Free The More They Disappear by Jesse Donaldson Page A

photo after photo. Generations of Finleys smiling into the flash. There was her grandmother in a black one-piece that made Mary Jane think of a penguin. Alongside her a photo of her grandfather. Pappy, Mary Jane called him. Anything-for-Mary-Jane Pappy. Her grandfather had been the one to tuck her in at night and tell her bedtime stories. He brought home leaves and taught her to identify the trees, and on Sundays they made pancakes in a century-old cast-iron skillet that Lyda once washed with Palmolive. Pappy hadn’t spoken for a week. Mary Jane was thirteen when he died, a girl a year away from starting to grow awkward. It had all been downhill after that. “Why’d you have to go and leave me?” she asked.
    The most recent photos added color. There was her mother in a beach chair, hair nested, smoke drifting from her lips. Jackson beside her. Jackson staring at her. Mary Jane’s heart slowed. Not even the faintest tendrils of affection held her parents together anymore. In the wall’s last photo, Jackson held Mary Jane, just a baby, just a whiff of hair on her head, which Lyda stroked with slender fingers. Mary Jane’s colorless eyes stared straight ahead. It was as if her parents had thought that by holding her they were holding each other. And then the story stopped. Her father hadn’t hung any photos of Mary Jane as a girl or as a teen or as a young woman, but that seemed to make sense in its way. Because when she looked back at the thin, drawn faces of her ancestors, their fair skin and hair, Mary Jane didn’t feel like part of them. She didn’t feel like part of anything.

 
    three
    A bulleted sun beat onto Mary Jane and sweat-dampened strands of brownish hair clung to her pale skin. She woke as if from a bad dream and wiped the grit from her eyes. She was in the backseat of Tara’s car. Alone. All the proper buttons were buttoned and zippers zipped but her mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and she had scratches and a bruise along her left forearm, bits of crushed leaves ground in her hair.
    She decided she must’ve fallen down and started making up an excuse to tell her mother in case Lyda asked why she hadn’t come home. She’d stayed at Tara’s. Tara had been upset over a fight with her boyfriend. That’s how Tara was—high drama. Mary Jane had stayed to comfort her with rom-coms and ice cream. Lyda knew how it was with girls. Mary Jane smiled at the story, how easy it came, how believable it seemed.
    She coughed as she opened the door and something loosed in her throat that she spat on the ground. The world was washed out in bright light and amplified sound. Birds chirping like jackhammers. The horrid hangover of a morning after. Tara’s car was one of a handful scattered among the beer cans and cigarette butts of the dirt track parking lot. Mary Jane looked for her—checked on a pair of bodies huddled in the field grass, checked under a tarp roped between two trees, finally found Tara naked as the day she was born and stretched across the bench seat of a truck with a boy wearing only his socks. Tara’s little tits stood at attention, her nipples bumpy from the cold. The boy had a long, thin penis. Uncircumcised. Mary Jane had never seen one like that.
    Tara got the boys now. Once upon time it had been Mary Jane, but when it mattered, when it meant getting felt up and fucked instead of passing notes in class or playing spin the bottle, Mary Jane had faded into the background.
    â€œTara,” Mary Jane said. “Wake up.”
    The boy whimpered in his sleep.
    The keys dangled in the ignition so the stereo could play but the speakers were silent. Mary Jane hoped Tara didn’t make her stick around to give the boy a jump. She leaned in through the open window and pressed Tara’s pink knee. “Tara,” she said. “Tara, wake the fuck up.” Tara wouldn’t move, so Mary Jane yanked her hair—just a little