by Carrie Laben
She’d thought about snagging Duane and his invitations for herself, after Mom’s digs and especially after he’d offered to buy Martha a dress on his wages from Arby’s if that was her problem. But Martha was right, he was weird and ugly. There was nothing electric about him, and when he looked at Martha his attention didn’t even reach her, it swirled around and dived back in on itself. Somehow, Abby knew he would be useless.
Duane, despite his nods, called again that night, and every night for the rest of the week. And every night, Mom either teased Martha or yelled at her until she cried. They were getting impossible to live with.
Every morning Abby got on the bus and pushed him harder. The problem was, it didn’t stick. Like Martha’s folds in time, it came undone, sooner if she was distracted and later if she was determined, but always by the end of the day in the face of what was looking more and more like a straight-up obsession on Duane’s part. So she would push him again on the bus home, if he was there, and a few hours later he’d be on the phone.
Martha spent every daylight hour outside that weekend, pretending that she could pretend not to hear Mom yelling that the phone was for her. Abby propped the phone just off the hook or unplugged it, but Mom kept noticing and putting it back. “People might need to call me, you know,” she told Abby with a tone of sarcasm that didn’t even fit her words. “I might pick up an extra shift or two. It costs a lot of money to support a pair of social butterflies.” At least, Abby thought it was sarcasm. But on Sunday, Mom actually did go to work, although not for as long as a shift usually lasted, and not because she got a call on the phone.
And then, the following Monday, she walked into the newspaper office and found Martha and Duane holding hands. Kristen was there too, and it wasn’t a good time to start yelling, so Abby just walked back out. And kept walking. She was prepared to tie anyone who tried to stop her into a mental pretzel, but no one did, so she left the building and headed to McDonald’s.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Duane’s brother Charlie was behind the counter, which was just what her mood needed. “Anyway you can’t be in here during school hours.”
“Screw you, Charlie,” she said, and pushed him, and then ordered a Big Mac she didn’t really want and ate it as slowly as she could.
Too slowly, she realized when a yellow bus chugged by. Now she was going to have to walk home. Pain in the ass, more than two miles and mostly no sidewalks, muddy ditches, stinking roadkill. Maybe she could find a pay phone and call Mom, but it wouldn’t be worth the yelling even if she did agree to drive into town.
She could go back to school and see if anyone trapped late in detention could be pushed into giving her a ride home. She’d have a headache afterward and it would probably be one of the pain-in-the-ass stoner kids, but maybe that was better than raccoon guts on her shoes.
As she stood up to go, Martha and Duane walked in. They were still holding hands, fingers knit together at the knuckles, and in a flash of irritation Abby imagined that they hadn’t let go of each other all day, had shrugged on their jackets and shouldered their backpacks while awkwardly conjoined.
“Hi, Abby!” If Martha was surprised to see her, she covered it far more smoothly than seemed Martha-like. “Charlie can give you a ride home too, if you like.”
Charlie opened his mouth but then closed it again without saying a word. The girl working the drive-through window shot him a sympathetic glance.
She wanted, badly, to refuse. Sitting in a car with Charlie and Duane and her traitor sister even for the five minutes it would take to get home sounded excruciating. But she couldn’t—well, what if she was walking home and they drove by. That would be worse.
She nodded and in two minutes Charlie had clocked out and they were in the car.
Mom wasn’t as good at concealing her activities as Grandfather had been, or maybe she thought that Abby wouldn’t care. Either way, it only took the car ride home for Abby to figure out that something was up. Martha wasn’t just all over Duane, she was bubbling and chatting to the world in general. She made an actual double entendre when Charlie complained about his battered Toyota shifting hard. Duane, over the course of five minutes, went from rolling his eyes back with delight to sort of terrified.
Abby didn’t say a word the entire ride. Had Martha—Mom—pushed her? Was that what it felt like? It had been so long she barely remembered. Or maybe she was so used to it she didn’t notice most of the time. Maybe it had taken something this out of character and weird to catch on. Ugh.
At home the breakfast dishes were still on the table and Mom, at least her body, was asleep on the couch. A bottle of pills and a half-full glass of water sat on the coffee table; Martha frowned and grabbed them both, darting the edge of a glance at Abby. Abby acted like she hadn’t noticed and went upstairs. Everything on TV was boring and she couldn’t even look at her notebook, and when Martha finally crept up the stairs and into her room, Abby only let her stay long enough to see that it was really Martha before she threw a stuffed bear at her and told her to get lost.
During dinner the phone didn’t ring and Martha didn’t cry and Mom just smirked. Somehow it was even worse this way. Once Mom and Martha were both in bed, Abby went to the bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet. There was the bottle of Seconal on the middle shelf, not even half-assedly concealed behind the Tums.
She picked the bottle up and rattled it, just a little, enough to tell that it was nearly full. She could steal it, sure. That might hold Mom up for a day or two, but she’d get more. There was nothing to burn down.
She hadn’t looked at Grandfather’s notebooks again since she’d realized she was doing things he’d never even bothered to try, but there was no use beating herself up for that now. She’d just have to start again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Abby found herself awake in the gray before dawn, unable to go back to sleep. It was stupid, especially with how little rest she’d gotten, but there was nothing she could do to will herself back under, to forget that her shoulder still felt damp (even though that was absurd, it had been hours since Buddy licked her).
It had been so long since she’d been back to the cabin. Why did she never go before, these years when no one could have stopped her? Just because she didn’t need to, she supposed. She didn’t need Grandfather’s power or Grandfather’s wisdom or even Grandfather’s tricks for getting money. The Internet and the life she had built for herself were enough. Why try any rites as risky as what she was going to have to do now?
She should have worked faster. She’d thought she’d have so much more time. I will have more time. She needed to calm down. She needed to go back to sleep.
Outside, there was a shadow at the windowsill and she knew before she even turned her head that it was going to be a goddamn hawk, staring in through the curtain gap at them.
She turned her head and grinned at it. It didn’t move, and it was still dark enough out there that she could only see a mossy, cobwebby lump of form. It probably couldn’t see her either, so her mockery was wasted. She could get up and chase it off, but what would be the point?
People were waking up on the east coast. A few were checking Facebook before work or school and seeing her picture of a cute puppy. She could feel it buoying her. After a few deeps breaths she fell back to sleep.
The room was full of sunlight when she was awakened by the shift and thump of Buddy jumping off the bed. To her surprise, Martha was already up and dressed, standing by the mirrored closet door fastening the necklace at her nape. She turned and gestured to Buddy to get back on the bed but he ignored her, wiggling his tail and pressing against her legs.
“I think he needs a walk,” Martha said when she saw that Abby was awake. “I can take him.” Abby could tell she didn’t want to, she knew the birds were out there, but she felt like she had to offer.
“Looks like. Where were you headed so early?”
“They have a breakfast buffet.”
“You go ahead do
wn and eat,” Abby said, trying to sound matchingly generous. “I’ll shower and then take this guy out to the truck.”
“Do you think he’ll be okay by himself?”
“It can’t be that hot out yet.”
And, in fact, it wasn’t. The birdless sky was clear and it was downright chilly again, enough to make her unhappy that she’d come outside with her hair still wet. Weird for July—she remembered waking up those mornings in the cabin and running out barefoot to the first of the sun, splashing into the creek without flinching.
But there was nothing less attractive than moping about the good old days. She’d seen it happen over and over again, someone with a decent online presence turned thirty-five, or in the worst cases thirty. They started with a little thing—they complained about Christmas decorations up too early, or linked to some listicle about 25 Signs That You’re a Child of the 90s, or they just refused to make the jump from LiveJournal to WordPress, Facebook to Tumblr, and then they were gone, trapped on an island with a tiny irrelevant handful of fans and followers they already had, sinking slowly beneath the rising tide of new in-jokes and outrages. The only way that Abby’s plans could work—the only way that her life could work—was if she never, never, never let that happen to her. She couldn’t look back.
Sometimes it made her laugh to think how, if Grandfather had actually succeeded, he would have been destroyed anyway by his pride and his absolute refusal to pay attention. He thought his brain was so special that it needed no input. A person Mom’s age with Grandfather’s attitudes would be marginalized, chalked up as having one of those fancy new autism spectrum disorders or just written off as an asshole, depending. One more generation, leaping into Martha, and he’d have been institutionalized flat out, no matter how young and healthy the body he’d managed to get hold of.
He thought he was so much smarter than us. Just girls, so our brains couldn’t possibly be as big as his. He was going to be so mad.
Her laugh made Buddy glance up from the tree he was sniffing, alarmed.
Back inside, she found Martha perched alone at the end of a long table with a fat blond family of five at the other end. “They have a waffle bar!” she said cheerfully, holding up a fork with a few crumbs clinging to it and a strawberry speared on the end, covered in whipped cream. Abby felt a little ill.
They had fruit salad too, though, and yogurt, and she made herself take a couple of hard-boiled eggs as well since she already knew they wouldn’t be stopping for lunch. She sat next to Martha and looked up at the screens playing Fox, trying to see something she could tweet a snarky remark about, but they were doing the weather right now. She’d expected a fire or something, a big explosion.
Oh, right.
“Is that all you’re eating?” Martha frowned, and stabbed another strawberry from the sludge of whipped cream and syrup on her plate.
“I’m not very hungry.”
Martha frowned harder, and held the strawberry in a wavery middle ground between them for a moment as though she was thinking of offering it to Abby before she popped it in her own mouth.
“Are you sick?” she asked after chewing for a moment.
“No.” The answer came so quickly from instinct that it took Abby a moment to realize that she’d actually lied.
Over the weekend Duane kept Martha on the phone for two hours each night. Mom gloated. Abby knew gloating now, when she saw it.
The gloating appeared on Martha’s face on Monday morning and Abby knew. It looked like a deformity, it was that foreign to the real Martha. It was disgusting to watch, but Abby didn’t have to see it for long. At lunch Duane and Martha weren’t in the newspaper office, or the library, or even against all odds in the cafeteria. They were ditching.
When Martha found out, she was going to be horrified. Not only was Duane way too stupid to pull this off without getting caught, she had Art today, the one class she actually liked.
When Abby got home, Mom was already awake.
“Since when did Duane not have a car?” Mom asked Abby snidely as she searched through the cupboards for an after-school snack.
“Since he rides the school bus every day?” Abby didn’t add a “duh” but she couldn’t keep it out of her voice. Mom slapped her across the back of the head.
“You didn’t tell me your sister was dating a loser.”
“She wasn’t dating him until you… nagged her into it.” Abby stood up straighter. She hadn’t realized up to this minute how close she was to Mom’s height now. Mom seemed on the verge of slapping her again but instead she was pushing her—the feeling was not hard to recognize, now that she’d noticed it once, an idea that popped up out of nowhere, a sense of ‘well why not?’ that slowly heated up until it felt irresistible.
She wasn’t going to forget about this, though, no matter what Mom pushed. She had already written down what happened in school today, she carried a notebook everywhere now.
She’d even wondered if that was how Grandfather got into the habit, if there were earlier notebooks he’d lost along the way somewhere that documented a line of ancestors all pulling this same shit on each other, ancestors he’d left Rhode Island to avoid the same as he left Mass to get away from Grandma’s people. It was easier to push and hold your own blood than anyone else, she knew even then, but she still didn’t like thinking that there were people out there somewhere who could try to push Grandfather. People who could push Grandfather, and succeed, even when he wasn’t already dying or dead. It would make sense, then, why they might think that sending a weak boy to deal with Mom was a worthwhile plan.
But compared to those mysterious people Mom didn’t seem so scary. Abby turned and let Mom think she’d won and went upstairs. Martha’s room was silent but the door was closed, so Abby knocked on it. After a minute she knocked again, louder. A minute later Martha finally opened up.
Despite the silence, it was clear from Martha’s eyes that she’d been crying, or trying very hard not to.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I just… I feel sick. Like something bad happened while Mom had my body. Was I acting weird in school?”
“You weren’t even there this afternoon. You and Duane disappeared somewhere.”
“Oh god.” Martha sounded so broken over this news that it couldn’t just be her art class, but she didn’t say anything else.
“The good news is, I think Mom has gone off Duane. Apparently she didn’t even know that he doesn’t have a car.”
Martha made a strange noise that seemed like it was meant to be a laugh.
At dinner, Mom was still sulky and hostile. Martha sat with her head bent low, ignored her green beans even though she usually loved green beans, and worked at not making eye contact with anyone.
It didn’t save her.
“Is there something wrong with the food?” Mom didn’t even bother trying to sound normal. “Or are you being a stubborn, picky bitch about that too?”
Abby, startled by the apparent reversal in Mom’s opinion, made the fatal mistake of looking up.
“Don’t give me that look. You’re spoiled rotten, the both of you.”
That was a song and dance Abby was used to. Ever since Mom had gone back to work she expected Abby and Martha to be grateful for every single breath they drew, like she was making some big sacrifice for them. The urge to defend herself flared briefly in Abby’s chest, but she was able to tamp it down to an eye-roll and an aggressive forking of her stroganoff.
Mom’s rant didn’t go on the usual rails this time, though.
“When I was your age,” she said fiercely, and that was enough to make both Abby and Martha look up again, “your grandfather had big plans for who your father was going to be. The idea of letting me be a normal girl, go with the local boys, have fun, that was never on his agenda, oh no. Oh no. It’s only thanks to me that you weren’t both born with gills and tails.”
Abby set her fork down as quietly as she could. Was Mom… could she be drunk? They
didn’t talk about this.
“And what thanks do I get? I bust my ass to let you two have normal lives, and you throw it back in my face! Being the town weirdoes! Dating losers! Thinking you’re too good to date at all!”
Martha was crying again. Abby wondered if crying too much could actually hurt her. Give her an eye infection or something.
“If I’d let your grandfather have his way, maybe I’d at least have kids who were smarter!” Mom stood up, abandoning her plate—but taking her glass, Abby noticed—and left in a rush. A moment later the front door slammed and the porch swing began to creak, too fast for the old chains.
Martha began to clear the table, and after a few minutes of trying to force down more stroganoff Abby joined her. They retreated upstairs to the sound of the porch swing still creaking.
“You can hang out in my room if you want,” Abby said when Martha hesitated at her door. “We can watch some TV or something. The Simpsons is on.”
By the time Abby heard Mom’s bedroom door slam, hours later, Martha was asleep across the foot of the bed. Abby wasn’t even tired—she was furious. She’d read enough in Grandfather’s notes to have assumed that his plans for their birth had gone forward, that she was sure to become as powerful as she could dream of, that it was in her blood. All she could think about now was that Mom had had a chance to make them half-gods, and instead their father was some hick kid from Alden.
Fuck it, she thought, I’m not going to let that stop me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
They arrived at the cabin well after sundown, with Martha in a silent sulk because they hadn’t stopped for dinner and Buddy whimpering with the need to pee again. Abby hadn’t had a chance to to update anything all day and she felt harassed, headachey. She threw the GPS in the dumpster back at the hotel and bought a map, which yes, had led to an illegal U-turn and a bunch of lost time on top of whatever Martha had done in her misery. Worth it to not hear that goddamn song again.