The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. I don’t want to think anymore—just for a few hours, I want to not think. I envy Jane in her coma. I wonder if she’s left her body behind. Has she returned to the woods, reliving what’s happened to her? And did she hear me when I spoke to her? Can one slip out of one’s body and back into the past, removed from time and space?

  My mind has been playing tricks on me lately—all those childhood memories that have resurfaced, at the most inopportune moments, memories I didn’t know existed. I haven’t even begun to ask my mother the questions that demand answers.

  Aurora; a phenomenon. A collision of air molecules, trapped particles.

  I’m exhausted, yet sleep won’t come. I didn’t think coming back to Aurora was going to be so unsettling. There is no other explanation. It must be this town.

  Three

  QUINN

  THE old, detached garage had been in desperate need of a paint job for years. The layers were peeling off and the bleached birch wood had been painted numerous times; multiple coats had merged into a shade that was hard to identify.

  Killing time in the swinging chair on the front porch, Quinn listened to the metal poles screeching with every painful descent. First, the garage was there. Then it was gone. There, gone. She wished everything was that easy, that she could make things disappear. She went over the list in her mind; PE on Tuesdays and Thursdays—she was too heavy and sweated profusely—even though she liked watching the boys play football and loved the sound of the rumbling buzzer; church on Sundays came in a close second. She could do without the itchy tights and the leather shoes pinching her feet, the dress stretching tightly over her body, the scent of Play-Doh and gossip and old hymnals with gold-rimmed pages. But most of all, she wanted to make a woman disappear—the woman she was waiting for on the porch.

  She hadn’t met her yet; in fact, she had just found out about her the previous morning. Her father had waited for her to come down for breakfast—she couldn’t remember the last time they’d had breakfast together—and he hadn’t even given her a chance to eat.

  “I met a very nice lady,” he had said and set the coffee cup down. “And I hope you’ll grow to love her as much as I have.”

  Just like that. There’d be another woman in the house. All those days and nights of business in some town were nothing more than a lie. He’d been out looking for a wife.

  Quinn thought about all their plans, traveling for the summer—he had even promised he’d take her to Galveston this fall, had told her all about the hotel, the Galvez. He had described in detail how only rich and famous people and American presidents had frequented it in the past, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, even famous actors, like Jimmy Stewart and Frank Sinatra, and Howard Hughes. Suites were named after them and Quinn had been looking forward to the trip.

  “What about Galveston?” Quinn had asked. “The hotel? The spa? Are we still going?”

  “Don’t you worry,” Mr. Murray said and patted her arm, “we’ll go soon, I promise. Really soon.”

  “The two of us?” Quinn asked.

  “Sure. Maybe we all go?”

  He had all but promised it would be just the two of them, and there’d be spas and a theater and restaurants where they’d serve fish with the head attached and he’d teach her how to use one of those fish knives with a spatula blade to separate the fish’s skeleton from the body. In a moment of clarity she admitted to herself that she’d have to give up on Galveston—it was never going to happen.

  Quinn continued swinging with brisk speed, hypnotized, running her fingers through her hair. It was poufy and frizzy and regardless of how diligently she used the flat iron, it returned to its untamed state once she stepped into the humidity of a Texas summer day.

  Quinn’s mind started to rush and her hands began to fidget as she recited ingredients from a cookbook. The old ladies at church, smelling of talcum powder, were always impressed.

  “What’s your daddy’s favorite dish?” they’d ask, and Quinn tried not to stare at their hands covered in dark spots with veins like blue rivers running through them.

  “Chicken-fried steak,” Quinn said and elaborated on the cut of meat—cube steak—and how she had to pound it fiercely with a meat mallet and then dip it in seasoned flour, pan-fry it, and serve it with a cream gravy made from pan drippings.

  As Quinn continued to swing, she yearned for that night’s dinner, could almost smell rosemary and chives on her fingertips and the scent of the pot roast with mashed potatoes and okra cooked to perfection wafting through the house. She loved the comforting clinks the fork made against the fine china as she scraped off every last morsel of food.

  Quinn forced herself to abandon this culinary vision—after all, she was waiting on the porch for her father and her new mother to show. He hadn’t given her a time or date, just said he’d pick her up—and so Quinn had been waiting out on the porch for the second day in a row, waiting for a car to kick up a cloud of dust on the winding road up to the house.

  Quinn stared at the cracked floorboards. She mistook the fissures for spilled paint but then looked closer and recognized an orderly army of ants marching along it, carrying food back and forth. Soon there’d be hundreds, even thousands more, carrying away everything in the house, and even though they were small and insignificant, moving mountains seemed only a matter of time. She hated insects, bugs, beetles—pests, all of them. She didn’t even like butterflies.

  Kneeling down, she was painfully aware of her stomach pushing against her lungs, forcing her to make a wheezing sound. Out of nowhere, almost like a hummingbird flapping its wings, she felt anxiety flaring up inside her.

  Hours passed, and her anxiety became a peculiar state of being. Sitting there with nothing to stare at but the wall with chipped paint, she began to drift into an unpleasant daydream, a memory of the last time she’d been on this porch waiting for someone to show.

  For her twelfth birthday she had handed out invitations in school, and she had sat in this very swing when her classmates showed up, gift bags in tow. Quinn knew they didn’t come for her friendship’s sake but out of sheer curiosity.

  At the birthday party, the kids ran through the house, opening and slamming doors, entering rooms no one had any business going in. “What’s in there?” they’d ask and rip the door open so it hit the wall behind it with a thud.

  “A study. You’re not allowed in there,” Quinn said but they entered nevertheless, giggling and intruding, leaving the door wide open. She heard distant, hazy chatter. She couldn’t make out the words, but laughter rang loud and clear and didn’t seem to stop.

  Due to the commotion her father had appeared at the top of the stairs. Everybody stared at him, the last button of his dress shirt undone, gaping open, exposing his belly. And they snickered when they saw him, mocked him, his waddle gait, how he used his body weight to swing his leg up, like a pendulum.

  After everybody left, cake crumbs and smears of icing were all that remained of the once-triple-layered Victoria sponge cake that had taken her all morning to make. No one had admired the light perfection of the cake itself and the richness of the frosting, none of the kids had said anything, but they had scraped the icing off and made a mess on their plates.

  —

  Now this woman, her new mother, was going to live with them. For a split second, she felt the need to run to one of the trees up front and climb up so she could see farther down the road. To everybody’s amazement, despite her size, Quinn was proficient in climbing trees. She was strong and not afraid of falling and even though she scraped her legs and skinned her knees in the process, it was all worth it; to peek into a nest—she would never disturb it; after all, momma bird was taking care of the baby birds—and to be able to catch a glimpse of her familiar surroundings that seemed so different from a higher viewpoint.

  Her new mother didn’t appear until nightfall. She wore one
of the prettiest green silk dresses Quinn had ever seen—the color of beans dropped in ice water just at the right time to stop them from cooking—and her hair smelled of oranges and bergamot pear and when the light hit it just right, the colors and highlights reminded her of autumn leaves, amber hues melded together like a crown on a princess. And in the middle of her face sat her eyes, deep green and dark as a lake. Quinn couldn’t help but imagine how pretty she’d be if she’d been given half of her new mother’s beauty.

  Quinn was adept at hiding her feelings, yet her heart had a life of its own. It picked up a beat or two, stumbled even, causing her to draw in a deep breath. She didn’t know what to say to her and so she just stood watching her father busily wiping his shiny face with a handkerchief. He seemed happy, his eyes were wide in anticipation, and he stood close to the woman, who was so small that three of her would fit into his body. Quinn could tell by just looking at her that she’d never love him. She was too exquisite a woman to love a man like her father.

  “Call me Sigrid,” the woman said and she grabbed Quinn’s hand, hanging limp by her side. Her smile was small, then fleeting. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she added but it sounded as if she had just told a lie.

  Quinn felt the woman’s eyes wander from her round face down her plump body and back up. The woman’s cheeks had a rosy hue, but the rest of her skin was quite pale, as if the warmth had recoiled the moment she realized Quinn was not what she’d expected.

  “Call you Secret?” Quinn asked, stretching the first syllable.

  “S-I-G-R-I-D,” the woman replied, spelling out her name.

  “Where are you from?” Quinn asked, since she detected an accent.

  “Austria,” the woman said.

  Quinn didn’t know what to expect of living with a mother or a woman functioning as a motherly figure, because she had never had one. There was a certain kind of pain and longing for her very own mother—a woman she had never met and who wasn’t spoken about unless Quinn brought her up herself—yet the pain was vague at best, elusive, as if Quinn was unable to assign any true meaning to someone she had lost but who had never been there to begin with.

  Sigrid turned out to not be very domestic. It took her hours to get ready in the morning, and she never seemed to have time to prepare breakfast or lunch. She drove into town, to the local beauty salon, frequently, however, and always returned in high spirits with arms full of bags and packages. The laundry piled up, and after a few months, it was decided that Mrs. Holmes would return to resume the responsibilities of maintaining the house.

  In due time, Sigrid made it a habit to stay in her room. Mrs. Holmes brought her tea on a silver tray with dainty fine china Quinn’s father had ordered from Austria as a gift to Sigrid, and she ate all her meals from the plates with gaudy peacock-looking birds and orange and blue flowers. The set came with cups and saucers, sugar bowl and creamer, a soup tureen, and serving plates, dessert bowls, bread plates, a cake stand, and a gravy boat.

  “Where did you get those peacock dishes from?” Quinn asked, fascinated by how every dish had its very own bowl or container.

  “It’s not a peacock, child,” Sigrid said as she gently caressed the shiny smooth surface of the dainty plate. “It’s a pheasant bird of paradise. The pattern is called Eden.”

  “Eden like Adam and Eve Eden?” Quinn asked, tempted to reach for the plate, wanting to feel its smoothness and weight, since Mrs. Holmes had been instructed to serve Quinn’s food on simple Pyrex plates with a thick red border.

  “Adam and Eve? Not so much. More like a perpetual place of bliss, you know, like your father and I.”

  Quinn knew it was all a lie—there was no paradise, no Eden, not even close. There was, however, Cadillac Man.

  Less than one year after her father had married Sigrid, a man in a midnight blue Cadillac had pulled into the driveway. Quinn had dug her shoes into the porch and halted the swing with a violent screech. The man was tall and wore a gray suit and shoes shinier than a newly minted quarter. He retrieved a suitcase from the trunk, nodded at her on his way to the front door, then knocked. Mrs. Holmes wasn’t expected for another two hours, but Sigrid must have been standing behind the door, because it opened just seconds later.

  “Go play, child,” Sigrid called out, and Quinn wondered what kind of games Sigrid thought teenagers played these days. She remained on the front porch for a while, then snuck into the kitchen. She ate the leftover cobbler, wondering what kind of cake and ice cream Mrs. Holmes would serve after dinner. She wasn’t supposed to eat before dinner nor roam or sneak about or spy on Sigrid, but Quinn was curious and if she was careful not to step on the wrong floorboard, if the slats remained silent on her behalf, she might be able to peek into Sigrid’s room.

  Quinn tiptoed as softly as her body size allowed, avoiding the raised edges of the boards. She turned the knob silently, and after releasing it, she pushed the door inward, allowing for a gap. She waited.

  The first thing she became aware of was Sigrid’s perfume lingering in the air. She took in the rich scent, a fruity and floral aroma like the sweet peas growing behind the house. The curtains were drawn, but an inch-wide gap let in a beam of light. After her eyes adjusted, she made out the man’s jacket draped over the back of a chair. The breakfast tray sat abandoned on the nightstand; the jelly-stained knife rested next to the shredded remnants of a biscuit.

  Cadillac Man was kneeling on the bed, next to Sigrid. She must have fainted—her body flat on her back with one leg hanging off the side of the mattress—but there was no shaking of Sigrid’s shoulder, no fanning of air, no smelling salt wafting toward her nose. She watched him undo the top button of Sigrid’s blouse with one hand while pushing her skirt up with the other.

  Quinn straightened up as if she’d been awakened by a bang of cymbals, her heart pounding and blood rushing like a fierce river through her ears. Cadillac Man’s hand made Sigrid’s body glide effortlessly with a swaying motion, peeling off her skirt. It rustled to the floor. His pointy shoes hit the wooden planks. Sigrid sat up, propping herself up by her elbows, watching him. Sigrid’s body had the shape of a violin and as Quinn stood watching, she imagined her own ample body struggling to execute such deliberate moves.

  Cadillac Man opened Sigrid’s blouse slowly, twisting each button. He ran his fingertip from her throat toward her breastbone, barely dragged it across her neck, but it had left behind a reddish streak on Sigrid’s pale skin. The blouse fell open and he studied her body. He held her left breast, gently at first, then, as if he thought otherwise, his hand clutched and covered it, making it entirely disappear. He lifted his hand, barely grazing her nipples, and meandered down her stomach, then back up, and paused again at her breastbone. He shoved Sigrid back onto the bed—for a moment Quinn wondered why Sigrid didn’t struggle against him when it seemed so violent, making her entire body bounce on the mattress. Cadillac Man crudely removed Sigrid’s underwear, the fabric cutting into her thighs. He got off the bed and on his knees. He kissed her just above her pubic bone, and a finger disappeared inside Sigrid.

  Sigrid in turn moved into his hand until he stopped suddenly, removing his finger. While she propped herself up on her elbows again, Cadillac Man got up and unzipped his pants. He grabbed Sigrid by the back of her head, wrapping her hair round his fingers, and then pulled her head back so she had to strain to look at him. Their bodies were statue-like but something seemed to unleash, like horses when the starting gates open. Quinn watched as they moved with the constant sound of flesh on flesh, only interrupted by the man flipping Sigrid onto her stomach. They switched places over and over and then Cadillac Man’s round backside heaved one last time and there was nothing but the sound of heavy breathing.

  Quinn was captivated as if she were a hare spellbound by the talons of an eagle. An unfamiliar scent lingered in the room, a scent she couldn’t quite place. Something much more powerful than red velvet cake with cream
cheese frosting, something that reached deeper than the stomach, surged through her, sank its teeth into her, leaving her with a terrible feeling of throbbing and longing.

  Leaving the way she had entered, silently, unbeknownst, Quinn went back to the swing on the porch. For a while, she kept momentum, but then allowed the swing to come to a stop. Still shaking, her body two steps ahead of itself, she couldn’t erase the image of Cadillac Man’s shiny shoes, their tips pointing upward as if to aim toward heaven. Like her father, he too was no match for Sigrid—he was a man who just showed up and stayed for an hour or two just to move on.

  Quinn lost her appetite. It wasn’t that her hunger had ceased, but a knowledge had emerged that food was no longer what she was after. The thought of meat roasting in the oven and the sound of swirling and rattling ice cubes in a glass of iced tea nauseated her, no longer made sense as a means of comfort. She pushed it all aside just to feel a sadness she had never felt before. How easily people throw each other away. She knew, in due time, she’d look just like her father and people would make fun of her too. The thought of him made her eyes sting—not the way people ridiculed him, nothing like that—but how he had easily cast his daughter aside for a beautiful woman who had never loved him in return.

  There she was—Quinn Murray, who had stopped growing at five feet five inches, who had the kind of face people forgot even before they’d stopped looking at it, a girl who had gained thirty pounds since her fifteenth birthday, all of them around the hips.

  Satisfying her hunger suddenly seemed no longer suitable. She felt that yearning leave her and she was fully awake, had only one mission. She longed to be like Sigrid, with violin hips and men adoring her, never to be discarded for anyone. Yet there was also a seed of fear inside of her, and she was unsure of its origin, like a dream she was unable to interpret.

  She wanted to be powerful, like Sigrid, as if this world was an instrument to be played. She wanted to be powerful, yet there was also this vulnerability that seemed too familiar to shake. And it terrified her.