by Ania Ahlborn
She expected to see nothing but emptiness—maybe a couple of towels thrown over the bar, some hangers for guests. But when she pulled open the door, she was taken aback. Arlen might have tossed some of Maggie’s stuff upstairs, but it looked as though she’d tried to cram the majority of it right here into the walk-in. Confronted with the things of her past, Maggie’s initial reaction was to recoil. She didn’t want to dredge up the unease with which she’d lived for so long. It’s why she had left, why she did everything in her power not to come back. The heavy burden of responsibility was too much to bear, here. At least out in Wilmington, she could distract herself with Dillon, with school.
But again, a sense of calm pulled at the corners of her heart. It’s just stuff. Something to keep her occupied while she was here. Because if she had no interest in keeping any of it, she could at least do Arlen a favor and liquidate the stuff. It was something to keep Maggie busy, to keep her from sitting in the hall across from Brynn’s bedroom door, staring at the knob, willing her still-to-be-interred sister to pull it open and give her that signature teenage sneer she’d never quite shaken off. Hey, dummy.
Maggie moved the stack of book boxes out of the closet to make space, then confronted the racks of clothes she hadn’t worn in years. That, paired with all of her abandoned shoes, would fill up at least a half dozen trash bags. They’d be tumbled down the stairs, tossed into the back of Brynn’s Camry, and driven to the Salvation Army before Maggie’s return flight three days from now. All that stuff had been left behind because her apartment in Wilmington was small—less than six hundred square feet with two tiny closets; at least, that’s what she had told herself while packing hardly anything for her first semester away. But part of Maggie had been glad to get rid of the possessions that had made her who she had been in the past. The whole point of going to Wilmington was to get out of town, to start over, to forget all the bullshit with her mom, to erase what had happened with that goddamn board.
She jutted an arm between a couple of hanging shirts and shoved them aside before surveying her shoes. A perfectly decent pair of runners sat among a menagerie of otherwise worn-out sneakers. She’d stuff those into her duffel bag. Running along The Loop always helped clear her head. Now, after what happened to Brynn, Maggie might very well have to pound the pavement every morning to keep herself from going mad.
She plucked up the sneakers to place them aside, then glanced to the overhead shelf. It was stacked with plastic tubs full of more clothes. Various shoe boxes were stockpiled in the upper corner, stuffed with pictures and high school memories. But there was an oddity as well. Just behind those boxes, there was an old sweater—not folded or hung like the rest, but thrown, as if in an attempt to hide something from view.
Maggie furrowed her eyebrows, tossed the sneakers onto the bed behind her, and rose up on her tiptoes to snag the sweater by its hem. But she hesitated as soon as her fingers touched the cording.
Tap tap tap. The sound came from behind her.
Maggie’s pulse skipped like a needle on a dusty record.
Standing among the things that had made up her previous life, her right arm still held aloft, she felt something brush up against her; something waist-height and featherlight, just enough to electrify the skin. The light in the room shifted, as though someone—or something—had snuck up behind her.
Maggie didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for that all-too-familiar sense of not being alone to pass, as it always had; to pass, but to never quite leave her, because it was always there. Always radiating from shadowed corners. Stopping her in her tracks as she walked through the house, warm one second, cold the next. Drafts, her dad had explained. Brynn’s stories, her mother had scoffed. Maybe a little of both, Maggie had told herself, purposefully forgetting the fact that Brynn’s stories consistently held a strange sort of truth.
But now, rather than that feeling of not being alone fading, she felt small fingers coil around her left hand instead.
She jumped at the sensation, her right arm jackknifing away from the closet’s upper shelf. Still clinging to the hem of that discarded sweater, she inadvertently yanked it down from its resting place. Something heavy tumbled along with it, hitting the carpet with a hard thud.
“Jeezy creezy, Auntie M!”
Maggie exhaled a yelp, both hands fluttering protectively to her chest. She stared at Hope, who had somehow soundlessly snuck into the room.
Hope squinted her eyes as she studied her aunt, much the way a kid would inspect an interesting insect—perhaps just before tearing off its wings. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Maggie said, trying to play it off. “Yeah, I’m fine. You just scared me, that’s all. What’s up?”
And what the hell was that smell? It was the second time she’d caught a whiff of smoke since coming home. It must have been Hope—the scent was coming from her clothes, as though she’d stood in front of a charcoal barbeque a few days prior. Dillon smelled like that often. It’s manly, he said in his best-but-still-terrible Dexter Morgan impersonation. It smells like testosterone and red meat. Like Cro-Magnon. Perhaps Howie had been grilling something for dinner a few days past? Maggie remembered from her own childhood, the scent of burning charcoal could take days to fade if you didn’t wash the clothes.
“I just wanted to see if you want an Otter Pop. We’ve got a bunch in the—hey.” Hope’s attention wavered. She furrowed her eyebrows, then pushed down against the billowing tulle of her tutu to look at the sweater that lay between them both. “What’s this?” She leaned down, plucked up the woolen fabric, and moved it aside.
And there, lying faceup, was porcelain-faced Dolly.
Maggie’s heart launched itself into her throat. She was suddenly scrambling out of the closet, pushing Hope along with her before slamming the door shut.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some old junk. Let’s go get that Otter Pop.”
Hope peered at her aunt’s peculiar reaction. “That’s not—”
“Downstairs.” Maggie’s tone was clipped, more forceful. She needed to get out of that room. Her hand fell upon Hope’s shoulder, guiding the girl toward the open door. “I hope you have cherry,” she said. “That’s the only kind of Otter Pop I’ll eat.”
Small talk. Optimism that she’d be able to steady her trembling breath by the time they reached the kitchen. Because, while that doll had in fact been Brynn’s, Maggie could swear that Dolly’s face had changed.
What had once been a blank expression was now more of a smile. As though welcoming Maggie home.
. . .
“Shit!” An involuntary curse tumbled from Maggie’s throat and into the gale. A trash bag fell from her fingers and into the garbage bin along the curb. Her hands groped at her shoulders and neck, as though touch alone could exorcise her worsening pain. But countless sick days, a handful of hospital stays, CT scans and X-rays, a spinal tap, and an MRI had long extinguished that sort of wishful thinking. By Maggie’s senior year, four different doctors had been left stumped, all four exhaling sighs of exasperation and declaring that her phantom pain was spawned by grief.
It may be psychological, one had suggested.
Might just be that you’re still growing, another had murmured around the cap of his pen.
If this was the old days, you’d be put in a mental ward as a hysteric, Brynn had joked, but Maggie hadn’t found it funny, probably because it was true.
She jabbed her fingers into the meat of her shoulders and glared at the bag inside the bin. Hope had been mistaken about the Otter Pops. There hadn’t been any in the freezer, and so Maggie had gone upstairs to take care of . . . that thing. Hidden among an assortment of threadbare T-shirts and items that weren’t suitable for donation, and wrapped in that old sweater like a mummy twirled in gauze, was the doll. She couldn’t stand looking at it. It reminded her too much of the visits to Friendship
Park, both with and without Brynn. It coaxed the memory of sleepless nights to the forefront of her mind, all those evenings she’d slept on the couch even as a teen, only to be teased by Brynn for being afraid of the dark.
Pivoting on the soles of her sneakers, she tried to fend off what felt like a million pounds pressing down onto her bones. It may be psychological. That doll wasn’t the problem. It never had been. It was this house. It was making her sick, too laden with sorrow and guilt, with memories too terrible to recall.
“Auntie Magdalene!”
Maggie started at the sound of Hope’s squeaky little-girl voice carried upon the wind, exhaling a soft mew when the motion sent an electric jolt of pain down the side of her neck. The kid positively refused to leave her alone. It was as though the house had assigned Maggie a watcher, and Hope had been selected for the job.
Hope stopped in her tracks upon the driveway, as if spooked by her aunt’s suffering. Her hair whipped across her face as she held a bright red Otter Pop in her right hand. “Auntie Magdalene?”
“Can you call me Maggie?” she asked.
“But I like Magdalene,” Hope protested. “It’s like the lady from the Bible.”
That was precisely why Maggie didn’t like her full name. A once-possessed woman who had watched Jesus die, who’d gained her sainthood by way of repentance. If all of this was somehow supposed to turn Maggie into a martyr, she wasn’t sure how much more lamentation she could take.
“They were in the garage fridge, not the kitchen one.” Hope thrust the Otter Pop in Maggie’s direction. “What were you throwing away? And what’s wrong with your neck?”
“Just cleaning out my old room,” Maggie said, “and I’m fine. I just pulled a muscle. You shouldn’t be out here . . .”
“You mean the stuff in the closet?” Hope glared at the trash can, looking awfully serious for someone her age.
“Yeah.” Maggie plucked the ice pop from Hope’s fingers and motioned for the girl to follow her up the front porch steps. Florence’s roiling clouds weren’t letting up anytime soon. Maggie had lived through some lengthy storms, but this one was taking the cake.
“Come on,” she told the girl. “Let’s get back inside. It’s going to pour.”
Hope turned to follow her aunt up to the house, latching on to her arm as they both hit the porch. “But why are you cleaning out your room when you’re going to stay?” Hope asked. “Now that Auntie Bee is gone, you gotta stay. Isn’t that why you came back?”
Maggie froze upon the porch planks. She slowly turned her head to look at her elder niece. Save for the dance wear, it was like looking through a wormhole twenty years deep. Grown-up Maggie on one side. Young Maggie just a foot away.
“What were you throwing away, Auntie Magdalene?” Hope asked again, but this time something dark flickered across her face. Something knowing, as though she’d seen what Maggie had done with the doll. Maggie pulled her arm free of Hope’s grasp.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just trash.” She took a single step away from the child.
Hope’s gaze narrowed faintly, as if reading the lie. “The lady from the Bible,” she said, “had seven devils inside her, Auntie M. I learned that at Sunday school. You don’t want devils crawling inside your stomach, do you, Auntie M? If you tell fibs, the devils can get inside.”
And then, as if to punctuate the kid’s point, pain shot through Maggie’s neck once again. Maggie hissed through her teeth, her hand clamping down against the ache.
“You should always stretch before dancing,” Hope continued. “My teacher says muscles are like rubber bands. You can hurt yourself real bad if you don’t.”
Arlen stepped outside through the open front door. “Maggie? What are you two doing out here? It’s positively hideous. Hope: inside, now. Go play with your sister.” Hope exhaled a huff and stomped her bare feet as she disappeared into the foyer, exiled to watch over a boisterous toddler who could be heard from somewhere deep inside the house.
“Sorry.” Arlen issued the apology only when Hope was out of earshot. Arlen’s attention paused upon the cherry ice pop in Maggie’s grasp, then trailed back to her sister’s face. “She’s a bit of a hanger-on. When she heard you were coming, she got really excited.”
“Kind of weird, don’t you think?” Maggie asked. Arlen shook her head, not understanding what could possibly be weird about a niece being clingy and enthralled by a woman she knew nothing about. Then again, kids were strange. Indecipherable. Precisely why Maggie didn’t want one of her own.
“Did you take that Tylenol?” Arlen asked, changing the subject.
“I forgot,” Maggie murmured. “Hey, Len? Why didn’t you tell me Bee was sick?”
“What?” Arlen tried to feign innocence, but Maggie wasn’t about to let her off that easily. She shifted the ice pop from one hand to the other, using the coldness of her empty palm to at least somewhat soothe the ache.
“Hope told me not to go inside Bee’s room because it’s what made her sick.”
Arlen tipped her head toward the slowly rotating porch fan overhead—off, but pushed by the wind. “Oh Lord,” she murmured.
“I thought that maybe that’s how you had explained her depression to them,” Maggie continued. “Sick, because depression is an illness. You wouldn’t have been wrong. But then I met Cheryl for coffee—”
“Cheryl Polley?”
“—and she said the same thing. That Brynn had looked sick. That her grandmother had mentioned it after she saw Bee at Saint Michael’s. She was at church, Len. Brynn. At church.”
Arlen lifted a hand to rub between her eyebrows, avoiding eye contact, staring at the floorboards, her perfectly pedicured toenails peeking out of her strappy sandals. Arlen had been keeping secrets, and now she’d been found out.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Maggie asked, her own hand still working the painful knot that had stiffened the muscles of her neck. “You could have called or texted. I could have asked her what was wrong.” Maybe a single simple question would have changed everything: Brynn, how do you feel? Brynn, are you okay? Perhaps that tiny inquiry would have meant the difference between life and death. If Maggie had just chosen the right words, had told her sister she loved her before hanging up, perhaps things would have been different. If she had only invited Brynn to hang out in North Carolina, to get away from Arlen and the kids, or had finally caved and revealed her secret: she’d played that board alone. She’d played it for years, up until the day their father had died. It’s my fault. My fault . . . Had Maggie done that, maybe Brynn would still be here now.
“And what would that have accomplished?” Arlen’s attention shifted to Maggie’s face. “Don’t stand here and suggest that knowing all the details of what went on here would have somehow changed what Brynn decided to do, okay?”
“I just—”
“You just want to blame someone,” Arlen said coolly. “But the truth of it is that you haven’t been home, Maggie. Not for the holidays, not for birthdays, not at all. But you would have been her savior, right? You would have made it better if you had only known.”
Maggie was stung by her sister’s implication that she couldn’t have helped. It was a hurtful, ugly thing to say. She wanted to yell, This isn’t my fault, but that would have let the devils in, according to Hope. “Why was she at church, Len? Can you at least tell me that?”
Arlen squared her shoulders, staring defiantly into her little sister’s face. “Why does anyone go to church, Maggie? She was looking for answers.”
Maggie shook her head. Yes, people filled up pews in the hope of basking in some sort of soul-affirming confirmation. They were desperate to know that this wasn’t it, that this thing called life wasn’t all that they had to work with. They wanted to find God. But Brynn wasn’t people. Arlen had said so herself, Brynn was Brynn, a girl who had never been scared of death, had never voiced the need f
or some far-fetched assurance that there was a heaven or that her sins would be forgiven. Those ideals were as bizarre to Brynn Olsen as her outward appearance had been strange.
“She was scared,” Maggie said.
“Scared of what?” Arlen asked.
“Of what’s here,” Maggie said, nearly inaudible. Something had happened—something Brynn hadn’t mentioned during their phone calls, something that had her asking Maggie even more urgently than before to please come home. I need to see you. What will it take? What Brynn didn’t know, however, was that fear was exactly what was keeping Maggie away.
“Maggie?”
With cold fingers pressed across her mouth, Maggie stared at her big sister. “Something’s wrong, Len,” she said. “Something’s been wrong ever since Dad . . .”
Arlen’s gaze slingshotted away, as though the mere mention of their father was a slap across the face.
“You can’t live here.” The words slithered from Maggie’s throat—secret thoughts she hadn’t dared bring up finally finding their voice. “It’s not safe. It hasn’t been safe for years.”
When she looked back to her sister’s face, Arlen was peering at her with incredulous alarm. But it wasn’t a look of worry. Rather, her expression was tense with a concern Maggie had only seen her wear once before—the day she had spent all afternoon on the phone with receptionists and doctors, desperate to pull their mother out of her hole. Now, that anxiousness was pointed squarely in Maggie’s direction.
“Mags . . . I think that maybe you should . . .” Hesitation. “I’m sorry, but you need help.”
Bullshit, she wanted to say. If this was all in her head, why the hell had Brynn sought sanctuary? If Arlen didn’t suspect anything, why were her kids going to Sunday school? The Olsens had never been religious, and yet there was Hope, telling Maggie who Mary Magdalene had been. Talking about devils.
“She was scared, Len.” Perhaps if she repeated it, Arlen would come to the same realization Maggie had: this wasn’t Maggie’s imagination. It wasn’t just unshakable guilt. This was real.