Chapter Text
When Max is six, she learns how to ride a bike.
It happens on the street outside her old house. She dreams of that place, sometimes. With its pale yellow sidings and single car garage. It was a tiny two bedroom, barely enough room for a little more than minimalistic lifestyle. There were crayon markings on the walls. Stained carpeting. A driveway with a crack. It wasn’t perfect, maybe not even pretty, but Max still dreams of it.
Her parents never seemed to get along quite right. There were always arguments. Always angry adults with the desperate questions of how to fix a failing marriage. Still, they tried. Her mom always got up early to iron her father’s shirts. Her dad never skipped making her mom’s coffee; two packets of sugar and a splash of creamer.
It’s why, despite all the sadness that seemed to always persist, Max knew she was still capable of love. Sometimes it came out too bitter and too strangled, but a hopeless marriage and breaking family don’t take it away.
Learning to ride a bike is a family affair. She’d always felt lonely growing up. Before, during, and after her changing families. She never had much of a sibling. She hoped, briefly, when Billy walked into her life, but he was already angry. He let loose the reins of his belief of being able to love earlier than she did.
With both her parents she used to feel less lonely. Something felt repairable when her dad held onto the back of the seat and her mom ran alongside. She dreams of that, too. She dreams of her mom cleaning a scrape from crashing into the curb and her dad making her laugh to distract her from the pain of the wound being cleaned.
Her parents divorced six months later. Her dad moved into a shitty apartment a half hour away. Six months after that, her mom found Neil Hargrove at a bar when she was half-drunk, foraging for love in difficult circumstances. Three months after that, there’s a quietly angry girl meeting a loudly angry boy, and instead of love there is only bitterness and an ache that both children cannot bear
Neil is worse than her father, but he’s so very different that Max suspects it’s what makes her mom okay with it. The loneliness grows like mold.
Max isn’t okay with any of it, but Neil can be cruel, is cruel, and she knows Billy is lonely too. So she tries to make things better, but things are only ever worse. Every other weekend she sees her dad at his shitty apartment, which at least has a pullout couch for her to sleep on. He’s more sad than she remembers, but he continues to pour cereal for her and they spend those weekend mornings watching cartoons.
There is no Billy to hurt her. No Neil to make Billy feel the need to hurt her. No mom to pretend like it isn’t happening. Her father is tired. He is further from how Max sees her parents, but the peace is more palpable.
When she hears Neil hit Billy for the first time and she can hear him crying, she tries to comfort him. What she finds, instead, is her brother-who-can’t-be grabbing her shirt collar and pulling on it until he’s satisfied enough by the limited tears in her eye.
She calls her dad that night, gripping the phone and asking him to pick her up early. He tells her that he’s got to his shift and that it’ll work itself out. He never quite got along with his brothers either. The pit in Max’s stomach grows so wide she begins to worry it will swallow her entirely.
She ran away two times that month. Each time the yellow house, which is now a crisp white. Each time she does, she falls asleep on the maintained lawn, which is greener than it used to be. Neil catches her before the third time and is the closest he’s ever gotten to shouting at her. A gentle hand from Susan on his shoulder is what makes him stop. Max flinches, preparing for a hit. She doesn’t know how to feel when he just tells her to go to bed.
On the way back to her room, Billy stands at his doorway. A bruise a week old is viewable underneath the short sleeve of his shirt. Max knows it’s coming and she could surely dodge it, but she gets close enough for him to push her so hard she hits the closest wall. It doesn’t make anything better, but Max naively hopes that she’ll be able to understand Billy and why he’s so angry all the time.
They begin to make plans to move away after that. Max does her best to plead otherwise. Her dad is a break from it and she’s got a friend group that she had since third grade. They’re two separate worlds from the home she feels like is in flames all the time. She can’t pretend to be okay with it when she can’t get away.
She runs away again, this time skating to her dad’s house in the middle of the night. Max spends an hour begging him to not let her go. When dawn comes, Sam Mayfield drives his daughter to a different home. He promises to call. To send letters. To be there still.
Max waits by the phone at the times he promises. She falls asleep with the cord twisted around her hand.
She dreams about the yellow house until a nightmare reminds her what she loves of it no longer remains.
-
Max knows how to mourn. She gets familiar with it after doing it all her life.
She mourns her parent’s marriage. She mourns a trying family. She mourns her mom sinking further into meekness and she mourns her father who stops caring as much. She mourns for Billy, who might have been different in another life if people were kind to him. She mourns Billy himself, despite how much she hates him from transferring his own anger into her. She mourns her mom, again, when she loses everything and then herself. Max mourns a life she couldn’t have had, not if she kicked and screamed and fought for it harder.
It feels like a question she doesn’t have to ask, but Max asks it anyway. Everyone is so damn sad. It feels like she may as well add more weight onto her suffocating grief.
Lucas’s eyes become wide and full of sorrow when Max asks the dreadful question and he can only manage to shake his head. He has a terrible time forming words about the staggering death tolls around them. Max loves him, loves how he comforts her, but she needs a direct answer. There has to be a finality to her trifling loss, otherwise it will only weigh her down so much she’ll sink.
Max asks Dustin one day, a little more than two weeks after the gate is closed and a piece to their group is never going to come back. They’re all at Lucas’s house, conglomerated in the living room. The others are in the kitchen rummaging for snacks, leaving the two of them alone while Ghostbusters is paused. A safe movie after so much uncertainty.
Dustin’s eyes are wide, too, but he doesn’t leave the question in the air like smoke trapped in a burning house. He squeezes one hand open and shut. They’re all sick of delivering bad news, but Max just needs this one thing, and she can’t ask anyone else to tell her.
“No, they never recovered your mom’s body. I guess they just included her when they declared the missing people as dead. I’m sorry, Max.”
It feels like a stab to the chest. It’s a wound her mom will never be able to clean like she did with the scrapes on her knees. Her gut tightens. The last hug from her mother wasn’t even real. It takes substantial strength not to vomit.
Even as she swallows down the bile in her throat , it doesn’t feel like news dropped from a bomber plane, but like a bullet from a gun she watched get raised to her chest. There’s a level of unfortunate preparedness she’s had her whole life.
It ripples through her body like a shudder as her body just turns on the old functions of grieving once more. Most of what used to be Max’s she didn’t get to keep.
“Max?” Dustin asks. He looks at her gently and terribly sadly. She wipes at her face and smiles weakly.
“Thank you, Dustin,” she tells him earnestly. If the world should be awful to her, she at least hopes it’s honest about its terrible treatment. No use in pretending in something else. And let the news be shared from someone who cares so deeply about her.
Dustin reaches out to console her with a hand to her arm, but Max recoils away with what little strength she has. She shakes her head and looks at the television. “When are those nerds going to come back? I swear we’ve paused this movie ten times and it’s only been a half hour.”
She doesn’t spare a look at him. She doesn’t think she can take Dustin’s expression of empathy.
By the time Lucas comes back, Max tries to clean up her expression and her filling eyes. He’s carrying a bowl of popcorn and a refill of her water and sets them down on the coffee table immediately upon seeing her.
“Is something wrong?” Lucas asks. Max tilts her head up, mostly endeared by him and minimally annoyed. It gets more difficult everyday to be able to hide feelings from him. It’s like he’s got a damn radar for these things.
To his credit, Dustin doesn’t say anything. At least not until Max tries, but fails to get any words out. A tiny, exhausted sigh is the only thing that feels doable.
“We were talking about the missing people. Her mom,” Dustin says. His voice is thin.
Lucas gets the same damn expression he gets everytime Max is sad. It makes him look smaller. It makes Max feel smaller.
Her lips quiver despite her effort to remain neutral, and she reaches out to touch his skin. Lucas, she gets to keep. She reminds herself of this every day.
“I’m sorry, Max,” he says. His voice is just as frail.
“I’m really tired of hearing that,” Max says. She pulls her bottom lip into her teeth and bites them until it stings.
“Maybe she’s still out there,” he tells her, “maybe she got scared and left, and she doesn’t know you’re okay.”
His voice is unsteady, unsure of his own words. Max smiles very small and shakes her head. She wraps her arms around herself as much as she can and stares at the flickering screen.
“Did they find anyone else who disappeared that night?” Max asks.
He considers the question for a long breath. Then when it seems he has the courage, he shakes his head. “No.”
“Lucas,” Max says, very softly, “my mom wasn’t perfect. But she wouldn’t have left me. Not unless she wasn’t given the choice.”
She hates how steady her voice is as she admits to knowing the fatal truth. Crying would be an appropriate response, but it feels fitting for Max to instead laugh as she lifts her head to stare at the ceiling.
“She usually worked graveyard shifts. She was supposed to be home early that day.”
When Max looks at Lucas again, his eyes are large and glossy. She turns over hand and opens her fingers. His hand easily slides onto her own.
“I just hope it was quicker than mine,” Max murmurs.
Lucas pulls her against his chest and holds her head. Dustin’s hand goes to her shoulder. A steady, grounding presence as her wound gasps with pain.
A minute later Mike and Will return. Max has gotten good at tuning people out, and she does so. Faintly she can hear their voices like they’re separated by glass. Mike asks if she’s okay and Lucas nods his head. His chin brushes the top of her hair.
It might be a lie, but there’s sometimes nothing to ease some heaviness. If they know better, they won’t push. It doesn’t take much to figure things out.
The movie starts again. Max leans into Lucas and watches with her eyes too blurry to make out the scenes.
Ghostbusters was the last movie Susan took Max to see in a theater.