can’t understand it. Why would someone close to Mrs. Apple steal what was keeping her alive?
“Since he was a baby. He’s my grandson, Trevor.” She mutters these words as if she has something sour in her mouth.
Trevor is still staring at the grass where Marceline fell, her soft outline in the damp overgrown green, his face trembling as if he might cry if he could just remember where he’d put the tears. Marceline remembers many times when she’s felt like that, so angry she can’t cry, not till later when no one is watching.
“Come inside, boy.” Mrs. Apple speaks softly with a voice like the rain that’s starting to smear the sand between the driveway pebbles into mud. Everyone’s hair is weeping fat droplets.
Trevor shivers like a scarecrow made of dried corn husks. His skinny body, his wordless, twisted mouth, makes up one of the creepiest, saddest things Marceline has ever seen. She wants to push him over but also, strangely, take his hand and lead him somewhere safe. He seems like an alien or a time traveler who’s shown up without the right gear or skin for this planet.
He hovers for the longest moment of Marceline’s life so far, eyebrows knit, gaze burning a hole in the grass. Then, he turns, head down, and strides in a fast, shaking clip into the garage.
Mrs. Apple’s watches him until the house door slams. Then she approaches Marceline. “Thank you,” she says, and gives the child’s shoulder a squeeze that wrings some of the rainwater out in a fresh deluge down her arm. Mrs. Apple’s eyelashes are beaded with moisture. Whether rain or tears, Marceline can’t tell.
The girl wipes her eyes and nods to Toby. “He helped.”
“Only a little,” he murmurs. “Sorry about your medicine.”
Mrs. Apple looks at the two children, clothes turned to wet suits, two lopsided puppies she’s only seen running around in other yards, until now.
“Go on inside. You’re both soaked.”
The things grown ups say.
