The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  “Well, they’re doing a damn good job,” Helen said, looking over his shoulder, scanning the tree line again, sure that someone (something) was out there, smiling a wicked little smile.

  CHAPTER 4

  Olive

  MAY 19, 2015

  Olive danced around the kitchen making breakfast. Daddy wasn’t downstairs yet, but he needed to be out the door in half an hour, so she was sure he’d be popping in at any minute, looking for coffee. And wouldn’t he be surprised when he saw the special breakfast she’d made?

  A busy beaver, that’s what Mama used to say when she saw Olive working hard at something. Aren’t you a busy beaver.

  Olive smiled. She was an industrious girl. That was a word from a vocabulary sheet a while ago, back when she did her homework regularly.

  Industrious.

  The old metal percolator was on the back of the stove, bubbling away. They used to have a Mr. Coffee coffeepot, but Mama liked the old-fashioned blue-and-white enameled percolator they used for camping better, so the electric one was put out at a yard sale. Mama loved yard sales—having them, stopping at them. Every spring, she cleaned the house, dragged a whole assortment of things out to the driveway, and set them up on rickety card tables: clothes, books, kitchen things, old toys, funny knickknacks. Stuff Olive was sure no one would want, but people always came and bought it. Then, over the summer, Mama would refill the house with treasures picked up from other people’s yard sales. Sometimes Olive was sure her mother was buying back things she’d sold at her own sale; just this weird cycle of things coming and going from their house. Olive had a boomerang her dad had given her for her birthday. She came to believe that some objects were like that boomerang—they went out, then found their way right back where they started from. Some things didn’t want to let go.

  Using the percolator, hearing it bubble up like a living thing as it filled the kitchen with its warm coffee smell, reminded her of Mama.

  Olive had taken to drinking coffee since Mama left; like her mother, she took it sweet with lots of milk. The first time she had it, she didn’t put enough milk and sugar in, and the bitterness made her insides pucker. She had a big cup and her heart raced like a rocket engine. But she learned to pour in plenty of milk, and soon, she found her body craving the jolt the early-morning coffee gave her. She’d taken to it just like she’d taken to a lot of things: cooking, making sure the dishes got done, making sure Daddy was up and out the door to make it to work on time each morning. And the renovations. The endless ripping down of drywall, moving of walls. The way she and Daddy would change something all around, only to put it back just the way it had been a month later.

  A Sisyphean task—that’s what it was. She’d learned about that in school. English was the one class she was in with Mike, and he loved when they did the unit on Greek myths and knew all the stories already. She thought most of the stories were alarming and sad, especially the one about Sisyphus—that poor man rolling the boulder up the hill with a stick only to have it roll back down. That’s what the renovations were like. Futile—that was the word Ms. Jenkins, Olive’s freshman English teacher, used to describe it.

  Olive poured some coffee into Mama’s favorite mug: an oversized red mug that was really more like a bowl and had a chip on one side.

  “When you go to a café in France, this is what all the people drink from,” Mama said once.

  “Have you been to France, Mama?” Olive asked.

  “No,” she said. “But that’s the first thing we’ll do when we find that treasure—go off and see the world! Sit down and have a café au lait in a French café!”

  Olive checked the oven—she was baking cinnamon buns from a can. She’d bought them herself at the general store. Her father didn’t go to the grocery store much these days. Riley used to bring sacks of groceries when she came over, but Daddy got mad and told her to quit doing that, that they weren’t a goddamn charity case. Olive would ask him for a little cash here and there so she could pick up what they needed at Ferguson’s General Store in town: coffee, milk, cereal, bread, canned soups. Nothing fancy. The cinnamon rolls, they were kind of an extravagance, but she was in a celebratory mood.

  “Morning, Ollie,” Daddy said, coming into the kitchen. “You had the news on at all?”

  “No,” she said.

  He took in a breath, puffed out his cheeks as he let it go. “Terrible thing,” he said in a low voice. “A bus crash out on Route 4 last night. Full of seniors from the high school coming back from a trip to Boston. A bunch hurt, three killed. Might be kids you know.” He watched her, waiting to see how she’d respond.

  Olive nodded. She didn’t really know any seniors. Sure, she passed them in the halls, and sometimes they seemed to know her (or her story at least, and would whisper or giggle to each other as they walked by).

  “Did the bus hit another car?”

  “No, it went off the road. They’re saying the driver swerved to avoid something in the road. An animal, maybe.”

  Olive nodded, wasn’t sure what else to say.

  Daddy looked around the kitchen, shuffled his feet.

  “There’s coffee ready,” Olive said.

  “Sure smells good in here.” He smiled.

  “I’m making cinnamon rolls,” she said.

  “Ya are, huh?” He reached for the pot of coffee on the stove, poured himself a cup. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Just thought we deserved a treat,” she said.

  He smiled at her, ruffled her hair. “You’re right, kiddo. We do deserve a treat.”

  The timer went off and Olive took the rolls out of the oven, put them on top of the stove to cool.

  “You got plans after school?” he asked.

  Funny question. When did she ever have plans after school? She didn’t play any sports, wasn’t in the drama club or anything like that. She sometimes got invited to a classmate’s house after school, but since her mom left, she always said no, made up some excuse for not going. Easier that way. Because once you went to someone’s house a couple of times, they’d kind of expect to be invited to your house. And no way was she inviting any of the girls from school to her house. She didn’t want people to know about the constant state of construction, to see the torn-open walls and ceiling, the exposed plumbing and wiring, the plywood subfloor, the plaster and drywall dust that covered everything. Proof that once her mama left, everything really did fall apart. Literally.

  She even made excuses to keep Mike away. He used to come over all the time. Her mom loved Mike and got a real kick out of his encyclopedic knowledge of weird and random facts. He’d come over and tell her all about the life cycle of some parasite in Africa he’d been reading about, and Mama would ask all kinds of questions and tell him how clever he was for knowing so much while she fed him fresh-baked oatmeal cookies (his favorite). Olive’s dad never knew what to make of Mike (a kid who neither hunted nor cared about sports)—they were weird and awkward around each other, and Olive thought it was best if she just avoided the whole scene. Also, she didn’t want Mike to see how bad the house really was. He’d freak and tell his mom, who might call the Department for Children and Families or something.

  But she and Mike hung out at school and in the woods. And the truth was Mike was about the only real friend Olive had these days, and Olive was Mike’s one friend.

  “Odd Oliver,” that’s what everyone at school called her—even the older kids she didn’t know. The kids in her class had been calling her Odd Oliver since fifth grade, and she’d thought she’d lose the name when they all moved on to high school, but it carried over, got worse even. High school was so big and strange—a world where the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. When she walked the halls, she was reminded of another story she’d learned about in English: the labyrinth that held the Minotaur. Only in her version, there were Minotaurs everywhere, around every corner, and the
y wore letter jackets, or cheap perfume and pounds of makeup. The high school served three towns, so there were a lot of kids Olive had never seen before, and originally, she’d looked forward to this, thought it would help her to blend in, to hide, but really it just made her stick out more. News of her nickname and what had happened with her mother spread fast during the first weeks of school.

  “What ya huntin’ for, Odd Oliver?” kids would tease when she came to school in her camouflage jacket and pants. Screw them, she thought. Sometimes she’d even mumble a quick “Fuck off,” but then they’d coo and chortle and say, “You’re such a freakazoid! No wonder your mom left you.” That was the worst—when they brought her mother into it. Sometimes she’d get to her locker and find stuff there, stuff she hadn’t put in: lip gloss, eye shadow, little notes that said, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Sometimes the notes were crueler. “Your mother’s a whore. She opened her legs for half the men in this town.”

  Mike told her not to pay any attention to it.

  “You know, I’ve got this game I play sometimes,” he told her once, when she’d found an especially crude note taped to her locker. He pretended he hadn’t seen what it said, just took it down and crumpled it up. “I come to school and pretend that I’m not one of them. That I’m this alien, from way off in some other galaxy. I’ve just been sent here to observe.”

  Olive nodded.

  “But see, the creatures from my home planet are coming back soon to pick me up, and after, they’re gonna destroy the Earth. One big fireball,” he said, making an exploding noise and waggling his fingers. “Poof!”

  Olive smiled but cringed a little. She didn’t want to think of everyone all burned up like that, not even the girls who’d left the cruel notes.

  “But the thing is, I get to pick people to come back with me. Everyone else will be disintegrated.” His eyes glittered. “The only one I’ve picked so far is you,” he told Olive, and gave her a big goofy smile.

  “Umm…thanks, I guess,” she’d said. The second bell rang, and they ran to class, already late.

  * * *

  . . .

  “I thought maybe we could start in on your room,” Daddy said now.

  Olive blinked at him. “Huh?” she said, thinking she’d misheard him because she’d been daydreaming about Mike and the aliens.

  “Your room,” he repeated. “I thought we could get started with it. No need to keep putting it off, right?”

  Her stomach knotted. Not her room. That was her one safe space. He had suggested making it bigger a couple of weeks ago, when Riley was over for dinner. She said her room was fine, she was happy with it the way it was.

  “Don’t you want it bigger? Better? A higher ceiling? A bigger closet?”

  “For god’s sake, Dustin,” Riley said. “She said she was happy with it the way it is. Can’t you just leave one room alone?”

  Her dad had backed down. But after Riley left, he kept talking about all the changes they’d make someday to Olive’s room, though he hadn’t gone as far as suggesting they actually start work. The walls and ceiling of her bedroom remained intact. And it was clean. Dust free. It was the one place of order in the whole house. The one place that had been left exactly the same as it was the day Mama went away.

  “Don’t you think we should finish up in the living room first? Put the rest of the drywall up? Paint, maybe?” She tried not to show how frantic she felt. How desperate.

  Not my room. Anything but that.

  Her dad looked disappointed. “I just want you to have a nice room. We can make it bigger, go into the spare room a little ways. You can have a walk-in closet. You know? Like we’ve been talking about?”

  It was Daddy who’d been doing all the talking, all the daydreaming, promising how nice, how perfect, things would be if they knocked out a wall here, put up some shelves there. As if true happiness could be brought about with a sledgehammer and new drywall.

  “My closet’s fine the way it is,” she told him. She didn’t have much clothing. Not like some of the girls in her class who seemed to have a different outfit for every day of the month. Olive was fine with her two pairs of jeans (patched in places), camo hunting pants with tons of pockets, a few T-shirts, a hoodie, and her camo jacket. She owned two pairs of shoes: hunting boots and sneakers.

  “I thought—” he said, looking lost, profoundly disappointed.

  “I really think we should concentrate on finishing some of the projects we’ve started,” she said, realizing how funny it was, her talking like she was the adult and he was the little kid with his crazy, impractical ideas. “Let’s work on the living room today after school, okay? That’ll be the first room Mama sees when she walks through the door. Don’t we want it to be perfect?”

  More than looking disappointed, he looked tired. Old. He’d lost weight since Mama left. His skin looked sallow; there were dark circles under his eyes. His sandy-colored hair was a little too long. She needed to take better care of him, to make sure he ate more and to encourage him to go to bed earlier instead of falling asleep each night on the ratty old couch in front of the television in the living room.

  For half a second, she thought about changing her mind, giving in, telling him sure, they could start in on her room just to make him happy, to see him smile.

  She bit her lip, waited.

  “Sure,” he said at last. “We can finish the living room first. What color do you think we should paint it?”

  Olive smiled, let herself breathe. She thought about it while she spread thick white frosting on the cinnamon rolls.

  “Blue,” she said. “Like the sky. Like the color of Mama’s favorite dress. You know the one I mean?”

  Daddy frowned hard, his brow wrinkling all old-man-like, as if the memory of Mama in her dress was just too much for him. He seemed to get visibly smaller, shrinking before her eyes. “I know the one you mean,” he said, voice low and crackling. He looked down into the coffee mug, then took a sip even though it was steaming hot. “I’ll pick up some paint samples on my way home and let you decide which one’s closest.”

  “Sounds good,” Olive said. She put a cinnamon roll on a plate and handed it to Daddy.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking a big bite as he headed back out of the kitchen to get ready for work. “Mmm! You’re getting to be quite the cook.”

  She thought of saying, They’re from a tube, Dad. A trained monkey could make them. But instead, she called out, “Thank you,” and took a sip from her own giant mug of coffee.

  * * *

  . . .

  She heard the shower go on, the plumbing making a not-so-comforting thumping sound. She was sure they’d put some of the pipes back together wrong when they redid the bathroom. Sometimes the thumping of the pipes turned into a low whine, sounding like there was a monster trapped behind the walls, screaming to get out. She had no doubt that they’d need to take the wall down again and replace the plumbing. Then maybe Daddy would decide that the shower should be moved to another wall and they’d do everything all over again.

  Twenty minutes later, she was wrapping up the rest of the rolls when Daddy came in, smelling like mentholated shaving cream and Irish Spring soap. He filled up his travel mug. Olive handed him the sack lunch she’d packed for him: a ham sandwich, an apple, and two cinnamon rolls.

  “I’m off,” he said, grabbing the keys to his truck. “You want a ride? I’ve gotta be over on County Road this morning—they’re redoing the culvert—but I can drop you off on the way.”

  County Road was on the other side of town from the high school. It wasn’t on the way at all. She smiled at his kind offer. “No thanks, I’ll take the bus.”

  “Better skedaddle if you don’t want to miss it,” he warned.

  “On my way in five minutes,” she said.

  “Good girl,” he called as he went out the front door, not lookin
g back. She heard his old Chevy start up, cranking slowly like it wasn’t sure it wanted to go anywhere, but then it caught and roared to life.

  She sat back down, got out another cinnamon bun. She wasn’t going to catch the bus. Odd Oliver wasn’t going to school at all today.

  She had other plans.

  CHAPTER 5

  Helen

  MAY 19, 2015

  Nate had his laptop open and played her the terrible sounds again and again. A red fox screaming. A fisher. Both noises cruel, pained, and hideous sounding. She flinched each time he pushed the play button. He cocked his head, listened harder, like he was trying to learn their language.

  “Is either of those what you heard?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I heard,” she said, taking a long sip of wine. “Now would you please stop playing them over and over?”

  She was tired and sore and wanted a hot bath. But they had only a tiny shower, barely large enough to turn around in, with a stained plastic enclosure and a handheld shower wand with water pressure so bad, Nate called it the spit bath. That would have to do.

  “People call them fisher cats, but they’re not cats at all,” he explained. “They’re actually a member of the weasel family.”

  He pushed play once more and the kitchen was filled with that horrible screeching.

  “Please, Nate,” she begged. “Just turn the fucking thing off.”

  They’d spent the morning stacking the lumber they’d had delivered under a nylon canopy, then set up a second canopy as a work area and place to store tools. The guy who delivered the lumber told them there had been a terrible accident down near the center of town last night—a school bus carrying high school kids went off the road. Three dead, twenty injured. The road was still down to one lane while the police worked the scene.