The Cormorant (15 page)

“What are you doing in Florida?” her mother suddenly asks. Under her breath she adds, “Besides getting drunk and arrested.”

Ah. Ah!
There it is
. There’s the judgment. The gavel banging. The executioner’s axe falling hard. Ha ha! “I’m here for work,
Mother
.”

I’m here because someone wants to send me a message. And I don’t yet know what that message is
.

“You don’t look dressed for work.”

“You don’t look like my mother. Though you’re damn sure starting to
sound
like her.”

“We’re both different, then. Fine.”

“Fine.”

“
Fine
.”

And they drive the next three-and-a-half hours in silence.

INTERLUDE

THE FATHERLESS GIRL

“I want to go see his grave,” Miriam says.

Her mother looks up from the kitchen table, where the woman is – as she is once a month – hunkering down and figuring out how she’s going to pay the stack of bills gathering in front of her.

Mother says nothing; she just gives a quizzical, irritated stare.

“Some of the other girls at school make fun of me,” Miriam says, as if in explanation.

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Because I don’t have a father.”

“I don’t understand how you’d make fun of someone for not having a father, Miriam. Put it out of your mind.”

And she goes back to her bills.

But Miriam persists.

“They say I’m an orphan girl. Or that Daddy left me because I was too ugly. Or that you don’t even know who he is. Or that you’re a lesbian–”

Here her mother perks up, this time with her brows knitted together. “Don’t say that word to me. The Lord does not abide that lifestyle. Nor does he abide us acknowledging it.” Mother sets the pen down. Crosses her arms. Her mood darkening to a black watercolor smear. “Children will find a way to make fun of you for anything and everything. Your name. Your clothes. The way you speak. The way you chew. It just means they feel weak and they’re trying to make themselves feel better by passing that weakness along to you. As I said, put it out of your mind.”

Miriam thinks,
That’s easier said than done
.

This should be the end of the conversation.

Miriam is twelve years old. She knows how this goes. Her mother is already angry with her for the interruption.

She shouldn’t push.

But in a rare moment of rebellion–

She pushes.

“I still want to see his grave,” she says.

“Well, you can’t,” Mother says. Short. Clipped. Final.

But Miriam pushes again.

“You say he died from cancer.”

“Yes. Bowel cancer. It was unpleasant.”

“I should be able to see his grave, then. Why don’t we go and put flowers on it? On what day did he die? We don’t pray for him. I don’t even know his name–”

Mother stands, uncoiling like a spring. “Leave it alone. He died. We were saddled with medical bills. He didn’t take care of himself. Death comes for those who refuse the responsibilities given to them, Miriam.”

“You’re angry at him. You’re angry at him for dying.”

Her mother thrusts a short, persecuting finger in her face.

“Say one more word, daughter, and you will go to bed without dinner. I will lock you in your room. I will eat alone. You will pray for temperance to stay that tongue, and I will pray that God sees fit to grant it.”

Miriam’s mouth hangs open. Tears gather in the corners of her eyes. Should she say anything at all? Even an acknowledgement? A “yes, Mother”? A “God bless”?

All she does is nod.

Her mother nods in return.

Then the woman goes back to her bills. And Miriam goes upstairs to cry. A familiar routine.

TWENTY-FOUR

NO SLEEP FOR SINNERS

Miriam reclines on a bed with pineapple bedsheets and feels her blood throbbing in her ears, her skin hot and alive like everything is heat rash and poison ivy and biting invisible flies. All she can do is lie there and stare up into the vortex of a spinning bamboo ceiling fan and think about her mother and how angry that woman makes her.

It occurs to her suddenly that she didn’t inflict herself on her mother so much as she inflicted her mother on herself.

Oops.

They didn’t say squat for the rest of the trip. Miriam slept a little. Dreamed of dark waters. Dreamed of the river trying to drown her. Wren’s face down there in the gloom. Caught in the mummified grip of Eleanor Caldecott. Eleanor’s fish-nibbled lips opening up, a gassy flurry of bubbles speaking words lost to the water but still found inside Miriam’s head as a haunting echo:
Fate has a path. You step in. You change lives by ending lives. Poisoned girls. Damaged girls. Ruined girls. Girls who will themselves become ruiners.
She screams, through the stirred water,
Good things, truly good things, don’t come without sacrifice!

Then Miriam awoke and they were there at a little house in the middle of Delray Beach, a little beige two-bedroom sheltered by drooping, wet, grief-struck palms. Evening had fallen. A couple of geriatric mummies walked an arthritic, trembling poodle nearby.

They went inside, everything in the house cast in a kind of Kmart version of British Colonial décor. The dark woods and the tan walls, the faux bamboo, the woven baskets for TV remotes and other sundries, the thatch mats instead of plush carpets. All of it with a faintly chintzy sheen, like a cheap-ass version of the rental place occupied by “Steve Max.”

The house wasn’t a mess, exactly.

But it wasn’t clean, either.

The ceiling fans were dusty. The stovetop pocked with stains. Dishes sat in the sink.

And then: the dog.

A little moppy-boppy Yorkshire terrier who slid around on the wood floors like an unmoored bumper car, little claws scrabbling to find purchase – the dog circled her, yapping and growling and rolling around like he wasn’t sure if he hated Miriam or loved Miriam. Then he ran off and peed in the corner and humped a couch pillow.

Good times.

Mother said nothing except “Your room is in here,” and then she showed Miriam the way to the second bedroom.

Which is where she now reclines.

She turns and rolls over to try to get comfortable–

And stifles a scream.

Louis lies next to her.

His one ruined eye lies open like a hole dug in the ground. Rich, loamy earth falls from the socket. Shiny beetles wrestle in the dirt. He smiles. “Home sweet home.”

“You scared the hell out of me.”

“You seemed bored. Thought you could use some company.”

“Please eat a sack of lightly toasted dicks.”

He smiles. His teeth are yellow like nicotine-stained wallpaper. “You have work to do.”

Prickled flesh rises on the backs of her arms, her hands, her neck.

“I haven’t heard you say that in a while.”
Not since girls started dying at the Caldecott School.

“This is important. Someone wants to hurt you.”

“I bet you know who it is.”

His one good eye winks.

“Tell me and spare me the drama. I’ll go. I’ll handle it.”

“What fun would that be?”

“I decide what’s work for me and what isn’t. You’re not my boss. You’re not my father.”

Louis sits up. More soil slides out of his eye socket, this time carrying segmented mealworms that ride the tide of earth and land on the pineapple sheets. “Maybe I am your father. You really don’t know. He’s dead, or so you’ve been told. Maybe I’m his ghost, come back to my baby girl to help instruct her in these troubled times.”

“Maybe you are. Maybe I don’t care.”

“You should care,” he says. “Because if you don’t handle this soon, everything you know and love will be torn apart. You know what you need to do. Find out who was renting that house.”

Her mother has a computer. Miriam saw it in the back corner of the living room on a little desk caddy-corner to the TV stand. The devil only knows if it’s hooked up to the Internet – she has a very hard time imagining her mother using the Internet. Then again, nothing about this place resonates with that woman. It’s like being in someone else’s house.

Miriam’s about to say something, but then–

Cigarette smoke.

The ghost of it.

Fresh smoke. Not old.

Drifting in from the cracked window.

A neighbor
, she thinks, but then she hears her mother out back, talking to the dog, whose name is apparently Rupert. “Go on, go get your cookie. Rupert. Cookie.
Rupert
. Cookie!”

Then the sound of lips on cigarette. Sucking. Exhaling.

Her mother is smoking.

“I have to see this,” Miriam says. Her fingers ache to have a cigarette between them, too.

“Time is falling off the clock,” the Trespasser says in Louis’ voice. But when she turns to see him he’s Ben, her high school boyfriend, the one who took her virginity, the one who put a baby in her, a baby that did not survive thanks to his wretched mother and her red snow shovel. And here Ben does as he did back then: he has a shotgun tilted toward his head, mouth open, barrel digging into the roof of his mouth–

A twitch of the finger–

Miriam’s cry is lost in the sound of the blast–

CHOOM.

She squeezes her eyes shut–

And when she opens them again, the Trespasser has gone.

TWENTY-FIVE

SHARING IS CARING

“This is one for the record books,” Miriam says, coming out through the patio door and stepping onto a small verandah. Mother sits on a small bench, a long cigarette in her small fingers. Rupert the Yorkie starts yapping.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Evelyn Black says, sucking on the cigarette like she’s a mosquito hungry for blood. She blows a jet of smoke out toward the small eighth-of-an-acre yard with the tall privacy fence and the climbing pink flowers.

“I’m talking about you. Smoking a cigarette.”

“I used to smoke before you were born.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Don’t use that kind of language. Please.”

“It doesn’t sound the same if I say,
You’re pooping me
.”

“So don’t say it at all.”

“I’m just saying,” Miriam says, hovering next to the bench, “I have a very hard time picturing you smoking back then. Or ever. I have a hard time picturing it even though you’re sitting
right there
, smoking like you can’t get the cancer in you fast enough.”

It’s then she thinks,
Touch her. Find out how she’s going to die.
Part of her aches to know. A kind of revenge. But it terrifies her, too. She’s afraid to see what waits in the darkness, afraid to reach into the hole and see what poisonous thing lies in wait. She hates this woman, or so she tells herself – but there’s a real difference between thinking it and acting on it.

She hears the Trespasser’s voice in the back of her mind–

She’s your mommy. Poor widdle Miriam doesn’t want to know how her mean old momsy-womsy meets the grave
.

“I don’t have cancer,” her mother snaps.

“Give me one.”

“What?”

“A cigarette.” Miriam snaps her fingers. “C’mon.”

“I’m not giving my daughter a cigarette. Especially a daughter who doesn’t know how to say the word ‘please.’” Inhale. Exhale. “I raised you better than that, young lady.”

Did you really?

“Fine.
Please
give me a cigarette.”

“No.” That word, said so bitchily. Like it gives her pleasure.

“I will smoke my own, then,” Miriam says, plucking the crumpled pack from her back pocket. “But just know that you’re contravening Smoker’s Code established in the late 1800s by Sir Smokey von Smokington and his wife, Esmerelda Cancerface, who
decreed
that smokers smoking together shall
share their cigarettes
like good little tobacco monkeys.”

Miriam sparks her lighter. Lights the cigarette. Pleasure blooms in the back of her brain – a surge that shoulders past all the fear and frustration she’s feeling in the bend of her belly.

“You’re very crass and very strange,” Mother says. “You’re not the daughter I raised.”