The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  But she’s also cloaked in the garb of Florida: beachy peach T-shirt with a palm tree on it, khaki shorts, a pair of flip-flops.

  Flip-flops.

  It’s like watching the Devil paint his toenails pink.

  The two of them stand there, an ocean of unsaid things separating them. Miriam grinds her teeth. Her mother starts to say something but then the words blacken and die, grapes to raisins.

  Finally, Miriam says, “Hi, Mom.”

  Her mother nods. “Hello, Miriam.” Her gaze drifts toward the detention building before she tilts her head toward the car. “Door’s unlocked.”

  “Great.”

  “Good.”

  “Great.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  ARE WE THERE YET?

  The choice went like this:

  Miriam heard Gabby’s voice in her head – they inflict themselves on other people – and she thought, Yep, that’s about right. She’s a curse. A weapon. A punishment. The ol’ albatross around the neck. And so she asks herself: who does she want to punish more? Who should catch the bite of the whip, the cut of the knife?

  Louis, well… she’s tired of hurting him. Last time she saw him, he was ready to give up and give in, ready to become a killer in service to her twisted worldview. But that isn’t him. He isn’t a killer. He’s killed for her once already. And if she knows Louis, that death will cling to him like a hungry ghost. Always eating away at him.

  She’s done her damage to that poor bastard. She’s chipped her name into his granite, and any more than that might bring his whole foundation crumbling down. Thinking about him makes her soul sink and soar, and it fills the hole between her heart and her stomach with equal parts panic worms and love petals, and the reality is, she cares too much about him to hurt him any more. (Even though right now her most burning urge is to pick up a phone and call him so she can cry and tell him all of this.)

  Ah. But her mother.

  Cruel, conservative Mother. Mother with her Bible. Mother with her box of matches and her lighter fluid and the ring of stones where she burned any of the books and comics and CDs Miriam had snuck into the house. Mother with her prayer. With her judgment. With her guilt.

  Always with the guilt.

  And so the choice became easy then.

  Mother had done damage to Miriam.

  So maybe it was time Miriam did some damage in return.

  Now she sits in the passenger seat of the Malibu, flitting a sneaky gaze toward this woman who purports to be her mother but who may in fact be an alien creature nesting in her mother’s stolen skin.

  Because things are not adding up.

  The peach shirt. The khaki shorts. The flip-flops.

  That’s part of it.

  Her mother is fastidious. Or was. Growing up, if Miriam tracked mud in the house, she’d be on her knees for hours, scrubbing stains while Mother looked on, sniffing dismissively and shaking her head, and when Miriam finally thought the stain was gone, her mother would descend upon the ghost of those footprints and continue her white-knuckled exorcism of filth.

  Every piece of dirt, every dust mote, was an enemy combatant. She was like a mother monkey picking lice. Pick, pick, pick.

  The car, though…

  It’s a mess.

  An old coffee cup in the cup holder. Some mail piling up in the back seat – circulars and coupons and penny-pincher papers. A layer of fuzzy dust gathering in the space where the windshield meets the dash.

  And then there’s the ashtray.

  It sits, pulled halfway out.

  It’s filled with the stubs of cigarettes.

  She thinks, This is someone else’s car.

  It has to be. She can smell the smoke in the upholstery. It makes her want to smoke. But instead she just stares. At this imposter. This mystery woman clothed in her mother’s flesh.

  They’re quiet. Both warily watch the other. Miriam watching when she thinks her mother isn’t looking and her mother looking when she must think Miriam isn’t watching. But they both see. They both know.

  Finally–

  “Do you need me to drop you somewhere?” Mother asks.

  She blinks. “I need my car out of the impound, but impound’s already closed for the day.” The car’s broken anyway, but I could sure use that money. “So. Ah. Eh, no. No.”

  “I can take you to my house.”

  “OK. Yeah. Fine.” Miriam clears her throat. “Where, ah, is your house again?”

  “Delray Beach. It’s a drive.”

  “A long drive?”

  “Long enough. Four hours.”

  “Oh.” Not like she has anywhere else to be. “OK.”

  Another seven-mile span of silence.

  “So, what have you been up to?” Mother asks. A slow-pitch softball of a question, a question to an acquaintance you haven’t seen in six months, not a daughter who ran away from home almost a decade before.

  Oh, you know. The usual. Seeing how people are going to die. Stealing from them. Or saving them by killing other people. I was a drifter and a thief. Now I’m a psychic assassin battling fate and – I’m sorry, am I boring you? It’s so mundane, I know. But hey, it’s a job and I’m pretty good at it, so you can finally be proud of me, Mommy Dearest.

  Instead she says, “Traveling.”

  (Like asking John Wayne Gacy, “What have you been up to?” and he says, “Entertaining children.”)

  “Oh. That’s nice.”

  “It’s all right. And, uh, how about you?”

  “I moved to Florida.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Yes, of course.” Her pinched lips form a small, puckered smile that fades as fast as it arrived. “I did some work with Habitat for Humanity, but mostly I just… I just retired here. It’s nice.”

  “It’s hot.”

  “It’s Florida.”

  “It’s winter.”

  “Are you wearing sunscreen?”

  “What? No. Like I feel like covering myself in glop and smelling like a piña colada all day? Ew.”

  “You should. You’re fair-skinned. You’ll burn.”

  “Ugh.”

  “And get some bug spray. A lot of mosquitoes down here and they’ve started to carry dengue fever–”

  “Bug spray smells even worse than tanning lotion. It’s like stripper perfume, except it also kills flying insects.”

  “Your hair is short.”

  “It is. It was long last year.”

  “Oh. And it’s got some…color.”

  “That’s because…” Miriam throws up her hands. “Because, I dunno, I fuckin’ like color.”

  Miriam drops that f-bomb just to see her mother flinch – two for flinching, you cranky prude. But she doesn’t flinch or wince or make any face at all. She just stares placidly ahead and finally says:

  “You’re different.”

  “I’m not. I’m the same girl I always was, just now on the outside for everyone to see.” Her mother gives her a look. Not angry. Just sad.

  “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 o
f 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 T
respasser 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.