Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Aweek later, Aunt Gretchen arrives at the door armed with a bag of dog food, three frozen casseroles, and a heap of groceries. “You can’t live on protein powder and—” she gestures around the messy kitchen “—whatever else this is.”
It’s empty bottles of wine and cereal boxes, mostly, with the occasional can of diet soda from Mom’s stash in the garage. All of it is piled neatly on the counter, ready to go out to recycling.
I just haven’t dealt with it yet.
In my defense, most of the mess in the house belonged to Mom.
When I arrived, it was more cluttered than I’d ever seen it.
Papers crammed into every nook and cranny, the pantry stocked until the door wouldn’t shut, the refrigerator about to burst. She’d somehow acquired more cutlery and plates than she could possibly use.
The linen closets and bathroom were similarly overstuffed.
I found eight boxes of condoms crammed into my bedside table, all expired.
(I want to laugh, but I can’t. She was always so worried, and now she’s gone and I can’t tell her that I don’t get laid enough for this absolute arsenal.)
It’s almost like she’d been waiting for me to come home. Stocking up so that I didn’t have to go shopping when I finally arrived.
Whenever I think about it, I feel a pang. I should have left Jeremy before I found out about Marc.
Aunt Gretchen stomps past a barking Bruce, who seems to have forgotten that she comes by at least once a week and gives him treats.
Skinny as she is, she barely fits between the shoe racks in the entryway, which are exploding with high heels and flip-flops and barely used tennis shoes.
I’m not sure when Mom bought all of these, or why.
Once a casserole is in the oven, Gretchen sits down at the table and uncaps a bottle of iced tea with a loud pop! “So. It’s time we talk about the house.”
I groan internally. Of course she wants to talk about the house.
Gretchen is Mom’s half-sister. She’s seven years older, but she looks at least a decade more in her oversized floral blouse and tan pants. Permed hair puffs out from the sides of her head, just barely covering dangling gold earrings reminiscent of a pirate’s.
Mom had scars on the tops of her ears. Sometimes I wonder if Gretchen has them, too.
But it would be impolite to ask. Gretchen has been my rock through all of this, driving forty-five minutes each way to make sure I’m still alive. She’s brought me endless groceries, and sat with me after the funeral when I couldn’t stop shaking. I’d probably be dead without her.
“What do you want to do with the house, Dominic?”
I brush a piece of hair from my face and frown down at the scuffed, white tabletop.
The truth is, I don’t know. Now that I’m here, I can’t imagine leaving.
The problem is that I can’t imagine staying, either.
It’s like my entire brain has shorted out.
I can’t think of any options. I can’t envision a future where I’m here or anywhere else.
I knew this was coming. Sooner or later, I’d have to decide if I wanted to sell or try to pay the mortgage.
My job is the next state over. I’m almost out of extended family leave.
But I can’t picture myself in the office anymore, answering phones and running meetings, acting like I want to be there, like I have any energy left to sell products that won’t do anything to make anyone’s life better.
Mom went to a lot of trouble to leave me the house. The mortgage is lower than my rent, but without anyone to split it with, I’ll be paying a lot more each month. And there is no way I can find a roommate when the house is… like this.
“Keep it?” My voice is unsteady. “At least, for now.”
She nods slowly. “Alright. Can you afford the mortgage?”
I shrug, trace my finger over a crack in the laminate. “Maybe for a few months.”
“Greg and I can help you,” she says.
“You don’t have to—”
“We already agreed. God knows you’ve been through enough.”
“Thanks,” I say, and hug her.
Later, when we’re digging through the papers inside a storage tote Mom shoved into the bathroom beside the litter box, Gretchen says, “She was a smart woman, your mother. I’m sure she had a reason to keep all of this.”
“I think it was the tumor,” I interject, stuffing yet another CVS receipt into a trash bag. “She got... really weird a couple months before her diagnosis.”
Gretchen is silent a long moment, mulling over her next words.
She never wants to talk about the tumor, just my mom.
“She’d be proud of you, you know. You got that degree and graduated a whole year early.
She used to brag about how smart you were when you were little.
” She grins, and I catch the corners of my mouth lifting involuntarily.
I finished my bachelor’s degree in three years, mostly because I took summer classes despite being one of the worst students to cross campus. I wanted to be done so fucking bad. Mom was proud, but I always felt like I let her down with my GPA.
It’s nice to talk about Mom before she got sick. About the woman she used to be before cancer stole everything from her.
“She was exaggerating,” I grumble, but my face heats anyway. After everything, it’s reassuring to hear.
“Did she ever tell you about that college she went to? The one with the funny name? I tried to look it up once. I don’t think it exists anymore.”
I blink at Gretchen. She’s hyper-focused on sorting piles of medical paperwork, moving with the efficiency of a machine. “I know she went to community college.”
“No, she went somewhere after that and got a bachelor’s, and then she got a master’s,” says Gretchen, nodding to herself.
“Oh,” I say, because no, I didn’t know.
I know almost nothing about Mom. Not really. Sure, I know her favorite color and her favorite foods, her likes and dislikes. But her past? It’s all a big, black hole. All the rules she made me swear to abide by, even after her death? No fucking idea why.
And Mom was neurotic. No baths, no swimming pools, no playing in lakes or rivers, no hot tubs, and certainly no ocean.
When she was at her sickest, a few days before she died, she grabbed my hand and made me swear that I wouldn’t go to the coast, that I’d never set foot in the ocean, never even see it with my own eyes.
“Pictures and videos will be enough,” she insisted and I agreed, because she was sick and dying, and I didn’t know what else to do.
When I was little, I yearned for the water. Watched as my friends took swimming lessons, spent their summers by the pool, or the lake, or on cruises.
At first, Mom said we were too poor. We couldn’t afford the community pool, let alone a vacation to the coast. And I couldn’t go in the water because I could drown, because she couldn’t afford anyone to teach me to swim.
But my continued protests were quickly met with rage—lost privileges, broken toys, nights without dinner.
By the time I was eight years old, I was terrified of the water.
My showers only lasted two minutes, if that.
“You can drown in half an inch of water,” she told me once.
I knew it wasn’t logical. I hadn’t done anything that should lead to drowning, but her fury was my terror, so I spent years reading about all the ways water could kill a person.
Dehydration, dry drowning, water intoxication, brain-eating amoebas, parasites.
By the time I was sixteen, I realized that almost nobody died from these things outside of survival situations and freak accidents.
Luckily, we were inland—I was almost never invited on anything more than the occasional camping trip, and most of my friends’ parents were perfectly understanding when I said I was afraid of the water, even the tiny streams that carved through hiking trails, or the waterfalls dribbling out of the rocks.
If we’d lived by the beach, I never would have been allowed to do anything.
At seventeen, I waded into a swimming pool for the first time, wearing a pair of my friend Aiden’s swim trunks.
I half-expected to burst into flames or find myself immediately overpowered by the water, but nothing happened.
I stepped into the pool, overwhelmed by the cold water, the strange resistance around my ankles, my calves.
The smell of chlorine filled my nostrils, and I did not die.
When Mom found out, she took my car for a drive and totaled it.
It was easier to just go along with her neuroses.
I wasn’t a swimmer. I’d never been to the ocean, couldn’t afford to go even if I’d wanted to.
I had no real reason to go swimming in the summer, even if it was hot and my friends ribbed me endlessly about my hydrophobia.
They theorized endlessly as to why, loudly speculating about everything from a third nipple to a micropenis, and I had to grin through it all like I wasn’t totally humiliated and also terrified of my mom, of her reaction if she found out I’d even considered going into the water.
It was almost like she thought some terrible Eldritch horror might snatch me away and drag me under. Or worse, that I was the Eldritch horror, to be transformed by a single drop of water, never to return to my human form again.
We had screaming fights about it. “Why can’t I swim?” I’d shout, and she’d scream right back at me, “Stay. Away. From. The. Water!”
For a time, I wasn’t even allowed to drink water.
She bought me Gatorade and Pedialyte and argued that I would be better hydrated if I drank them instead.
My fifth-grade teacher put a stop to that, insisting that sugary drinks were not allowed in class.
Mom reluctantly backed down after the school nurse informed her that I didn’t have a qualifying medical exemption.
I jolt back to reality when Gretchen speaks.
“It had a such a funny name,” she muses. “That school.”