She got up. She didn't look at me. She went up the stairs, and halfway up she stopped, right in the spot where she'd been sitting in March in the dark, and I thought she was going to say something, and then she went on, and her door shut. It didn't slam. I almost wish it had.
Marcus turned the shears over in his hand and looked at them, as if he'd never seen a pair of scissors before. Then he put them on top of the bookshelf, up high, where you'd put something to keep it from a toddler.
"Marlo," he said. "You all right?"
I said, "No," and got up, and gathered all of it, every piece, the long strips that had come all the way loose and the little curls of thread, and carried it up the stairs past Hadley's shut door into my room, and shut my own door, and stood there with my back against it.
I thought I would cry then. I'd been holding it the whole way up the stairs like a glass of water filled too full. But I stood there and nothing came. What came instead was something cold and very clear, like the feeling of the first morning air when you walk out of the bowling alley after close and it's almost midnight and the parking lot is empty and the whole world seems to have been rinsed. I stood there and I thought: all right. What's left.
I laid it out on my bed. I took the comforter off first so there'd be nothing under it but the white sheet, and I laid the dress out flat, bodice at the top, the skirt fanned out below it in strips, and I put every loose piece where it had come from, like a puzzle. It took a long time. When I was done it looked like a drawing of a dress somebody had gone over with a comb.
The bodice was whole. The back was whole, the V and the buttons. One strap was cut through clean, about halfway down; the other was cut most of the way through and hanging by a few threads. The skirt was cut from the hem up in eleven long slits, some of them stopping around my knee, some of them going all the way up to where the hip curved in. Below the waist there was maybe six inches of crepe left uncut, all the way around. Below that it was all strips.
I got my phone out and took footage of it. It was what you were supposed to do after something happened to your car. I walked slowly around the bed with the phone over it, and my hands were steady. Then I took a photo of the pink layaway card with PAID IN FULL across the bottom, lying on top of the bodice.
Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed and looked at the footage, all of it, twice. On the screen it looked final, like a news story about something that had already happened to somebody else.
When it was over the second time I got up, and I opened my door, and I went back downstairs.
They were in the kitchen. I could hear them before I got there, Marcus's voice low and steady, my mother's higher and faster, and they both stopped when they saw me in the doorway. My mother was standing at the sink with her back to the window and her arms crossed. Marcus was at the table, still in his vest, his big hands flat on the wood in front of him like he was keeping it from floating away.