The Seven Boxed Set

by Sarah M. Cradit

  “Be nice to your mother at dinner, Sweet Maureen. She hurts in ways you can’t understand.”

  The tears ran down Maureen’s cheeks unabated. She spun on her father, and the solidity, the realness of him, trapped her breath in her chest. “Yeah? She’s not the only one.”

  Her father smiled sadly and then faded into the soft air of her bedroom.

  “Five minutes!” Evangeline screamed. Thud, thud, thud went the soldier.

  “Up yours,” Maureen said. Evangeline enjoyed lording her two extra years in this world over Maureen, and Maureen wasn’t about to let her take her licks that easily. Down the hall, a new horror appeared, escalating in obscene volume as Elizabeth turned on her Partridge Family record that made Maureen want to throw herself down the stairs every single time. There was no use yelling at her anymore. Elizabeth was such an odd kid that she hadn’t the faintest idea why no one else wanted to hear her ridiculous music. At least her Herman’s Hermits phase was over.

  * * *

  Maureen turned up the volume on her own record player and Carly Simon drowned out the world beyond her bedroom.

  Her hand came to a rest at page 378. Maureen had no inkling what the text on the page meant. She was failing algebra and had no interest in improving. Maureen knew she would never have a use for it, because beautiful housewives had no use for math or other trivial subjects better suited for the man caring for her.

  She smiled and sighed as she ran her fingers over the rough lines in the delicate petals of the dried rose stuck near the spine.

  “Peter,” she whispered. He was a secret not even her father knew, not that he could do much about it in his current state. If any of her family still among the living found out… well, she couldn’t even let herself think of it. She had never known trouble like the reveal of Peter Evers would bring.

  I’ll take you away from here, Sweet Maureen. Peter’s words, whispered in the steamed backseat of his tiny sports car. His sweaty, taught body pressed over the top of her, every jerky movement taking her away from the fourteen-year-old living with a deep, dark secret, yearning for escape. Wishing with every tendril of her soul that she was someone else, somewhere else.

  She thought it odd that the only two men in her life who loved her both called her Sweet Maureen, but she believed it was a sign that they were the only ones she could trust. It made sense, in a way few things in her life ever did.

  Maureen loved the hardness of his pectorals in her soft palms. They conveyed strength. Safety. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it, Mr. Evers.

  Call me Peter. You’re done with the eighth grade, Sweet Maureen. I’m not your teacher anymore.

  * * *

  Madeline had already gone full empath by the time Maureen made it into the dining room. She braced herself for the incoming theatrics.

  “Four dead, Mother! I felt each one, deep in the marrow of my bones!”

  Maureen rolled her eyes so hard her sockets ached and grabbed a plate. “Here we go,” she hissed under her breath.

  “Maureen,” Irish Colleen warned. “Maddy…” Long sigh. The one all the Deschanel children knew all too well, for it came at the moments where their mother was about to disappoint them in some profound way. “It’s a terrible thing, what happened at Kent State. Truly horrible. But the damage is done. What will going to Ohio do except put you behind in school even more?”

  “School?” The question came out somewhere between a scream and a sob. “This happened at a school, Mother. Don’t you understand?”

  Another sigh. Irish Colleen handed Elizabeth and Colleen plates. “I’m afraid I don’t, Madeline. And this isn’t a suitable dinner subject.”

  “Not a…” Spittle flew from Madeline as she whipped her head around in disgust. Maureen almost felt bad for her. If there was any of the seven who felt the pain of living under this roof as much as Maureen, it was Madeline. But Madeline was an insufferable cow who had no emotional self-control, and this erased any empathy Maureen managed to muster.

  It was too bad, because it would have been nice to have an ally… even one sibling she got along with, and could confide in on a sleepless night.

  “Sit,” Irish Colleen demanded. They all did, even agitated Madeline. Augustus slid in quietly just as the hands linked for evening prayer. He flashed a guilty look to Irish Colleen for being late, but her focus was elsewhere.

  “Where’s Charles?” Irish Colleen asked. She shook her head before anyone could answer. The answer was the same most nights. “Augustus, will you lead us?”

  “Let up, will you?” Maureen hissed at Madeline, who crushed her hand in hers.

  Augustus hung his head. “Bless us, oh Lord, and Thy gifts, which we are about to receive, through Thy bounty. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.”

  “Amen,” everyone but Madeline repeated.

  “Pass the bread please, Maddy,” Irish Colleen said. Tension choked the air.

  “No.”

  “What did you say? No, we’re not doing this tonight. Only one of us is the parent, Madeline, and you should count your blessings it’s not you.” She closed her eyes. Shook her head with a look toward the ceiling. “I can’t remember the last time I actually slept.”

  “Here you go, Mama,” Elizabeth said sweetly and handed the basket across her sisters.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about your day, missy.”

  “Can’t stay out of trouble, eh Lizzy?” Maureen taunted, tearing her roll in half. She would never miss an opportunity to keep her mother’s ire pointed at someone other than herself.

  “It’s none of your business,” Elizabeth returned. She stabbed her peas hard enough to scratch the plate with her fork. The screech that followed was horrible. Augustus winced.

  “We’ll discuss it tonight.” Irish Colleen put an end to the conversation.

  “Let’s talk about something happy,” Colleen suggested. Maureen had a fresh new eye roll for her oldest sister, who was always all too eager to be on the side of authority. Maureen suspected she didn’t even know what it was like to be a kid. “Like Evangeline’s teacher suggesting she skip a grade. What an amazing honor!”

  “That’s not happy news,” Evangeline said. “I’ll be a freak.”

  “Too late,” Maureen said.

  “You won’t be a freak,” Colleen soothed. So reasonable. So perfect. I hate you. “You’ll graduate sooner, be in college sooner. Who wouldn’t love that?”

  Everyone, even Irish Colleen, looked at her like she was completely mad.

  “If you think it’s so great, why didn’t you skip a grade?” Evangeline returned.

  “She wasn’t asked,” Maureen quipped. “Sucking up to your teachers doesn’t automatically make you a genius.”

  “Maureen, remember yourself!” Irish Colleen flared. “What’s gotten into you tonight?”

  “You ask her that every night,” Madeline said as she stared at the food on her plate, untouched. “As if you expect everything to change when nothing does. Nothing ever changes.”

  “Just like how you whine about some new crisis every night as if you’re the goddamned Lord and Savior of the world,” Maureen whipped back. She pulled her shoulders erect. “Your head might just fall off your shoulders if you tried to have a normal evening.”

  “She’s an empath,” Augustus said evenly. He set his fork on the plate. “You don’t have to agree with what she’s saying, or going through, to accept it.”

  “Shocking! You always take her side!”

  “I’m only trying to help you understand.”

  “Help me understand? Or using your powers of persuasion on me?”

  “I’ve never done that,” Augustus defended. He looked wounded. “I wouldn’t.”

  “So you say. How would I know?”

  “Back to Evangeline,” Colleen chimed in.

  “Fuck Evangeline.” Maureen threw her napkin on her plate. “And fuck you, Augustus, and you, Colleen, and yeah, even you, Lizzy. And especially whiny Madeline.”


  “Maureen!” Irish Colleen yelled after her, but Maureen was gone, mentally, emotionally, completely. Now that she’d tasted a life outside of her own, her tolerance for her family had shorter frays and quicker explosions.

  She ran down Sixth until she hit St. Charles Avenue, as fast as her legs could take her. Rain blinded her and ripped through her clothes, but it only quickened her stride and her resolution. She didn’t stop until she reached the dime store at the corner of Jackson. She fumbled in her jeans for some change and dropped it into the payphone.

  Twenty minutes later, she hopped in Peter’s car and they sped off in the direction of her future.

  * * *

  Maureen thought she was so clever. So worldly, so wise, with her way-too-old-for-her boyfriend, a secret she wore with smug, haughty self-indulgence, suggesting she was far too cunning for anyone to ever discover what she was doing when no one was paying attention.

  Madeline had always been able to sense shifts in her siblings. She couldn’t read minds, perhaps, but she could read emotions, and when you possess such an affliction you get used to studying the people around you, learning how to differentiate their periods of normalcy from the peaks and valleys of trauma and joy. Some were easier to detect changes in than others. Augustus had presumably one prevailing emotion at all times, and that was a steady, even focus. Occasionally he dipped into worry, especially where Madeline was concerned, but he very rarely blipped too high or low on the radar. When he did, you knew something was invariably wrong, and there was good cause to pay attention.

  Others, like Maureen, like Evangeline, or sweet Lizzy, ran the gamut on a near-daily basis. Wild swings that could make a person dizzy to follow them.

  Madeline wasn’t judging, exactly. Not about this. She may find other reasons to disconnect her empathy from her siblings, but as she herself was all over the place most of the time, she could relate to them on this, if nothing else.

  Even those with a dramatic range still had cues that grabbed Madeline’s attention. In Maureen’s case, she existed in a perpetual state of angst, to varying degrees, but rarely held onto any joy for more than a fleeting moment.

  When Maureen’s elation lasted not only hours, but days, and then weeks, Madeline knew something had happened. Shifted. She listened closer with her sixth sense and discovered that beyond joy, she found love. Or lust, more probably, because love had a soft evenness about it, as far as emotions went, where lust spiked all over the place, erratic and unpredictable.

  From there, it took very little effort to uncover the cause. Madeline only needed to ask her classmates if they had heard of her freshman sister dating anyone. One of them—David if she recalled, though it wasn’t important—took a double hit from the joint and held his answer with his smoke. He blew them out together. “Don’t you know? She’s fucking that middle school teacher... he teaches English, maybe? Shit, it’s been a while. Quivers… Beavers…”

  “Evers,” answered another, probably Edie, reaching for what was left of the dwindling roach. “Don’t bogart, man, come on.”

  Mr. Evers, who interestingly taught an elective class to eighth graders on the finer messages of Shakespeare, who was married, who had children, who was at least forty.

  Could it really be that he was carrying on a relationship with Maureen? Forget that he was her teacher, forget that he was three times her age and married. What grown man would find himself enraptured with the childish grievances of a young girl who could potentially pass for eight if age was measured on an emotional spectrum? Why Maureen, of all the choices? Was it because she was so immature? That other girls her age weren’t falling for whatever trap he laid?

  Madeline knew she should report it. To her mother, at a minimum, but what she should really do is find a payphone and call it in to the authorities. Mr. Evers was at best a criminal, and at worst, a predator, and his behavior needed to stop, even if it ripped apart his family and life. Both would be his own fault. Life was a series of choices and results.

  Instead, she couldn’t muster within her the concern she knew she should possess for her sister’s well-being. She had learned long ago that her capacity for concern for others had limitations in the way others didn’t have, because to absorb the emotions of others put herself in high alert, and even danger. Maybe when the world stopped spending all its energy in killing each other she would have time and room in her heart for the trivial affair between her sister and her old teacher. It would be over before anyone was the wiser, anyway. No way that old coward was leaving his wife for a kid.

  Madeline cleared her mind of her sister, who had only been there to begin with because of that knowing smile she flashed as she skipped by in the hallway, wearing her uniform a size too small. No, there were far more important things in life than correcting the course of a vapid, clueless child.

  “Earth to Maddy,” Edie said through a cough of smoke. “Did you hear me? You in?”

  “Saturday morning. Ten. Be there or be square,” David added with his lazy pothead grin that she wished he would stop employing. She hung with him because he had access to the best drugs and the best information, but it burned her heart because she knew he was an activist only because he believed it to be socially “in.” His actual passions changed with the wind… or the smoke, as it were.

  “I need to ask my mother,” Madeline said, without much hope. She didn’t know why she continued to ask. The answer was always no. It would never be yes until the day she stopped asking, and start taking action.

  Like a true warrior of justice.

  * * *

  Irish Colleen wasn’t home.

  “Jesus, where the hell is she?” Madeline asked Evangeline, who sat spread-legged on a chair in the dining room, face pressed into a textbook.

  Evangeline shrugged without looking up.

  “She didn’t say?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Well, why not?”

  Evangeline closed her eyes. Her neck sank into her shoulders as she affected a heavy sigh of exasperation. “Because not everything is a national emergency for me like it is for you,” she huffed. With a dramatic smack, she slammed closed her calculus book and marched up the stairs.

  Madeline rolled her eyes. And they called her dramatic.

  “She won’t be home until late,” Colleen said from behind her. Madeline nearly jumped. “I’m handling dinner tonight.”

  “Not tuna casserole, right?” That disgusting dish was the only thing her older sister apparently knew how to make.

  Colleen flashed a guilty look. “It’s just for one night.”

  Madeline brushed past her, intent on locking herself away until she could confront her mother. This wasn’t the end of the world. She needed time to think, anyway, to conjure a better strategy, one that might actually get through to her stubborn mother this time. She needed to be on that bus Saturday, come hell or high water.

  Colleen’s brows knitted together. She reached out for Madeline’s arm and pulled her back, lining them up face-to-face. “Everything okay? Maybe I can help in Mom’s absence?”

  Madeline snorted. “You can’t help with this.”

  Her older sister wedged herself in the doorway. “I know what you think of me. That I take everything too seriously and don’t know how to have fun.”

  Madeline twerked her mouth in response. “Can I go upstairs now?”

  Colleen folded her hands into a tent over her mouth. “I’m more like Dad than Mom, you know. I get what you’re trying to do, and I don’t think you’re foolish, like Mom does. I know you’re compassionate. I know being an empath makes your already large heart hurt even more when you see and feel terrible things happening to others. If I can help, Maddy, I will.”

  She sensed that her sister’s offer was authentic, but Madeline knew better than to blindly trust any of her siblings, except Augustus. Yet, what if Colleen could help her? Irish Colleen valued the opinion of her eldest daughter, enough that her words might be the difference between pe
rsuading Irish Colleen and alienating her once again.

  So Madeline took a chance.

  She told Colleen about the bus leaving Saturday for Washington, about the rally for Kent State. How they would also stand against Nixon, and the war, and all the other great injustices plaguing the country. They were too numerous to count, and every single one was etched upon her soul, because of who she was.

  “Madeline…” Colleen’s softness had dissolved. In its place was the rigid form of her mother, preparing to unleash some great tyranny upon her.

  She was a fool. She’d taken a chance, and this had backfired spectacularly.

  “You know what, Colleen? It’s fine. I didn’t need your permission anyway.” Madeline pressed forward. She grunted when Colleen held her ground. “Let me through.”

  “Listen, I’m on your side, but you have to finish school,” Colleen was saying, but Madeline was done hearing everyone around her continue to throw up barriers. While she was in school, people were dying. Wars were being fought. What was school in the face of all this?

  “I can do both.”

  “It’s a distraction.”

  “I don’t want to hear it from you,” Madeline snapped. “I get it from Mom all the damn time.”

  Colleen shook her head. “You don’t understand. I’m on your side.”

  “The hell you are!”

  “If you would just listen…”

  “Listen? To more people telling me how not to be myself?”

  Colleen’s hand pressed into her bicep with what Madeline guessed was supposed to be some kind of comfort. Instead it burned. She shook her away.

  “I want you to be yourself. But you need that diploma first. The world is different for women now, and we can’t waste the chances given to us. Wouldn’t you feel better out there saving the world if you knew you had a life to return to when you’re done?”

  “You say that as if you think activism is a hobby, not a way of life,” Madeline spat. She backed away from her sister, into the counter. “It is my life.”