She looked at me over the top of her wine glass, with that penetrating, knowing gaze only a small number of people in this world had perfected.
“Ah, I have finally decided that I do like you,” she said after a long pause.
I smiled. “That won’t last for long.”
She smiled back. Wiser than mine, I was sure. Sharper. Definitely kinder. I might be able to grow the first two of those things, but I think kindness wasn’t something that would take root inside me. My soil was rotten.
“I’m not really allergic to muffins,” I blurted. What was this new habit I was forming? Speaking in silences I would normally have relished?
She raised a brow and the side of her mouth turned up. “Oh, I know.”
It was an almost pleasant afternoon with a stranger, fueled of course by wine, and then later, the muffins tasted delightful. I ate two. Two bundles of complex carbs, sugar, and saturated fat.
And I loved it.
I didn’t hate myself entirely for it either.
I didn’t hate the company, either.
The distraction from my laptop was welcome, to say the least. And Margot’s eccentric, harsh, and amusing personality had birthed an itch, right at the back of my neck. The place where stories grew from, like an infection. Which, to me, was what they were. I’d have the symptoms, a few snatches of ideas, sniffles of storyline. Mostly late at night, or early in the morning, when my brain too foggy to grasp on.
I wouldn’t panic.
What’s the need?
Viruses always spread.
I’d get sicker and sicker until the story took over and the only cure was to purge it right out onto the page.
The trick was not to get too ahead of myself. Start trying to cure myself—write—before I was properly sick.
So, I wouldn’t write Margot’s character yet. Or whatever version of her I’d morph her into. But I’d let it stew. That’s how it was sometimes. A conversation. A homeless person on the street yelling in my face about the rapture. Some TV show full of teenage drivel and plot holes. Music. Murder.
Ah, it was mostly murder, if I was honest.
Murder was a tragedy for some. It was both recreation and vocation for me. A fresh killing; the more brutal and grisly, the better. Of course, I would’ve rather some poor human being not have to be killed, but it wasn’t like it was for the sake of my story.
They’d be killed either way.
As I looked down to the flashing screen, the thing that ruined my fucking buzz, it was the murder aspect of my personality that came to mind.
My mother hated that.
That, from a young age, I wanted to know more about Dean Corll than the fucking Babysitter’s Club or whatever it was she tried to push on me. Or that I wore black and shredded the pastel dresses she bought me with kitchen scissors.
I could ignore the call.
It was the right thing to do.
For myself, of course.
But I had to answer at some point. I allocated my mother five minutes a month. That’s how much she got from me. She already had dominion over an entire childhood. She should be lucky she got this much.
“You haven’t been answering my calls,” was her greeting. The start of every call were variations of this.
I sighed. “I’m aware of that.”
“You’re not even going to bother to make up some excuse?” she snapped.
I bit my lip. It was a tick I’d developed some point in my early teen years. I’d chew the skin until it was swollen and raw and I couldn’t eat without pain for a week. There was a study somewhere that there was a chemical released in some people’s body that relaxed them when they bit their lips. It shouldn’t be a surprise I was a person who relaxed themselves by eating away at their own flesh.
“What’s the point?” I asked my mother. “You know it’s not because I’m busy, on a deadline, or have lost service. It’s because I don’t want to talk to you.”
I both hated and loved myself for the honest cruelty in which I spoke to my mother.
“Thanksgiving is coming up,” she said, instead of starting some passive aggressive back and forth as she so loved to do. Maybe she was mindful of her time limit.
“I’m aware of that also,” I replied, staring out the window, wondering what this would all look like covered in snow. Everything was almost dead, apart from some leaves clinging to trees, delaying the inevitable. Sure, the majority of the forest was pine that endured through it all, but I liked the trees that withered, decayed, and grew new life.
I liked them the most dead.
“And?” she probed.
“And?” I parroted.
“I haven’t received notice of your arrival.”
Another thing I’d given my mother—or more accurately, my father—was my attendance at exactly two national holidays, and one personal one: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and my father’s birthday.
I hated almost every second of all of it. Usually, I came home so hurt, broken, and plagued with childhood trauma, I wrote half a bestseller in a week. Which was about seventy percent of the reason I went in the first place. The other thirty percent was my father.
I didn’t have him anymore, and I wasn’t that desperate for some new emotional scars to turn into a book.
“You haven’t because I won’t be arriving,” I said finally.
A pause.
A sharp one.
“You come to every family holiday, that’s something we have agreed upon. I say nothing that I hear from my daughter twelve times a year. That she doesn’t call me on my birthday or answer my calls on hers. Nothing about the way you speak about us in the media—”
“I don’t speak about you at all,” I cut her off.
“Exactly.” The word was terse. Accusing. “You are one of the most famous writers in your generation; some of that, at least is in part thanks to the education your father and I provided you with.”
I massaged my temples. “Yes, sure, I’ll sing your praises in the next Times piece,” I lied.
“You have to come to Thanksgiving.”
“The only thing I have to do is get a Pap smear every three years. Thanksgiving is optional and the anniversary of gross genocide and colonialism.”
What I was saying was one hundred percent true, but it wasn’t the genocide and colonialism that stopped me from going. Unfortunately for the human race, both of those things were commonplace.
“You’re not even going to come and visit your father?” my mother asked in that sharp, guilt birthing tone she was an expert in.
“Why would I visit my father? He’s dead,” I replied, in my harsh, cold, and cruel tone I was an expert in.
My mother’s sharp intake of breath told me I hit the spot I wanted.
“Your father is not dead, Magnolia,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare speak like that about him again.”
I snorted. “I’ll believe you if you put him on the phone right now and he says my name,” I challenged.
A pause. A long pause.
“Right, you can’t,” I said, breaking the silence. “Because he doesn’t remember my name. Or the fact he has a daughter. Or a wife, for that matter. And my father would be the only reason I went home for Thanksgiving because he’s the only one of my parents that doesn’t blame me for Cody’s death.”