Marilyn

by Virginia Marshall

2022 Fiction Contest Honorable Mention

When she was six and I was five, Marilyn and our father fell into the river behind our house. We girls played there almost every day, trying to ignore the biting flies and playing various iterations of pretend. That day, Marilyn was Captain Hook and I was Peter Pan. Our sisters, I think, were involved in their own game featuring princesses and kings. The river is fast that time of year, in early summer when snow is still melting off the mountaintops and the water rushes with an urgency I’ve only ever seen in places where summers are brief and bursting with wildflowers and winters are unending and bleak. 

I can still see Marilyn’s ponytail swinging back and forth as she hopped from one rock to the next. “Not so far!” I called out to her, for she was almost at the rock we called Mufasa, the boundary of our play; any farther than that and we would not be able to swim back to safety if we slipped. But Marilyn was brandishing her stick-turned-saber, cackling in her raspy, mannish voice she reserved for villains. Our father was at the riverbank with us that day, which wasn’t normally the case. He was a big rock of a man with a dark black beard and forearms like the branches of trees. He called out to her, too, and Marilyn turned and stuck out her tongue as if the devil possessed her, as Sadie would later say. Our father made a growl of frustration and moved toward her, stepping from rock to rock in his weekend shoes, the ones whose soles were worn smooth from use, while Marilyn, caught up in a drama of her own, took her stance on Mufasa, braced as if my father might hurl himself at her and she would have to fight. But he never made it to Mufasa. He slipped on a wet rock that had no name and toppled backward, his tree-limb arms windmilling pointlessly. He careened into the river and we three girls on the riverbank squealed with surprise when we were splashed with buckets of ice-cold water. It was then that Marilyn fell, too, and then they were both in the water. 

Judith, the best swimmer of all of us, sprang into action. She grabbed a branch from the brush and waded into the river. Sadie held onto her arm and went in as far as her shins so that the two of them plus the branch extended as far as Marilyn, who was splashing and working her arms and legs furiously so as not to be swept into the current. She grabbed hold of the branch and Sadie and Judith dragged her in, cursing her for her foolishness. Ellen was on the riverbank, crying and hugging her knees to her chest. It was then that I realized something was wrong with our father, whose head had not reappeared above the surface of the water. I screamed and ran into the river, and if Marilyn hadn’t caught my arm and held me back, I might have been lost that day. But it was only my father we lost. I suppose the great tragedy is that he didn’t even save Marilyn—his daughters saved her. And it was his daughters who killed him, though Marilyn of course took all the shame herself, as if absorbing the worst of us would make her stronger. 

It was a year ago now that I last saw Marilyn. My social media–savvy sisters found her handle on Instagram and examined each post (none of which were geotagged, they explained to me with the exasperated patience one assumes when talking to the elderly, even though I am the youngest). I scrolled through them in between patients and glimpsed a street sign in one of Marilyn’s posts. 

“She’s in Brooklyn!” I shouted. I had stepped into the echoey hallway, pulling down my mask to take the FaceTime call. 

I was then in Queens and if Marilyn was in Brooklyn, that meant we had both come to the city from the same nothing Montana town, had both struggled to orient ourselves, bemused by the cacophony of city sounds and the tall buildings that blocked the standard east-west sweep of the sun—and in all that time, I had not known she was so near. 

Judith agreed that Marilyn had to be in Brooklyn. The architecture of the buildings in her post and the unique name on the street sign placed her in Fort Greene. Then Ellen joined and it was the four of our floating faces. It was decided that I should be the one to find her because I was in New York and because she had always liked me best. I didn’t protest, partially because I had to see my next patient and partially because I really did believe that if any of us had a chance of convincing our sister to come home and say goodbye to our dying mother, it would be me. 

On my next day off, I took a series of subways to Fort Greene. Sadie thought she worked in a coffee shop or bookstore, based on her light-filled posts and the shelves stuffed with books in the background. It was laughably easy to find her. In the third store I tried, a bookstore with a witty name I’ve now forgotten, I found Marilyn behind the counter. I waited between the small press shelves and the poetry section until she looked up. She was chewing on a lock of her hair and it dropped out of her mouth like a dead fish. I asked if we could go somewhere to talk. She nodded, and her coworker, a man with a nose ring who made me think of deli meat, remarked that we looked identical. 

“I’m older,” said Marilyn. 

“Ten months,” I clarified. 

“Irish twins,” said Marilyn. 

In fifteen minutes, she took her lunch break and we walked out of the store together, an awkward three or four feet between us so that we could avoid the cavernous subway grate that took up most of the sidewalk. At least that was something that had remained the same: both of us were terrified of falling into holes in the street, wary of ground that seemed solid enough to everyone else. 

Marilyn took me to get grilled peanut butter sandwiches at her favorite bodega and we sat on a bench on Fulton Street, raising our voices each time a bus roared by. She wanted to know how I’d found her. I told her about the posts. 

“I guess I wasn’t trying too hard to be discreet,” she said. 

I told her our mother was dying. “It’s ovarian cancer,” I said. “She wants to see you.” Marilyn finished the last of her sandwich. She licked the peanut butter off her fingers and looked at me. 

“Oh, Lucy,” she said, pity written on her face. “You know I can’t do that.” 

Marilyn tucked her hair behind her ears. Another bus wheezed by and I felt sweat prickle under my arms. At work they call me Mountain, in part because I’m tall and I come from a state known for its enormous rocks, but also because I have never broken down in front of my colleagues, even when they rolled patients in on stretchers, everyone gasping for air, and there was nothing we could do to save them. 

“Tell them you couldn’t find me,” Marilyn said. 

I rested my head on her shoulder. I have four older sisters but it has always been about Marilyn for me. I have always wanted more of her than she could give. 

If I don’t count the nights she snuck out of the house in high school, climbing out of our window and shimmying down the drainage pipe, dropping silently to the ground and sprinting off across the meadow and down to the main road to hitch a ride to goodness knows where (and me pretending to be asleep, torn between feeling hurt she didn’t ask me to come with her and worried sick for her safety, a woman alone in that great western state of drunk men and road rage)—if I don’t count those nights (and I try not to, for she always returned home with the sun), we were in college the first time Marilyn disappeared. 

We matriculated at the University of Montana in Missoula the same year, since I graduated early and didn’t want to be left at home. I went to her apartment every few days, partly to check on her and partly because I was wildly lonely, cast off to a new city without my horde of sisters. 

Halfway into our first semester, Marilyn stopped going to class. We had an intro to psychology class together, and after the second lecture with no Marilyn, I tried calling her and got her voicemail. When her roommate said she hadn’t seen Marilyn in a few days, I panicked, then went to her English class because I knew her schedule by heart and because I didn’t want to alarm anyone. After I attended her philosophy class the next day, responding to her name when the professor called it out and fumbling through what I remembered about Plato’s cave, I walked out of the building into dazzling, late fall sunlight and checked my phone. A text from Marilyn. 

I’m okay. Sorry to ghost. 

I answered that I was glad she was alive. 

Did you tell mom? she asked. 

I was going to call her this afternoon. 

Thank the lord. 

I sent a text back saying I loved her, but a red exclamation mark appeared next to my text. Undeliverable. She had lost service, probably. 

My patients often ask me if I believe in an afterlife. I suppose I do. Or at least, I believe it when I see the effect that the idea of an afterlife creates: upon reaching the end, my dying patients adjust their shoulders and settle back into their pillows, as if to watch a show. As if all has been forgiven. 

Whenever Marilyn got into trouble when we were kids, she submitted herself to a sort of monastic punishment of her own creation. She wouldn’t eat sweets for weeks until the period of repentance had run its course, and she refused to join in the games we played. It would be after some small offense: shattering one of our mother’s vases on accident, or calling Sadie a rude name in a moment of frustration. Whenever she withdrew from us, I lost interest in the family, too. I declined trips to the dollar store, staying home to play card games with her, pleased to have her all to myself. Then, when our sisters and mother came home, Marilyn would slip away to climb the chokecherry tree in the backyard or to hide in the attic, where I knew she had a blanket fort and a pile of comic books she’d stolen one at a time, as if ferreting away food for the winter. She never invited me to those private spaces, though I longed to be with her. There have always been places Marilyn has gone where I am not allowed to follow. 

Some years ago, in the midst of Marilyn’s third or fourth disappearance, I happened to come across a man who knew her in the St. Louis ER. He had come in with a pain in his side that turned out to be a ruptured appendix and when he saw me, he gasped. “Marilyn!” he said, eyes wide in shock. “What are you doing here?” 

If I hadn’t been on the twenty-third hour of my twenty-four-hour call, I might have been more surprised. As it was, I told him I was Lucy, Marilyn’s sister, and asked if he knew where she was. 

“Last I saw her was a month ago, in Indianapolis. She was working at a pub, I think. Something having to do with a duck.” 

Before I could ask more, an attending wheeled him away and I was left alone in that cold, fluorescent hallway. I drove to Indiana the next day, having frantically searched every combination of duck and pub in my phone and come up with The Grey Goose. I arrived in the evening, sleep-deprived and buzzy. She wasn’t behind the bar, but a waitress said there was a Marilyn who worked there and told me the street she thought she lived on. I drove to the street and waited in my car with the engine running for the heat, nodding off and jerking up every few minutes, terrified that I had missed her. 

Then, an hour or two later, I heard a knock on my car window and I startled awake. Marilyn was there, a purple beanie pulled down over her ears and a scarf tied around her face, looking haggard and different. I rolled down my window. 

“You could die in there if you keep the car running like that,” she said. 

“Only if I’m in a garage,” I said. 

I followed her up five flights of stairs to her studio apartment. She opened a bottle of wine and we sat on her couch. She said she liked Indianapolis. The people were distant and the pay was decent. I told her about my job in the emergency room and how I sometimes prayed for a minor accident so that I would have something to do. 

“Nothing life-threatening, of course,” I clarified. “Just something to get my mind off things.” I slurred my words and Marilyn laughed and opened a second bottle of wine. Then she asked if my patients ever arrived dead. “I mean, what happens when you’re too late to save them?” 

I paused, the wineglass halfway to my lips. 

“No, don’t answer that,” she said. 

She went to her dresser and pulled out an old T-shirt and pajama pants and tossed them to me. She said she had to be at work early in the morning but that I could stay as long as I liked. “You work at a bar,” I said. “Bullshit you have to go in early.” 

She sat down next to me and patted my back as I began to cry. “I’m sorry, Lucy,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt you anymore.” 

I told her she was being an idiot. I said she was only hurting herself.

She stood up and backed away. “You have to let me go.” 

When people ask if I have siblings, I say that I have four sisters. I rattle off enough details about three of them that no one asks about the fourth. So many sisters, they will say. I nod. The curse of being in a pack of girls.

I’m not sure who told our mother how our father died, but once she knew the reason for his careless entry into the river that day, a war erupted in her. She was a Christian woman, chock-full of forgiveness, but she also had a deep, dark anger that she tried her whole life to control. I think she passed that anger to all us girls in one way or another. She wanted to rage and scream at Marilyn, and perhaps that would have been better. Instead, she committed herself to loving Marilyn fiercely and mutely, governing her with sharp looks and avoidance, terrified that if she let herself speak openly to Marilyn, something nasty and unforgivable would come out of her and she might be damned to hell, never to meet our father in the afterlife, the one she had been raised her whole life to believe in. 

I went back to Antelope without Marilyn when my mother entered her last days. I told my sisters I hadn’t been able to find her in Brooklyn, and they believed me. We gathered in our mother’s hospital room, Ellen and Judith in the vinyl hospital chairs, Sadie on the end of her bed, and me perched on the windowsill. Mother’s long hair was streaked with grey and wound into a braid that sat on her shoulder. She listened as we told stories of our wild youth, as we did each time we returned to her house for the holidays, her eyes ticking onto each of us in turn, always counting, always coming up short. My sisters retold the story of the time Judith careened down the hill on her bike and lost her two front teeth, and the one about the dog trainer who convinced us to kick our Rottweiler out of our mother’s bed so the trainer could sleep in it instead. My sisters, perhaps thinking of our mother’s comfort, left Marilyn out of the stories. But all the stories I want to remember are hers, and if I ever see her again, I know which one I will tell: 

We were eight, in that rare two-month period before you turned nine, and we were playing a game in our bedroom where the ground was lava and we had to jump from one piece of furniture to another to avoid burning up. I was on top of the bookshelf and you were saying I could make it to the bed, easy. You were perched on top of the radiator, arms held wide to maintain your balance. You looked like a cormorant drying its wings and the sun streamed from the window, making the sequins on your T-shirt sparkle.

I jumped, and the whole bookshelf toppled, spilling picture books and the piggy bank and our Peter Pan alarm clock and me along with it. I landed with my foot underneath the bookshelf. Pain shot through my leg and I was too stunned to cry. I remember looking up at your small, white face which was my face exactly only upside down, your hair haloed around you, the ends of it tickling my nose. I remember wanting to be you in that moment, to trade places not only because the pain in my foot was then insistent and sharp but also because it has always been so hard to be you, so lonely. I will never not want to be where you are. You must know that.

Published July 10th, 2022