by Zoe Kane
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” said Annie, and there was something curious in how Linnet’s expression changed. Annie wasn’t sure she liked how carefully the girl was reading her, as if every thought in her head was laid bare to Linnet’s searching gaze.
“Just passing through,” she said. “My friends' band is on tour and they pay me to come along and run the light board sometimes. And I thought it would be a good chance to catch up with Marcus.”
“Catch up,” thought Annie with a hint of bitterness as she sipped her coffee, suddenly feeling very old and very tired. Linnet poured two more cups of coffee, and Annie watched with a little pang in her chest as she confidently added the exact right amount of cream and sugar to the mug that was clearly for Marcus.
It was hard to blame him, thought Annie with a hollow, sad little ache inside her chest, for wanting this woman. She was Annie’s opposite in every way. She was gorgeous and sexy and half Annie’s age, and even the fact that she walked with a limp and her thighs were laced with scars didn’t detract a bit; it just made her seem more interesting and glamorous, somehow, like she’d led an adventurous life. Her skin glowed amber-gold in the kitchen’s warm morning light, and her body was the perfect balance of soft curves and strong muscle.
Annie was nearly forty, she had gray hair coming in at the temples, she was stiff and dull and wound too tight and all she did was drive Marcus crazy. Linnet was young and fun and asked nothing of him; back in New York they lived separate lives and got together occasionally to go have beers or watch the Knicks game, after which they would probably have mind-blowing sex and then part ways perfectly amicably.
Annie came saddled with three children, a house full of painful memories, an almost pathological need to keep Marcus at arm's length, and far too much baggage to expect a man like him to carry.
Linnet came with no strings attached, and she knew how he liked his coffee.
You’re such an idiot, she hissed at herself, blinking back tears of frustration for having been so stupid as to think that one kiss under the mistletoe meant anything. She was delusional for having misread his signals so badly. Linnet had been in his life for years. Annie would never be able to stop herself from pushing him away, and Linnet was the kind of woman he would always come back to.
That was all it would ever be.
As if on cue, to add the one missing note in this symphony of awkwardness, Marcus – clad in a pair of gray flannel pajama pants and a soft, perfectly faded Springsteen t-shirt - stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing his sleep-bleary eyes and running a hand through his mussed hair. He stopped short when he saw both women there in front of him, and looked rather helplessly from one to the other as if trying to gather as much information as possible before opening his mouth. If she hadn’t been so angry at him already, Annie might have laughed; but right now all her energy was going towards not losing her temper in front of the girl Marcus had brought home to fuck last night while she and the children slept upstairs.
At that moment, she hated him more than she had ever hated anyone in her entire life.
Well, no, actually, she might have hated Linnet a little bit more, since at this moment Linnet was watching Annie watch Marcus with a curious, thoughtful intensity, as though she were solving a puzzle.
“Annie, it’s not what it looks like,” Marcus began, and both women’s heads swiveled towards him as one, making the same incredulous expression.
"Nope," Linnet interrupted scornfully, making Annie hate her a tiny bit less. “Worst opening ever. Try again."
“I’ve got this, Linnet,” he said quietly.
“You didn’t even tell her I was in town. That makes me look like an asshole."
“Okay, I’m not doing this right now,” said Annie, setting down her coffee and feeling like the room was suddenly far too crowded for her personal comfort.
“Annie, it’s not – we didn’t –“
“You’re an adult, Marcus,” she said in a carefully neutral tone, swallowing down tears as she turned her back and left the room. “You can sleep with whoever you want. I would simply prefer not to have strange women parading in and out of the house at all hours when the children are here. Linnet, it was nice to meet you, help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
“Annie, come back,” Linnet started to say as Marcus stood stock-still, staring after her, watching her walk away.
Linnet gave him a violent shove. “Jesus Christ,” she hissed, “go fix it.”
“I don’t –“
“Go after her right now, you dumbass,” she said, gathering up her clothes, “or so help me God I’ll never speak to you again. Did you see the look on her face? Go. I’ll drop your car back here this afternoon." Then she tactfully disappeared, leaving him alone in the living room.
He gathered himself for a long moment before climbing the stairs and, for the first time ever, entered Annie’s bedroom. She was pacing back and forth in front of the window, her arms wrapped tightly around her torso the way she did when she was trying to press her emotions back down inside her.
“I didn’t sleep with her,” he began, his voice low to keep from waking up the children.
“That’s a good one, Marcus,” she said with a sneer, “that’s hilarious. You’re not sleeping with the gorgeous twenty-something I found half-naked in my kitchen wearing nothing but the shirt you had on last night? You didn’t leave the house after we had a fight to go hook up with your girlfriend? Why else would you refuse to tell me where you were going?"
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Look, I know you have an arrangement, I know you’re both very modern and bohemian and I’m the Victorian spinster in this story, I get it, I’m old-fashioned, but if you’re going to call up your fuck buddy –“
“Don’t call her that.”
“ . . . and fly her across the country whenever you want to get laid, then we’re going to need to set up some ground rules because there are children in this house.”
“She's my friend, Annie, it was just a friendly drink.”
“Look, I know you think I’m a thousand years old, but even I know what that means.”
“We didn’t do anything,” he snapped. “We drank beer. We ate French fries. All I did was get too drunk to drive and talk about you.”
This stopped her in her tracks, but she still could not quite look at him.
“There’s nothing to be jealous of,” he said, trying to be reassuring, but it was the wrong thing to say. She whirled around on him, eyes blazing, her voice full of fury.
“Jesus,” she exploded, “that’s what you think this is? You think I’m jealous? You think my first thought when you don’t come home until after midnight without telling me where you’re going –“
“Were you – did you wait up for me?”
“ . . . and then I find a half-naked stranger in my kitchen –“
“Your kitchen?”
“Marcus, you can stroke your male ego by banging as many twenty-year-olds as you want,” she said wearily, “I couldn’t give less of a damn who you sleep with. But you cannot just bring them uninvited into this house.”
“Our house," he interrupted, his own voice rising to meet hers. “Our house. Our kids. Our family. I live here, Annie. You don’t have to like it – I know you’ve never liked it, you’ve made that abundantly clear – but it wasn’t your decision, it was Danny’s decision, and my love life was not one of the qualifying factors.”
“So Linnet’s your love life?” retorted Annie, hating herself for how catty the words sounded as she spat them at him. “I thought you said you weren’t sleeping with her.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I haven’t slept with her since I slept with you.”
“Well, that’s big of you.”
“Jesus, Annie, what do you want from me?” he snapped. “Tell me what you want me to do. Honest to God, tell me and I’ll do it, because right now I am doing the best I can and I am out of ideas. I quit my job an
d I put my life on hold and I walked away from everything that mattered to me to fly across the country and try to be some kind of a father to these kids –“
“I didn’t ask you to do any of that!”
“It wasn’t yours to ask!” he shot back. “They’re not your children. This is a choice that their parents got to make, and you’re so angry at Danny Walters right now that you can’t even see straight, you’re so angry that he didn’t let you play the noble heroine and carry the whole burden yourself –“
“How dare you –“
“ . . . and if you knew yourself a fraction as well as you think you do, Annie, you’d realize the thing that’s been blindingly obvious since the moment you came onto me in the kitchen after the funeral –“
“Shut up, Marcus, just shut up right now –“
“I’m not him, Annie,” he burst out, and she froze.
The world stopped moving. Her skin went cold all over and she stared at him with icy fear in her heart, begging him not to say the thing she knew he was about to say. But was too late. She’d pushed him too far, pushed him past the limits of his compassion and kindness, and so he was going to do it, he was going to say the terrible thing out loud, and it was all her fault. She felt the Dark Thing stir from its slumber and begin to rise up inside her chest, making itself ready.
“Stop it, Marcus,” she said quietly, but it was a feeble attempt, he barely heard, he smashed right through it and kept going.
“I’m not him,” he insisted again. “You want me to be him, and I’m not, and you’re so angry it makes you hate everybody. You hated that other man you were with because no matter how tightly you closed your eyes, you couldn’t quite convince yourself he was Danny.”
“Stop it.”
“And you hate the children for existing, and Grace for meeting him first, because by the time you realized how you felt it was too late, there was no way out without wrecking his family. The one thing he’d never, ever do.”
“Stop it.”
“No, you need to hear this, Annie, somebody needs to say this to you. And nobody else can see you the way I can. Nobody else is willing to say what needs to be said.”
“Oh, suddenly you’re the person that knows me best?”
He stepped in closer to her then, eyes flashing bright with anger, but with something else too, and she felt her heart quicken with a sensation that wasn’t fear.
"I see right through those walls," he said softly, "I know all of it. I see all of it. Do you want to know why you really hate me? And why you hate yourself? I saw it. I'll tell you. It's because that first time, in the kitchen – "
“Marcus, stop.”
“No, this is important. The first time, in the kitchen, you were thinking of Danny. You were picturing Danny. Danny's hands. Danny's mouth. Danny inside you. That's where you go, when you disappear in bed. That's what you do. I saw it happen. I was there. And you hated me for not being him, but you hated yourself more, for betraying your sister. But the second time,” and he moved in even closer now, their faces were just inches apart, “the second time you weren’t thinking about Danny at all. The second time you were right there, with me. And you hate yourself for that most of all," he said softly, "for how good it made you feel. You hate yourself for being unfaithful. You feel like you’re cheating on him with me."
They were so close that she could feel his breath on her skin. His eyes were dark and wide and right there and she wanted to tell him he was wrong but her whole body would have made that a lie. "You don't want to let go," he whispered, "you don't want to move on. You're so scared of what lives on the other side of that door."
Everything he was saying to her was true. How badly she wanted to press her mouth to his – even now, when she was so angry – was proof that he was right. She hadn't disappeared. She hadn't gone inside to that remote, faraway place where she had spent all those strained nights with Malcolm Burke, where she had gone that first time with Marcus on the kitchen chair. The devastating truth was that she had forgotten Danny Walter existed from the moment Marcus kissed her mouth in the hallway until she woke up in his arms the next morning. That was why it felt like having her heart ripped out. That was why this hurt so badly.
She pulled away from him then and moved to the window, wrapping her arms protectively around herself, unable to look at him anymore.
“I want so badly for you not to hate me,” he said, the ribbon of anger in his voice fading the slightest bit, replaced by a bright note of desperation. “But I don’t know how to tell you that this isn’t a competition. I don’t know how to tell you that I’m not a threat to your place in this family. It was over before it started, Annie, I was never going to be able to make a place for myself equal to yours. Don’t you get that? But you hate me just for being here, for existing, for reminding you that Danny didn’t think you could do this alone. Reminding you that you weren’t his partner. You weren’t the only person he trusted. You don’t get to win at everything, Annie, you don’t get to always have your way.”
“You think this is about winning?” she shot back at him. “Are you forgetting that I lost the two most important people in my life?”
“Am I forgetting? How would it be possible for me to forget when you spend every minute of the day constantly reminding me? You are in love with your grief, Annie, it’s the only thing in the whole world you really trust. Your sadness. Your isolation. You’ve built temples to them, you worship them, you can’t see anything else. You’re terrified to let them go. You are terrified of being happy.”
“I don’t have time for happy, Marcus,” she snapped, “I have three kids depending on me and I am at my wits’ end here. You don’t think I know I’m not cut out for this? You don’t think I’m aware of just how badly I’m failing?”
“Annie –“
“I didn’t want this, Marcus, I didn’t choose this life. I liked the life I had. I know it wasn’t glamorous like yours, it didn’t have a chauffeur and a penthouse loft, but it was mine, and I was happy, so don’t expect me to be jumping up and down because my only sister was hurled through the windshield of her car and left me to pick up the pieces.”
He looked stricken, unsteady, and all the fight had gone out of him. He reached out a hand for her but she slapped it away. The words were pouring out of her now, like a geyser, she couldn’t have stopped if she wanted to, she was incandescent with rage and it had simply taken over her body, so she just stood there, ice-cold, and let it happen, let the words fall onto his skin and seep inside, down to his heart, like corrosive poison. He had said things she could never, ever forgive, and all she wanted to do in this moment was hurt him as badly as she possibly could.
“You weren’t there,” she said, in a soft dangerous voice, “so you don’t know. You weren’t the one that had to go to the morgue. You weren’t the one that talked to the paramedics, or had to file the death certificates. So you don’t know anything. Let me tell you. Let me fill you in on what you missed while you were going down on that girl in your hip New York apartment and not answering your phone.”
“Annie –“
“There were cuts all over her body from the broken glass,” she interrupted, pushing on as though he hadn't spoken. “Sliced up her skin top to bottom. Grace never had a scar in her life, but when I saw her on that table in the morgue it was like someone had taken a knife to her. Just gone to town all over her face. See, the passenger side seatbelt, it had kind of a glitch to it sometimes, you’d think it was buckled all the way because it made the little click sound, but you always had to check it. So if you got in the car in a hurry and you forgot to check, then when the car crashed into the side of a mountain –“
“Annie, don’t.”
“ . . . then it would just snap right open and send you flying through broken glass into the snow. But she was the lucky one,” she went on, ignoring him, “because at least she got thrown clear of the car. You know what happened to your brother?” she said, turning to him, “you know ho
w Danny died? You want to hear? You want to hear the words I had to hear? See, his seatbelt worked fine. It did its job. Which means he was burned. I couldn’t look at him, that day in the morgue, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the body. They brought his doctor in to identify the remains – that’s what they call it, you know, that’s our cute little insider hospital lingo for what you call it when the man you love most in the whole world dies in a fire on the side of the highway while his wife bleeds to death in the snow. That’s who I am now, Marcus. You fucking asshole. And you think this is about winning? You think I enjoy feeling this way? That I like holding onto this? That there is one single tiny piece of my life right now that even remotely resembles what I wanted? I swear to God, Marcus, I am holding it together by the skin of my teeth right now, I am this close to losing it, I loved them more than anything else in the world and they died on the side of the road like animals and where were you then?”
She had not even noticed when she’d begun to cry, had no idea until she stopped to take a breath and found that she couldn’t, found that her chest was constricted with rough, gasping sobs. Marcus was rooted in place, his face white with horror, tears making their way down his cheeks too. They regarded each other for a long, awful, silent moment.
Then they heard the screaming.
Chapter Nineteen: The Worst Imaginable Thing
Lucy was lying in bed flipping through a book about unicorns and explaining the stories to Princess when she heard noises from down the hall that sounded like Aunt Annie was watching a scary loud movie in her bedroom with the sound turned way up. Which didn’t seem like her, especially not in the mornings. Isaac and Sophia were still sleeping, so Lucy grabbed Princess by the tail and decided to go investigate herself.
But it wasn't a movie. It was Aunt Annie and Uncle Marcus, and they were mad.
Neither one of the grownups heard her tiptoe down the hall on little bare feet, or saw her standing behind them in the hallway. They shouted for a long time about some things she didn’t understand at all, and when Lucy saw that Aunt Annie looked like she might start to cry, she was just about to enter the room and go give her a hug when something awful came out of Aunt Annie's mouth.
