Unleaving

by Melissa Ostrom

  “Bad firing.” The aunt made a face. She went to stand by her sister and toed a cardboard box on the floor. “These all have to go.”

  “What? That’s nuts.” Mom let the broken pieces drop back into the garbage and bent to inspect the box’s contents. She pulled out a mug. “Goodness gracious. Don’t throw these out.”

  “They’re rejects.”

  Mom thumbed a frozen rivulet of glaze at the mug’s foot. “They just dripped a little. I’ll take them.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll send you home with a shitload, but not these.” The aunt took the mug from Mom and threw it into the garbage. It landed with a loud crack. Aunt Wren scowled at the box. “Too much flux in the glaze. Thought I had the recipe down, even added a few minutes to the firing hold, but the celadon’s still giving me crap.”

  Mom clucked. “I hate to see them destroyed.”

  Aunt Wren crossed the room. “I don’t believe in giving away seconds. Seconds stick around as long as the firsts do. For years and years, thousands of years. So no. Those are garbage. But these…” She picked a mug out of her inventory and waited for her sister to join her. “How about this one to start with? You can have your morning coffee in it. See this?” She thumbed the lip. “I call it cream-breaking-red. Sam calls it blush.”

  “So pretty.”

  “It’s yours.”

  She thanked her and pressed the mug against her chest. Her smile disappeared when she glanced at Maggie. “Why are you way over there?”

  “Oh.” She straightened from the wall and walked over.

  Mom held out her new mug.

  “Beautiful.”

  Aunt Wren selected a second cup in earthy browns. “And for Margaret. To go with the Bambi eyes.”

  “Thank you.” It was curvy and big, the browns in matte and gloss, and with a perfect ribbon of a handle. Maybe not the kind of sculpture her mother was looking for, but sculptural in its own way.

  Inspecting her mug, Mom asked, “You don’t use any lead glazes, do you?”

  The aunt made a squawking sound. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Well, I was just wondering…”

  “Jesus, Min. This isn’t the seventies. No one uses lead glazes anymore.” She snorted. “Unless you’ve got an enemy you want to poison.”

  Mom smiled, abashed. “Sorry.”

  Aunt Wren met Maggie’s gaze and rolled her eyes, as if to include her in her exasperation. “Should I throw together some killer glazes, Margaret? Might take a few decades to finish off our target, but what the hell. Got anyone you want me to get rid of?”

  “That’s okay.”

  The sisters laughed, easy with each other again.

  Maggie turned. Did she want to get rid of anyone? Not anymore. She already had.

  * * *

  Quilt to chin, eyes on silvered shadows, Maggie listened.

  The tumble of lake: up, down, get up now, fall again, turn, I said, before I do it for you, crash. Foliage pattered in the woods. More rain or wind in the leaves? They sounded the same. The house was asleep. If Maggie listened hard, she thought she could almost hear the sisters in Aunt Wren’s room, the slow inhale, exhale, snuffling murmur. Did their twinness synchronize their breathing? Would they touch in their sleep? Did some deep troughs in their brains magnetize them, turn the faintest recollection of shared enwombing into a lasting pull? A tidal pull, a lunar listing. Lunacy. Enwombing, wounding. Felled and wrenched.

  Wretched.

  Getting hurt required planning. Or no planning. Maggie realized this after the fact. She was told how this was so.

  There were variations on procedures she should have considered before the bad thing happened. Shower. Did she shave her legs? Condition? Exfoliate? Makeup. Red lipstick or pink? Eyeliner or mascara? Body. Lotion? Serviceable white underwear or satin or lace and satin? Sports bra? Sexy bra? Hair. Ponytail? Loose? Clothes. Tight shirt? Tight jeans? Loose? Loose. Sneakers? Flats? Heels? Friends. Alone? With one? Or two? Single girls? Searching girls? Pretty girls? Ugly girls? Loose girls? Doing. Drinking? What kind? How many? One, two, three? Four? Sober enough to remember? Too drunk to know? To know to say no? There: That was it. Speak up, loud, even louder, scream the word, or not a person will believe it. Practically a rule. Too softly spoken, and any word must count as yes.

  2

  MOM HAD TAKEN the week off from her job at Carlton Library. When she returned to Vermont, she’d go back alone. Maggie was staying with Wren for however many weeks or months she wanted. She wasn’t sure what she wanted or what she’d do while she stayed. Currently, she had no interest in deciding either. She had, however, formed a hazy notion of how this stint would begin: She was going to wander by the water, unthinking and uninterrupted, while Mom and Aunt Wren went off and did whatever—shopped, visited a museum, ate out.

  But they didn’t. Instead, they took over the beach.

  The weather had turned beautiful. Morning after morning at the breakfast table, while drinking her coffee out of the new mug, Maggie would eye the bright sunshine over the sink. She’d mention taking a walk by the lake. And Mom would beam and say, “Oh, that’s wonderful, honey.” Then: “You can join us.” As if she’d already called the lake but was willing to share.

  Four days of this, and Mom never took the hint: Maggie didn’t want to join them. She wanted to be alone.

  She knew it was stupid to act like the aunt’s stretch of shoreline could hold only one, two people max, and the first morning, when the dawn had broken over the water without a hint of the previous day’s harsh weather, she had ventured out with them. But she’d slipped back into the house after twenty minutes. She’d felt like an intruder.

  Mom and Aunt Wren must have decided to avoid whatever issues they couldn’t agree on, because after that initial tension in the kitchen, they got along fine. Remarkably well, in fact—talking, sprawled side by side on the sand, or walking slowly through the surf, heads down, or in the water, slim sisters wading into a mirror of light and sky.

  Maggie mostly stayed in the loft. Under the windows, curled up on the iron-framed bed, she read Aunt Wren’s old gothic romances, not her thing but a distraction.

  The books didn’t always help. When the words, rather than marshaling her thoughts, began to fray and untie them, she’d sit up quickly, turn around, press her forehead against the window screen, and find her mother and aunt below, their wind-whipped hair, the waves washing away their footprints in the sand.

  Every day, the lake matched the sky in blue, pink, or violet, however the sky was feeling at any particular hour. Every day, the seagulls flew in shattering reels and echoed the whitecaps in flash and color. It was a landscape orchestrated in doubles and rhymes.

  And Maggie would slouch down to the bed, leaving the twinning world to the twins, and go back to a novel that, when looked at as yet another example of the romantic-suspense genre, also seemed afflicted with redundancy: the same male lead, brooding and curt, dangerous and private, violent but ultimately tender; the same female protagonist, recklessly inquisitive and full of longing; and the same storm-wracked, gabled Victorian, teetering on a cliff, sinister and beautiful.

  With the raucous water and birdcalls and wind sweeping in through the loft windows, Maggie read mechanically. When she finished one book, she promptly started another. She read to blot her mind, to not remember. She read for the settings—the eerie mansions, with their hidden chambers, dark passages, and countless windows. The settings were the real characters—multifaceted, many-eyed monsters. They swallowed their inhabitants. They housed secrets.

  Maybe Wren’s cabin did, too. Maggie was getting that impression.

  On Friday afternoon, her fifth day at the aunt’s, she heard the rumble of a pickup and the spit and crunch of gravel. A door slammed. She lowered her book.

  It was probably Sam, the assistant who kept to the studio. Something was going on with him; Maggie just didn’t know what. He was like a phantom who made himself known with sounds, the cracks and thud
s of his labor and, once in a while, a question for the aunt, who’d taken the week off from work. Just through these sounds, the sharpness of some, the heaviness of others, Maggie could tell he was unhappy. And why was that? She thought back to the first time she’d met him. Who were Kate and Linnie? What didn’t he want his father to know? How did the aunt figure into these situations?

  And Aunt Wren. What was up with her?

  Maggie could see why Mom had picked here as the place for her and her daughter to go. It was the solution on which she hinged hopes. For Maggie, healing, and for herself, the same, only with her sister in mind.

  What Maggie couldn’t understand was why Aunt Wren had agreed. Why would this woman—the runaway, the recluse—open her house to the sister she’d spent most of her life avoiding? Open her house to a niece she didn’t even know?

  Maggie dropped her frown to the novel in her lap. The characters in this one were especially aggravating—the protagonist, silly; her love interest, a total jerk. And yet Amanda Darling was convinced Colt Manning harbored a sensitive core.

  Maggie snorted. Sure, he’s just pretending to be an asshole.

  Exasperated, she slapped the book shut, slid off the bed, and grabbed her cardigan.

  Downstairs, she opened the screen door. Mom and Aunt Wren were crouched by the water, as if they were searching for something. Probably my beach glass, Maggie thought gloomily. “Mom!”

  The wind and water half-muffled her call, but her mother still heard it. She looked up and smiled.

  Maggie dangled the keys she’d found by her mom’s purse on a kitchen chair. “Mind if I borrow the car?”

  * * *

  According to Aunt Wren, Maggie had two options for bookstores, one twenty minutes southeast in Allenport, the other twenty minutes southwest in Kesley. “I always go to the one in Allenport,” the aunt had said. “So do Thomas and Sam. It has a nice selection, and it’s bigger and busier than the other one, probably because of Allenport College.”

  “How do I get to Kesley?” Maggie had asked.

  She drove with the windows down and followed the parkway, with Lake Ontario’s brilliant blue rippling on her right. After taking the County Line exit, she headed south, turned right onto Ridge Road, and, down ten miles or so, took a left onto Maple Grove. She had the roads almost entirely to herself and passed sweeping fields, orchards, a farmhouse dwarfed by its red barn, pecking chickens, penned goats, a John Deere tractor, a combine harvester, another farmhouse, another barn, more fields, more orchards …

  She drove fast but could have been speeding on a big treadmill, so repetitive was the landscape. I’ve found the middle of nowhere. The thought gratified her. Nowhere was exactly where she wanted to be.

  But Maple Grove eventually became the Main Street of a town … of sorts. The business section—from the looks of it, just Main Street itself—had beautiful buildings, elegant and ornate, one after the other, but except for a few, they were relics, their windows either empty and blackly glinting the late-afternoon sunshine or filled with junk. A canal cut through Kesley. The Erie Canal, Maggie guessed.

  Tree Hollow Books appeared on her right, near the end of the block that came after the canal’s lift-bridge. She pulled into the municipal lot and had her pick of parking spots. After crossing the street, she hesitated outside the bookstore and admired its swirly-lettered sign, the window display (neat and colorful with new releases), and the beveled glass door, its woodwork trim painted a glossy red.

  She was prepared to find the shop as empty as the parking lot, all the storefront’s charm and effort wasted, but when she entered, jangling the bells on the door, four young women glanced her way.

  The floor was polished oak; the ceiling, high and decorated with pressed plates of tin. In between, from top to bottom: books, books, books. The walls were books. An old wooden table spanned the front of the shop. Farther down, the main space opened into smaller sections: HISTORY NOOK, BIOGRAPHY NOOK, COOKBOOK NOOK, TEEN NOOK.

  By the door, an old-fashioned cash register sat on a tall counter. An employee perched on a stool there, legs crossed, a paperback splayed and propped up on her knee. She was around Maggie’s age, Asian, and wore her black hair in two tight knobs, like gleaming horns. And she eyed Maggie with open interest. “You’re new.”

  Maggie wasn’t sure how to answer, so she just nodded and stuck her hands into her cardigan pockets. “Do you sell used books?”

  “Basement.” She tilted her head. “The stairs are way back there in the reading nook.” She closed the paperback, half-stood, and asked hopefully, “Need help finding something?”

  “Oh, no. No, thanks.” Maggie slipped past the desk and the other customers, pretty sure they were watching her, and found the staircase.

  The used section was darker than the upstairs. It was very quiet. Maggie looked around. There wasn’t anyone else on the floor.

  Her skin prickled with goose bumps. Her scalp tightened. A fast rattle stole the silence. It was the sound of her own breathing. She deliberately slowed her exhalation, tried to shrug off the panic, told herself, This isn’t the same. Stay calm. She was alone, after all. She could hardly be any safer.

  Until someone follows me down here. Until someone unsafe shows up.

  She glanced uneasily over her shoulder. Instead of exploring the packed shelves along the walls, she stuck with the sales table at the foot of the stairs. The books were divided into sections, labeled CHEAP, CHEAPER, SUPER-CHEAP. She decided quickly, choosing a few classics she’d never read. The novels smelled musty, as if the previous owners had stored them for too long in damp basements, but they were only a couple of bucks each, so that settled it. Maggie didn’t have much cash.

  Upstairs, two of the customers Maggie recognized from earlier had made their way to the back. The girls sat cross-legged on either end of an overstuffed couch, unopened books in their laps and steaming mugs in their hands. They were talking about someone’s Twitter addiction but fell silent when Maggie reached the top of the stairs.

  She smiled stiffly and hurried out of the reading nook.

  The person working at the desk looked like she was waiting for her. When Maggie set the books by the register, the clerk smiled and asked, “Find everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  The late-day sunlight spilled through the front windows and over the girl, teasing a blueness out of her black hair, and cast a shadow across the counter that (because of the buns) might have belonged to Mickey Mouse. The clerk drew the paperbacks closer to her and arranged them on the counter side by side.

  Maggie found her change purse in her cardigan pocket and took out a wrinkled ten.

  “Aha!” The girl brandished one of the paperbacks. “Good choice. Some French in the dialogue.” Eagerly: “Do you speak French?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a little?”

  Maggie frowned. “No.” What the hell?

  “Oh.” She sighed. “That’s too bad. I thought maybe you would.” She set down Villette. “You kind of look French.”

  “I do?” Huh.

  “Well, I think so. I’ve never actually been to France.” She clasped her hands under her chin and considered the other two books’ covers. “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” She hummed appreciatively. “One of the first feminist novels. Haven’t read it. Not yet. And a third Victorian. Middlemarch.” She twinkled a smile. “That’ll keep you busy.”

  Maggie stared at the girl. Did she always comment on her customers’ purchases? And appearances? How … rude. It was probably a good thing she didn’t work in a grocery store. (“Oh, these are the overnight pads with wings. You must get heavy periods. And Little Debbie Star Crunches? Bad for you.”) Maggie pointedly held out her money.

  The smile widened. “I’m interested in what people read.” She shrugged, as if her interest excused the nosiness, then rang up the books. “I’m going through a Russian phase, myself,” she said airily. “Chekhov, of course. Some Tolstoy. A little Dostoyevsky.”
She handed Maggie her change and slipped the receipt and books into a brown bag. “And I’m finally getting around to Nabokov. I started Lolita last night. Ever read it?”

  Maggie shook her head. She had zero interest in reading Lolita.

  “Our book club just finished Doctor Zhivago, but we’re shifting back to contemporary stuff and doing My Name Is Lucy Barton next.”

  “By Elizabeth Strout?” Maggie had been wanting to read that.

  The girl nodded. “In a few weeks.” She reached down and brought back up a flyer. “Here’s our schedule.” She leaned forward to hand it to Maggie, then stayed that way, hanging over the desk. “We need more members.”

  Directly behind Maggie, someone muttered, “Really bad.”

  Maggie whirled around.

  This girl rubbed a tattoo of a feather by the base of her throat. “There are only four of us.” She twisted one of the piercings along her ear. On the side of her neck was another tattoo, not a picture but a word and numbers. Maggie had just made it out—Romans 12:9—when the girl turned to glare out the window. “You should come.” She said this fiercely, almost daring Maggie to disagree.

  “Thanks.” She swiftly collected her bag. The two book club members had her practically sandwiched. She sidestepped toward the door. “I’ll, um, think about that.”

  “Great!” The clerk shared a victorious glance with the other girl, as if Maggie’s involvement in the book club were a done deal, then added in a singsong manner, “See you soon.”

  “Good-bye!” the girls from the back of the bookstore called.

  Disoriented by this show of excessive interest and warmth, Maggie mumbled a good-bye and backed out of the store, holding her bag against her chest like a shield.

  3

  THE WIND ROLLED off the lake, grabbed Maggie’s hair, and flung it straight up. She held her cold forearms and hunched in her T-shirt. Mom and Aunt Wren were gone for the day. Maggie finally had the beach to herself.