by Ania Ahlborn
She shot a look back through her open bedroom door, her throat clicking dryly as she swallowed against the lump that had formed there. Her phone was buzzing every few seconds, phantom messages blipping onto the screen.
And there, across the room, the closet door was slowly creeping open.
She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. A shadow in the darkness, darker than the night that surrounded it. Watching her. Waiting.
An ever-present nightmare.
Her inescapable, preordained, self-prophesized truth.
. . .
Screaming.
Someone was screaming.
Maggie’s muscles spasmed, jerking her into full consciousness. She’d been up all night, wide-eyed and curled into the corner of the sofa. But as soon as the sun started to rise, exhaustion hit her hard. She’d drifted in and out of wakefulness all morning, but now, sleep was stripped away with the roughness of a Band-Aid pull. A zing of pain speared through the base of her skull. Her heart clamored up her windpipe. For a moment, she couldn’t remember where the hell she was. All she knew was that she had fled the terror she felt last night, turned on the living room lights, and hunkered down on the couch like a terrified child, and now, someone was screaming the way she had wanted to just hours before.
“I don’t want appo, I want oh-ange!”
Maggie blinked at her surroundings. Her mother’s living room, but not her mother’s things. One of Arlen’s Pottery Barn pillows was crushed against her chest. She winced as she pushed herself up to sit, the vertebrae in her neck feeling as though they’d fused together overnight. The pain was worse than ever now. Yeah, the couch—that had been a splendid idea.
A whimper tripped across her tongue. She grabbed at her neck in a feeble attempt at relief. But this wasn’t just a crick from sleeping in a fear-induced huddle. This was the very agony that had kept her out of school and landed her in doctors’ offices, a pain that had hit her head-on after speeding home from what was supposed to be a fun-filled week on the beach.
Don’t go. Friend, don’t go.
Another scream. High-pitched. A tiny soprano. “I want oh-ange! Not this juice! Momma, noooo!”
“Hayden!” Arlen’s tone snapped like a rubber band. Even from clear across the house, her aggravation was clear. It had seemed odd that Arlen wasn’t mourning, that she hadn’t processed the fact that Brynn was gone, but now, Maggie could hardly blame her. Because who in the world could think, let alone grieve, with a three-year-old screaming into your goddamn ear all day?
Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered, trying her best to ease the tension that was now quite literally making her neck pop every time she moved.
She had two more days in Savannah. Today, all details for Brynn had to be in order. Tomorrow, the funeral. That was, if Florence allowed it to happen at all. And at this rate, Maggie doubted she’d be able to make it without an emergency chiropractor adjustment, if she could even find a place that was open in the middle of a goddamn storm. But she was quickly inching up to her threshold; once she crossed it, moving around—let alone thinking straight—would become next to impossible. And leaving Savannah? How was she supposed to leave now, after what had happened last night?
“Did you sleep down here?”
Startled, Maggie blinked her eyes open, then dropped her hands to her lap. Hope stood not three feet from her, her hair a tornado of golden candy floss. The Caribbean blue of her pajamas was bright enough to force Maggie into a squint. Elsa the Snow Queen smiled at her from the center of Hope’s sleep shirt. Its bottom hem was snagged on the pink tulle of her tutu. Hope lifted a piece of Nutella-smeared toast to her mouth and took a giant bite, leaving chocolate track marks across both cheeks like a clown’s gruesomely wide smile.
“Hey, Hope.” Maggie needed a drink, and not just juice. A screwdriver. But judging by Hayden’s skin-flaying screech, they were fresh out of OJ. A crying shame.
Maggie tried to roll her neck, winced, and stopped midway.
“Did you hurt yourself again?” Hope asked, her chocolate breath cutting through the distance, twisting Maggie’s already knotted stomach into a tighter snare.
“Just sore,” she murmured. “Why’s Hay screaming her head off?”
“Oh.” Hope’s attention shifted in the direction of the kitchen, then returned to her aunt a moment later. “She always does this.”
Maybe this is why Brynn killed herself. Maggie considered the possibility, then immediately hated herself for such a nasty thought.
“I heard what you said,” Hope announced.
“What I said?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah. You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain.” Hope spoke around a mouthful of bread and hazelnut spread. “And you shouldn’t curse. Especially the F-word. Especially if you’re a girl. My mom says.”
“Sorry.” Maggie detached herself from Arlen’s now misshapen throw pillow. She propped it against the arm of the couch, not bothering to fluff it back into shape. That would drive Arlen nuts, no doubt. She needed a shower. The scorch of hot water would at least ease some of that stiffness from her shoulders. Her phone was still upstairs.
Hi, Maggie, hi.
Instant nausea.
She had to show Cheryl the messages that had come in from Brynn’s number; maybe then Cheryl would understand how much Maggie needed help. Or maybe Maggie would finally crack and call Dillon, tell him everything, ask him what she was supposed to do. See a psychiatrist, he’d probably say, because this sort of narrative didn’t fit into Dillon’s scientific world. Back in Wilmington, she and Dillon believed in logic and reason. Here in Savannah, none of that seemed to exist.
Another wince as she got to her feet.
“I told you not to go in there,” Hope said, her tone flat, stopping Maggie in her tracks.
She stared at her niece—five years old but somehow ancient. Somehow knowing. Maggie felt her throat constrict, as if threatening to close up in anaphylactic shock.
“Hey, Hope?” The words felt gooey, coated in phlegm. Any second now, she’d be tripping over herself to get to the bathroom. The queasiness was getting worse the longer she stood there, as if standing so close to her niece was intensifying the sensation. “Do you remember how I threw something in the trash yesterday, when the bin was out by the curb?”
Hope furrowed her eyebrows as she chewed, but she didn’t respond.
“Did you take out what I put in there?” Maggie asked.
Her niece continued to devour her toast. Hope looked completely unconcerned, and her nonchalance only made Maggie that much more anxious. Had the kid gone cagey, the answer would have been clear: yes, she’d gone digging through the garbage; don’t tell her mom, don’t get her in trouble. But the way she stood there, so lackadaisical in her tutu and pajamas, so utterly torpid—it made Maggie want to join Hayden’s screaming fit.
“Hope?” Maggie swallowed, watching the kid. “Can you answer me?” With the last bite of toast packed into her cheek, Hope’s gaze slowly drifted upward to meet her aunt’s eyes. “Did you bring that trash back inside?”
The inquiry caused Hope’s eyes to darken a shade, but Maggie refused to be deterred.
“Maybe I should ask your mom, then,” Maggie suggested. “Since you don’t want to tell me yourself.”
Hope pursed her chocolate-smeared mouth, then took a step forward to lessen the distance between herself and her aunt. The scratchy edging of her tutu brushed across Maggie’s bare knees. Being so close was the last thing Maggie wanted, but being afraid of a five-year-old, of her family . . . it was beyond ridiculous. And so she stood her ground.
“You aren’t always very nice, Auntie Magdalene,” Hope said.
“What? How am I not nice?” Maggie straightened to her full height.
“You call your friends
bad names. And you curse. And you throw away stuff that doesn’t belong to you,” Hope said. “That’s like stealing. That doll isn’t yours, and you know it.”
Another scream, as though little Hayden were somehow personifying the wails trapped inside Maggie’s head.
“But I won’t tell my mom,” she said. “Because I love you.” Flat. Affectless. “No matter what.” And then, with a few backward steps, she wandered off, leaving Maggie frozen in front of the couch, tumbling toward panic.
You call your friends awful names.
Hope was talking about Cheryl. About something that happened a decade before. As if Hope had somehow been there to see it happen herself.
FIFTEEN
* * *
MAGGIE SLAMMED THE trunk of Brynn’s Camry closed and climbed into the driver’s seat. With all the windows rolled down and the wind whipping through the interior, she blasted the stereo in the driveway. It was a feeble attempt at soothing her rattled nerves, but at least it brought her back to the days when Brynn would do this very thing—sit in the car when she was particularly pissed, listening to darkwave and smoking clove cigarettes while Maggie spied on her from the upstairs window.
By then, the fights between Brynn and their mother were out of control. Their mom was hardly ever sober, and when she did have momentary blips of lucidity, they were brought on not by a clear mind but by the rare lulls in her seemingly permanent high. That respite, however, was always accompanied by an emergency doctor’s appointment, another prescription, their mother’s tires squealing down the road as she booked it to the pharmacy. By then, sobriety would have meant full-blown withdrawal. Dangerous depression. Anger and constant crying. A complete mental break.
Both Maggie and Brynn had tried to help, lending encouragement while Arlen attempted to get their mother to see a shrink. I already have a therapist, was their mom’s go-to response. And she was right, she did indeed have one. Unfortunately, that quack—along with Mom’s collection of other doctors—continued to prescribe the very drugs that were robbing the girls of their remaining parent.
Eventually, even typically coolheaded Arlen reached her breaking point. Rifling through their mother’s things and calling the numbers she found on every orange pill bottle she discovered, Arlen demanded to talk to each prescribing physician while Maggie and Brynn watched on in muted fascination. Naturally, none of the doctors would breathe a word about their patient without power of attorney. Arlen yelled a menagerie of colorful swears into the phone that afternoon. Fucking drug dealer! and Soul-sucking asshole! had been among her favorite insults. After eight attempts, Arlen had all but thrown her cell phone across the room. It was the first time Maggie had seen her eldest sister get so emotional. And yet she couldn’t quite pinpoint the source of Arlen’s anger. Was it their mother’s downward spiral, or was Arlen pissed because she wasn’t used to being denied her way?
Regardless, the girls’ efforts got them nowhere. Their mother continued visiting the same doctors who kept giving her the addictive snake oil. Pills came from a variety of places around town—each doctor having their own designated go-to spot because Stella was smart. The pharmacists on duty couldn’t be allowed to catch on. She paid cash rather than relying on insurance to foot the bill, and no one was the wiser. No one but her daughters, who frequently found ATM receipts on the kitchen island for hundreds of dollars’ worth of withdrawals. But they couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it because it was Stella Olsen’s money. Their mother was an adult.
Maggie had been out the afternoon Brynn’s first panicked call came in, sitting on the floor at her Advanced Placement English teacher’s house, working on her graduation speech, with a calico cat curled up in her lap. She ignored the ringing of her cell phone from the depths of her backpack, but when it rang for the third time in less than two minutes, Mrs. Miller gave Maggie a stern yet thoughtful look. It might be an emergency. And so Maggie answered the call.
You have to get over here! Brynn had nearly screamed the words, and that’s what had scared Maggie the most—her sister’s tone. The panic in her voice. Maggie sat cemented in place as she listened to Brynn cry on the line. She sounded as though she were on a boat, or in a swimming pool, or at the lake they used to visit with their father when the Georgia heat got too oppressive to stand. Water sloshing. Heavy thuds against something hard. Wet limbs hitting porcelain and tile.
During Maggie’s rush home, an ambulance blasted past her, lights on, siren blaring. She pulled over as it passed, watching its reflection in her rearview as it turned onto a street a few blocks down, pointing itself toward the closest hospital. When her attention finally drifted from the mirror to the world outside her car window, she found herself parked in front of a wrought iron fence, the headstones of Friendship Park just beyond.
Stella Olsen didn’t die that afternoon. Oh, hell no. She had her stomach pumped and was back on the couch, popping pills like candy less than twenty-four hours later.
It’s what pushed Maggie over the edge.
With her arms loaded up with prescription bottles, Maggie marched to the downstairs guest bathroom. Bottle caps bounced against the floor. A rainbow of colorful pills splashed into the toilet bowl. Every bottle she emptied was chucked across the room and against the wall—an angry fuck you directed at every opiate, every depressant, every doctor who undeniably knew Mom had a problem. The bottles ricocheted against the sink counter, the mirror, the open bathroom door.
Brynn had materialized during this spectacle, watching, incredulous, knowing that the repercussions would be severe. She called Arlen. Um, you might want to come over, she suggested. I think Mags may have just started World War III.
An understatement, to be sure. A few minutes later, Brynn was pressing a dish towel to Maggie’s wounded cheek, both girls weeping, their life pure and utter chaos. Arlen arrived after the attack. She drove Maggie to the hospital for stitches. Before she left that night, she looked her little sister in the eyes and sighed. It’s good that you’re leaving, she said. Just get out of here. She’s toxic. Make a better life somewhere else.
The scar on Maggie’s cheek had all but faded when, a few months later, Stella Olsen performed an encore, this time with a permanent end.
And for her first few hours as an orphan, Maggie couldn’t help but feel nothing but anger. Their mom had broken beneath the weight of tragedy. She had loved their dad so deeply that she had been destroyed by his loss. Surely, people had more than likely thought, the girls must understand how terribly sad that is. And yes, it was. But the real tragedy wasn’t that she had suffocated on her own mourning, but that the love she claimed to have had for her children hadn’t been enough to convince her to live.
Maggie now looked up from Brynn’s steering wheel and toward the house they’d all grown up in, and a twinge of resentment tightened into a calcified stone at the very center of her chest. Perhaps if Stella Olsen had possessed any decency, she would have spared her children years of pain. Maybe, had the girls not grown up under the thumb of an addict, Brynn’s life wouldn’t have ended this way.
Or maybe Maggie was just kidding herself. Perhaps fate really was at play, and she herself had set it into motion—a stupid kid with too much curiosity, a girl who hadn’t known when to quit. It was easy to blame their mother, but the truth of it was, none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for what Maggie had done.
She pulled out of the driveway and guided the car down the road. The oaks were ragged from their endless beating. They waved their ancient and now mostly leafless limbs at her as she passed, as though trying to warn her to stay back.
But Maggie didn’t stop until she rolled up to Friendship Park. Only then did she hit the brakes, and rather than regarding the headstones with sympathy, she glared at them instead. It hadn’t crossed her mind to visit their father’s plot during her visit, because buried right next to him was their mom. And somewhere, apart from them, would be Brynn
.
Maggie pictured her favorite sister placed in the children’s section of the graveyard—no room for her next to their parents. Brynn, twenty-five yet still a child.
Dead kids are never happy because nobody wants to play with them.
Except the Olsen girls had been unhappy long before any of them had died.
Maggie guided the Camry through the cemetery gates faster than she should have. Gravel popped beneath the tires as she rolled toward the corner of the graveyard she hadn’t dared visit in a decade. Brynn’s rosary beads and tiny bird skull bounced along as she went.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Florence was getting ready to finally make landfall, to ravage all of Savannah with wind and heavy rain, but Maggie didn’t let the danger of it keep her away.
Slamming on the brakes when that all-too-familiar stone sarcophagus came into view, she threw the car into park, shoved the driver’s door open, and marched around to the back.
There, in the trunk, was that goddamn doll. This time, she’d get rid of it for good. She’d put it back in its place, where it should have stayed. But Simon’s warning rang in her ears: It’s not just people they can get into . . . It’s things, too. Yes, the doll had started out as belonging to Brynn, but it had ceased being hers the moment she had left it on that tomb. And stupid Maggie had brought it home. Stupid, gullible Maggie had offered to be its friend.
She grabbed the doll by one booted foot, slammed the trunk closed, and marched toward the grave site she’d rescued it from so long ago. And as she approached the tomb, she felt herself grow that much more vengeful. Her father. Her mother. Now Brynn. With whom would this end?
Her fingers tightened around the doll’s leg, and rather than carefully placing it upon the grave where she had found it, she tossed it instead. The doll swept through the air in a wide arc, landing hard against the top of the limestone box. There was a crack, like the pop of a lightbulb. One of its small porcelain hands exploded against the monument’s top, mimicking the shards of broken glass hidden beneath a sheet upon her sister’s floor.