The coffee machine gurgled, settling into a steady drip whose sound ricocheted off the walls. Doris watched Ma through the reflection in the glass, catching her flinch at some invisible offense.
She should be out looking for her. That’s what she should have done as soon as she found out. Ma probably wouldn’t even move, just sit here until her mug shattered in her grip. Yet, knowing that, Doris was still here, pouring coffee into her mother’s mug and waiting patiently for her to spiral.
Doris’s hands were shaking. Too much caffeine, she thought, knowing full well that wasn’t it.
“She’s fine,” Ma said.
Doris stared at her but said nothing.
Ma caught the omission. “What? Say it.”
“Say what, Ma?”
“She is fine!” She slammed her mug onto the table, exploding scalding coffee all over the table. Little molten rivers ran across the tabletop, dropping over the sides and onto the rug.
Mother and daughter stared at the mess, then at each other. Doris’s phone started to ring from inside her jeans pocket.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“No.” She knew who it was, and he was the last person she wanted to speak to now. James always caught the distress in her voice, even when she didn’t notice it herself. He’d catch it and then he’d get in the car and come here, thinking himself a prize for his charity, unconcerned that his presence only tightened the noose a little further around their relationship.
“It could be her.”
“It’s not.”
“Answer it.”
Digging the phone out of her pocket, she tossed it onto the table without looking. It splattered into the spilled coffee.
Ma glanced at it and sniffed.
“It’s not,” Doris repeated.
The front door opened. Ma’s eyes darted toward the noise, sparking full of fire so instantly that there was no doubt as to who had just arrived.
Doris didn’t want to look and was immediately sorry when she did. Her mouth failed her, veins icing over as she saw her sister waltz through the door. No one seemed to see it—no one said a thing—but Thea wasn’t alone.
It was here. The monster of her childhood, slithering around Thea’s face and neck and torso, all its hands, all those fingers, denting Thea’s pale skin. A pattern of bruises bloomed under its touch, and no one said a thing about it.
Ma lunged out of her seat. “Where were you? What do you think you’re doing? Good God, what did you do?”
Thea smiled in the doorway, possessed. Her hair clung to her sweaty scalp, her shirt and pants askew.
Ma stopped short, as if afraid to touch her. “What have you done?”
“Hi, Ma,” Thea said. The door rattled the photos on the wall as she slammed it shut. “I see you’ve brought in reinforcements.”
The monster squeezed. Thea’s voice choked under the strain as she wobbled in place, unable to keep herself upright without swaying.
The phone again began to ring. Thea moved toward it like a snake. “For fuck’s sake, what the hell happened here?”
She tossed the soaked and slippery phone toward Doris. “Your husband needs you.”
It clattered to the floor, Doris refusing to catch it. That thing coiled around her arm. Doris imagined its hot breath against the nape of Thea’s neck.
Thea shrugged, gliding past her mother and sister, heading toward her room. “I’m going to bed.”
This time, Ma didn’t hesitate, slapping her across the face with every ounce of strength she could muster. “How dare you?”
Thea sneered, but before she could drag her fists out of her sluggish stupor to retaliate, Doris was in front of her, accepting the blow. It struck her in the shoulder. Thea was so high, she couldn’t land a punch if her fist was the size of a bowling ball.
Ma screeched like a parakeet in Doris’s ear, while Thea recoiled at the sight of her sister.
“Oh, of course,” she said. “Here comes the fucking queen.”
Doris wanted to shake her. “Don’t you see it? Don’t you feel it?” she asked.
Ma swatted a hand over Doris’s shoulder, aiming her claws at Thea’s face. “You ingrate. Look what you’ve done!”
Both were screaming, passing insults through the open cracks of Doris’s barrier. Ma lunged again, but Doris swung around to face her, catching her by the shoulders to hold her at bay. But it was too late—the woman had ignited and refused to be stopped. Without hesitating Ma landed a palm on Doris’s cheek in the same fashion as she’d done with her youngest. The contact stung, jostling Doris out of her dissociated calm.
“Don’t,” she said, and shoved her mother until she flew backward, crashing into one of the dining room chairs. She didn’t even push her that hard, but the shock of it must have disoriented her more than the contact itself.
She felt it then—the monster’s slither around her waist, the way its touch ignited her nerves into a frenzy. It was going to get her, just like it got Thea.
Doris shook it off and leaned over her mother, taller than her by a good three inches. She spoke quietly so that Ma had to really focus on what she said, because, for once, she was listening.
“You won’t ever do that again, Mother.”
Ma drew her chin tight, saying everything that needed to be said with a repugnant stare. Doris had to look away.
Her equilibrium was off as blood thrummed through her temples at high speed, rocketing from her heart after the new surge of adrenaline. She felt ill, off balance. She might have been sick if not for the slow clap that startled her out of her own head.
“Two peas in a pod, you are,” Thea said. She leaned against the railing, perched halfway up the stairs, smirking.
“Quite a show, but as I said before, I am quite tired.”
Doris had to pick the words out of her inebriated slurring, but the message was there all the same.
Doris shouted at her in a voice she hadn’t known she possessed. “Where are you going?”
But Thea didn’t miss a beat. “To my room, Mother.” She said it with intention, fully aware that Ma hadn’t opened her mouth. The monster clung to her back, cloaking Thea’s body completely as she retreated to her room.
From upstairs, a second door slammed, silence resuming after the chaotic intermission.
Ma hadn’t moved, and Doris grabbed her things and left before she could. The front door swung outward as she fled, a thousand needle-like thoughts stabbing at her. She knew she couldn’t leave Thea there, but Doris couldn’t stay either. Honestly, she wasn’t sure which of them was more dangerous at the moment. What she did know was that all of them being together would get someone hurt.
Or at least that’s what she told herself.
This is what’s best. She unlocked her car.
I’ll figure out how to stop it. I won’t let that thing touch her again. She started the ignition.
What could I do, anyway? She drove away.
Ma won’t dare touch her now. She pulled over a few blocks away. Everything was fog again. She’d driven into nothing. Water sloshed along the brake pedal.
I hate both of them. She dropped her forehead to the steering wheel as the fog seeped into her car.
What have I done?
She cried.
Doris awoke with a cough, a sob catching in her throat. How the hell had she managed to fall asleep?
She reached a hand toward Thea, who shuddered slightly at her touch and sighed. Also asleep. Doris’s head was simultaneously heavy yet light, her pain a subtle throb instead of a scream. They must have been floating for hours, settling into a lazy drift as the waters smoothed over the top of her neighborhood. Street lights poked through the surface. A city-issued garbage can floated just out of reach. Somehow, everywhere, there was noise—the constant roar carried with it needle-pricks
of screams, metal on metal, snapping and crumbling and cracking of wood and concrete, and familiar yet out of place sounds like zippers and the clinking of plates in the dishwasher as it was loaded. The associations were close enough to create a layer of nostalgic dread that settled over her. Her pulse thudded inside her head like footsteps trodding up and down some faraway hallway.
It had been a long time since they had been this close to one another, and Doris listened to her sister’s wheezing and tried not to cry.
Thea eventually spoke first, having woken up without Doris knowing it. “What’s wrong?”
“Where do I start?”
“Did you really not see it?” She spoke if the words pained her.
Doris’s hackles rose in defense, anticipating the undercurrent of blame that wormed its way into every conversation, but whether Thea was just tired, or the flood blotted it out, it wasn’t there.
She had no idea how to respond. So much of her character was packaged by resentment that it stained everything. She felt exposed, like a black hood had just been yanked from her head and all the sounds and smells and sights formerly muffled in shadow were now achingly clear.
But she had to say something. Even after all this time, the compulsion to soothe her baby sister hadn’t faded. Now, for once, Thea was actually asking for comfort, and Doris hadn’t a clue how to provide it anymore.
“I don’t know what I saw,” she ended up saying, hoping Thea was able to fill in the gaps herself.
She was quiet for a while, but just when Doris was sure Thea was ignoring her, she started up again.
“Do you remember Jay?”
“Jay?”
“That kid down the street. He moved when I was like eight or nine.”
“Jesus, what made you think of him?”
“Did I ever tell you how he taught me to ride a bike?”
Doris just went ahead and assumed Thea was playing fast and loose with the word taught. It was likely more akin to an interrogation than a lesson, especially considering what she remembered of Jay, and what she knew for certain of Thea.
“How on earth did that even come about?”
“Ma was saying a bunch of shit about not wasting money on things I wouldn’t play with, so I decided I was going to show her a thing or two. Jay was the only kid I knew that had a bike, so I waited by the front window for hours one Saturday, watching for him to come outside. He finally did, going to play basketball or whatever, and before he’d even made it to the end of his driveway I’m halfway down the street, yelling at him to let me see his bike. I wasn’t sure it would even work. Figured this big kid would tell me to shove off or throw something at me, but he kind of looked at me funny and then goes inside the garage and gets it. Didn’t even ask me why or anything. So, he’s holding it by the handlebars, just staring at me, and I ask him to show me how to ride. If you could have seen his face, Doris—I’ve been in some bad shit, but I have never seen fear like I did then. I’ll never forget it.”
Doris cupped her palm, catching the rain and watching it trickle little rivers across her hand. “Was he afraid you’d break his bike or something?”
“I mean, probably, but that’s not what was wrong. He said something like, ‘Well, you just get on and peddle.’ Which, of course, I knew already, but I want him to show me first. I’m doubting myself; maybe Ma knows something I don’t about bikes? Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to get me one—”
“She’s just a bitch.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
“Yes, you did.”
She was quiet, and Doris wondered if Thea was reliving the same memories that she was. “So, what happened?”
“He got on the bike, wobbled a bit, and crashed it right into his dad’s truck. I start yelling at him, because even I know that this isn’t how you’re supposed to ride a bike. He got on again, crashed again. He does it a few times until he gets a few houses down before crashing in someone’s yard. The whole time I’m asking him if he knows what he’s doing, and he’s getting redder and redder until he finally throws the bike down in the street, tells me to go ahead and try it if I think I can do better. So I do, and promptly wreck face first into his dad’s truck. Again. That truck was like a magnet for dumb kids.”
“Wait.” Doris peeled herself from her sister and faced her. “Is that why you and Jay were helping plant those trees in their front yard? Ma refused to tell me what that was all about. Tried saying that you were being a conscientious neighbor or something stupid.”
Thea tilted her chin back in a cackle. “She told me that she’d get me a bike once I finished paying off my debt.”
“Did she?”
“What do you think?”
The storm picked up. Rain slammed against the metal like artillery. “Must have been a nice truck.”
“It was.”
The conversation ended as abruptly as it started, dragging with a lingering sense of incompletion. A mist billowed up from the water’s surface, the storm slamming down on them thrusting water particles into the air. Doris grabbed for her sister’s hand—she knew Thea was still there, but the air started to gray, and it was harder to see, and Thea had slipped between her fingers so many times before that just knowing wasn’t enough.
Tracing Thea’s trembling arm, she found her hand and squeezed.
“Do you know how I met James?” Water filled her ears so that her voice thrummed and snarled inside her head. She hadn’t expected Thea to hear her.
“No,” she said.
Doris struggled with where to start. She wasn’t sure why she even brought it up. Thea was the last person with whom she wanted to discuss her marriage. Though Doris never wanted to discuss her marriage with anyone, not even her husband.
“Coffee.”
“What?”
“So fucking cliché.” She screamed the words, fighting all the barriers she spent years creating to hold it all in. “I hate that we met in a coffee shop. I don’t know why. Maybe I just hate telling the story.”
Thea flexed her fingers to stall her shaking, pulling them in and out of her sister’s grip whenever it seemed to crescendo. They both needed a distraction.
“It was a donut place. Cheap iced coffee for a buck. I went there every Thursday—it was when I was still working at Aetna. Staff meetings every Thursday morning. Then one time, James was there. He told me later that it wasn’t me that initially attracted him, but the barista that saw me coming and called out my order before I was even inside the building. She nodded at me as I got in line, and I paid for my coffee—the same large Americano as always—without even speaking. He said that the rest of the room buzzed on like usual, but the exchange was the most fascinating thing he’d seen all year. His words. He said that he just had to ‘know the woman that commanded the room.’”
She sneered at having to repeat it. It was a sentiment that rubbed her raw as soon as he confessed it. Like she was something to tame. Like she existed for his domestication pleasure. He’d sworn up and down that he hadn’t meant it that way.
Had he told her that prior to their rehearsal dinner, she might not have ever married him.
“The next Thursday my coffee was already paid for by the time I got to the register. I handed him a few bucks on my way out and told him that I’d rather he not bother. To his credit, he took my money and folded it into his wallet. He also never bought my coffee again. Not even after we were married. He just . . . was always there. He waited. He was so patient. I suppose he fascinated me the way I fascinated him. We were so different—I thought, at least. Turns out we were cut from the same black cloth. We each had our experiments. So determined to expose each other. Both so certain that there was something hidden within the other one, something we would be rewarded with once we found it. I’m not even sure what I was looking for in him. I think . . .”
She trailed away, petrified
even on the brink of destruction to admit the truth. “I think I wanted him to attack me. I could handle that. I deserved that. Because if someone like him could snap, then it meant that I wasn’t alone in my shittiness.”
Thea laughed, the sharpness of it slicing clean through the rumble. “You definitely weren’t alone in the shitty person department.”
Doris felt her skin heat up against Thea’s palm. “I hate heroin.”
“So do I. Mostly.”
Something big bumped against the side of their raft, and Thea bolted upright. “What the fuck was that?”
They’d hit something, dragged over the top of it as they skimmed the surface of a drowning city. “A pole. A tree or a car. I don’t know.”
“It was that thing.”
“I don’t think so.” Whatever it was felt hard, rooted in place. “There’s a lot of stuff in the water.”
“I know there is. I’ve seen it.”
Thea flipped onto her haunches, wobbling the raft in uncomfortable ways. Her fingers gripped the edge of the metal. They floated along, trailing blood for whatever monsters lurked underneath.
She stayed that way for a while, until her eyes disappeared into thought. “Why did you marry him?” Thea released the edge, pulling her palms close to her chest. “I never thought you’d marry anyone.”
“It made sense.”
“That’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit.”
“What does it matter?” She didn’t mean to snap—she wasn’t even angry, just annoyed. The question threw her off guard, partly because she thought she’d already answered it, partly because when Thea asked, she couldn’t come up with any sort of response.
“I know why,” Thea said.
“Yeah?” She probably thought it was because of her, because everything was always about her.
“To escape.”
“Escape what?”
Thea looked away.
Bingo. “I’ve done a lousy job of it, if that’s the case.” She had it wrong, though. Close, but wrong. Doris didn’t want to escape—she wanted to disappear. What Thea could never understand was that Doris could never escape her. It wasn’t Thea’s fault or her doing—Doris did it to herself. The tether that tied them was too strong—they could light each end ablaze and still not sever it in a lifetime.
A Flood of Posies Page 10
