Interstitial #10
“I know,” says Mae. “I fell asleep right away and then all of a sudden I was wide awake, feeling like it was nine a.m.”
“Well, try again,” says Jordan, without sympathy. To both of them Mae is eight years old in a peach-colored two-piece Carter’s
pajama set with ruffles at the shoulders, refusing to go to bed because she wants to hang out with the big girls and their
friends in the kitchen. Except now she is a twenty-nine-year-old traitor who forgot to remove her mascara before bed, which
is now giving her the look of a restless racoon.
“I can’t,” says Mae softly. She rubs her eyes, smearing the mascara further. “There’s something I need to tell you guys. It’s
been weighing on me, and I need you to know what’s going on.”
Unrelenting, Jordan says, “Is it another amazing example of disloyalty?”
At the same time Natalie says, “Oh, Mae, are you pregnant?”
Mae shakes her head. “Neither of those. It’s worse. Or maybe better, I don’t know. But I don’t know what to do, and I need
you guys, okay? I really need you.”
“Okay,” says Natalie finally, glancing at Jordan.
Jordan pulls out the stool next to her. “Sit down. Tell us.”
Mae can’t find a delicate way into the story, there’s no easy on-ramp, so she tells the ending first, and quickly, without any verbal punctuation.
She says, “I fell for a stupid scam and I lost most of my money and I’m living out of my car.
” Then, seeing the shocked faces of her sisters, and guessing what might come next, she says, “You don’t need to berate me. I’ve berated myself enough already.”
Jordan speaks first. “Whoa, Mae,” she says. “You’re going to have to back up.”
“Back way up,” says Natalie. “We can’t berate you if we don’t even know what happened.”
“Okay,” says Mae. Deep breath, filling her ribs, big exhale. Then she tells the story. “Last month, a box came for me at my
apartment. Well, Tony’s apartment. Inside the box was a Bluetooth speaker.”
She hadn’t ordered any speakers, she explains, so obviously she was confused. “I thought maybe it was from one of you!”
“I would have sent you a speaker if I knew you needed one,” Jordan hurries to say.
“Me too,” says Natalie competitively.
“No, that’s just it, I didn’t need one. I have a speaker! I have a great speaker. It’s in the back of my car right now. So
I . . . I don’t know, it made me think of Mom, you know? How she used to send us silly gifts, in college and stuff. She did
that for you guys too, right?”
“Holiday socks,” Natalie and Jordan say together.
“Exactly! Who even knew Thanksgiving socks were a thing?” This is Jordan.
“Turkeys wearing Pilgrim hats,” confirms Natalie. “Or a coloring book . . .”
“Not even an adult coloring book,” says Jordan, nodding and smiling at the memory. “Just a regular children’s coloring book with, like, puppies to color in, and a box of eight fat Crayolas.”
“Jumbos,” says Natalie. They’re all quiet for a few seconds, remembering, and then Natalie says, “Anyway, go on. Box. Speaker.”
“Okay, so, I know Mom wasn’t actually sending me a speaker, duh, but I guess part of me somehow thought she was. You know
how we used to dance around the kitchen sometimes—”
“Hold up,” says Jordan. “Hold right up. What family did you grow up in, Mae? Mom never danced in the kitchen.”
Mae looks back and forth between them, confused. “Yes, she did.”
“When Mom was in the kitchen,” says Natalie, “she was doing forty things at once and she was rushed. She certainly wasn’t
dancing.”
“Only sometimes,” says Mae.
“To what?”
Mae considers. “Elton John,” she says finally.
“Elton John isn’t danceable,” says Natalie decisively, as if this settles it.
“ ‘Crocodile Rock,’ ” says Mae. “You can dance to ‘Crocodile Rock.’ ”
Jordan thinks about this. “Awkward dancing, maybe.”
“I didn’t say she was a good dancer,” says Mae. “I just said she danced. But now that I think about it, this was after you two were out of the house. Remember,
I was there for all those years without you, Jordan, and for four years without either of you.”
“I never had her to myself,” says Natalie. “Not on the front end and not on the back end.”
“Not the point of the story, Natalie,” says Jordan. “The point is—Go ahead, Mae. What’s the point?”
“The point,” says Mae, “is that when I saw the speaker I thought about Mom and me, and I really did believe for a second that
it was from her.”
“Oh, Mae,” says Jordan. There’s so much pity in her voice that Mae cringes. “So who was it from? I can’t figure out where this could possibly be going.”
Mae takes a deep, shuddering breath. “This is the bad part.” Inside the box was a slip of paper with a QR code. It looked
like something you’d get inside a box from, say, , with Mae’s name and address printed on it, along with the code and
a message that said SCAN HERE FOR A MESSAGE ABOUT YOUR GIFT.
“So I scanned the code.” Then, uncertainly, “Like anyone would, right?”
“Right,” say her sisters agreeably. And, “Of course, we’d scan it too.”
“But it was a scam.”
“A scam?”
Mae nods sadly, and her eyes fill. “A scan scam.”
“What do you mean?” Jordan’s brow is furrowed.
“I mean, when I scanned it, all that appeared was a message that said ENJOY! But it must have also gotten, I don’t know, some malware on my phone, and somebody got into my online banking accounts and
got my passwords and everything, and over the next week or so my debit account was wiped out. And that was all I had.”
“What account?”
“My debit—”
Jordan says, “You keep all of your money in your debit account?”
Natalie turns on her. “Oh my god, is that what you’re focusing on?” To Mae she says, “Did you report it?”
“I closed that account.”
“Did you tell the bank people why you were closing it?” Jordan asks. Mae shakes her head. “Why not?”
“I was embarrassed,” whispers Mae.
“You were a victim,” says Jordan. “You should be advocating for yourself, not be embarrassed.”
“I changed my passwords. I took my phone to my friend Chip and he got the malware off.”
“You have a friend Chip who’s an electronics expert?”
Mae nods. “He works for a data recovery service.” Then, small grin. “Ohhh, yeah, I get it. Chip.” The grin doesn’t last long,
but it’s nice to see a flash of the old Mae come out of the rubble. “I didn’t know who to report it to.”
“The bank, for starters. The FBI. I think the FTC?”
Mae shakes her head. “I was too exhausted to figure that out. And ashamed. It’s humiliating, to think someone sent you a present—your
dead mom!—and then you’re completely wiped out. What I had in there would probably be nothing to you guys, spare change or
whatever, but it was all that was keeping me from basically not having a place to live.”
“The shame is common,” says Natalie. “I’ve read about people being extorted right in front of their family members but not
telling anyone because they’re so far in it. I read an article about a lonely rich lady who lost, like, fifty thousand dollars
when someone called pretending to be her grandson needing to post bond.”
“But I’m not a lonely rich grandmother,” says Mae. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have fallen for it.”
“I might have fallen for it too,” says Natalie soothingly, even though there’s something in her expression that makes Mae
think that she doesn’t really believe she would have.
“And besides that,” says Jordan, “you never should have been teetering on the edge like that without telling us!”
Mae realizes she’s feeling comforted by this, by the familiarity of the kitchen and her sisters’ voices, the strangeness of
the late hour, the relief of having shared the thing she’s been carrying around. But the real problem is still there.
“None of this is the point, okay? All my rent money, everything I had, was in that one account. So it’s gone.
Now I owe Tony twelve hundred dollars.” Mae can feel it rising again, the sense of panic that has been with her for the last month, the feeling like she’s always on the verge of hyperventilating.
“We can lend you rent money,” says Jordan. “We can give you rent money. You should have asked.”
Mae puts a hand on her chest to try to slow her jackhammer heart. “It’s not just that, though. I mean, that would help get
Tony off my back. But I have nowhere to live, nothing to start over with. I was going to live here. I thought I could ask Dad to let me stay here for the fall, while I figure things out, maybe get a job and save some money.”
“Ohhhh,” says Natalie.
“I moved my stuff out of Tony’s, and I can’t even pay the storage fees. I don’t have a security deposit or recent landlord
references. I don’t have anything. I’m literally without a home. I don’t know what to do, you guys. I don’t know what to do.”
She’s looking into the future, and all she sees is a dark, scary void, a black hole she will get lost in.
“It’ll be okay,” says Jordan.
Mae turns on her. “How’s it going to be okay? Like, specifically?” Her voice rises. “I know you want to be helpful but if
you were, you wouldn’t just say it’s going to be okay and then be fine with Dad selling the house.” She screws her face up.
“Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Uh-oh, here comes the Storm,” and something about this, about her perfect sisters with their put-together
lives, their offers of help that aren’t really a solution, their complacency, so enrages Mae that she just can’t take it anymore. She slides off the stool, and, as much as a barefoot young woman in
pajamas can stomp, she stomps upstairs.
“I’ll go,” Natalie says.
Jordan is half off her stool. “Should we both go?”
“Let me try first.”
Mae had always moved through the world as if with a gentle breeze at her back, Natalie thinks as she climbs the stairs. But
she hasn’t been like that for a long time, maybe not since Theresa’s death. Even the fact that she’d gone home to their father
and Kara’s wedding without telling them, which just a few hours ago Natalie and Jordan considered to be an impeachable offense,
was a sign, a plea. A cry for help. Mae needed her family.