That day, I found Margot under the stairs in the dark. She wiped her runny nose and wet cheeks on her sleeve, trying to hide her tears.
Today in Stars Harbor, she wasn’t crying, only because she’d learned to keep that inside. But I could see the same shattered Margot. She took my failed marriage too personally. I don’t expect her to ask; I simply launch into the fantasy.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Margot. She was sensitive but strong. Easily overwhelmed emotionally, but relentless in her actions. One day she was feeling so misunderstood that she hid in the crawl space under the stairs. There, she found a portal to a world where it was forever autumn with brightly colored leaves and sweater weather. Margot couldn’t retrace her steps to see how she ended up there, but the townspeople knew the how didn’t matter. She was their queen and her brother their king. Their royal family. The prophecy had told them all about this brother and sister. They had been waiting for us.”
Every time Margot’s heart broke, I was there to heal it. At Nana’s townhouse the space was smaller and more narrow than in our childhood home, and we were bigger. Nana kept the space jammed with toilet paper and paper towels, but we wriggled in anyway. After Mom and Dad died, Margot made me scrub the mean parts about our parents from my stories. She was content with the place that looked beautiful but strange, where we were in control and we decided that nothing could hurt us as long as we ruled together.
In this astrology house, Margot rests her head on my shoulder and remembers who we are. The invincible brother and sister. When I’m done, something inside her opens up.
“I’m so scared,” she says.
“Of what?”
“That someone’s gonna die.”
“You think Aimee’s going to kill me?”
“Remember what she did when she caught you cheating years ago? Now you have three kids and you’re with another woman in the same house. I’d say that’s next-level all around.”
“It’s not a terrible point. How is she going to kill me?”
“With a gun? Or a knife. I bet she has the guts to do it with a knife. Slice you up.”
I ruffle her hair and shift my seat. “This isn’t as easy as it used to be,” I say.
“She is still postpartum from the baby. Good mothers can snap too.”
I shake my head, her ear bobbing on my shoulder from the way we’re connected.
“Not Aimee,” I say.
“Then you’re going to end up in a sad two-bedroom apartment in Kips Bay, and I’m going to have to live with you every other weekend to help you take care of the girls,” she says. “I’m not sure that’s much less of a nightmare.”
“Oh shit, Margot, that’s bleak.”
Margot starts laughing so hard that a single tear escapes. I feel her arm move to wipe her face.
“Where did you come up with that scenario?” I ask.
“I was sure it was coming for us,” she says. “Real as the day before us.”
I’m both disturbed and impressed. I always think of Margot as the practical one, while I’m the creative one. For the first time, I realize with all the damage in our past, Margot could have been a writer too. A dismal divorcé’s apartment and her as my pseudo-coparent. That’s the work of a wild imagination.
My story will have a happy ending; it’s the only way things end for me.
RINI
It’s a day of lasts. My last Sun Worship event ended after fifteen minutes. Cut short. Ahead, my last dinner at Stars Harbor awaits. Will I die at midnight? Will I make it through the whole day tomorrow? There’s no way of knowing. The only thing guaranteed is today, my last full day alive.
Walking through the farmers’ market in town, I glance down at my phone. Still no word from Eric. I don’t regret texting him last night, but I won’t badger him either. I’d love one last conversation, but I leave that detail in the hands of the Universe. Instead, I gather up the courage to dial my mom, crossing another goodbye off my final-day to-do list.
“Who’s this?” she says by way of greeting.
“Ha, ha, it hasn’t been that long,” I say.
Of course, that’s a lie. It’s been nearly six months.
I had called my mother as soon as I hung up with the psychic and found out my date of death. It was instinctual. I was scared and wanted my mother. But as soon as she said hello, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. She had enough pain from one daughter. I was supposed to be her relief.
Andi and Mom had always butted heads. Two Tauruses, stubborn in different ways. My mother’s insistence that Andi change was matched only by Andi’s will to stay the same. I always loved my big sister, but I knew she was difficult. Stories cast her as a colicky baby. A tantrum-prone toddler. Those could have been normal developmental milestones, and her rift with my mother resolved by her sweet elementary-school years, but my father upended that.
Andi’s first nosedive happened when Dad left our family for another woman. She took it the hardest of the three of us. Mom wanted someone new, I wanted to forget him, but Andi wanted her daddy. It was unfortunate timing, as Andi was facing down the new hormones of puberty; she struggled with anorexia and bulimia through her teenage years. And then it got worse.
Andi’s second nosedive came in college. Even now, I have nightmares of the day she dropped out. She shook with fright in our apartment doorway with two trash bags of clothes, having moved out of her student housing. I will never feel safe again, she said. She repeated it over and over like a mantra. Even though I was barely sixteen, I knew that in a way Andi died that night when she came home from college. She lost her will. Her joy. Her spirit. A shell of my sister returned to us.
Mom thought she needed a break. Time heals all wounds, she’d said. Andi didn’t get out of bed for days. Days became weeks, weeks became months. We knew Andi was depressed, but we didn’t know why she was afraid to go to a doctor for help. As soon as I saved up enough money for a visit, I went to a clinic and gave them all of Andi’s symptoms as my own. I left with a prescription for an antidepressant.
The pills kept her from getting kicked out of the house, a threat my mother had leveled when it was clear Andi wasn’t going back to school. She said Andi was an adult and needed a job to help pay some bills. Andi secured an at-home position as a customer service phone rep for a department store, but when someone would yell at her, which inevitably happened, she would shame-spiral. That job didn’t last long, Andi stopped taking her meds, and my mother made good on her promise. She told Andi she was no longer welcome under her roof. I thought my mother was too harsh, but when our father’s gift of the property came through, I didn’t need to fight about it. Andi and I left, with whatever thin thread of a relationship we had with our mother intact.
During that first winter in Greenport, Andi and I felt like two little kids whose parents had left them home alone for the first time. Except it was our house. We layered on all the clothes we brought from Queens and warmed ourselves by the fire day and night. We dreamed of what the house could be. Andi wanted some place she could be safe: a home. I wanted some place that could be my legacy: a business. With Eric, we designed both.
I expected Andi would slowly reveal more of what had happened that night, things she couldn’t tell her baby sister. Then my eighteenth birthday passed, and my twentieth, and I was a successful businesswoman, but I never found out the whole story. Over the years I’d pieced together that she’d had an inappropriate relationship with her professor that ended badly. But I didn’t feel the need to drag out the horrid details of the past as long as we were together and moving forward. I didn’t expect that things would grow worse than ever when we left the city.
“You need something, Rini?” my mom asks. A bee buzzes around a bouquet of sunflowers at the farmers’ market.
“No, I’m just checking in. Where in the world are you?” I ask.
“It’s summer, so I’m in Hawaii. You caught me before my shift.”
