Followers

by Megan Angelo

  She goes the way he told her, but it has only been a block before she sees them. Both of them. Together. On a bench. It’s so random. The truth is, Floss wasn’t sure that either of them would be here. All she had to go on for Marlow was the idea that had sat in her chest all these years: someday Marlow would figure it out, and then, in an instant, be gone. All she had to go on for Orla was what always came up when Floss searched for her: 404. Not found.

  Found you now, Floss thinks, closing in on them. She is pleased to see that Marlow looks different. As beautiful as always, but something else: more awake. Maybe she’s started to use the serums that Floss is always trying to give her.

  Orla looks the same, except for the gray hair. We get it, Orla, Floss thinks. You’re different. Then she straightens her spine and reminds herself, as both of them look up and see her: in the minds of her daughter and old friend, she is the agreed-upon asshole. Best not to come in too hot.

  She has not been the world’s greatest mom. She can admit that. But she is the mom. Her. She pretends her heel is stuck again, just to buy some time. She says a silent prayer that Marlow and Orla will grade her on a curve. At the very least, she deserves full credit for completion.

  * * *

  Orla has to stop herself from touching Marlow. She wants to put her mouth on her, to grab her by the scruff and carry her away. Marlow scratches her neck, like she can feel Orla’s thought. Then she shades her eyes and says, “Are you kidding me?”

  Orla follows her gaze. It takes her a moment to recognize the woman coming toward them. There is no way around it; Floss is twice the size she used to be. Well, good for her, Orla thinks. She put her time in being thin. Still, it must be a lot to carry around on five-inch heels.

  A group of ladies power walking stops when they see Floss. They flap their hands. They remember her, from long ago, before they came here. Floss lights up and dawdles, talking with them longer than she should, considering her runaway daughter is waiting just a few yards away.

  Orla looks at Marlow. The girl is frowning, with narrowed eyes, as Floss poses and kisses the air around the walkers’ cheeks. For the first time, Orla sees something of herself in Marlow’s face.

  She puts her arm around her. She tries to block out a blinding flash of memory—this same person in her arms. She is so angry for a moment; she has been cheated of this body. Of the smell of its head at three, resting on her shoulder, of the sight of its legs at nine, scrambling after a basketball, of the feel of its waist beneath a wedding dress. She forces herself to breathe, to say what she was going to. What she has to. “Marlow,” she says. “There’s no way of knowing if I would have been any better.”

  Marlow softens her jaw. Floss leaves the women and runs toward her daughter, somehow, without falling. Floss grabs Marlow and rubs her back. As if she can’t help herself, she reaches out her other hand and pulls Orla in, too. All three of them are stiff-limbed at first, holding something back. Then Orla feels the air between them loosening, just a little. They pull back and look at each other. They take the same shuddering breath. There is a sudden possibility, if only a small one, that none of them are all bad.

  * * *

  “I can’t picture you on that pirate boat,” Orla says to Floss. Marlow was about to say the same thing, but in a much brinier tone.

  Floss sniffs. “What pirate boat?” she says. “I flew to London and chartered a yacht from Southampton. There was some sort of mess with the coast guard on the way in, about my American passport—” here, Floss smiles, like isn’t the coast guard darling “—but I just answered all their questions, took the ticket, and said I’d deal with it later.”

  “The ticket?” Orla says. “Floss, it’s a felony charge, crossing the border. You’re looking at jail time when you go back.”

  “My daughter was missing,” Floss says. Marlow hears the possessive way she leans on the word. “I didn’t think about felony charges. I didn’t think about anything. I just tried to find her.”

  It is the kind of line Marlow can imagine her mother saying for the camera, except the tone is off. Floss has a performance voice, and this—this isn’t it. She sounds exhausted, punched through by worry and adrenaline, and she looks the oldest she ever has. Suddenly, Marlow realizes it: Floss is not wearing makeup.

  Orla looks around nervously. “You haven’t talked to anyone else here, have you?”

  “No,” Floss says. Then she snaps her fingers. “Oh, there was a guy who told me how to get to your store. He wasn’t happy to hear that I came from California, but don’t worry. I paid him off.”

  Orla’s mouth hangs open, but Marlow laughs—she’s not surprised. She thinks of herself, of her great lengths to get here: marching to Ventnor in the dark, sneaking over the border. Of course Floss had sailed right up to the wall. Of course she had forced her way in.

  “Marlow,” Orla says. “Is she all right?”

  Marlow looks over and sees that Floss is shrinking into a fog. Orla’s face is white. She isn’t used to seeing this. She doesn’t have fog, she says, and only knows a few people who do. It’s less common, in Atlantis. Giving up their screens when they came here seemed to save their minds just in time.

  Orla says they should come up to her apartment. When Marlow helps Floss start walking, Orla hesitates. Then she takes Floss’s other arm.

  * * *

  Floss would like to know: Who is the dipshit who planned a red carpet on a boardwalk?

  She is tripping every five seconds, despite the fact that Orla holds her on her left, and an assistant of Melissa’s is on her right.

  She sees the bank of photographers coming up, all of them squawking at her: Over here.

  She braces herself for the part when they yell at Orla to step aside. It always makes Floss uneasy, though she can’t quite work out why. To be the sole thing in the picture—isn’t it what she has worked so hard for? But she can never stand the sound of it: And now, Floss alone.

  She is the talent, she reminds herself. She can do whatever she wants. This time, when Orla is told to move, Floss is going to hold on to her.

  * * *

  Orla knows that when she lets Marlow and Floss into her new home, it will be messy. It follows that, as soon as she and Kyle downsized, both of their sons came careening home, claiming a crisis each—the wrong job, the wrong girl.

  Kyle was eager to unload the old house next door to her bookstore, to get into a smaller, newer place on the boardwalk. He trotted ahead of Orla, like an eager puppy, when they went to look at the old-person units.

  “It’s in a former ballroom,” the realtor told them proudly, like Atlantis wasn’t lousy with those.

  “You’re going to love the view,” Kyle promised Orla, and when they got into the unit, she did.

  “But I said I want a two-bedroom,” she added.

  Kyle danced over to the wall. He pulled a handle. A crinkled divider emerged, sealing the rest of the place off from a narrow space near the window.

  “There you go,” he said. “Two-bedroom.”

  Orla shook her head as Kyle struggled with the handle, trying to figure out how it clipped into the wall on the other side. “That doesn’t count,” she said.

  * * *

  The boys Orla introduces her to don’t get up until Orla tells them to, sharply. Marlow takes their hands, sweaty from holding their books open, in hers. They are handsome, with charming smiles that burst quickly across their faces, even when their mother is making them be polite. Marlow can feel the gulf between them, can remember how old thirty-five sounded when she was in her twenties. She can tell, too, that they don’t know who she is. Orla only tells them her name.

  She thinks that they look nothing like her. Then Orla says, “They have our hair, too, but they’ve always worn it this way.” Frank and Gary both have shaved heads.

  Marlow asks, a while later, when Floss has dozed off in her chair, to see
a picture of the boys as children. Orla goes into another room and comes back with a printed one: Frank and Gary on the beach, heads ducked over their buckets. They are off-center in the photo; they only take up the left side. Orla points to the empty sand next to them, studded with toys and half-formed castles, and says, “Right there. That’s where I imagined you.”

  It is exactly, for some reason, what Marlow needs to hear.

  She wants to offer Orla something, too. So she takes a plastic bag out of her pocket and shows her the letter from Floss she found. Orla takes the envelope. She checks the address and the date. She hands it back. “That’s okay,” she says. “Why don’t you just keep it?”

  * * *

  Floss is only pretending to be asleep. It’s a bad look, sixty-three and fat and dozing in a chair in an unfamiliar home, but it is not as embarrassing as being awake and ignored for hours on end. Marlow and Orla are asking each other questions Floss knows all the answers to. Like someone who saw the movie already, she is dying to ruin their endings. She knows so much more about both of these women than they will ever know about each other, no matter how long they sit at Orla’s table, matching up their notes. But they don’t want to hear from her, she knows. She knows they both have the same thought, when it comes to her—she never cared about me at all—but that isn’t true. She has fucked up plenty, has hurt people, has built a career on looking like she enjoys being completely self-absorbed. She understands why, whenever she has tried to show these women that she loves them, they have looked at her with suspicion: What is her angle? What is she after? And often, she does have an angle. Often, they are right. When she betrayed Orla, she was selfish and scared, and too dubious of her own strength to believe she could really ruin a life. When she betrayed Marlow, putting her on those pills, she was too dubious of her own strength to believe she could really protect one. It’s possible that her loving Orla and Marlow has, overall, made their lives worse. But it has made her a better person. Not a good one, she knows. Just better.

  She forgets that she is asleep and raises one eyebrow high as she listens. Oh, these bitches are editing heavily. Orla skips the part of her story where she stole Marlow from the hospital. Marlow skips the part of hers where she attacked that girl.

  Hey, Marlow, Floss imagines yelling. Orla almost aborted you! Oh, and, Orla—Marlow bit someone. Exactly—like a dog!

  But then Floss hears Orla showing Marlow another picture, one that must be of Orla and Floss. Marlow says they are beautiful. Orla corrects her: they’re young. Maybe because she’s actually listening, for once, Floss hears exactly the way Orla says it. Like their age explains everything.

  So she decides to test the theory—to see if she can be different now that decades have gone by. To see if she can do, in this moment, the best thing for her daughter, which is to just keep her mouth shut. To let both of them believe that the other is as pure and perfect as they’ve imagined. She tries it for five seconds, then ten, then twenty. She keeps on counting.

  * * *

  Somehow, the afternoon goes by. Orla tells Marlow about Danny.

  “Did you love him?” Marlow asks her.

  “No,” Orla says. “I was obsessed with him. And I don’t mean it in the way your mother says ‘obsessed,’ if she still throws that word around. I mean it literally, and I’m not using ‘literally’ there, either, the way she does.”

  “Danny was a loser,” Floss says simply. “And bald. Be glad you got your hair from your mother’s side.”

  After that, they all look into their glasses awkwardly. Orla examines the water in hers and realizes that this may be the problem: water.

  As if on cue, Kyle comes home from work and starts to mix drinks. When he hears who the women in his kitchen are, his eyebrows nearly exit his face. But by the time he gets the shaker down, he has taken it all in stride. Five minutes later, Floss fawns over his vodka martini, sounding relieved. Kyle smiles and bows, then picks up the phone to order pizza. Orla laughs as Marlow gawks at the piece of buttoned plastic. She gets up to touch its cord.

  It gets dark and the boys go out, to wherever they go. When he’s done eating, Kyle excuses himself. He says he has work to do. He means to give them space, but Orla feels panicked as he moves down the hall. When she looks back at Floss and Marlow, she sees them watching wistfully, too. Maybe they all need a break.

  Orla shows Marlow how to use the shower. Then she goes into the living room and unfolds the futon near the window. She stands back so Floss can lie down.

  Floss’s hair spreads out on the pillow behind her. “I thought you would hate me,” she says, in yet another voice of hers that Orla doesn’t know: older, quiet, but clear as a bell.

  “I do hate you,” Orla says. She makes it sound like a joke they have had forever. They are still laughing when Marlow comes in, clean and shining in Orla’s best nightgown, and climbs into bed with her mother. Orla pulls the partition. She goes down the hall, to the room that is hers.

  * * *

  But none of them can sleep. First Floss, then Marlow, then Orla, who wakes to the suck of the sliding door—they all step out onto the veranda.

  The next day, Floss will sigh on the sofa. She should head back to the States, take her punishment like a big girl, she will say with a pout. She will say this every morning for weeks, for months, until she doesn’t bother anymore. An immigration enforcement agent, following up on a tip from someone who saw Floss, will knock on the door just once. Orla will go to her bedroom while the agent sits Floss down at the table, and will hear, in disbelief, how quickly the encounter turns to Floss putting on a show and the agent laughing along. No one will bother them again.

  One morning, Floss will come to breakfast in a sheer purple nightie, and Frank and Gary will evacuate for good the same day. One evening, Kyle will snap at Floss, “If you want martinis, maybe pick up some olives. We’re out.” Orla will tire of her, too, of the way Floss’s fabric wall blocks the natural light from the rest of her home. Every day, she will vow to talk to Floss about a timeline for her moving out. And every day—for a year, until the woman across the hall blessedly dies and Floss can be coaxed over there, like a cat—she will end up letting it go. She will turn on the lamps instead.

  On the fourth day that Floss fails to leave, Marlow will reach out and take a key from Orla’s hand.

  She will sail back out of Atlantis on the restaurant-supply boat, this time meeting a water-skiing operation at the sandbar to return her to Ventnor. From there, she will go to New York, back to the place on Twenty-First Street where Floss and Orla lived. Floss still owns it. When she sees the super who watched her pick the lock, she will call him by the name Orla gave her—Linus—and tell him who she is. He will surprise her greatly by crying when he hears. They will become friends, Marlow and Linus and Linus’s wife, and then they will become family. Marlow will spend dinnertime and holidays with them, the three of them sharing a joint as they wash the dishes after the children go to sleep. The kids are half-grown; the youngest is eight. But they have never had an aunt before, and Marlow is pleased to find that being theirs is more than enough for her.

  She will tweak her appearance until no one knows her anymore. This means growing older, and applying a shy dose of makeup, and dyeing her hair darker—thinking, when she picks the color, of the photo Orla showed her, the one of her and Floss in their twenties. But even though she can see the image clearly—their barely grown faces tipped smugly together, like nothing could ever divide them—she will not be able to remember which one of them had it, the shade she wants.

  She will wait months to buy a new device, under the name M. Cadden, which she will use to start over. She will follow Jacqueline—just Jacqueline—for a few days. She will watch her throw a party for neon-patterned leggings. She will see Ida, back in the picture, her restlessness quenched by a back tattoo, and a new woman, giggly and pregnant, in her own old seat on Jacqueline’s sofa. She will tune
in just in time to hear the woman say “Ellis” in a tone of plush ownership, and she will realize that this person has replaced her elsewhere, too. She will think about trying to find out more: who the new wife is, what flaws of hers Ellis is counting on. But then the sight of Jacqueline shimmying in tights will make her homesick, and she will quickly tell her mind to delete all Constellation Network feeds. She will never go back to where she grew up, not even when Aston dies. She will pay to have his ashes shipped and sift them into the Hudson. When she walks near the water, it’s strange—she will think not of him, but of the baby she once thought might inherit his looks. At first, she will worry she chose wrong, leaving her eggs. But as the years pass, Marlow is certain: she has a good life. And she doesn’t need to share it.

  She will become a waitress, hoisting bowls of glossy ziti in an amber-lit cave of a place on Tenth Avenue. She will fall in love with the job—with holding the warm plates and knowing the table numbers by heart and feeling the kitchen’s steamed urgency. She will love the way people’s faces turn toward her as she approaches their tables, then turn away as soon as their business is finished, pleasantly forgetting her. She will feel the least seen, and the most important, she ever has in her life. She will take extra shifts when her friends have auditions, her friends who dream of bigger things and can’t believe she doesn’t. They cannot fathom that this is enough to make her happy; they want so much to be famous.