The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  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.”

  “And you’re not the mother who raised me.”

  “You’re rude.”

  “Crass, strange, rude. You know what else I am? Gone. This was a mistake. Obviously. Enjoy your cigarette.”

  She turns and throws open the patio door.

  “Wait,” her mother says.

  She waits.

  A pause. Then: “I’m sorry.”

  “Now I know you really are an alien.”

  “Don’t be mean. Please.” Miriam hears no anger hiding in those words. They’re soft and sad. An honest plea.

  All Miriam can say is, “OK.”

  “Will you sit with me?”

  “Yeah.” She feels smacked around. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t like this woman. She doesn’t even know this woman. Miriam tells herself she stays just because she’s curious. As if she’s reading a book and wants to find out how it all turns out.

  She goes. She sits. They smoke.

  The dog jumps up in Mother’s lap. It licks a liver spot on the woman’s arm as if it tastes like ice cream. Slurp slurp slurp. It’s kind of gross and Miriam wants to say something, but in a rare moment of restraint, mentally duct-tapes her mouth shut.

  Her mother finally speaks. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I know.”

  “That boy…”

  “Ben.”

  “I don’t know what happened between you two–”

  “You do too know. He–” She almost says fucked me up against a tree but is able to catch those words before they go flying out of her mouth. “We had sex, and I got pregnant.”

  “But he killed himself.”

  “He… did.”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “Because… because because because,” and suddenly she growls and bites the knuckle on her thumb and thinks, I don’t want to sit here and talk about this. It’s much easier to be snarky and mean and stab her mother with sharp pointy words but this is real talk and she’s never done it with her mother, not ever, not that she can remember. But here it comes, the gusher, the geyser, the can’t-stop-it-if-she-wanted-to. “Because he was a fucked-up kid who had a fucked-up family and because I was horrible to him and because we were both teenagers with crazy hormones and immature brains and romantic ideas about life and death and all the things that fall between them–” And now she’s trying to stuff emotional gauze in the sucking chest wound she’s feeling right now but oh no, the blood keeps coming. “It was my fault, I was a jerk, and that word doesn’t even cover it. I wasn’t a jerk, I was a monster, a monster in a way that only a spurned, bitter teenage girl can be, and next thing I know, he’s dead and I’m pregnant. And then…” But the words die in her mouth because if she says more she’ll cry and she can’t cry in front of this woman. So instead she smokes. And stares. And trembles. “You know what happened then.”

  “I wanted to kill her,” Evelyn says. “I wanted to kill that horrible woman.”

  Whoa.

  Miriam sits up straight. “I… I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  “I thought about it, you know.” Mother stares up in the shuddering palm leaves above their heads. “I thought I would go over there and… beat her the way she beat you. I had a shovel in the shed out back I used for gardening. I’d take it to her house. I’d knock on the door. Then I’d beat her to death. Because she took something from you and that took something from me, too.”

  “Jesus,” Miriam says, and then realizes that above all else, Mother will be stung by blasphemy, and she quickly mutters an apology but her mother seems to have not heard. Evelyn Black just sits, the cigarette between the V of her fingers burning down. The ash growing long, like a witch’s bent finger. “What, ah, happened to Ben’s mother after I left?”

  “She went to jail. They took your testimony in the hospital.”

  “I remember. Sort of.” She also remembers the morphine.

  “They let her out not long ago. Overcrowded prisons.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope she takes a lesson from her son. I hope they still have that shotgun, and I hope she’s willing to take her own life just as she took the life of the child inside you.”

  Miriam almost cries out at a small uterine twinge inside her – like a corkscrew poking through skin and twisting. She doesn’t even know what to say to that. Hearing something like that come from her mother’s lips…

  “It is what it is,” Mother says suddenly. “Onward and upward. Hold on one second. We need something.”

  She goes inside.

  Miriam sits, heart pounding, gut churning. Lips dry. She hears the distant cry of a child somewhere, several houses over, and it damn near kills her.

  Evelyn Black returns with two glasses.

  And a bottle of crème de menthe.

  The woman’s drink of choice.

  That’s what Miriam stole from her mother that night when she went out into the woods and met Ben. They drank it. They coupled, clumsy and unaware, mouths tasting of too-sweet mint.

  Her mother can’t remember that. It would be too cruel. A vicious commemoration. When handed a glass, Miriam takes it and stares into it as Mother pours a few fingers of the liqueur – a draught of leprechaun blood, dark and impossibly green. Her mother clinks a glass against hers and Miriam takes a sip. Her mouth puckers at the too-sweet mint, and nausea flops around inside of her like a clubbed fish on the deck of a boat but she keeps drinking it because she doesn’t know when she’ll ever get the chance to drink with her mother again.

  And then her mother touches her.

  Hand on her sleeve. Not skin. Just touching fabric.

  Miriam wants for the fingers to dip – maybe on accident, or maybe Evelyn will reach for her daughter’s hand as a matronly gesture. Then the death vision will come fast as lightning and Miriam will ride it to whatever sad end the woman meets–

  But then Mother withdraws her hand.

  “We look forward,” her mother says. “We move forward. Eight years isn’t that long. A blink of an eye. You have your whole future ahead of you. You can… meet a good man. You can… still have a child–”

  “Mother–”

  “Because I want grandchildren–”

  “Mom.”

  Her mother looks at her.

  “They told me I can’t have children.”

  Her mother stares. “What do you mean? That’s not… I don’t understand. They told me there was damage, but, but…”

  “They told you. They had to have told you. Were you just not listening?”

  “That was a hard time, Miriam, a very hard time–”

  Miriam’s teeth bite down on the r
im of the glass. She really doesn’t want to talk about this. She wants to throw up. Her tongue wets her lips and she holds the cigarette and glass between both hands, palms clasped around these two vices as if in prayer. “It died inside of me.” And with it, something else gained life. “When they pulled it out there were… problems. Infection. I… I don’t know, it was a long time ago. I came out of a fugue and the doctor was there and he held my hand and told me, he said I’d never have kids. The scarring… it was…” She unclasps her hands and holds them up as if in defense. “I’m not having children. Okay?”

  “There’s always adoption–”

  “I don’t… I can’t.”

  “You have options.”

  “And I don’t want them!” Miriam says. “I don’t want children. At no point do I think I’d be a good mother. I’d be a fucking horrible mother. My luck, I’d have a daughter and I’d ruin that kid like a dress on prom night. She’d hate me. I’d hate her. The cycle continues.”

  “If only you hadn’t…” Mother lets a sigh swallow the words, and she picks the dog back up and puts Rupert in her lap.

  “If only what? Say it.”

  “If only you hadn’t… been the way you were. To the boy.”

  “To Ben.”

  Her mother makes a small nod.

  Miriam stands. “Goddamnit. Goddamnit goddamnit shit.” She takes the glass of crème de menthe and tosses it and the ice onto the lawn, then chucks the glass after it.

  “Miriam!” Her mother looks on, horrified.

  “I should’ve known we’d get here.”

  “You can’t just… act like this.”

  “You blame me. You blame me for all of it.”

  “If you had been nicer to him–”

  “Oh, that’s some perfectly polished horseshit, isn’t it? How convenient that you don’t see yourself in this – you with a fucking bag over your head. Let me rip off that bag and tell you what I see: I see a shitty mother who kept me feeling bad about myself for the better part of my life.”

  Evelyn stands, eyes wet and shining, shaking a finger. “I did my best with you, Miriam, I tried to teach you values–”

  “Values. Values! Values? Oh fuck you. You had me pray to a god that didn’t seem to give a damn about any of us. You wouldn’t tell me anything about my father. You burned up anything that gave me any pleasure at all. And you act all shocked that the first chance I got I’d run into the woods and fuck some dude and get knocked up. What values did you think you were teaching me? Because I learned ignorance. And anger. And self-hatred. And anger on top of anger! Don’t act surprised that I have this cyanide cocktail in my heart. Like they say on that old dumb-ass drug commercial: I learned it by watching you.”

  She flicks her cigarette into a nearby birdbath. Ssssss.

  Then she turns to leave.

  Her mother stands. “Miriam, don’t you walk away–”

  “Let’s just agree that I disappoint you and you disappoint me. OK? And you want to know why I’m glad I can’t have kids? Because I’m afraid I’d turn into you and my kid would turn into me. Goodnight.”

  The castle razed, the earth salted, she storms back inside.

  A tempest shattering its teacup.

  INTERLUDE

  NOW

  “You made her cry?” Grosky asks.

  “I made her cry,” Miriam says, batting the ashtray back and forth like a hockey puck between two goalies. She closes her eyes and tries to shut everything out. All the noise. All the memories. She tries to forget how this story ends but how can she? An impossible quest with too many monsters.

  “I made my mother cry once,” Grosky says. He’s up and walking around now. Miriam has to admit: he has a lightness to his step, like he’s less a fleshy boulder and more a roly-poly balloon. Like his bones are hollow. Like he could move fast if he wanted to. “I was seventeen years old and I thought I was tough shit and I called her the c-word. I don’t even remember why. She wouldn’t let me go out with the guys or some shit. So I called her that word. She slapped me across the face so hard I thought I’d have a handprint at graduation, at my wedding, at my funeral even. Then after she slapped me she just broke down at the kitchen table. Sobbing.”

  “That’s a heartwarming story. Isn’t that a Norman Rockwell painting? ‘Chunky Son Calls Slap-Happy Mama A Cunt?’ The 1950s were a more innocent time.”

  Grosky doesn’t laugh this time. He just levels those pinch-skin eyes at her. Vills jumps in.

  “So what’d you do?” the woman with the ink-scribble hair says to Miriam. “You made her cry, then what?”

  Miriam says, “I went in, laid on the bed, and waited. Mother… stayed outside for what seemed like forever, crying. And not regular crying, but the gulping, hard-to-catch-your-breath, drowning-in-a-puddle-of-your-own-sorrow kind of crying. I thought about going back out there but I’d kinda made my exit and why ruin the theater of it? I was still mad. So I waited her out. She went inside. Eventually found her way to bed. That’s when I found my way to her computer.”

  “To find out who was renting out that house,” Vills says.

  Miriam nods.

  “And?”

  “It took me a little while to find the ad – but you don’t find a lot of rental places on Torch Key. Eventually I found it and gave the people a call. Nice guy. Gay, maybe. I made up some hasty horseshit about how my boyfriend Peter Lake and I were filming a porno there – I said, all very tasteful, mostly anal, which I thought was funny. He did not, which was the point. He gets mad and I explain, yeah, ooh, I’m mad too because the director skipped town and he owes us a check – and I said, we should both call him, but I only have his cell and he’s not answering that, so, hey, could you spare a porn star a moment of kindness and give me his other phone number? And he gave it to me.”

  “You like to lie,” Grosky says.

  “That’s not true, actually. The truth is usually way more interesting.”

  “But you lie a lot.”

  “The truth is a hammer, but a lie is a screwdriver. A more elegant tool. Sometimes you just want to pick a lock, not break a window. Even though breaking a window is always more fun.”

  Vills pulls out another cigarette, lights it, hands it to Miriam. Then lights her own and plants her elbow on the table, leaning on her hand. “So, you called the number.”

  “I called the number.”

  “And?”

  “It was a club. In South Beach. Nightclub called Atake.”

  Vills tenses up. There it is. “Atake.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “What do you think I did? I went to Miami.”

  “And who did you meet at Atake?”

  “C’mon, Catherine. I think you know.”

  Now Vills really tightens up – chin off her hand, elbow off the table – and for a half a second her eyes are hot pins trying to stick Miriam to the wall. But then Grosky tilts his head down to get his own look, and Vills fake-laughs it away. “No, I don’t, and that’s why I’m asking.”

  “That is where I met Tap-Tap.”

  PART FOUR

  305 TILL I DIE

  TWENTY-SIX

  DAUGHTER OF THE YEAR

  She steals her mother’s car.

  No way around it. While her mother’s asleep Miriam sneaks into the kitchen and over to a pelican-shaped peg-board by the front door where the keys hang, and she snatches the Malibu’s keys.

  Rupert barks at her. Roww roww roww yap yap yap.

  She takes a mop bucket from a nearby closet and sticks it over the dog. The mop bucket moves around like a Roomba. The dog’s barks echo within, then eventually the dog quits and just sits under his dome.

  Miriam leaves.

  She stops, though. On the front stoop. That surprises her. She wills her feet to go, urging them forward like she’s trying to make an old person drive faster. But her stubborn feet just stand where they are, and it’s like they’re nailed to the walkway with iron spikes
of pure guilt.

  Mother will be crushed. You’re running away again.

  I’ll be back, she tells herself.

  Bullshit.

  I’ll at least drop off her car.

  How sweet. What a nice daughter you are.

  Oh, don’t get sarcastic with me.

  You’re the one arguing with yourself, princess.

  She growls and goes back inside.

  She takes five hundred bucks from her stash and drops it on the breakfast nook table. Then she leaves a note:

  Renting your car for a few days.

  Here’s some cash to cover it.

  See you on the other side.

  – m.

  Miriam hurries off before she feels any other emotion besides the burning itching pee-pee-dance desire to get as far away from this place as humanly fucking possible.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE GOOD NEWS GOSPEL

  Night. The sky a dark sea. Highways looping to other highways – arterial knots. Streetlights smear.

  Miriam’s tired as she heads toward Miami Beach. She stops at a gas station along the way, fuels up with some kind of cheap-shit teeth-rotting cappuccino that sprays out of the machine like foamy diarrhea.

  It keeps her awake. It does its job. But it leaves her feeling like she’s running along a serrated blade – like she’s sawing herself in half with every step taken, every mile driven, like she’s about to spill everything that’s inside of her onto the seat of her mother’s Malibu.

  She passes by a fruit stand. Derelict. Half-collapsed on the side of the highway. She sees a crooked sandwich-board sign and she’s certain that it reads HELLO, MIRIAM in drippy red paint, but when she blinks, all it says is ORANGES AND BANANAS.

  “You believe in God?”

  She jolts, startled. Almost swerves into the passing lane. A primer-colored pick-up truck blasts its horn and zips past.

  The dead thug kid sits in the passenger seat.

  Stringy brains connect his shattered skull and matted hair to the back of the seat. He twirls a long black feather between his fingers like a rock star with a drumstick. When he shifts, his puffy winter jacket goes vviiip vviiip.