by Ania Ahlborn
Hope—Arlen’s second child, born halfway through Maggie’s last year of high school—had been a running gag among the boys in Maggie’s senior high school class. She never heard the end of it.
Hey, Maggie, say hi to my baby mama for me.
Hey, Maggie, tell your sister I miss her.
Only once did she lose her temper. Hey, pervert, are you getting arthritis in that right hand yet? Cruel irony: Maggie had spat the question just as the assistant principal had passed her in the hall. After-school detention, two days. Arlen hadn’t found it the least bit funny. Brynn, on the other hand . . .
It’s like the goddamn Breakfast Club, she had cackled. Except you’d be the nerd who brought the flare gun to school. Brynn, of course, would have been the girl sitting at the back of the room, eating Pixy Stix for lunch and setting books on fire.
The screaming toddler was Hayden, and a niece Maggie had yet to meet. Arlen could have pushed harder for Maggie to come home for the holidays, and Maggie certainly could have made more of an effort. But neither of them did. Brynn had been the one to plead. Just come home, Maggie, please. For a weekend. For some turkey. For presents under the tree. Maggie turned down all open invitations despite her middle sister’s appeals. Three years gone, and it didn’t feel like nearly long enough. It was, Maggie supposed, appropriate that had it not been for Brynn, she wouldn’t have been standing next to Arlen right now.
“Harry, Hope . . . come say hi to your Aunt Maggie.” It wasn’t a request. Arlen gave the command and, within an instant, a boy and girl leapt onto the curb and fell in line next to their mother, Sound of Music–style. Harry, once nothing but a tiny child, was now a premonition of his future self. Tall. Handsome. Light-brown hair grown out like a hotshot surfer, his hairstyle perfectly coupled with a bright Billabong T-shirt and scuffed-up Vans—the kind of guy Maggie imagined herself falling head over heels for in San Diego despite Dillon’s broken heart. That was, if she was accepted into the grad program there. Fat chance of that now, though. The thought of those goddamn phytoplankton made her want to cry.
Hope hadn’t yet turned two when Maggie had seen her last. Now, the five-year-old stood lean and graceful beside her brother, her blond hair pulled up in a bun, her stick-skinny frame encased in a pink dance leotard, pink tights, and matching ballet shoes—a Southern cupcake, already on her way to becoming a clone of her mom. Arlen offered up an apologetic smile, as if embarrassed by her kid’s getup. “I just swept her up from dance class,” she explained. “No time to change, right, sugar?” She extended an arm, dragged a thumb across Hope’s cheek as if to wipe away invisible dirt. “I’m trying my best to keep things normal around here, but . . .” Her words trailed to nothing, but Maggie understood. She’d been trying to keep things normal for the past decade herself. There would be no mention of that struggle, however, of that awful inescapable guilt, especially not in front of the kids.
“Heya, Harry,” Maggie said, stepping up to give her nephew a hug.
“Hi, Aunt Maggie,” Harrison murmured beneath his breath—already in the throes of preteen angst at the tender age of eight. She released him, and could sense his relief as soon as her arms fell back to her sides.
Hope watched the exchange with curiosity, her expression flickering between interest and gravitas. And then she stepped up to the aunt she hardly knew, leaned in, and spoke with a solemnness beyond her years. “Auntie Magdalene, I’m sorry for your loss. But we’re trying to keep things normal around here.” And then, as if having planned it all out in advance, she wrapped her arms around Maggie’s waist in a viselike embrace and whispered, “I missed you.”
This from a child Maggie didn’t know at all. And all she could do was whisper back, “I missed you, too.”
. . .
The Pacifica was so new it still smelled like plastic and glue. Blasting the air-conditioning on high and pushing fifty down a rural highway that suggested half that speed, Arlen said nothing about the unfolding events that had clearly thrown a wrench in the schedule of a busy working mom. The airport wasn’t exactly close to home—roughly thirty minutes northwest of where they had grown up, which Brynn had lovingly called the middle of fucking nowhere, and Arlen hadn’t moved away from because the schools were good and the crime was low. That, and she knew that as soon as Mom kicked off, the house was for the taking, Brynn had said during one of their many conversations, full of vitriol. I swear, Mags, among the three of us, you got all the brains. With my luck, Len will keep poppin’ ’em out and I’ll end up a fucking wet nurse in my own home.
At the time, Maggie had laughed. Brynn, born too weird for words, completely bizarre by the time she was fifteen; Brynn, with her box-dyed black hair and blunt-cut bangs, her skin powdered to a ghostly white and lips painted a gory maroon; Brynn, who had lived alone in that giant house for a good three months after their mom had died right there in the master bathroom, growing comfortable with the solitude, until Arlen swept in with Howie, the kids, and a newborn baby to make the house their own. That Brynn—a creepy Mary Poppins to her sister’s kids. Just a spoonful of arsenic. It was a ridiculous notion. Hilarious. Insane.
But Arlen had every right to move in. Their mother’s will left the house to all three of the girls, and not because she loved them all equally. No. Toward the end of her life, Stella Olsen had been the type of woman to throw a scrap of meat to the wolves and watch them fight. The house had been granted to all her children not because she was being magnanimous, but because not choosing was far more dramatic. And oh, the quarrel it had caused . . .
Maggie sold off her share to Arlen without a second thought. All that money would afford her a comfortable lifestyle in Wilmington—close to the UNC campus, not an hour’s worth of gridlock away. Not a cheap option. And after Maggie graduated and it came to her master’s degree, that cash would grant her the opportunity to go to any school she wanted, hopefully on the West Coast, if they would have her. Selling had been a no-brainer. She didn’t need much motivation to avoid setting foot anywhere near their childhood backyard swimming pool. That late-night memory was still vivid, still crippling in its pain. The pool tarp, nothing but a jumble of plastic floating upon the surface of the water. The pool light, still on, as if to suggest that Maggie had just missed the action.
Brynn, on the other hand, had been home, and yet she was the one to stubbornly hold on to her share of the house. As a result, Arlen and Brynn butted heads more often than not, and Arlen’s kids ended up with an overgrown goth girl as a live-in aunt.
Brynn bitched and moaned about the house being monopolized by Arlen and her brood every chance she got, but Maggie had been the only one to leave Georgia. She hadn’t bothered to consider the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, no matter how close to home it might have been. She packed up her things and left for North Carolina the summer she’d graduated high school, no longer willing to share space with their stumbling, slurring drunk of a matriarch. But it was only a few weeks into freshman year that Maggie was forced back to Savannah. A result of Brynn’s midnight call.
Maggie chewed a fingernail as Arlen drove. Meanwhile, Dillon continued to text: DID YOU GET THERE OKAY? Maggie left his queries unanswered. A response would only encourage another question, and another after that. Responding would prompt Arlen to ask who she was texting, or what was so important, or shoot off their mom’s favorite barb: I bet that can’t wait. Maggie couldn’t handle that. Not now. Not while stuck here in the car.
“Florence is fixing to be a real problem.” Arlen tried for conversation over the blast of the A/C. “The wind is going to pick up this afternoon. One more day and they would have probably delayed flights, shut the whole airport down.” Maggie’s outbound flight had been stuck on the tarmac for more than an hour, giving Maggie hope that Florence would, perhaps, make an emergency trip home next to impossible. After all, it was stronger in Savannah. But no such luck.
Maggie said nothing as she stared
at the fifty-foot cross made of white painted pipe that loomed over the highway. At its foot, a marquee warned drivers that THE _EVIL IS _ _ON_ US, SAVE YOU_ SO_ _. That cross had been there for as long as Maggie remembered. Every time they passed it as kids, Brynn would spin stories of a towering Jesus figure, sacrificed on that very spot.
He died for your sins, she had said. He spilled blood enough to fill Daddy’s pool.
I ain’t got no sins, Maggie had scoffed. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.
“I don’t have any sins,” their mother had corrected from the front seat. Ain’t isn’t a word. And cool it with the stories back there.
But Brynn had rolled her eyes and whispered into Maggie’s ear. Everyone’s got sins, dummy. Even little kids like you. Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day, when she ain’t listenin’. Brynn had made good on her promise, and she’d done it with her typical dramatic flair.
With Arlen’s Chrysler leaving that cross in the rearview, Maggie wondered if sitting through an occasional Sunday service would have restored some semblance of normalcy to her and Brynn’s oddly dark childhoods. If they had prayed the way their mother had taught them rather than faking it, if Maggie had turned to God, perhaps things would have been different. Better. Not like they were now.
Arlen cleared her throat against the relative silence. The kids were busy with their tablets; the backseat sounded like an arcade. “Anyway, as for the service . . . I left most of it up to Father John. You remember him. He organized for Mom. I just, I–I mean . . .” Arlen stammered, the first crack in her pristine facade.
Brynn would have wanted Maggie to protest. Father John? That old pedophile? If she could have reached out from beyond the veil, she’d have slid her hand down Maggie’s throat to coax out the words: A church service? Over my dead body. Oh, wait. But what alternative would Brynn—a girl who was never satisfied with anything—be happy with? A black-clad procession down the cobblestone streets of medieval Bruges? A boys’ choir echoing through the empty chambers of Dracula’s Transylvanian castle? Jackals pulling her rotting corpse onto an English hillside before devouring her beneath a full moon?
Maggie covered her mouth and snorted out a laugh.
“What?” Arlen perked, immediately defensive.
“Sorry, nothing,” Maggie said. She dropped her hand to her lap and looked out the window.
“I don’t see what’s funny about any of this,” Arlen protested. “Do you know how hard it’s been? How stressful? And to top it off, this damn storm . . .”
“Nothing’s funny,” Maggie said. “Father John, he’s great.” She pictured nothing but strangers clad in various ensembles, none of them morose enough for Brynn’s taste—cry harder; a bunch of people Brynn never knew or gave a shit about filling up pews and pretending to care while Florence brought a cyclone down atop the church, tearing off its roof, sending the steeple careening into the earth like the devil’s arrow. Maybe if Florence made landfall at just the right time, the service wouldn’t be so bad.
Maggie’s phone vibrated in her messenger bag. Another text from Dillon, no doubt. Hell, if Arlen was fine with inviting strangers to the funeral, Maggie should have invited Dillon to tag along. It would have made it easy to wriggle out of staying at the house, at least. Aunt Maggie shacking up in her old room with a random guy? Not a snowflake’s chance in Georgia.
A defunct gas station came up on the right, an old black Cadillac facing the highway parked out front. A FOR SALE sign sat propped against the inside of the windshield, so sun-bleached it was hardly readable anymore. It was a giant boat of a vehicle. Brynn would have loved it: a dead man’s hearse.
“What about her friends?” Maggie asked, looking back to her sister.
Arlen scoffed—a reflex—then corrected herself with a long sigh, as if realizing how insensitive her initial reaction was. “There’s going to be an obituary. It’s not like I know who those people are, Maggie.”
Those people. That’s what their mom used to call them. Maggie recalled their mother’s face when Brynn had brought Simon, her first boyfriend, over for the first time. Clad in all black, and with an unspiked Mohawk lying dormant atop an otherwise shaven head, he was immediately deemed one of those people. If you asked Stella Olsen, it was a damn tragedy to have someone like Simon wandering around her pristine estate. Maggie caught her snorting at his discarded combat boots next to the front door, limp and unlaced, scuffed and well-loved. Disgusting, she had snarled, not once stopping to consider that he could have just left them on his feet—that he’d taken them off to be courteous, and all his thoughtfulness got him was an ugly behind-the-back jab. But those types of things hardly blipped on Mrs. Olsen’s radar, just as they failed to register on Arlen’s now.
“Isn’t her phone upstairs?” Maggie asked.
“Mom!” A whine from the backseat, cutting through the conversation, momentarily obliterating the electronic calliope of educational apps that were nothing more than glorified video games. F is for Friend, Family, Fun . . .
“Her what?” Arlen asked, ignoring Hayden’s outburst.
“Her cell phone,” Maggie said. “Isn’t it upstairs in her room?”
“Mo-om!” G is for Girl, Game, Ghost . . .
Maggie closed her eyes against the sound. She took a breath, trying to keep her agitation in check.
Arlen shook her head, not getting Maggie’s point. “I guess . . . ? I don’t know. I was only in there for a second.”
“Because if it is, we could call—”
“You think I’d stay in there for longer than a second?” Arlen asked, cutting Maggie off. “Do you really think that’s something I would have wanted to do?”
“Mom-eeeee!!”
“Jesus, Hay, cool it!” Arlen snapped, and for half a second Maggie was overtaken by the sudden urge to vomit into the footwell of the front seat. In Arlen’s flash of impatience, her voice sounded exactly like their mom’s, as though the woman had clawed her way out of the grave, having risen from the dead. H is for . . .
“But I’m hungr-eeeeee,” Hayden squealed. “I want Donald’s!”
“Yeah, can we go to McDonald’s?” Hope chimed in, jumping to her little sister’s aid. “Mom? Can we? I’m hungry, too. I can’t remember the last time I ate. Can we?”
“I wanna see the Ronalds!” Hayden.
“No.” Refusal. Flat. Unaffected by the abrupt onset of backseat famine.
“But I’m starving!” Hope. “It’s still forever till home!”
“I want chickens!” Hayden.
“Mom?” Harry, even-toned and leaning between the two front seats like some sort of child trauma mediator; channeling Sally Struthers, imploring Arlen to please remember the children.
“I want catch-ups!” Hayden’s tone was reaching optimum pitch. “I wanna play in the jungle!”
“Oh my God.” Maggie, but a mere whisper. Suddenly, replying to texts didn’t seem half bad. She reached into her bag.
“Stop yelling, Hay!” Hope roared at her sister. “It’s not gonna help!”
Phone out.
“You’re going to cause an accident,” Arlen announced, as if subtly threatening the lives of her offspring would somehow calm them down.
Screen on.
“You’re gonna cause an accident!” Hope yelled while Hayden continued to screech. “And you’re bugging Auntie Magdalene!”
“You aren’t bugging me—” Maggie said, unsure of why she was about to deny such a self-evident truth. But nobody was listening anyway. She blasted out a message. I is for . . .
I’VE MADE A HUGE MISTAKE.
“Hope.” Arlen. An edge of warning in her tone.
“There,” Harry said, pointing to an off-ramp, a highway sign announcing food, gas, and a creepy motel only child-smugglers would have used ahead.
Maggie bit her bottom lip, almost afra
id to look in Arlen’s direction, imagining her sister’s face replaced by their mother’s sallow skin, her distant bag-eyed stare.
“I want French eyes!” Hayden exploded in a fit of three-year-old insistence, tired of being silenced, refusing to be ignored. “I want French eyes!” she screamed, her legs kicking in a torrent of fury, as though kicking hard enough would send her Lecter-like child restraints flying from the car seat, allowing her to murder every person in that minivan for denying her the one thing, the only thing, she’d ever asked for in her whole entire life. “I want French eyes!” The rampage continued. Hope’s quiet murmur of jeez was but a soft underscore to her little sister’s blind outrage.
Maggie couldn’t help herself. She laughed. Because Arlen’s life was nuts.
SAVE ME! Fingers flying over the QWERTY keyboard.
“Mom?” Harry, staring pointedly at the quickly oncoming turnoff, his expression that of stoic desperation. Take the easy way out, it said. Make it stop.
WHAT? WHAT’S GOING ON? Dillon responding.
Maggie opened her mouth, about to offer to cover the cost, ready to admit that she was a little hungry herself even though queasiness was still clinging to the back of her throat like thin plastic film, like a wet tarp freshly pulled from a pool. But Arlen jerked the wheel to the right before Maggie could speak. The Chrysler hit the off-ramp way too fast. For a flash of a second, Maggie imagined the car flying off the road and into an embankment of trees, the branches hissing with summer cicadas and slumbering fireflies, the car slamming into an immovable trunk of an ancient oak, leaves and insects and birds exploding out and away from the tree like green fireworks. The Olsens’ final hurrah. One last tragedy to wipe the entire brood out for good. And it would be Maggie’s fault, because had she not required a ride from the airport, Arlen wouldn’t have been pushed to the brink. M is for Mommy, Madness, Massacre . . .