Marilou Is Everywhere

Description

Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction

One of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2019

A SKIMM READS PICK

A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK

“This novel reads like a miracle.” —NPR

Consumed by the longing for a different life, a teenager flees her family and carefully slips into another — replacing a girl whose own sudden disappearance still haunts the town.

Fourteen-year-old Cindy and her two older brothers live in rural Pennsylvania, in a house with occasional electricity, two fierce dogs, one book, and a mother who comes and goes for months at a time. Deprived of adult supervision, the siblings rely on one another for nourishment of all kinds. As Cindy’s brothers take on new responsibilities for her care, the shadow of danger looms larger and the status quo no longer seems tolerable.

So when a glamorous teen from a more affluent, cultured home goes missing, Cindy escapes her own family’s poverty and slips into the missing teen’s life. As Jude Vanderjohn, Cindy is suddenly surrounded by books and art, by new foods and traditions, and most important, by a startling sense of possibility. In her borrowed life she also finds herself accepting the confused love of a mother who is constitutionally incapable of grasping what has happened to her real daughter. As Cindy experiences overwhelming maternal love for the first time, she must reckon with her own deceits and, in the process, learn what it means to be a daughter, a sister, and a neighbor.

Marilou Is Everywhere is a powerful, propulsive portrait of an overlooked girl who finds for the first time that her choices matter.”Marilou is Everywhere is a novel of stunning emotional intelligence, and Cindy an unforgettable character, but it’s Smith’s writing that’s the real star of the book…The book is almost otherworldly in its beauty and power. . .Fiction debuts this accomplished don’t come along very often at all, and Marilou Is Everywhere proves that Smith is a writer of immense talent and rare imagination.”—Michael Schaub, NPR

“It’s a book brimming with longing, with heartbreak. It’s a coming-of-age by coming into somebody else. . . . And yet the novel is about more than just adolescent angst, a young girl’s longing to be somewhere else, someone else. Its universality lies in its generosity — its empathy for every character within it, regardless of his or her decisions, no matter how flawed. There is compassion for questionable actions rooted in longing. Reduced to those longings, are any of us so dissimilar?”—New York Times Book Review

“Strange and gripping.”—The New Yorker

“Moving, wise, and important.” —Vulture (Best Overlooked Books of 2019)
 
“Magnificent . . . You crack open a book which seems to be about a missing girl and end up on a journey about what it means to be an outsider, to live with the trauma of neglect. It explores questions about how a young person might find her way through life with no adults lighting the way with care.”—Pittsburgh Current

“This one’s like ‘Sliding Doors’ meets ‘Freaky Friday’ from a sharp, smart writing voice.”—The Skimm

“Simmering mystery that confronts questions about the consequences of action and inaction alike, and what it means to belong.” – Vanity Fair

“Stunningly evocative . . . a depiction of poverty and insularity that wouldn’t be out of place in the books of Lauren Groff or Tim Gautreaux.”—Boston Globe 

“Stark, vivid and emotional, this novel examines what it means to disappear.”—Electric Literature

“Marilou Is Everywhere is a breathtakingly empathetic portrayal of a young woman in crisis, and an astonishingly assured debut. With lyrical precision, Ms. Smith writes Cindy with humanity and kindness, bringing her to vivid life. . . Cindy’s hunger to have those miles inside of her be recognized is part of the most human of desires: to be known as a person with an inherent worth — a need that countless hearts everywhere carry inside of them.”—Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“Sarah Elaine Smith’s remarkably accomplished debut novel casts a wondrous spell. Her brilliantly drawn young narrator, a young girl starved of maternal love and a stranger to human kindness, easily wins our sympathy . . . . Marilou Is Everywhere has drama and poignancy, but its other source of delight is Smith’s stunning prose. Beautiful phrasings or original formulations glint on the page . . . we find ourselves swept along while marveling at a unique new voice.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“[Sarah Elaine Smith] has thrown down a tale that transcends place. The dexterity of her writing and the intricacy of the story make ‘Marilou Is Everywhere’ deserving of another familiar tag in the book world: a stunning literary debut.”—Pittsburgh Quarterly
 
“Sometimes a story haunts you. The prose leaves you raw, defying you to articulate what the book is because it feels too immense. Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, is such a book. . . Written in Smith’s evocative prose, Cindy’s voice is remarkable . . . Smith succeeds in capturing the intricacies of poverty empathy, which makes the novel a particularly heartbreaking read.”—Paste 

“Beautiful debut novel. . .one of the most unforgettable books I’ve read this year, offering a uniquely haunting, but also disarmingly funny and lyrical look at loss, love and the desire to be seen for who you know yourself to be.” –Nylon 

“Smith’s writing is feral. It’s alert, skittish, and hungry. . .A poignant story of accountability.”– Bust Magazine 

“This is a mysterious and strangely exciting debut. Smith is a poet, and writes in sensory-driven, soul-tapping prose . . . Literary-minded teens will find a kindred heroine in the wonderfully weird and wry Cindy.”—Booklist 

“Hauntingly gorgeous… Spare and sensual and surprisingly funny… Smith’s characters are as rich as her prose.—Kirkus, starred review

“Sarah Elaine Smith has one of the most likable and delightful writing voices I have encountered recently – funny, lyrical, sexy, sad, humane, and just a total pleasure to read.” – Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

“Sarah Smith’s debut, Marilou is Everywhere, is one of the most exquisitely written books I’ve read in a long time. Page after page I was struck by lines so unbearably beautiful and wise that by the final sentence I’d underlined most of the book. That she manages to do this while also telling a firecracker of a story about what happens when 14 year old Cindy slips into the life of the missing girl next door proves Smith a master. A haunting novel about craving escape so badly you’re willing to erase yourself, by a writer I would follow anywhere.” – Julie Buntin, author of Marlena 

“Marilou is Everywhere is everything. A missing girl story turned on its ear. That ear so close to the rural Pennsylvania ground that you’ll know every goddamn goat and swimming hole, every derelict heart and jar of homemade blackberry wine. The fullness of Sarah Smith’s prose will you leave feeling like you’re hiding in plain sight–just like Cindy Stoat standing in for the missing girl. And as Smith plumbs what it means to disappear, you’ll find yourself in such fullness that you’ll ache and disappear too. This is the rare book that wants for nothing.” – Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July CreekSarah Elaine Smith holds MFAs in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Wallace fellowship.

I used to think my troubles got legs the summer Jude Vanderjohn disappeared, but now I see how they started much earlier.

Before that summer, the things that happened to me were air and water and just as see-thru. They were real but I didn’t care for them much. I did not care for the real. It didn’t seem so special to me, whatever communion I could take with the dust spangles, or the snakes that spun in an oiled way along the rotting tractor tires stacked up by the shed, or the stony light that fell in those hills and made the vines and mosses this vivid nightmare green. None of it had a purpose to me. Everything I saw seemed to have been emptied out and left there humming. I watched the cars. I read catalogs, which I collected and which my family called Cindy’s magazines. My life was an empty place. From where I stood, it seared on with a blank and merciless light. All dust and no song. Rainbows in oil puddles. Bug bites hatched with a curved X from my fingernails. Donald Duck orange juice in the can. Red mottles on my brother Clinton’s puffy hands, otherwise so white they were actually yellow, like hard cheese. The mole on my belly button. You get to know things this way, by looking at yourself. You know the world by the shape of what comes back when you yell.

I had only ever been myself, and found it lacking. Even when the sun was shining, when the world was up, when I was born. And some days, I was really, really born. Most of my day I spent carving little pits in time where I could hide out in a texture of light or an idea. And then, that summer, I made a space between myself and all that. I guess how I could say it is, I began to see the other world, and it was not real and yet I could pull it across the real at will, like a thin cotton curtain. When I stood just far enough outside of it, my life, suddenly the blaring light resolved itself into a huge movie screen blooming out of the dark, a woman’s jaw jutting into the abandoning tilt of a kiss. The beginning of romance came from that distance. Black and white, the sparkling velvet dark and always someone else is there in the mind, in the cavern above my head. But a stranger. But it doesn’t matter, really. The point is that at that moment in my life, I would kill or die, die or kill, to be anyone else.

I wasn’t trying to become Jude. Not exactly. But I wanted to disappear, and she had left a space. When I stepped into that space, I vanished from my senses. It changed me into someone who didn’t have my actual mind. The same way it changed Jude, when Virgil called her Marilou as they walked the halls of our high school arm in arm, shining like magazine people you’d never see. She became that other girl, and it lit her up, and that is what I wanted.

Now, I know how that sounds: teenage, teenage. I was, and it brought me to wickedness. Except in wickedness, I loved the world, too, in a way so fierce I assumed no one could imagine. And I love it still. It was, quite simply, how I survived.

 

I

 

Jude Vanderjohn was last seen in the parking lot across from Burchinal’s General Store in Gans, just over the West Virginia border, where she had been camping in Coopers Rock State Forest with four other girls from the newly graduated West Greene High School senior class. The quickest way back went through Morgantown, but they had gone instead through Fayette County. When asked why they took the long way, Kayla apparently said that they wanted a prettier drive, they weren’t anxious to come back so soon. Then, when Detective Torboli asked again, she admitted they had wanted to smoke a blunt in the car, and Jude had a strict personal law against blunt smoking on interstates. Which did turn out to be true, but it wasn’t the real reason either.

Eventually Crystal admitted that they had been followed, and took the other route because they were trying to lose the boys who had been hanging around their campsite. The boys had seemed vaguely related. They all had a similar smudge of mustache and they spoke in a brisk mystery language. At first, Shawn, B.D., and Caleb had loitered in a helpful way, starting the fire and sharing from their thirty racks, showing off places around the margins of Cheat Lake where the fish were so gullible you’d think they wanted to die in your hands.

The second night of the trip, the boys took them on a hike through some path that wound around the massive blocks of limestone stories below the lookout pavilion. They took secret avenues through the rock where slim light fell through, silvery and ancient. At the Ravens Rock Overlook, they had produced homemade blackberry wine in a three-liter Pepsi bottle. They were romance minded, of course. The girls didn’t rebuff them too hard at first. It is sometimes nice to see a little attention. A little of that light lands on you, say, on a dizzy vista, and sweet wine is sweet, or so I’m told.

Thrill seekers prefer Ravens Rock Overlook because it is unfenced. The view isn’t troubled by those coin-op lookie-loos. It feels likely, if you place a foot wrong, that you will spin off into the sky and never again trouble with gravity. So the boys dared to touch the girls in the dark, on the small of the back, the casual first declaration. It was romance. Apparently Kayla even held hands with Shawn, the tall one with the buff of his arms showing through his cut-up T-shirt. They talked about the souls of animals and the things the stars looked like, and they talked about their idiot worried parents and how they would all be just fine.

Shawn walked Kayla closer to the edge. He said he wanted to show her a place where you could see the river down below like a moving silver chain. Close to the drop, he kicked her in the back of the knee, sly, to make her stumble and grab on to him dearly. Kayla pantomimed this by pinwheeling her arms in dismay when she told me the story. Shawn had probably intended for her to swoon into his arms, but she instead shrieked and tore back up from the edge, and running blind in the dark she turned her ankle in a gopher hole. The boys carried her back to camp and bound her ankle with duct tape and even went to the Eagle Lodge CafŽ to bring her ice, a Coke, a stack of cordwood to apologize.

But things had turned. Suddenly Kayla’s absent boyfriend asserted himself a bit more firmly in her memory. She started to talk about him a lot. Maybe she was trying to remind herself as much as anything, but she did allude to Lyle’s WPIAL wrestling trophies and bow-hunting expertise something on the heavy side. The musk wore down to a lean little smell. But the boys kept working their angle, saying how cold a night for May. Saying, man, what a lonely thing, to sleep alone on a night so cold. When the girls didn’t respond they laid it down for a while and kept up the friendliness, but Jude had already heard the sour note. She said she didn’t like their manners and they could go bang their dicks together if they were so fucking cold. The smallest of the boys, B.D., feint-stepped to her with his hand rared back, like he would slap her in the face, and they noticed then that he had a knife. It was nothing special, with a black plastic handle like for a kitchen, but he let it wave around meanly all the same. Jude brought out a canister of pepper spray-none of the others knew she even carried such a thing-and scorched B.D. right at the bridge of his nose.

Tia and Crystal and Kayla wanted to leave immediately, but it had already been dark for some time and they had left the cars outside the park limits to avoid the vehicle fee. Jude and Amber doubted the boys would come back, and with Kayla on one foot it would take forever to hike out in the dark. But the boys did pass through a few times in the night to thrash around in the underbrush and scare them, muttering under their breath in a simmering way: bitches, bitches, bitches. Crystal was sure someone had peed on her tent in the middle of the night.

In the morning, they broke camp as soon as the light started to change and hiked back out of the park. Jude’s car was scratched up with key marks that bit down to the metal. They had not told the boys where they’d left their cars, but Jude realized one must have followed her when she had made the trek to get bug spray from the trunk. Still, she didn’t seem scared, they said. Pissed off, though, like anyone would be.

Once they were loaded up and driving off, a shitty Chevy Corsica pulled out of the brush by the highway entrance and kicked up hard behind them on the turns, swinging out into the oncoming lane and passing them on blind curves, then slowing down to nothing so the girls would have to go around. Amber, who was driving the other vehicle, claimed the Corsica nipped her rear bumper a few times, and though they brought it in to gather evidence, nothing could be discerned from the condition of her car. Jude, who was driving in front, pulled off toward Uniontown. She said she knew a back way. The boys didn’t follow

Jude’s car was still in front. She didn’t know her way so well as she thought-they were about to enter a toll road, and she swerved off at the last exit before the turnpike. Her vehicle was knocking and slugging to accelerate, and as they went through Gans, it slowed up and seemed to shake on the turns. On one hairpin she hit a pothole and limped it into the parking lot across from Burchinal’s, where a hand-lettered sign advertised a pepperoni roll sale for the students of Ferd Swaney Elementary and the American flag hung rigid like it does everywhere. An old boy in greased coveralls and no undershirt was smoking in a watchful way on his porch, right up by the road, as they peeped the dark windows. Closed, Sunday morning, for church. He came out from behind a dismembered Honda Rebel to look at Jude’s car. From what they described, he said it sounded like someone had put sugar in her gas tank and the fuel filter would have to be dumped. He offered his services, or she could use the phone inside to call AAA. Jude chose to call, even though it would take a few hours. She waved him off and called on her cell. She must have had it with friendly men by that point.

The other girls were getting anxious. They had a mutual friend who was getting married in Nineveh that afternoon, and while they didn’t want to abandon Jude, it happened that Kayla, Crystal, Amber, and Tia were all in the wedding party, and Jude was not. Morgan, the bride, expected them at eleven to have their hair duded up with mini rhinestones and all that. More to the point, Morgan was a real grudge keeper and had already dis- and reinvited Amber multiple times, so they were relieved when Jude told them to go on. The old boy said Jude could wait inside the store. It just so happened to belong to his uncle. He fished a key out from the mailbox and let them into the unlit place already decided. He gave them Cokes to calm them down, and said he hoped they would all pass through again someday on happier errands.

It was not even clear whether he or his wife had been the last person to see Jude. His name was Denny Cogar and he advised that the tow truck arrived around two, many hours after it was supposed to come. He also advised that he had watched Jude hitch herself up into the cab and laugh with the driver about something. But Cheryl Cogar recalled that Jude had spent a long time on her cell phone, pacing along the crick behind the store, talking to someone, fighting, kind of, and hours before the tow truck arrived, she had gotten into a low little hat-shaped sedan that had skidded up from nowhere.

“And they was playing loud music about riding for the devil,” Cheryl said. “Gangster music, I think it was.”

“You saw Jude get into this car?”

“I heard it.”

“What kind of car was it?” Detective Torboli asked.

“Red,” she said.

“Nothing else?”

“It was red.”

The interview pressed on along this line for hours. The detective named all types of cars in a soft, chanting voice.

 

II

 

The summer Jude disappeared, my brothers and I had turned basically feral since our mother had gone off for a number of months and we were living free, according to our own ideas and customs. Our mother disappearing was nothing new, but she usually came back within a few weeks. This time, we had not exactly been counting the days, but we had run out of food maybe a month past and been improvising ever since. I was fourteen and ruled by a dark planet. My brothers were grown, or seemed so to me at the time. In winter, they ate Steak-umms in front of the TV and made up theories about the New World Order while Clinton got lazy angry drunk around twilight. But in summer, Virgil lined up mowing jobs all over, and they were suddenly honest workingmen, and you couldn’t tell them a single thing.

Our well was low from a dry spring, so we bathed in the pond. We called it Heaven Lake because we had grand imaginations and no sense, but it was really just a retainer pond. The family that owned it was called the Dukes and they had built a house, too, which looked like a blank face. They had made the pond, just scratched it right in and pulled the silver into it somehow with backhoes and a spillway of cinder blocks. They peopled it with catfish and bluegill. It was fenced in at the road with an eighteen-foot chain-link gate. The family kept it locked all the time except when they wanted to swim or fish, although they only came up a few times each year and the place was essentially ours.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7500 × 5.1600 × 7.9900 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09780525535256
ISBN-10	052553525X
Author	Sarah Elaine Smith
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC066000
Subjects	Debut novel, rural Pennsylvania, missing teen, books about teenagers, books about class, affluence and poverty, girl goes missing, debut novels, books about rural areas, books about farming, absent parents, sarah elaine smith, marilou is everywhere, missing girl, dysfunctional family, realistic fiction books, small town, Appalachia, contemporary fiction, Mothers and daughters, literary fiction, books about race, women's fiction, novels, dysfunctional families, FIC019000, coming of age, Escapism, Kidnapping, fiction, FIC066000, drama