Burn Our Bodies Down

by Rory Power

  “You mean you got her,” Mom says, and there, there, that’s the weak spot I have to keep aiming at. “It’s not worth it. I know you think you understand, but she can’t ever give you enough to make up for what she takes.”

  “Oh, I understand that,” I say. “I learned it from you.”

  “Fuck,” Mom says quietly. She’s desperate now, not angry. That’s so much better. “This is—I can’t do this, Margot. Do you understand what it’s costing me to be here?”

  “No,” I say, “because you never told me a thing. You never let me in, Mom.” She won’t bring it up on her own, will she? Not even after I asked her about it in my voice mail. Fine—I’ll do it. Maybe this will get her to crack open. “Like Katherine,” I say, and she flinches, full and sudden, like I hit her. “Why didn’t you tell me about Katherine?”

  “We can’t waste time with this,” Mom says, pleading, her gaze flicking to Fairhaven and back. “Okay? I tried to get us out of here and I can do it again, but we have to go, and we have to do it right now.”

  I stand my ground. “It’s now or never, Mom. Why wouldn’t you want me to know my family?”

  “Because it’s not any family at all. It’s not real.” My disappointment must be obvious, because Mom comes toward me, takes my face in her hands. Her thumb insistent on that spot under my left eye, where her scar marks her own skin. “I know,” she says, soft and on the edge of crying. “I know it’s not what you wanted. If I could change it, I would. But we have to go. You have to get in the car.”

  I bat her hands away. That’s not loving me. Loving me is giving me what you owe me. “What happened to her? I am not going anywhere until you tell me the truth.”

  “Margot—”

  “Do you think I don’t mean it?” I step toward her and she staggers back, and I hate feeling like this, like I’m about to break her, but it’s the only way I ever get anything I’m after. And sure, maybe I can’t make her want me. Maybe I can’t make her love me the way mothers are supposed to love their children. But I can make her give me this. “Do you think I’m kidding? You had a sister and I had an aunt and you kept her from me,” I say, my voice louder and louder. “You took her away, and I want to know why.”

  “Because I—” Mom’s voice fails, and she covers her mouth with her hands, her eyes squeezed shut. “I’m what happened to her,” I hear her say. Muffled, thick with tears.

  I stand there. Mom at my feet. Sun in my eyes.

  I’m what happened.

  “What does that mean?”

  But do I really want to know? I remember what Katherine wrote in her Bible. She was afraid, whether she wanted to admit it or not. Afraid of Mom.

  The fires, the boxes of files. The trouble that people say comes with being a Nielsen girl. How does that make Katherine a secret worth keeping? And not from everybody. Just from me.

  I don’t have a chance to wonder. Mom straightens, swiping at the tear tracks left on her cheeks. “I don’t owe you that,” she says. And it’s bullshit, it’s such a mess, both of us standing there with our scales, trying to reckon with something that will never balance.

  One day, I think, in a bolt of clarity I cannot stand, I will have to stop counting. For better or worse, I will have to let it go.

  I don’t want to. My whole life, it’s been pushing against my mother that’s kept me on my feet. If I let go there’ll be nothing left.

  “Yes,” I insist, “you do.” That’s what I do. That’s what I will always do.

  “Katherine’s dead,” she says, with some difficulty, “and that’s what you need to know.”

  “And the other girl?” I wasn’t planning to bring her up, not when it’s such an easy way for Mom to hurt me, but it slips out. I grit my teeth, keep on. “What do I need to know about her?”

  Mom’s brow furrows. “Who?”

  Another lie. Another. Like I haven’t heard enough. “Nothing, right?” I say, like she never responded. “You and Gram keep deciding what I need to know, and it’s always nothing, and how the hell is that fair? Why wouldn’t you ever tell me about her?”

  “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about,” Mom says. And the thing is, I know how she sounds when she’s lying. I’ve heard it for years, felt swallowed by that rush of rage it calls to the surface. And she’s not lying this time. But I’m sure that Gram is.

  I don’t understand. Her and Gram—I thought they were keeping the same secrets. Where does it leave me if they aren’t?

  In the quiet, Mom reaches out and rests her hand on the roof of the car. “Now will you please get in? So we can go?”

  I twist to look over my shoulder. Gram’s there on the porch, leaning against the support post, watching us.

  “Margot?” Mom says.

  Those scales again, flickering in my mind’s eye. Mom on one side, years and years stacking high. On the other, Gram.

  And there, a shadow behind them both, Katherine and the body in the field, both of them waiting for me. Waiting for me to find out how they died.

  “No,” I say, turning back to Mom. “I can’t leave right now.”

  Mom’s face goes to stone. “Excuse me?”

  I have to ask for it. “Can you wait?”

  “Margot.” She takes a deep breath. I can see her trying to keep herself in check. It won’t work. “Margot, get in the car.”

  “No.”

  “Get in the fucking car, Margot.”

  “I’m not going right now,” I say. I can’t help smiling. Usually it’s Mom going quiet and calm while I’m losing my grip. This feels better.

  Mom shuts her eyes, and I hear her let out a disbelieving laugh, brittle and cold. “You have got to be kidding me,” she says, before looking at me again. “This is what I get? I come back for you, I come to Phalene for you, and I get—”

  “What you get is me,” I say, every ounce of bitterness bleeding through. That calm I thought I had in my pocket disappears in an instant. “What a letdown. What a disappointment. I’m so sorry for you. Is there a support group you can go to? A hotline you can call for mothers with horrible daughters?”

  Mom only looks at me for a moment and then purses her lips. “I’m not doing this,” she says. “That’s it. I’m done.”

  “You’re done?” My voice rises. This whole thing has a hold on me so tight I could choke. “You started it.”

  She doesn’t respond. Just goes to open the car door, and I feel myself start to disappear. She doesn’t get to do this. To break me open and then act like she doesn’t care, like I’m the only one feeling anything at all.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey, you might be done, but I’m not.”

  She swings the door open. “If you want to stay with your grandmother, that’s fine.”

  I lunge toward her, close the distance to grab the handle. “No, we’re not finished.”

  “I said we are, Margot.”

  “I said we’re not,” and I slam the door shut. My arm hurts from the force of it, but it doesn’t matter, because at least Mom is looking at me. And it feels good, because she looks afraid. Just like Katherine must have, that day in the grove.

  “You don’t get to call me ungrateful,” I say, starting quiet. “Not when I’ve never asked you for a thing, not when I’ve taken care of myself for—”

  “I didn’t say that,” Mom cuts in, with an exaggerated confusion. “Do not put words in my mouth.”

  “It’s what you meant.” She came back for me and I’m taking it for granted—I know how to translate her when we fight.

  But she’s shaking her head. “You can’t tell me what I meant.”

  I struggle to take a deep breath. “But it sounded that way to me. Doesn’t that matter? Doesn’t it matter how you made me feel?” It’s like I’m throwing myself at a brick wall. Mom barely blinks. “I don’t just stop feeling bad because you didn’t mean it.”

  I swallow the tears that are closing my throat. I can feel them pricking at my eyes, and I know they’re about to fall,
but please, please, Margot, get a grip. Mom doesn’t care when I cry. It doesn’t soften her. It only makes things worse.

  “It’s not my fault,” Mom says, “if you can’t hear what I’m saying without adding your own insecurities.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know.” We always end up this way. Me crumbling to pieces. “But doesn’t it matter to you that you made me feel that way?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Answer me, Mom. Please.” She just keeps looking at me like she’s confused, and I can feel myself getting hysterical. My voice breaking, sobs starting to build up in my chest. “Doesn’t it matter? Doesn’t it matter to you?”

  Nothing. Just quiet. Quiet, quiet, quiet, nothing coming out, and she’s not even here. She’s not even listening, and I can’t feel for both of us. I just can’t, and I scream, scream, “Answer me!” so loud it tears at my throat.

  “Margot.”

  It breaks over me. The world gone like glass, cold and clear. I turn.

  Gram. She’s a few feet behind me, hands in her pockets. Relief, for a moment. That it’s over. And then indignation, because even now Gram’s not looking at me. No, she’s looking at Mom, a frown etched so deep into her forehead that I wonder if it’ll ever come out.

  “If she wants to stay,” Gram says evenly, “you can’t make her leave, Jo.”

  Mom suddenly looks about two inches tall. She looks like the girl in the field, scared and lost. “She’s my daughter,” she says.

  “And you’re mine,” Gram answers. “I couldn’t make you stay. And you can’t make her leave.”

  Mom looks back and forth between me and Gram. I can see everything now, every eddy of emotion across her features, like Gram is laying her bare.

  “I’ll be in town,” she says at last. “Margot, I’ll wait in town, okay? You asked me to wait and I’ll wait.”

  I won’t ever tell her what it does to me to hear that. How it makes my chest ache. How it makes me want to go with her after all.

  “Okay, Josephine,” Gram says. “It’s time for you to go now.”

  We stand there in the driveway and watch Mom get into the car. We watch her reverse out onto the highway, watch her ease toward town, slowly, like she’s hoping I’ll call her back. I don’t.

  “Well,” Gram says once the car has finally disappeared over the horizon. “That was quite enough excitement, I think.”

  NINETEEN

  Gram doesn’t say anything as we go back into the house. It feels like too long a walk, the ash plains hovering beyond Fairhaven, the Miller house bright across the fields.

  I end up at the kitchen table again, shucking corn for Gram while my mind follows Mom into the town she left behind. Katherine, the fire, the questions nobody ever got answered—will people still hold it all against her? After all, I don’t think the past ever really leaves, in Phalene. It breathes. It holds on.

  It happens again.

  Maybe I should’ve gone with her. She did come after me. And she’s never done anything that big before.

  No. Stop it. I always do this, anytime she gives me anything.

  I tear the husk from the last ear of corn so hard it slices into my palm. I left her. It’ll take more than one good thing to get me back.

  Gram steps away from the stove and fetches a bottle of water from the fridge, holds it out to me. As I take it, she says, “It was wise of you not to go with Josephine.”

  “Was it?” I crack the cap of the bottle, take a long sip. Above me, the kitchen light is catching Gram’s shoulders, her brow, throwing her face into shadow until she moves, leans on the counter with her hands folded in front of her.

  “Yes. She’s never been suited to motherhood.” Gram shares a satisfied smile with me, like she expects me to join in. “Well, you know that better than anyone.”

  “I think we do just fine,” I say. It’s not true, but that’s not the point. Gram doesn’t get to judge Mom, not when she helped make her this way.

  “Oh, you do?” Gram is watching me, a look on her face I know too well from Mom’s, and I suppose from my own. Simmering resentment, almost an eagerness to be made angry.

  Does she think I chose her? I know that’s what it looks like. But I chose myself, chose getting answers. Not Gram.

  “She’s not perfect,” I say. “But I love her. And I know she loves me.”

  Gram’s better at this than Mom. The wound is there for only a second before she seals herself back up. “Does she?” she asks. “Everything she hid from you—is that love?”

  It feels like I’m waking up. Like everything since the morgue was a dream, a fever, and now I’m here, back in my body, alive with anger. “She didn’t do it alone,” I say, leaning across the table. “Katherine? The girl? And you’re standing there like you haven’t lied right to my face.”

  “Because your mother asked me to,” Gram says. “I’d do anything for my family. Especially if it means protecting you.”

  I stare at her, my mouth open. How can all of that be true? And how can it still mean the fucking world to me to hear it, after everything I’ve seen here?

  Gram straightens up then, brushing her hands on her jeans. “Actually,” she says, “that reminds me. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Another shot at answers, so here I am, waiting on the landing as she pulls down a rickety staircase to the attic. It’s barely wide enough for one person. “Up there?” I ask, nervous.

  “After you,” Gram says. She’s smiling.

  “Okay,” I say. Give her my best smile back and take a few tentative steps up. The stairs creak underneath me, the dark slithering down from the attic to clutch at my ankles. For a second I imagine Gram shutting the trapdoor. Leaving me up there.

  “Is there a light?” I ask, hesitating.

  “At the top,” Gram says. So I keep going.

  Up, up, step after step, until at last I reach the attic, and I edge forward, waiting for the floor to drop out from underneath me. Gram’s footsteps follow me up the stairs. I let out a small breath of relief.

  Finally, “Here,” comes her voice from behind me, and I hear a click. Light ricocheting around me, spraying from the bare bulb above. The ceiling just beams and the roof beyond, the walls made of slats with insulation peeking through.

  Just ahead of me a bookcase is practically empty save for a handful of picture books stacked on the bottom. Next to it, three plastic garbage bags that look like they’re holding clothing, with the sleeve of a coat poking out the top of the nearest one.

  Gram takes hold of my elbow, steers me to the other side of the attic. “Over here.”

  The light barely reaches this part, but it’s enough to make out a collection of cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. Some of them damp with mold, some of them with newspaper spilling out the top. Gram lifts one of the boxes off the stack and sets it on the floor. I recoil as a mouse comes skittering out a hole in the bottom and disappears into the dark.

  “What is all this stuff?” I ask as she sorts through the contents.

  “Some of Jo’s and Katherine’s things,” Gram says, her voice muffled. I lean in eagerly, try to get a glimpse of what’s inside.

  Finally Gram straightens, pulling something out of the box. “Here it is,” she says.

  A dress, with a prim little collar and long sleeves that close around the wrists with a bow. It looks like the one the girl was wearing, like the ones I found in my dresser, dated and too formal for anything I’ve seen in Phalene.

  Is this where that dress came from?

  Yesterday I would’ve called this proof that the dead girl came from Fairhaven, that Gram was keeping her hidden. Now I know better. This isn’t enough to force the truth out of Gram.

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “You wanted to show me a dress?”

  “It was your mother’s,” she says. “Lots of this was. She barely took anything with her when she left.” Gram turns around, tilts her head. “She almost didn’t take you.”

  Sho
ck punches through me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been thinking that my whole life. I’ve never heard it out loud before.

  “She did, though,” I say, once I’ve gotten my breath back.

  “Well, after all that, I should hope so,” Gram says. She steps toward me, the dress still in her hands. I go rigid as she holds it up to my shoulders, smooths it along the collar until her fingers are pressed against my neck. “Doesn’t that look nice?”

  Nice? Gram with a stack of clothes and a girl to dress them up in, before she sent her out into the fields to die. It was something abstract yesterday, something I could pick up and put down. Now it’s the two of them in the attic, Gram’s hands soft on that other girl’s cheeks, and maybe Gram didn’t set that fire, maybe Gram didn’t decide to end it, but the door just closed on any kind of innocence for me. I don’t think there was ever any here to begin with.

  “I don’t know,” I say nervously.

  “Try it on, then.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No,” Gram says, a hardness suddenly running through her voice. “I insist.”

  I look around, feel goose bumps rise on my skin even in the attic heat. “Okay, I’ll just go to my room and—”

  “Nonsense.” Gram unzips the dress and holds it out to me. “I’m your grandmother. Nothing to hide from me.”

  No ground to give in her eyes, no frailty in her body. Mom is something breakable, but the woman she came from is not. I inch away from her, curl in on myself as I unzip my shorts and let them drop around my ankles. My shirt next. I drape it over one of the stacks of boxes.

  “Stand up straight,” Gram says. “You’ll get a bend in your spine if you keep hunching like that.”

  I close my eyes for a moment. I could be buried now. I could be in a grave and this could be Gram dressing me for my funeral. But I’m breathing. I’m here.

  “Fine,” I say, and I reach for the dress, slip it on.

  It’s too small, like the dress that girl was wearing when we pulled her out of the fire. Gram makes a sound of disapproval and turns me by the shoulders. It won’t zip, I know it won’t, but she forces it anyway.