Chapter 51
Malcolm nursed his anger. It helped tamp down his fear. The boat churned over waves, rocked hard to one side, and he held Maggie by a fistful of fabric. Jennie squinted, peering into the gray darkness and the thinning snowfall. Her lips were pressed together, holding things in, as she always had.
“It’s almost over,” he said.
Jennie gave her head a single shake. “It’s not right.”
Malcolm wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. The wind played games with their voices. “What?”
“It’s not right,” she repeated, gaze straight ahead, navigating but also avoiding his eyes. “We shouldn’t have to do this! We’re her children!”
Jennie swore silently, only her expression and the movement of her lips giving the profanity away. Her emotions angered her. Her travels and studies had made her hard in some ways, but the hurt and disappointment she’d taken with her on her travels remained.
“You think I want to be here?” he called over the sound of the motor and the waves.
“She chose you!”
“She chose herself,” Malcolm said. “She always did. Maggie was so selfish, she let herself die in Indiana when she could’ve come home to Maine anytime!”
Jennie finally glanced at him. It felt a bit like forgiveness. “She wanted to stay where she was happy. Where she’d raised us.”
He wanted to keep arguing, to remind her that Maggie had never been that kind of sentimental.
Malcolm figured she had stayed because she was afraid of returning to Maine, or because it would mean admitting she was going to die at last. But they’d had a thousand conversations about their mother’s selfishness, and with luck, they’d have a thousand more.
“Let’s just get it done,” he said.
If the noise stole the words, she must have gotten the meaning, because she nodded and faced front again, determined. Malcolm held on to the side of the boat. He thought he could see the paleness of sand ahead, a bit of beach.
Maggie screamed. Jennie jerked so hard that she twisted the tiller, slewing them off course. A wave rolled beneath them and nearly spilled them out, but she managed to right their trajectory in time to let the next wave power them forward instead of tossing them sideways again.
Malcolm looked down. Maggie’s eyes were bloody and gleaming and she stared at him.
He’d tried to avoid looking at what had become of her face.
Regardless of his anger, this was still his mother.
She’d loved him and manipulated him, supported him and hurt him, made him feel he’d never be enough, but always kept a place for him.
You’re as bad as Jennie, he thought. It was difficult to know what to feel when love and bitterness had been woven so tightly together all your life. But the time for hopes and dreams and children’s broken hearts had passed.
Maggie writhed in agony, tested the strength of the handcuffs. Desperate-eyed, she hissed, baring teeth like black thorns. The boat bounced on smaller waves, speeding toward shore.
“Don’t do this, Malcolm!” the creature pleaded. “I have a new life now! Jennie, don’t do this to Momma.”
Jennie flinched, struggling, but suddenly, her eyes cleared. Malcolm saw the moment that one word—Momma—struck her the same way it had him. She’d always hated for her children to call her anything but her name.
“Okay, Maggie,” Jennie said.
A wave pushed them from behind. They were thirty feet from the sand when Maggie fought her pain back enough to sit up, get one knee beneath her, and lunge at Malcolm. He brought the shovel handle up, got both hands on it, and managed to turn her aside.
Maggie fell overboard, splashed into the surf, and a foam-topped wave rolled over her.
Malcolm jumped after her, up to his chest in the icy Atlantic.
Jennie kept the boat straight, beached it, and the motor choked out just as it slid up onto the sand.
Malcolm waded to the monster his mother had become and got a grip on her just as she burst from the water and put her handcuffed wrists over his head, going for his throat.
He still held the shovel. He brought it up cross-body and held her away as he slipped his head out of her grasp, splashing warily backward, wielding the shovel, ready to split her head open.
Her wrists had been cuffed behind her, but underwater, she’d somehow brought them under her feet so her hands were in front of her now.
It didn’t matter—couldn’t matter. She was weak from pain.
Maggie’s lips peeled back from those wicked teeth, splitting, wading after him. Hunger and ferocity drove her, but he saw the pain in her eyes and the way her strength flagged just from moving through the water.
He’d backed nearer the beach. The water was only to his waist now, and he swung the shovel, smashed her in the skull with its iron blade.
She sagged into the water. He thought she might just float away, and they couldn’t have that.
Jennie splashed into the surf, running toward her, but Malcolm reached her first.
Maggie clawed his chest with both hands, digging through his shirt and sodden sweater.
He coughed out salt water, cleared his throat, and started to sing.
Sadness joined the pain etched on her face. “Malcolm, no—”
Jennie shoved Maggie’s head under the waves.
Malcolm grabbed Maggie by the handcuffs, and together, they hauled her ashore as he continued to sing.
She hung limply in their grasp, feet dragging through the sand where the surf kept washing away the snow to keep it from accumulating.
Farther up the beach, rarely touched by the tide, the snow coated the sand and ice rimed a lifeguard chair.
They paused at the chair just to catch their breaths.
Malcolm kept singing Billie Holiday, but took deeper breaths and longer gaps between each line.
“God, look at her,” Jennie said.
Malcolm didn’t want to. Whatever part of Maggie still lingered in the dead thing had been extinguished now.
Except that it hadn’t, not completely. Perhaps thanks to the curse that had begun all of this, a vestige remained, and she opened her eyes.
“You were always … a good boy … Malcolm.”
Jennie barked laughter. Malcolm heard the anguish in her.
Even mostly dead, their mother overlooked all Jennie had done to be loved.
Maggie had dismissed her because she hadn’t inherited the old fire of witchcraft, and Jennie had dedicated her life to overcoming that disappointment.
Maggie had given Malcolm this task, but without Jennie and Violet, he would never have made it.
Maggie faded, head lolling, a corpse again. Brother and sister knew she wouldn’t stay that way for long, and they hurried over the rocks beyond the sand, up a path through browned beach grass and dying goldenrod.
“Even dead, she can still always make things worse,” Malcolm said.
Jennie’s smile carried a dreadful sadness, but it didn’t slow them down.
She gripped the tire iron in one hand and dragged Maggie with the other, bent to their shared labor.
They crested a rise and found themselves on the edge of a narrow road across from a stand of pine trees.
Fifty yards to the north lay a small parking lot with a closed-up wooden hut that might have been a snack bar or public bathroom.
Down the little road to the south were a few old saltbox homes that had probably been in the same families for generations.
These were quiet places, isolated by design, and time meant very little here.
“I don’t think it matters where, as long as it’s on the island,” Jennie said.
They carried Maggie across the road. He kicked up some snow to unearth a bed of pine needles. The soil at the tree line was solid ground, not sand. He nodded to Jennie, and they set their mother down gently, both watching to see if she opened her eyes again.
He sang quietly, just to make sure, and jammed the blade of the shovel into the earth.
It surprised him to find the soil cooperative.
He’d half expected it to be frozen solid, but then it only felt like January.
It was November, and this snowstorm had surprised everyone.
A day or two earlier, the weather would have been autumnal, and in another twenty-four hours, it would probably return to more modest temperatures. The ground wasn’t frozen yet.
Malcolm tossed the first shovelful of dirt and pine needles.
Jennie sat on her haunches, tire iron in hand, watching Maggie’s corpse.
For the first time, softly, she began to sing along with her brother as he dug.
Malcolm carved out the shape of their mother’s grave, a bit more than five feet long and three wide.
He was methodical, removing the first layer of dirt, and had managed to get the whole thing about eighteen inches deep when he realized how clearly he could see his fingers wrapped around the shovel.
He looked up. The sky at the edge of the horizon had lightened to a pale blue, just a stripe, but it heralded the sun.
“You’d better hurry,” Jennie said.
Malcolm shot her a look of brotherly irritation.
He hadn’t come all this way just to let the sun rise without him fulfilling his promise.
He thought about Violet, wishing suddenly that he had not left her behind.
The idea of Shediak had been fraught with danger in the moments before they’d stolen the boat, but now he wanted her there with him.
Violet had loved Maggie, too, maybe more purely and clearly than her own children had loved her. She should have been there.
He dug faster. Time to finish the job.
Jennie shot to her feet. She stared southward along the shore, saying nothing but communicating everything.
Malcolm spun to see two dark figures coming along the beach, bent in pain but nevertheless careening toward them, staggering as if flung by the wind and unable to halt without collapsing.
They seemed almost like ghosts, but of course, they weren’t ghosts at all.
One of them was Elias.
The other meant to kill them.
Neither would allow Malcolm to finish digging his mother’s grave.
Malcolm’s grip tightened on the shovel.