36

36

T he next morning, they wake to see that the storm has finally passed, and, though the earth is still blanketed with snow, the clouds have cleared and the bright sun reflects off the ground with fervor.

Flora's dad lies with Iris on the living room floor. He shakes a tambourine and presses giant buttons on a baby-sized keyboard Esther bought.

"Want to join us?" he asks as Flora walks through the room.

Her feet and heart stop. Flora sees her baby's face under the water, fingers holding her little head below the surface.

I might try to kill her

She looks at her father with Iris and longs for the normalcy of it all. But she doesn't trust these hands that sometimes do not feel like her own.

Esther enters from the kitchen, sensing something is up. "I was about to take a walk. Flora, you want to come?"

Flora nods.

They walk through the woods in silence. Flora is exhausted. She should have spent the night sleeping thanks to all the extra help, but instead she scrolled on her phone endlessly, hiding its light beneath the duvet and turning it off whenever Connor stirred. She read mom forums and social media threads and anything she could find about sleep deprivation and its hallucinatory effects. Paired with the imbalance of post-birth hormones, she knows now through her research that it could have all been in her mind.

But… the hair… her mother's smell… the blood under her nails… and then this morning, while emptying the dishwasher, she found a handful of artificial sweetener packets in the silverware drawer.

"Do you or Dad use fake sweetener?" she asks Esther as their boots crunch the snow.

Esther frowns. "No. Or, maybe your dad does sometimes."

If she finds it an odd question, she doesn't say. Flora wracks her brain. Could they have been sent in the food order her father had delivered?

"How are you feeling today?" Esther asks, and Flora wants to push the question right back into Esther's mouth.

"Good, yeah, thanks," she says.

They walk in silence, their feet moving in sync, the crunching a steady rhythm.

"It's probably annoying," Esther says, reading Flora's mind, "hearing that question over and over again."

Flora considers. "A little," she admits.

Esther smiles. "Well, then, let's talk about something else."

"Can you tell me about when my mom died?" Flora asks.

Esther stops in her tracks. But Flora's expression gives nothing away; she acts as though this line of inquiry is as common as wondering what to cook for dinner.

"Uh, well," Esther starts, moving her feet again to catch up with Flora, "what would you want to know?"

And suddenly, they reach the spot that Flora has been walking toward for twenty minutes, whether or not she was conscious of it. The fire her mother built. Or, rather, the remnants of the fire. Two burnt logs. Flora frowns. As she stares at the pile, she realizes maybe it's not the proof she needs. Weren't there more logs here the other night?

"I'm not sure what I want to know," Flora admits. "She and I weren't talking when she died, and I think I just didn't want anything to do with her. Or her death. You know?"

Flora does not dwell on the truth, which is that she was so wracked with guilt over her mother's suicide that she knew she'd never be able to forgive herself. She had told her mother to get out of her life. And so, her mother had complied.

would things be different if

"I kinda checked out," Flora says, cutting off her own thoughts. "I don't even really know what happened except that she shot herself."

Esther nods slowly, turning something over in her mind. "That's pretty much the whole of it."

"Where?" Flora asks. Esther looks at her quizzically, increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation. Flora repeats, "Where did she shoot herself?"

"She was in the living room—"

"No, I mean, where on her body?"

Esther shifts her weight between her feet. "Maybe we should head back. You could ask your dad—"

"I don't want to," she says quickly. Then, covering, she follows up with, "I don't want to stress him out. I just want some of the details, you know?"

Esther bites her lip. Dust dances in the rays of sunlight that shine through the trees around them.

"She shot herself in the head. Or, well, the throat. Like this." She holds the tips of her fingers in a gun shape and presses them under her mouth, pointing upward.

"And the bullet went out the top of her skull?"

Esther's eyes narrow, and she clearly wants to resist, wants to return to the house and wash her hands of Flora's curiosity. But she answers, "Out her eye."

Flora thinks of her mother's tic, her twitching eye. "The right one?" she asks, and Esther nods.

Then, as if hurrying to get this over with, Esther adds, "They didn't find her for a few days. I think…" She makes a sort of I'm sorry expression. "I think a downstairs neighbor complained of the smell."

Flora knows this story. Her mother told it to her. The "neighbor" who died. The neighbor whose lonely death had filled her mother with dread. The neighbor whose story Jodi did not want to be her own.

But that was her mother's story. She did die alone.

Flora is profoundly sad.

The two women have been standing so still that a squirrel meanders by them, smelling the ground in search of food. He is so close that Flora can see the individual hairs on his back, the medley of browns and blacks and whites, his beady eyes that dart around with a singular focus.

And then something else comes to her. An echo of a memory.

"Esther," she says, "I have a weird question."

Esther raises her eyebrows, and Flora knows she must be thinking how all of these questions have been weird. Still, Flora doesn't hesitate.

"I need you to be honest with me," she says.

"Okay…" Esther replies, wary.

"When they found my mom… what kind of state was her body in?"

Esther looks confused.

Flora tries to clarify. "I mean—were there any—bugs?"

Esther's expression changes. She looks at Flora with something akin to fear. And then she finally finds her voice.

"Beetles," she croaks. "Flesh-eating beetles."