We Sing It Anyway
“Take care of your brother, Elsinore. He’s little, he doesn’t understand. I’ll take care of you, and you take care of him.”
—Jane Harrington-Price
An ordinary family home in Portland, Oregon
Trying to remember why I bothered coming downstairs in the first place
I STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF the dark living room, trying to remember why I was there, and trying with equal fervor not to think about how disappointed my mother would have been if she could see the place.
She’d never been the best housekeeper the world had ever known, but she and Dad had always been good about splitting the chores, and Artie and I had been encouraged to pitch in since we were old enough not to make the messes worse.
Our house had always been cluttered but clean, someplace we wouldn’t be ashamed to show to company.
That was over now. It had started to slip when Mom died.
Dad stopped cleaning then, and so did I.
What was the point in dusting or running the vacuum cleaner when my mother would still be dead anyway?
I couldn’t dust my way out of her death, or dry so many dishes that she’d come back and tell me I’d done a good job. She was gone.
Turning around, I stomped back up the stairs and left the destroyed living room to the shadows.
My mother wasn’t here, and she was never going to be here again, and I couldn’t stand one more minute in the space that had been hers above all others.
Maybe later, when I could remember why I’d been there to begin with.
Her absence was like acid in the air, turning it toxic and impossible to breathe.
What makes matters worse is that we know ghosts exist. You can’t be a member of this family and not know ghosts exist, because we were pretty much all raised by one.
Mary Dunlavy has been our family babysitter since my grandmother was a baby, and she’s been dead the whole time.
You don’t get toilet trained by a dead woman without coming to accept the persistence of life after death.
Only my mother didn’t persist. When she died, she went straight on to whatever comes next, not lingering around for the rest of us to cling on to.
She died, and she disappeared, and she was gone, forever.
It wasn’t fair. It was never going to be fair.
How was I supposed to give a damn about mopping the kitchen floor in the wake of her leaving me?
But when Mom died, my brother kept cleaning as best as he knew how.
Arthur wasn’t the most skilled, but he tried, and he cared, and because of those two things, we hadn’t descended fully into squalor.
Oh, the place had been a total wreck, but it had been the sort of wreck that didn’t necessarily slip over the line into becoming a biohazard.
Yes, the dishes had overflowed the sink, but they hadn’t been covered in mold, and the trash had been occasionally taken out.
Anyone who’d looked at the place would have been able to tell that we were coping. Not well, but coping.
All that changed six months ago, when a bunch of rejects from a new production of Starlight Express appeared in our living room, grabbed my brother, and vanished.
Not cool. Oh, and all the rejects had been cuckoos, meaning they had the face of the woman who’d accidentally killed my original brother and built a replacement out of the memories the rest of us had lying around at the tops of our minds.
Yeah, our shit is both unique and overly complicated.
What about it? Beyond the fact that my overall family life is why I can’t keep a girlfriend to save my life.
Most of the women available in the greater Portland area are either straight, human, or both, and the human ones always think I’m lying to them when I have to cancel another dinner or trip to the movies. The nonhuman girls, well.
For a lot of the nonhuman girls close enough to human to actually be in my available dating pool, their species is in a state of critical decline, which means all hands on deck for the reproduction trenches.
I’m not particularly into the idea of being a mom, not even of the step variety, and they don’t get to opt out of preserving their species’ genetic health.
So we just politely agree not to do the whole “doomed hookup” routine, and they settle down with people who can help them co-parent.
“Hey, are you endangered enough to be required to reproduce for preservationist reasons?” is not the most romantic question ever asked during the early stages of a relationship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
The girl I’d most recently been flirting with, Amelia, was a Hockomock Swamp Beastie, a species of humanoid so rare that they’re only found in one wetland region of Massachusetts.
We’d only gotten as far as heavy petting before the subject of species-saving reproduction came up, and well, I might be invited to the wedding, but I wasn’t going to be a bride.
And this isn’t entirely relevant to what happened six months ago, so: getting back on track.
A bunch of sci-fi cuckoos kidnapped my brother, and I called my cousin Annie immediately.
Why her? Well, Annie had been there when my original brother died and my other cousin, Sarah, had constructed his replacement.
She understood the score better than most people.
Also, she’s a sorcerer, and that means all this magic bullshit is a little more her wheelhouse than it is my own.
If anyone would be able to figure out what to do next, I figured it was going to be Annie.
So I’d told her what had happened, and she’d put me on speakerphone with my sort of creepy maternal grandparents, and then they’d said they were going to handle things and hung up. Leaving me with nothing to do but sit at home with my traumatized father and wait.
Mom was the love of Dad’s life. That’s how you want it to be with your parents, right?
You want them to be some grandiose love story that you can aspire to and be vaguely embarrassed by at the same time.
Only when your parents are a love story, they’re fragile.
It’s like having a beautiful, breakable vase and living in earthquake country. There’s a risk.
They’d been stronger than some people, and they’d survived losing their only son, survived having him replaced by a relative stranger, survived the return of Mom’s parents and the chaos it dragged along in its wake.
But one bullet and their love story ended, and everything broke down.
When I’d gone upstairs to tell my father that Arthur was gone, he’d barely looked away from his computer, only replied, in a dull, dead voice that he supposed it had always only been a matter of time.
So I’d lost my mother, lost my brother—twice—and now lost my father, effectively. I’d gone back downstairs, sat down on one of the few clear spots on the couch, put my head in my hands, and cried.
And that was six months ago, and I didn’t think anyone had washed a dish since then.
The smell in most of the house was an unpleasant mixture of body odor and trash, making it feel like I was walking through a dumpster.
I barely noticed anymore. My entire world was falling apart.
Losing Artie had been hard. Losing Mom had been cataclysmic. Losing Arthur after everything else …
Well, it had been unthinkable. He wasn’t the brother I’d had in the beginning, but he was the brother I had left, and the brother I had learned, one awkward moment at a time, to love.
Without him, it was just me and Dad alone in the dark, and I was becoming increasingly afraid that we were never going to make it out again.
I stalked down the hall, ignoring the trash and laundry on the floor, and let myself back into my bedroom, which was in many ways as bad as the rest of the house.
There was less actual garbage, but the laundry had piled up until it was taller than the bed, and three-quarters of the mugs and tumblers from the kitchen covered my dresser, bedside table, and vanity.
I’d have to rinse some of them out soon, or I’d have to resort to drinking straight out of the bottles.
I threw myself down on my bed—one of the few clean flat surfaces left in the house, although that status was in question, with as often as I was eating my meals there—and rolled onto my back, staring up at the ceiling.
I’d only been like that for a few minutes before I heard Mary make a small noise of startled disapproval off to one side.
“Elsinore Norelle Harrington-Price, I know I raised you better than this,” she said, in the sort of clipped, horrified tone that basically guaranteed the mice were going to turn her impending lecture into a catechism.
The thought of being yelled at by rodents for the rest of my life was too much added on top of everything else.
I grabbed my spare pillow and pulled it down over my face.
Maybe if I pressed hard enough, I could suffocate myself before she really got rolling.
No such luck. Only a moment later, she was grabbing the pillow out of my hands and throwing it across the room, into the mess against the wall. I groaned. “Now I need a new pillowcase,” I complained, rolling over to glare at the ghost in my room.
The ghost in question glared right back, folding her arms across her chest to emphasize just how annoyed she was. “You already needed a new pillowcase,” she said. “And new sheets. And from the way it’s crunching underfoot, maybe a new rug. What is going on here? Did you just give up?”
“Yes,” I said curtly. “That’s exactly what we did. Glad you noticed. Thanks for this little reminder that I’m trash and deserve to sink into the bog I’ve been curating beneath my bed.”
Mary sighed, expression softening. “Oh, sweetheart. I suppose you’re right: that wasn’t very generous of me, was it? I know you’ve been going through a hard time.”