Chapter Ten
Sitting in my same seat at the dinner table now, I can still hear my mom’s voice in my head from that night as she explained the curse: If you ever really, truly fall in love …
It felt like a lame joke. Monsters weren’t real.
This was just my mom’s weird, convoluted way of warning me against love bombers and unsafe sex.
A misguided attempt to explain why she’d lied to me my entire life about my dad still being alive, when really, they were just young and strangers and things hadn’t worked out.
Then Tyler happened.
My mom shuffles around the dinner table, setting a gentle hand on my shoulder. A bittersweet tang permeates the whole house courtesy of the rhubarb syrup she boiled down this morning, the same stuff she’s now trying to convince me, Elliott and Laura to pour over our slices of dry vanilla cake.
‘It’s gonna soften it up, I swear,’ my mom insists.
‘It’s so … pink,’ I say, wrinkling my nose as my mom tips the porcelain gravy boat over my cake. An almost radioactive pink liquid dribbles out, pooling on top of the cake as though the sponge is made of plastic.
Elliott and Laura smile politely as my mom does the same to their slices and her own, then takes her seat next to me at the dinner table and rubs her hands together.
‘There we go,’ she exclaims. She reaches across the table and squeezes Laura’s wrist. ‘Another very happy birthday to our sweet Laura.’
‘Happy birthday,’ Elliott and I echo, our forks hovering over our cake.
Laura inherited the place next door to us from her aunt long before we ever lived in ours, but my mom says that when she moved in eighteen years ago and saw Laura meditating on her porch swing with Fleetwood Mac playing from somewhere inside her house, it felt like fate.
Neither of them had any family, and so, as my mother tells it, they made a pact to be each other’s everything: best friend, sister, therapist. This means that Elliott and I have basically celebrated every single birthday and holiday together since we were born, our houses only separated by a shared wall my mom has repeatedly ‘joked’ about knocking through.
‘This is actually really good,’ Laura says through a mouthful of cake. ‘It doesn’t taste as sandy with the syrup.’
‘Why do you sound so surprised?’ my mom says. She brushes a lock of blond hair that’s escaped from her messy ponytail off her forehead. ‘I picked the rhubarb and bottled it this morning – you can’t get much fresher than that.’
‘You said the same thing about the tomatoes from the Great Poisoning of 2019,’ I remind her.
Elliott and Laura grimace. My mom rolls her eyes. Try as she might, the only thing remotely earthy about her is the Gaia tattoo on her lower back.
My mom refills Laura’s glass of red wine and says to her, ‘You still haven’t told us how your date was last night.’
‘Oh God,’ Elliott groans.
‘Is this the guy who’s super into jiu-jitsu?’ I say.
‘That was four boyfriends ago,’ he says with a tight smile.
‘Four boyfriends ago,’ Laura splutters. ‘That’s not even … that’s not—’
‘This is the one with all the clown stuff,’ my mom says.
‘Clown room,’ Elliott corrects.
‘It’s not a clown room,’ Laura says, sipping from her glass. ‘It’s more like a room with clown accents. A couple of clown paintings and the occasional clown gumball machine.’ She glowers at my mom, who’s trying to muffle her laughter behind her hand. ‘It’s not a crime to have hobbies,’ Laura barks.
‘It should be when it’s clowns,’ Elliott grumbles.
‘Look.’ Laura forks another hunk of cake into her mouth and levels a playful glare at her son.
‘If I counted every single man my age out for a weird hobby, I’d never date again.
At least it’s not lizard breeding or extreme metal detecting.
Or golf.’ She points her fork at my mom, tines-first. ‘The date was fine. We went to the National Gallery, we saw some art, he talked a lot about clowns.’
‘So, no second date?’ I ask.
‘Oh, this is the sixth date,’ Elliott interjects.
‘He’s cute!’ Laura exclaims. She rests her head in her hand, her long, curly hair the same black as Elliott’s falling in front of her face. ‘And if I breathe deeply enough, I can meditate myself away from the clown monologues.’
‘Or, you can date someone else,’ I point out.
‘Or, you can stop dating forever,’ Elliott says.
‘There’s an idea,’ my mom says, her voice just a little too high. ‘Join me in forever singledom, where there are no clowns, no having to pretend to care about lizard breeding, no waiting for someone to call you back.’
‘Nobody calls anybody any more,’ I say.
‘Well,’ my mom says. ‘That should tell you how long I’ve been out of the dating game.’
I blink at her. I don’t need the reminder of how long she’s been out of the game, when she’s been forced out of it for basically my entire life.
Laura clears her throat. ‘Oh, Indie,’ she says suddenly.
‘You know how my New Year’s resolution was to finally clean out the attic at our house?
’ She gestures between her and Elliott, as though I need any help understanding who she’s talking about.
‘I found a box of records up there that I thought you might want for your collection.’
‘Did you finally get a record player?’ my mom says, turning to me.
My cheeks blaze red as Elliott’s gaze finds mine.
Besides Sam, Elliott is the only one who knows my sudden interest in vinyl was about Tyler.
He caught me screenshotting Tyler’s Instagram Story where he was playing guitar in his boxers and put two and two together.
He made a promise not to tell Julian, though, which I know he hasn’t broken simply because of the fact that Julian has yet to make fun of me about it.
‘Oh – uh, I’m working on it,’ I say quickly. ‘But that would be really cool – you know, the records. Thank you.’
‘Technically you’re helping me create space for the clown cookie jar Donnie bought for my birthday.’ Laura raises her eyebrows. ‘So thank you.’
We finish eating our cake, which is surprisingly not terrible. When everyone is done, Elliott and I are left to clean up the dirty dishes in the kitchen like always, a non-negotiable tradition our mothers swear isn’t technically forced child labour.
The two of us fall into our usual rhythm, me scrubbing the pots and pans in the sink and him loading all the plates and cutlery into the dishwasher.
He tells me about the way Clown Guy stares almost exclusively at his mom’s feet every time he comes to pick her up for dates, and I tell him he’ll probably want to go to Julian’s house tomorrow afternoon to avoid hearing the scream therapy session my mom is hosting at our place.
It’s easy and boring and comfortable – exactly the kind of thing I wish Sam could hop into my body temporarily and feel for herself, so she’d finally give up on the idea of me and Elliott ever being anything beyond two people whose moms happen to love each other enough to get matching belly button piercings.
When we’re done, Elliott goes home to join Julian online for some game. As soon as the front door shuts, I know this is it, what I’ve been waiting for. My mom and Laura, alone.
They’re sat next to each other on the big floral couch that dominates our living room, cradling their glasses of wine and laughing loudly about something dumb Laura’s boss at the library said to her.
My house is a slender row home filled with thrift store furniture my mom scrounged together when we first moved in.
She’s always sworn she’s going to update it, but most of her decorating budget has gone to the ever-rotating collection of rainbow-printed tapestries on the walls, the mountains of crystals on every free inch of surface and the mixture of Buddhist, Wiccan, Hindu and Kabbalah statues lining our shelves, all remnants of short-lived spiritual experimentations.
I tuck myself into the leather recliner across the coffee table and fold my legs under me.
I don’t actually have a plan here, more like the loose goal of finding some kind of starting point for how I’m going to break the curse, though I know getting information won’t be easy.
My mom never intended to tell me about Austin Taylor or my dad or the curse in the first place.
She sure as hell doesn’t know it passed down to me.
I can just imagine the guilt she’d feel, the way she’d blame herself, if she found out.
Memories of her pain, her face that night when she told me what Austin had done to her, lived rent-free in my head as it was.
She didn’t need worrying about me in the mix.
‘Mom.’ I clench my hands so tightly into fists, my fingernails bite my palms. She and Laura both look up.
‘Something you said earlier tonight – about being single forever.’ I have to be extremely careful here, avoid setting off my mom’s internal panic alarm.
‘Have you – have you ever tried to break the curse?’
Silence encases the room as the two women glance between each other. My mom sits a fraction of an inch straighter.
‘Have I … ?’ she starts. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Like, the curse Austin Taylor put on you,’ I say. ‘Have you ever tried to … I don’t know. Counteract it, or something?’
‘Honey.’ Laura reaches over and clutches my mom’s hand. ‘Magic can be so … complicated. We wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘But you had access to magical … stuff,’ I say, wincing at my blatant lack of knowledge of what I thought, up until my birthday, was something just out of Ella Enchanted. I gesture to Laura. ‘With your coven, and everything.’
She chuckles. ‘Oh, Indie, we were nowhere near the same plane as Austin. Most of us were just there for the free tarot readings. Then Terrence turned it into a cult and things just kind of petered out.’
My mom nods sombrely.
‘What about talking to Austin?’ I say. ‘Did you ever try to convince him to break the curse? After time went by and things between you … I don’t know. Cooled off.’
This time, a laugh explodes out of my mother. But it’s dark, curled around the edges. I can tell Laura is trying to communicate something to me with her eyes, but I keep my gaze locked on my mom, unwilling to be dissuaded.
‘Convince him?’ my mom says. ‘There was no convincing Austin to do anything.’
‘So, you never even tried?’ I say. ‘Not even if it meant you could be with Dad?’
At the mention of my dad, my mom flinches as though I’ve actually smacked her. Laura lets out a small groan.
Because that was it. It took three years for my mom to fall in love with my dad.
Once Austin was out of the picture, Owen’s mysterious illnesses went away, and he was able to take me every weekend.
Apparently, we met his parents in Philly, made crepes for the masses in Eastern Market, saw the cherry blossoms light up the Tidal Basin with an explosion of baby pink.
My mom started coming along, my weekends with my dad becoming weekends with my family.
But it was something very basic, my mom said, that made her realise she was in love with him.
Just his nodding off on her shoulder in front of the TV at our house after he’d spent two hours putting me to sleep; it always used to take so long because, whenever I asked for another game, then another one, then another, he always said yes.
It was instantaneous: he started convulsing, limbs twisting as he fell to the floor.
Scales, spines, gills. What Austin had said – it couldn’t really mean …
could it? But there was no denying the proof.
My dad was a monster. A full-blown Creature from the Black Lagoon.
My mom and Laura took turns sleeping on the bathroom floor, looking after my dad as he soaked in the tub and they tried to figure out what to do.
It was only when she and Laura took him out to a reservoir near where my mom used to camp as a kid that, after a few days, he turned back.
But when he called and my mom rushed to pick him up, he turned again.
That’s how they figured out what was going on: my dad could be himself, but only without my mom around.
‘Love, relationships, all that – I put it to bed a long time ago,’ my mom says.
‘But … have you ever tested it, though?’ I ask. ‘The curse?’
‘Once,’ my mom says. ‘I was ninety-nine per cent sure it would only impact people I actually loved, but I had to see if Austin had really made it impossible for me to be with anyone. Do you remember Mr Lawson, your sixth-grade biology teacher? He had really big hands—’
‘I remember him,’ Laura says, chuckling.
‘Oh my God,’ I shout. ‘You slept with my science teacher?’
‘It was an experiment,’ my mom insists. ‘If anyone would understand the importance of testing a hypothesis, I figured it’d be him. But we slept together, it meant nothing, his big hands stayed hands. And, you know what else? It proved to me that Owen was my person.’
And that I really must be in love with Tyler.
I blink the thought away. ‘Then why not try to fix it?’ I say. ‘Why not try to break this curse so Dad—’
‘Indie, I’ve made peace with it all,’ my mom says. She sounds so exhausted, her voice a groan. ‘Your dad is safer in California – it’s easier this way.’
A swell of anger, sudden and scorching, climbs up my throat. ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘How super mature of you. But did you ever maybe think I might want a relationship with him?’
‘We’ve been through this,’ Mom says. ‘Having your dad in just your life – it would be too hard. Too risky. It needed to be all or nothing.’
‘So he gets an email a year and I get nothing except one last goodbye,’ I say.
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I can hear how they sound. Nothing, as though I haven’t been the sun of my mom’s personal solar system from the moment she got pregnant.
My mom purses her lips and nods. Laura glances pleadingly between the two of us as my mom stands slowly, her bare feet making a light thud on the floor.
As a single tear slips down her cheek, that angry fire in me is immediately doused with guilt.
I rub a hand across my forehead, the pain on my mom’s face electric-bright.
‘Mom, I’m sorry,’ I say softly. ‘I didn’t mean – I know this has sucked for you too. I just think, like …’ I swallow, trying to find the right words. ‘If you want a happily-ever-after with Dad, then you deserve—’
‘Indie, want has nothing to do with it,’ my mom says. Her shoulders slump as she stares down at me. ‘I accepted a long time ago that cursed women don’t get a happily-ever-after.’