Chapter Six

SIX

Katherine called me midmorning on the eleventh to tell me she would get a later start than anticipated. Her flight had been delayed. She hadn’t gotten to the hotel until nearly three in the morning. Blah blah blah.

“Take your time,” I replied, trying not to sound thrilled at the delay.

She called me again in the early afternoon to tell me that getting the rental car was a debacle. She was stuck in traffic leaving the city. Blah blah blah.

“Take your time.”

She called me again in the midafternoon to tell me that the traffic was terrible. She was about to run some Lincoln off the road. Blah blah blah. By this time, the majority of her language was profanity. She was not going to be pleasant when she got here.

“Take your time.”

The house had been calm so far. No blood on the walls, no screaming at night, and Angelica and her friends were gone. Fredricka also seemed calmer, tidying things in an orderly fashion instead of moving objects from room to room for no reason. It seemed as if Father Cyrus’ blessing—aborted though it had been—had some impact, after all. I was thankful for the reprieve; we’d had a lot of work to get done in the days leading up to Katherine’s arrival.

A few days prior, I dug up the bones of Elias’ mother, which was always a laborious, multihour task. She had been buried out in the woods underneath a half-dead oak tree and was a pain in the neck to find the first time I dug her up, let me tell you. Since that first time, I had marked the tree with paint, a fuchsia M for “mother,” making her easier to find. Still, the digging-up part was strenuous. My prime body-excavating years were definitely behind me. I always tried to rebury the bones in a shallower grave than the one her initial gravedigger (whoever that had been) had dug, but I still wanted the bones deep enough to avoid detection by any wild animal. Elias might not care for the idea of a fox chewing on his mother’s ribs, were he to find out.

I was sweating and covered in mud by the time my shovel hit plastic. The first time I had done this, I’d had a delusion that I needed to treat the bones with some degree of respect, and I’d brought the nicest urnlike pot I owned—the kind you grow trees in before planting them out back—to carry them in as I hauled them back to the house. I placed them in the pot with care and reverence and then returned them gently to the dirt when I was finished. After the third time, I realized that trying to find a whole human skeleton in the dirt over and over was a monumental pain in the ass, so I bought a series of plastic bins from the Save Mart to serve as makeshift coffins. Small ones for the delicate finger bones, larger ones for the ribs and femurs. It felt a bit like organizing a closet, only with human remains. It took just a few more times after that for me to determine that lugging several large bins full of human remains up and back to the house was also not particularly pleasant, nor was lugging the urnlike pot, which was heavy as all get-out. That was where the garbage bag came in, the thick kind that doesn’t tear easily. Now the bins come out of the ground, the bones go into the bag, and the bag goes up to the house. I left the shovel and the empty bins by the tree as I turned back towards the house, garbage bag full of bones flung over my shoulder. I would be back soon.

I tracked mud all over the foyer and up the stairs, much—I’m sure—to Fredricka’s annoyance. The most likely place to find Elias was in Hal’s office. I unceremoniously dropped his mother’s bones on the floor, calling out for him. He didn’t appear, so I would have to summon him. I grumbled. After digging up his mother, I was fairly thirsty and in no mood for singing.

I sighed and cleared my throat. “Sleep now, my darling. Don’t you cry.” My voice was hoarse and off pitch, but it would do the trick. This was the song she used to sing to him, and it never failed to bring him about. “Mommy’s gonna stay with you all through the night.”

A puff of black mist started forming in the corner of the room. The bones began clattering on the floor.

I continued singing. “Ne’er shall you worry. Ne’er shall you mourn.?.?.?.”

Elias hissed into existence in the corner, face already black, teeth gleaming, jet-engine noise sounding. He was never a fan of the beginning of this process. He moved towards me. I skittered out of his reach, eyeing the bones as they trembled.

“You won’t see your little gray horse no more.”

Out from the bones sprang a gossamer-thin form of a woman, skin drooping, empty sockets for eyes. She howled. Elias moved closer to me, his jaw unhinged like that of a python ready to devour a rat.

I continued singing. “He ain’t in the field. No, he’s long gone.?.?.?.”

Elias looked to his right. He noticed the ghost of his mother emerging from the bones and his rattle quieted. His mouth folded back in on itself and his fangs vanished. His mother reached her skeletal arms out for him.

“But you’ll see his sweet face again ’fore long.”

I moved back to allow space for the reunion. Elias’ charcoal face regained its normal hue, and his eyes lost their resemblance to a burning void. For a minute, he looked just like a regular child as he stepped into the open arms of his dead mother. She wrapped her cracking arms around him and her mouth fell open. In a weak, gasping voice, she sang, “It all comes around with the moon and the sun, but Mommy’s gonna stay here till all is done.” The two of them collapsed into each other in a stream of ash and the room was empty once more, save for the bones on the floor, now still.

The first time I did this, I thought for sure I had cracked the code. I told Hal I had solved the Elias problem once and for all and he wouldn’t be bothering us anymore. It’s almost laughable how naive I was, and not so long ago either. Elias was back after about a week, and up to his usual tricks, lurking in corners, sinking his fangs into passersby who got too close. A disappointment for sure. On the bright side, I learned that reuniting Elias with the bones of his mother bought me one Elias-free week, which wasn’t nothing. Sometimes it was nice just to have one less thing to deal with.

I knelt down and started putting the bones back in the garbage bag. That song would be stuck in my head for the rest of the day. At the very least, I would be humming it the entire time I reburied Elias’ mother.

As I trudged back down the staircase, I passed by Fredricka, on her hands and knees, scrubbing my muddy footprints off the floor. I looked behind me and saw that I was still tracking mud and—if we’re being honest—trace particles of Elias’ mother. Fredricka followed my gaze and might have looked frustrated if she allowed that emotion to register on her face. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. Fredricka returned to scrubbing.

When Katherine finally arrived in the late afternoon of the eleventh, she was—as predicted—in an unpleasant mood.

“You would not believe how much goddamn construction there is by the airport,” she said to me instead of hello, wrapping an arm around me in a cursory hug as we met in the driveway, just outside her rental. “They’re putting in a new exit ramp, I think. Who the hell knows? Traffic was backed up for miles.”

Fortunately for me, she was too wrapped up in her own irritation to notice how visibly nervous I was.

“And then there was a goddamn pileup on the northbound side of the road and I was stuck in that traffic forever. And the wreck was on the other side of the road, for Christ’s sake. Everybody was just slowing down to gawk like a bunch of fucking morons.”

“Language,” I said, grabbing her bags.

Katherine would turn thirty in a few months, but she looked older. Her job, important and stressful, was starting to take a toll on her. I could see crow’s-feet that wanted to appear around her eyes, and lines on her forehead that refused to vanish when her face stilled. Her hair, dark and stylish, appeared free of gray, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she dyed it. She certainly hadn’t been afraid of hair dye as a teenager; her hair had often been defiant shades of blue, green, and once even pink.

For some reason, Katherine had dressed for her travels as if she were heading to a business meeting. She wore smart gray slacks that would easily compose one half of a power suit, and a silk blouse that was still neatly tucked in despite her lengthy car ride from the airport. I wondered what her teenage self might have said about her current outfit.

Katherine seemed to be studying me as well, charting the changes in my appearance. It had been several years since we’d seen each other in person, after all. Things had changed. “Your hair’s gone gray,” she said.

“Happens to the best of us,” I replied. In truth, I didn’t care much about the grays. I’ve always been somewhat neutral concerning my own appearance—I’ve never been anything special, not the kind anyone would think to feature in a magazine, but I had still managed to turn a head or two in the past. Hal’s head, at least. Noelle used to snipe at me for having the sort of skin that looked decent enough without much makeup, but over the years, the lines had set in. Distinguished, one might say, if one weren’t aware of how many of those lines were caused by lack of sleep. The grays too for that matter. Years ago, I might’ve considered dyeing my hair like my mother had when her hair started to go (The silver stands out in hair like ours, she once told me), but there didn’t seem to be much of a point to upkeep these days. So instead I let the salt mix into the pepper and let my hair grow long—the opposite of Katherine’s practice, it would seem.

“You’ve had a long trip,” I said. “You’ll want to settle in, I’m sure. Get comfortable.” Change out of those nonsensical clothes and what I now saw were heels on her feet. Since when did Katherine wear heels?

Katherine pulled her duffel bag from my grasp and hoisted it over her shoulder. “If it’s all the same, Mom, I’d like to get started figuring out what the hell happened to Dad. I’m so pissed I wasted most of the day in traffic.” With that, she set off towards the house and I followed, wheeling her suitcase behind me.

Hal and I had been successful in keeping Katherine away from the house for the entirety of the four years we’d lived here. Luckily, we had Katherine’s petty disinterest on our side. Ever since Katherine had left for college, it had been clear she had left for good. She made it a point to make her visits home as short as possible and arranged summer classes to keep her away at school, with no reason to return. She landed a good job immediately after graduating and threw her heart into it, quickly climbing the ranks and filling her time with work. She was now upper-upper management at some bank or another and had no time to visit. For a while it hurt our feelings, although I couldn’t say I blamed her for her distance. Hal hadn’t exactly made things easy for her, and although Katherine pretended not to be, she was always one to hold on to the tail end of a grudge. Still, once I had realized what life would be like in the new house, I drew a rare line in the sand. Katherine couldn’t be in the house. It was too dangerous, too frightening. Hal and I living there was one thing—we knew how to handle the pranksters (I did, anyway); we weren’t scared (I wasn’t, anyway); we had figured it all out (I had, anyway)—but Katherine was another story. I was perfectly willing to make a heaven of any hell in which I happened to find myself, but I would be goddamned if I made my daughter endure it.

Hal tended not to like the infrequent occasions when I drew lines in the sand, but in this situation, he wasn’t hard to convince. We came up with some half-hearted excuse for postponing the initial visit we planned for Katherine, and never made any serious plans for her to visit again. For her part, Katherine half-heartedly feigned disappointment and never brought up any serious desire to visit again. We spoke on the phone briefly yet regularly, readily accepted one another’s excuses for not spending holidays together (I’m doing Christmas with Claire’s family or Your father and I are thinking about heading up to Maine for the holidays), and we were mutually satisfied with the arrangement, albeit for different reasons.

As such, this was the first time Katherine was seeing the house. Even through her frustration, she paused outside and looked up, taking it all in. “Jesus, Mom. This is a beautiful house.”

I stood next to her and smiled, following her gaze. The blue and white of the paint made the house stand out against the yellowing trees that surrounded it, and the turret was always impressive, whatever the season. The house could be a pain in the neck more often than not, but nobody could deny its beauty. “It sure is,” I said.

We walked inside and Katherine mumbled a few other compliments, rare for her, about the house. “Original hardwood,” I said as we ascended the stairs. “And you’ll see in the kitchen—vintage stove. Still in working condition.”

Katherine made small noises of appreciation, but her interest was already fading.

Choosing which room to put Katherine up in had been a feat. Each room was challenging in its own right. The first bedroom on the left was nice because it had a fireplace, which would have been enticing were it not for Blythe’s having been chained up and burned alive in there. Blythe liked to come crawling out of the fireplace, skin melted by flames, charcoal limbs dragging her along the floor, leaving a trail of ash in her wake. She would get right in your face and scream, charred fingers scratching at your cheek—not exactly pleasant. Blythe was the reason we couldn’t light fires in the house; she would raise hell whenever one was lit—howling, flinging open doors and windows, and bringing about tornado-like winds that would snuff out any flames we started. But who could blame her?

The second bedroom was the room where the man who killed Fredricka—that grinning man, Jasper—had been found dead in the closet. He’d killed Blythe—his wife—as well, but I was always more perturbed about Fredricka, given the substantially more pleasant nature of our relationship. The papers at the time said that Jasper had committed suicide, but once you saw him there, all crumpled in on himself and bent at those unnatural angles, you knew it hadn’t been a suicide. Still, he didn’t do too much besides spend his time in the closet, body bent like a dead spider’s. When you opened the closet door, his head fell towards you, mouth agape, revealing those same gleaming teeth now shattered. One broken hand would rise, revealing the red head of a matchstick between his fingers. He flicked at it with a dried, cracked finger. It never lit. I didn’t interact with Jasper very much. In my defense, I wasn’t particularly interested in getting to know him, given what he had done to Fredricka and all.

The last guest bedroom was generally fine, although from time to time a large gash would appear on the wall, giving way to some sort of black void oozing something that looked an awful lot like blood but was definitely not blood. I wasn’t too sure what it was all about, but I had a feeling it was best not to touch it.

So the second bedroom it was. Least of three evils, I supposed.

Katherine flung her bag on the bed with a sigh. I lingered in the doorway with her suitcase, on guard for any pranksters in the room. Jasper usually went away for a little while after Father Cyrus’ blessing, but one could never be too careful around here.

Katherine checked the time on her phone. “I want to go down to the police station today, file that missing person report,” she said absentmindedly, scrolling through her emails.

“It might be a little late for that today, dear,” I said. “It’s a small town, not a lot of police officers.”

Katherine was typing out an email, barely listening. “They can take our information,” she said to her phone.

“They won’t be able to get started on anything until tomorrow,” I said.

I heard the swoosh from Katherine’s phone as she sent her email. She stared at her screen, one hand on her hip. “Four forty-eight,” she mumbled to herself.

“It’s at least a thirty-minute drive to the station,” I said. “And you’ve had such a long day in the car already.”

Katherine lowered her phone, pressed her eyes shut. “Fuck.” It was her way of admitting that I was right, and I would take it. She stood there for a second, eyes closed, before springing back into action, hands flung into the air. “Fuck. Fine, fine. Fuck.” She ripped her duffel open and started pulling out clothes, begrudgingly settling into the room.

I held my breath as she moved towards the closet and wrenched the door open. Jasper was nowhere to be seen. I exhaled.

“Do you have any hangers in here?” Katherine asked, examining the closet.

“I have some upstairs,” I said quickly, trying to minimize the amount of time Katherine would spend inside the closet. I retrieved a handful of hangers for her and left her to unpack. I was grateful for both the night’s reprieve from a police investigation and a continued prankster-free household. Neither of those realities could be delayed forever, but I would take whatever calm moments I could get.

In the kitchen, a cup of tea, still steaming, was waiting for me. I lifted the cup to my lips. “Thanks, Fredricka,” I said into the air.

“You’re welcome, ma’am.” I wasn’t sure where Fredricka’s response came from. I was grateful for our truce.

The day before, Fredricka and I had gathered up all the bird carcasses from the yard and tossed them into the garbage bag that previously contained the bones of Elias’ mother. I didn’t want Katherine to become unnerved by the birds, especially since after a few days they begin attracting ants. There had been more birds in the yard than I’d thought; collecting them turned into quite the chore. We burned the birds in a bonfire in the backyard, Fredricka holding the bag open and me tossing each feathered corpse, one by one, into the fire. Together, we watched the birds burn, their feathers singeing into nothingness as their bodies blackened. Our faces glowed orange with the fire in the diminishing dusk light. Somewhere inside the house, Blythe howled and roared, climbing the walls and scratching her nails against the ceiling.

“I’m really worried about Katherine’s visit,” I said.

Fredricka murmured in response, pushing a smoldering bird closer to the flames with a stick.

“I don’t like that the boards are off the door,” I said, watching a burning feather drift into the air.

“Needs must when the devil drives,” Fredricka responded.

“I suppose,” I said.

We stood in silence, the sky growing dark around us. The heat from the flames was a comfort in the chilling air. The fire cracked and spat, ashes lifting skyward. The flames started cooking the flesh of the birds, feathers completely gone now, and an aroma of charred poultry hung thick in the air.

“You know what we haven’t had in a while?” I said. “Roast chicken.”

“Mmmm,” Fredricka responded. “I believe we have a chicken in the icebox. If ma’am wishes, I could prepare it for dinner tonight.”

“That sounds good,” I said, my mouth starting to water. “Perhaps with fingerling potatoes?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, excellent,” I said, taking Fredricka’s stick to poke at another carcass, mostly eviscerated at this point. “I’m starving.”

Today, I stood in the kitchen, tea nearly finished, and looked out at the remnants of the bonfire in the backyard. It had raged on for an hour or so while Fredricka cooked and I watched the birds turn to ash. It really had been a pleasant evening, after all. And the chicken had been delicious.

My pleasant recollections were shattered by the sound of crashing and clattering from upstairs. Goddamnit, I thought, leaving my teacup on the counter and dashing out of the kitchen. This is happening too soon. Father Cyrus had just blessed the house. True, he hadn’t gotten to finish, but I thought I had at least a week before things started getting chaotic again. I sprinted up the steps. Who was doing this? Elias? Not due back for several days, at least. It couldn’t be Angelica—she and her friends tended to stay gone the longest. Had Fredricka decided she was upset with me again? Even after our truce?

The noise was coming from Hal’s office. Likely Elias, then. What on earth did I excavate his mother for? I thought. If I weren’t going to get a week of peace out of the ordeal, I wouldn’t have even bothered digging up the woman.

I burst through the office door, ready to give Elias a piece of my mind, even if I ended up getting bitten in the process. However, instead of Elias’ chalky presence, I found Katherine yanking at the cabinet doors lining the lower halves of Hal’s bookshelves.

“Katherine,” I said, my voice a mix of surprise and relief, “what on earth are you doing?”

“All these doors are fucking locked,” Katherine growled, pulling harder at the cabinets.

“Language.”

“Locked.” She pulled on the handles of a set of cabinets. “Locked.” She grabbed at another set of handles. “They’re all fucking locked!”

“Could you be careful with those, please?” She was yanking on the cabinets so hard I could envision the wood shattering.

“Why the hell did Dad lock all his cabinets?”

“I have no earthly idea.”

“What the hell is he keeping in here?”

“I don’t know. Drafts of manuscripts, perhaps? Signed copies of his books?” Both of these suggestions were unlikely.

Katherine swiveled around on the floor and started tugging at the drawers of his desk. “These are fucking locked too. Goddamnit!” She slammed both palms against the top of Hal’s desk, hard. A cup of pens tipped over.

“Jesus Christ, Katherine,” I said, startled by her outburst. “Language.”

“Is there a key anywhere?” She dug through the items on top of Hal’s desk—the toppled cup of pens, a little bowl of paper clips, stacks of random papers. Her oncoming emotional outbursts had the same tells as her childhood tantrums. Raised volume of speech, rapid movements, inflexible insistence on getting what she wanted. When she returned home from her stay at my sister’s and discovered we had gotten rid of Bilboa, she tore around her room, looking for him and shouting, Where is he? Where is he? long after we told her we had given him away. Then she threw things. And she was seventeen at the time, probably too old for all that.

“I’m sure there’s got to be one somewhere.”

Katherine stood, waving her arms about her face. “And why are there so many goddamn flies in this house?”

“Katherine—could you just calm down?”

Of course, nobody ever listens when you tell them to calm down. “Fuck!” Katherine screamed. “Fuck fuck fuck!” She snatched up a stack of papers, crinkling them in her hands and raising them high, preparing to hurl them across the room. The tantrum was nigh. I ducked in preparation.

Then, seemingly remembering she was almost thirty, Katherine stilled herself. She set the papers back on Hal’s desk in a messy, crumpled ball, and took several long, deep breaths, her fingers sunk deep into her hair. She looked as if restraining herself from throwing things was causing her physical pain, but she breathed her way through it.

“Sorry,” she said finally, not looking at me. “I’m sorry.”

I blinked. This was progress. When she was a child, Katherine’s tantrums had been legendary, both in length and in power. She had completely lacked the ability to calm herself or see reason, so it had been left to me to assuage her or just to hold on for dear life until the storm passed. Hal had always said I gave in to her tantrums too quickly. However, if the choice was either giving in to Katherine’s demands or hours of vicious tantruming, I tended to choose the former over the latter. Somewhere along the way, it seemed as if Katherine had learned a way to resist giving in to her own temper, although her restraint looked wobbly.

I recovered from my shock. “You’re tired,” I said. “You’ve had a long day of travel. You clearly aren’t in a good headspace to cope with setbacks.” I motioned to the desk, a mess of spilled pencils and crumpled papers; then I moved towards her, reaching out a calming hand to place on her back. “Take the night off. Get some rest.” My hand connected with the swell of her shoulder, and I took momentary joy in the warmth of her living body, as well as the nonoccurrence of ghastly death-day flashbacks following the touch. “Then tomorrow you can start up with a clear head.”

Katherine’s hands were still in her hair, but she nodded, taking long, purposeful breaths. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, you’re right.” She lowered a hand and patted mine, a touch that didn’t so much communicate appreciation of comfort as it did Okay, Mom, that’s enough of that. I released her shoulder and she lowered both hands to her side, meeting my eyes at last. “And I suppose it’s about dinnertime. Do you have any food around here?”

I smiled. “I have some delicious roast chicken leftovers.”

---

—The chicken was indeed delicious, even reheated. I prepared dinner while Katherine changed and likely sent more emails upstairs. Fredricka loitered along the periphery of the kitchen, whispering cooking tips and instructions for working the antique stove.

“You can take the night off, you know,” I hissed at her.

“Ma’am will find a cup of fat in the icebox. It will keep the chicken from growing too dry,” she responded.

After a while, Katherine joined me. She had finally shed her professional attire in favor of gray lounge pants and a Sex Pistols T-shirt, and she looked much more like the Katherine I remembered, the firecracker of a teenager trying desperately to be edgy.

Katherine found a bottle of red wine in the pantry. She had likely been looking for one, but was unhappy when she found it nonetheless. She grabbed it by the neck, held it in front of me. “Was Dad drinking again?” she asked, a question I didn’t feel like answering.

“I think that may have been a housewarming gift,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. Our real estate agent had brought it over shortly after we moved in. Not feeling like explaining the decades of bad history this family had with that sort of thing, I hid the bottle away in the pantry. The fact that it had gone untouched all this time spoke more to Hal’s dislike of red wine than to his sobriety.

After dinner, we lounged in the living room, on either side of one of the vintage sofas, and we enjoyed the sleepy haze that follows a big meal. Katherine twirled her fingers around her third glass of wine, swirling it and occasionally lowering her nose to the glass to inhale deeply before taking another sip. Sometime between when Katherine left for college and now, she had learned how to look proper while drinking wine. Lord knows she hadn’t learned that from Hal or me.

Katherine must have started drinking when she was in college. Despite her punk rock inclinations and general air of rebellion, Katherine had been a surprisingly teetotaling teenager. She had been nettlesome and tempestuous, sure, but as far as I knew, she hadn’t even had so much as a sip of beer at a party. She must have learned a lesson early on about the consequences of certain types of habits, and chosen instead to throw herself into her academics, a means of getting herself far away from such consequences. I told her once that I was proud of her for all that and she rolled her eyes at me. Somewhere along the way, she must’ve decided the habit wasn’t so horrible, after all.

“The chicken was good,” Katherine said, nose in her glass. “Very moist.”

“Added in a cup of fat while it cooked,” I said.

Katherine murmured in response and attended to her wine. We sat in silence, save for the buzzing of the occasional fly.

When I was pregnant with Katherine, I had been so excited to learn that I was having a daughter. I’d had my trepidations about having a child to begin with, especially considering the chaos that Noelle and I had experienced growing up. Our father, with his little ways, was often needier than Noelle and me combined, making him an additional child for my mother to raise. But finding out that I was having a girl had cast an exciting glow over the whole prospect. Katherine had been my little shadow when she was younger, running errands with me, crying if we had to be apart. It was nice.

“How’s Claire?” I asked. I might as well take this opportunity to get to know my daughter again, before she busied herself with her work and her emails and her quest to find out what had happened to her father.

“Broke up,” Katherine said into her glass.

“Oh. I’m so sorry, Katherine.”

“Yeah. Well.”

The air was tense. I needed to tread lightly here. We were five or six missteps away from an outburst. “When did it happen?”

“A few months ago,” Katherine said.

Katherine and Claire had been together for a few years at least, although Katherine hadn’t told us about her until they were serious, so it could’ve been longer for all I knew. Prior to Claire, Katherine had dated a few girlfriends with varying degrees of seriousness, none lasting longer than a few months. I always wondered what the common denominator was for all those brief relationships. Was it the type of women Katherine found herself drawn to? Was it a lack of desire for a longer commitment on Katherine’s part? Was it Katherine’s demanding nature or her tantrums, which must have grown tiresome to all women who were not her mother? Or was it something deeper, some flaw or brokenness within Katherine, something put there by Hal and me, despite our best efforts?

The length of Katherine’s relationship with Claire had seemed like a good sign. Katherine was starting to calm herself, to settle. Katherine always spoke highly of Claire, albeit in her own guarded manner. Still, to those who knew Katherine—and I would argue that I knew her fairly well—it was evident that she cared deeply for Claire, more than she had cared for anybody in the past.

“She moved her stuff out,” Katherine said, answering a question I didn’t ask. “She’s living closer to her parents now.”

“Are you?.?.?. okay?” I didn’t know how this question would be received. Katherine and I had never really talked about her feelings in the context of romantic relationships, even when she had been a teenager. Of course, there had been more pressing issues in our lives at the time, and I struggled to remember if Katherine had even dated anyone during her adolescent years. She must have. I was just forgetting.

“I’m fine.” Katherine took a long pull of her wine. That was that.

When she was younger, I had always thought Katherine more closely resembled Hal than me. She had his dark hair, his taut jaw, his piercing eyes. She definitely took on more of his personality than of mine, always preferring to be the one to set the rules rather than follow them. As I watched her on the couch now, I thought that she looked quite like me after all, her hard angles having softened with time, lines forming on her face just as they had formed over mine. And the way she tugged at her ear, absentmindedly—that was my mannerism, always had been. How funny that she should have picked up one of my quirks so unintentionally and kept it with her all this time, even through the distance, both geographical and emotional.

“Do you remember that time Bilboa got out of his cage?” Katherine asked.

Lost in my own thoughts, I was more startled by the sound of her voice than by the content of the question. Still, I blinked. “What?” I asked.

Katherine shrugged. “Random, I know,” she said. “I was just thinking about him. Some nature documentary came on the other day. The narrator mentioned something about boa constrictors liking to have places to hide, and I thought, Yeah, they sure do.” She glanced at me. “Do you remember?”

I chuckled. “Yes, I do. You came out of your bedroom looking more guilty than I had ever seen you, and I thought, She’s really done something wrong this time. The way you looked, I thought you might have killed someone.”

“I thought you guys were about to kill me,” Katherine said. “That was the most scared I ever was to tell you guys something. And that includes coming out.”

“You were just standing there, looking like you were about to confess to serial arson, and giving me a panic attack. And then you said—and I remember this exactly—”

“He’s gone on an unexpected journey,”Katherine and I said simultaneously, both starting to laugh.

“It took me so long to even figure out who you were talking about,” I said.

“And then you went back to my room to check,” Katherine giggled, “as if I would have misplaced a five-foot snake in his own cage.”

“We tore up the house looking for him.” I laughed, picturing us racing around the old house, panicked. “And calling his name, for God’s sake. Like he was a dog.”

“Bilboa, Bilboa,”Katherine mimicked, and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “C’mere, boy.?.?.?.”

“You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find a giant snake,” I said. “But how long did we look? Hours?”

Katherine’s eyes started to glisten. Her wineglass was swaying. “And?.?.?. do you remember?.?.?.??”

Oh, I remembered. I could barely get the words out. “Your father?.?.?. peeling out of his office like it was on fire?.?.?.”

“Screaming?.?.?.”

“A full two octaves higher?.?.?.”

“That?.?.?. goddamn hobbit?.?.?. almost bit me.?.?.?.”Katherine wheezed, bent at the waist. Her laughter was contagious, and I gladly let myself fall victim to it. For several moments, the only sounds in the room were giggles and Katherine’s occasional snorts.

Hal had been fairly mad about Bilboa, and the search party we had formed was fueled more by fear than by amusement at the time. I was relieved to see that Katherine had colored the memory with humor now, especially when it would have been so easy to paint it the usual dismal shade of so many of her teenage memories. Hal’s discovery of Bilboa in his office had played a large role in his eventually convincing me to get rid of the snake, but I didn’t need to mention that today.

Katherine dabbed at her eyes and nose, still giggling. She took another sip of her wine, properly aerated now after the jostling it had received. After a time, her chuckles and sighs and sniffs faded into silence.

“Claire said I was angry all the time.”

Katherine’s sudden words startled me more than any of the pranksters in the house ever had. I looked at her, blinking and soundless. She stared into the distance, clutching her wine like a security blanket.

“She said living with me was like walking on eggshells. That she never knew what would set me off. She said it made her tired.” Katherine’s mouth twitched, a frown trying to fight its way onto her face. “She said she didn’t want to be tired anymore.”

I knew the feeling.

“She has a new girlfriend now,” Katherine said, her voice bitter. “Some fucking therapist or something. Someone well-adjusted who doesn’t get angry, I bet.”

I considered asking her how she knew this but thought better of it. My next move was crucial, and I could spot a bad response when I saw one.

“I tried, Mom. I really tried.” Katherine’s eyes were starting to glisten again, but she wasn’t laughing. “I know how I am. I don’t want to be this way. I’ve seen what?.?.?.” She waved her hand as if to erase the sentence she had inadvertently started. “I went to therapy. I took medication. I cut back on the drinking. I thought I was getting better. But, apparently, I wasn’t.”

This was more information about Katherine than I had received in years, likely since she was a child. I felt lost and she still wasn’t looking at me. I considered touching her, an attempt at comfort, but sometimes when you touched things around here, you regretted it.

Katherine’s face was wet. She finished off her wine in a large gulp, then stared at the glass as she would have at an enemy. Her lips were starting to adopt a maroon hue.

Finally, her eyes, glinting and tinged with red around the corners, met mine. “I’m so scared I’m going to be just like him,” she said.

When Katherine was younger, getting her to stop crying had been easy. She usually wanted something, and I could give it to her. A toy? Sure. A cookie before dinner? Ill-advised, but why not? A five-foot boa constrictor that eats frozen mice and escapes periodically? Sounds like a fun adventure! I could get her what she needed, bandage up any injury she had, tell her it would all be okay, and usually be right. I didn’t have many jobs in this world, but keeping Katherine from crying was an important one. And right now all signs would suggest that I had failed.

“Katherine?.?.?.”

She gestured at her empty glass, made a crude mimic of a laugh. “As if we needed any more evidence.”

“Katherine?.?.?.”

“I know you’ll love me, anyway.” Her mouth twitched. “But will anyone else?”

I had lines here. Somewhere inside of me was the right thing to say, the thing that would make everything better, stop Katherine from crying. The answer she couldn’t get from therapy (she had gone to therapy?) or medication (she had taken medication?). My lines were in an old book somewhere, tucked far away on the bookshelf of my mind and covered in dust. I had misplaced it. Perhaps I had thrown it away years ago, not thinking.

I was too late. Katherine wrapped up her grief with a shake of her head and a sharp exhalation. “Anyway.” A tight laugh served as the ribbon wrapping up the moment, never again to be undone. “Might as well finish off the wine, I suppose.” She launched off the couch, glass in hand, and plodded towards the kitchen, finger swiping at her eyes. Apparently, cutting back on the drinking was not on the docket for tonight.

There was no point in my saying anything now to make everything better. Katherine seemed done with show-and-tell and was taking her toys back home to play by herself, as she usually preferred. Still, I searched my mind for something that might fix the situation. Muscle memory and all.

“Mom,” Katherine’s voice called from the kitchen, “did you know you had a kettle boiling on the stove?”

Goddamnit, Fredricka. Talk about muscle memory.

“Oh, um?.?.?. yes, I did.” The lie was evident. “Water. For tea.”

“It’s really boiling. I think it’s done. I’m going to take it off the stove, okay?”

“Yes, dear, that’s fine.”

Katherine walked back over to the living room. She stood in the entranceway, looking at me quizzically. “Sorry. I just get nervous leaving things on the stove when we’re so far away from the kitchen. It’s a quirk I have.”

Of course I knew this was a quirk of Katherine’s. Because it was a quirk of mine. Katherine had grown up hearing me fret over the stove, anxious about leaving the kitchen with pans on the burners for even a second. I’d go on about things catching fire, while Katherine and Hal just rolled their eyes at me. How many times had Katherine been making herself a grilled cheese and darted out of the kitchen for just a second—just to get something from the other room, she’d say—only to be sent back by me shouting, Don’t you leave that stove unattended? Countless.

“I know, dear.” The stove wasn’t unattended, I thought. Fredricka was there.

Katherine was looking at me the same way I had looked at her when she was four years old and told me she could pour her own milk from the gallon jug into her cereal bowl. “Do you want tea?” she asked.

I sighed and lifted myself off the couch. I didn’t want tea, but what kind of person would I look like if I said I didn’t? A crazy woman who forgot about a kettle full of boiling water for tea she didn’t even plan to drink. I decided to have a conversation with Fredricka later and tell her to calm down with the tea for a little while. She wouldn’t like it, but she had already agreed to keep her distance from Katherine for me, hadn’t she?

But when I got to the kitchen, I saw that Fredricka had left out the chamomile and a jar of honey, and that sounded pretty good, after all.