She stared from between curtains, heart racing. Everything was about to explode. In the kitchen, her mother was starting to plate food. Out front, kids would keep arriving. If Aggie didn’t hear them congregate, she’d see them once they began amassing at the shed, and then Aggie would go back there, she’d have to, and she’d make Liv unlock the door, and Liv couldn’t take that. And then there was Doug, the night’s wild card. Liv checked her phone every thirty seconds for a return call, but the last notification was still Bruno, its paltry three-minute-and-forty-six-second length belying the call’s blunt force. She fumbled out her phone, started to text Doug, MOM HOME PLEASE STOP, but only got one word into it before Mom was tapping her on the shoulder.
“Food’s up,” her mom sang. “A twenty percent tip will be added to the bill.”
Liv let the curtain fall and moved, dreamlike, into the kitchen, her brain bruised and whirling. She could see no way out—every door seemed blocked by trays of food. Liv sat at the table, her vision doubling until there were not two place settings but four, as if her father might yet amble in from the bathroom, only to be joined by Doug, the old Doug, who’d regale the table with how his latest corn maze design best applied his patented Trick.
The special dinner Aggie had promised was just that: beautiful baby spinach salads with sherry-sautéed Bosc pears, glistening bits of bacon, pecans candied with sugar and cayenne pepper, a balsamic-and-olive-oil dressing, and a sprinkling of parmesan, with two side plates of homemade rolls, homemade herb butter, and fanned slices of Gruyère cheese. Liv didn’t think she could feel anything but dread at this point, but she was wrong. Heartbreak cracked her in half. Aggie Fleming could cook. She could do lots of things. She’d once been a person with skills and aspirations, not a broken-down cash gatherer whose life, already falling apart, was just about to be smashed flat.
Aggie smiled, lifted her glass of water in a toast.
Water, not wine—and like that, Liv knew how to remove her mother from the pain of what was about to come. It was worse than what she’d done to Bruno. Save for the harm she’d inflicted upon A, it was the worst thing, she felt certain, she would ever do to anyone. She drew her water glass back, withholding the toast. Her lips trembled as she forced out the hideous, betraying words.
“We need to have wine with this,” she said.
Aggie’s forehead tightened. “Oh, honey.”
Liv’s fake smile felt like flesh peeling from her face.
“Come on,” she teased. “If there’s one meal to have wine with, it’s this one.”
It was clear that Aggie wanted to object. Liv banked on her mom’s insecurity, fully aware of the cruelty of it. He mother, understandably, might think she and Liv had drifted too far apart to have comfortable conversation. A little wine might smooth the edges, set her mind and stomach at ease, and so Aggie shrugged, capitulating to the easier path. She climbed the kitchen stool to reach the cabinet where she’d banished the bottles.
“Chardonnay.” Her voice tried for camaraderie. “Good for salads. We’ll have to add ice.”
She poured a small glass for Liv and a full one for herself. An ugly yellow color: A’s terrified urine, the pus of split tumors. These were the liquids Liv deserved, and she completed the toast and drank, and over the rim watched her mother do the same.
“I know we missed Thanksgiving last year,” Aggie said. “Should we say what we’re thankful for?”
“That’s okay,” Liv said, because there was nothing to say.
Liv pushed food around. Her mother ate. When Aggie went to the bathroom, Liv took the last Vicodin she had, ground it between spoons, and stirred it into Aggie’s glass. When her mom returned, she took bigger gulps than before. Liv refilled her mother’s glass and checked her phone and glanced at the front window, wondering if more people had arrived early, and when she turned back around, her mother’s glass was half-empty and Liv refilled it again. Instead of a dinner it was euthanasia, with Liv the loyal nurse feeding toxins to her beloved, but terminal, patient.
By the end of dinner, Aggie was sloppy, her mouth over-wet, her eyelids heavy, her gestures large and erratic.
“Tricia told me,” she said. “You know Tricia. Amber’s mom. Tricia told me you were going around with a different boy now. Not Doug at all. Is that true? Or is Tricia a liar? My daughter the man killer, I said.”
“It’s not true,” Liv said. And it wasn’t, not anymore.
Aggie knocked over her glass, but it was empty. She tried to focus her eyes upon the tabletop droplets, but it was too much work.
“Sorry, Mom,” Liv whispered.
With only minutes to go before eight o’clock, Liv went to her mother’s side and helped her stand. Aggie’s body felt as if it belonged to a different creature. Believing this made it easier on Liv. This wasn’t her mother. It was another captured, injured beast. Liv hurried the beast down the hall and into the bedroom, and let the beast curl into a ball atop the mattress. The beast made moist murmurs, but Liv had to hurry. She shut the door, threw on her raincoat, and sprinted into the backyard, quick as a deer, admitting that tonight she was a beast, too. The time of humans had passed.
No time, no time. Quick, quick, improvise. An idea hit her, a crazy one, her only chance. She snatched the tools she needed and evaded her old friend, whose car she heard rattle into the driveway, and she reached the shed minutes before anyone would make it to the backyard. She knew by the din of laughter that the assembled teens were waiting under umbrellas for Doug Monk, their grand marshal, to parade them to the show. The sound of so many people so close to A was terrifying, but Liv did what she had to do before a line of twenty-some teenagers snaked around the side of the house.
Liv crouched in the rain at the edge of the woods to wait, watch, and listen. She therefore wasn’t present for the show—she could only hear the loudest noises near the end—and yet, shivering against the wet bark of a tree and wrapped in a white sheet of her own breath, she believed she could picture every single thing that happened.
It goes like this. Doug reaches the shed door and whirls around with enough dash that you can imagine a magician’s cape joining his ensemble of jacket and shorts. He welcomes one and all, as if instead of trudging across a soggy lawn, they have arrived at an exclusive club. He ignores the tittering at his cordiality, pretends he doesn’t see the flasks of liquor passed about. There are people here who lampoon Doug at school, and that should bother him, but it doesn’t. He’s too proud of the attendance—strong for having had only one day to pull it together.
Liv knows how Doug can monologue, but to these kids, his ability to harness so many words is an amusing surprise. They laugh and applaud, and Doug, as always, is deaf to their derision. He gets serious now. He motions them to be quiet. He cautions that they shouldn’t be scared by what they’re about to see, nothing’s going to hurt them, and this gets some in the crowd cheering louder, even while those with keener survival instincts feel their first twinges of concern.
When Doug switches the subject to Lee Fleming, the frivolity ebbs. What does Liv’s missing, basket-case father have to do with this? And where, come to think of it, is Liv? Doug’s off script now, ranting about how Lee Fleming tried to warn the whole ungrateful town, but no one listened. Even the most belligerent audience members feel a cold, eely slither in their stomachs.