7

In the eyes of the inexperienced, the salt air stings. It’s so thickly dissolved into the oxygen here that it sticks to your clothes and your hair, your nostrils and your eyeballs if you don’t generously blink. You’ll notice those raised on the Shore all have this slight squint, long eyelashes, too. These are evolutionary traits, designed for life on the coast, helping residents get on with their business without going blind. It’s dangerous to spend too much time on the shore if you’re an out-of-towner. And you best not open your eyes underwater.

Once, Miranda opened her eyes in the surf off Long Beach Island and had to be bed-rested for a week, the result of some amoebic subterfuge on her system; and this was a girl who’d spent every summer on the shore, in that house off East Mermaid Lane, the one with the gravel driveway and the outdoor shower, the unfinished third-story addition wrapped to this day in a veil of industrial plastic. Every summer until she was ten, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the Swami’s would trade their beige Long Island castle for a more serene spot a stone’s skip from the sea, slyly chosen by her parents for its distance from the taffy shops and townie bars that populate the island further north, away from anywhere that might attract youth or lasciviousness or life.

The Shore House was Mother and Father’s summer reward to themselves. The two worked dolorously through most of the year, but in the warmth of the center season, they could stay mostly housebound, hosting only the most crucial of clients in the comfort of flip-flops and Tommy Bahamas. While they enjoyed what was, for them, essentially just a change of scenery, the Shore meanwhile became the very spine of Miranda’s childhood. From it grew swim lessons and conch collecting, arcade games and expensive sweets and staying up past bed time with her head poked out her bedroom window, listening to the surf.

In her 22nd year, these summer memories have taken on the qualities that all early childhood nostalgia aspire to: immensely sweet, immensely narrow in perspective, and immensely unlikely to have occurred as remembered.

Yes, once or twice a year, Henry, the summer help, grilled his Cajun Andouilles in the backyard, sending a singular smoky sweetness spiraling outward from the house to the surrounding streets, but in Miranda’s mind, this is the way the house, nay her entire childhood, has always smelled. Every once in a while, she gets a rare whiff…and it takes her back. Oh, yes it does.

And only rarely did she see the fat orange cat licking itself in the sun atop a stone driveway post, but in all her memories, the cat is always there, tongue on hind leg, semi-smiling, stretched out satisfied in the sun.

But just when that shore world was readying to open up its shell and reveal the shining, priceless pearl of pubescent experience within — she might’ve stolen hugely important kisses under the boardwalk, chucked beer bottles into the sea, and put out illicit cigarettes in clamshells, watched the sunset over faraway surf, a soft hand in hers — it was ripped from her. It’s that very ripping which now tinges all her shore memories. In every familiar whoosh of briny air, in the clopping of sandals upon beechwood, in the funnel cake fragrance, the remembrance she has is accompanied by another, a remembrance of what she ought to have.

She was ten when Father informed her that LBI had become “unnecessary.” Taking off summers was no longer financially feasible, and Caleb was too old to be interested in the same old summer shore shenanigans — he was busy with serious internships in the City. Tacitly, it was thought foolish to stick around the place for only Miranda’s sake. They fired Henry. Father accidentally ran over the cat. She’d never forgive them.

Every year thereafter, Miranda would have her heart re-rent by the inevitable conversations about potential buyers, selling the house outright or, no, putting it up for auction, which renovations were absolutely necessary in this market and which were frivolous, and on and on. But after Hurricane Sandy blew in and sank the local housing market, those conversations ceased altogether. As did the renovations. Right now, there’s a space-age stove below wet, mildewed wainscoting. The outdoor showerhead, glimmering fresh silver, is barely held aloft by grimy, kasha posts. And then there’s the plastic cocoon wrapped around the house’s forehead like a surgical mask, a reminder to all potentially interested parties that something is wrong here.

Only to Miranda did the cracks, drafts, and rotted beams ever sing an endearing paean. To everyone else, the house was an eyesore, and thus, a nuisance. So, they abandoned it. Miranda, however, refused to.

As soon as she got her license, Miranda began escaping to the shore on all sorts of jaunts, for a day here, for a week-long residency there. Mother and Father weren’t what you would call “attentive” caregivers. Comings and goings were never much remarked upon as long as responsibilities were taken care of and important events attended. Silence was what amounted to permission in the Swami household. If something was disagreeable, it was vocalized, otherwise, the least necessary communication was the best. Be concise, and don’t ask for the same thing twice. So, Miranda was, and never did.

The driver stops a few blocks from the destination, at his passenger’s request, letting her out onto Ocean Avenue. She remains motionless on the side of the road until his lights are far away and out of sight. Now that the street is empty, now that all nearby car noises have ceased, she moves into the center of the road, closing her eyes and tuning her frequency to the distant waves breaking on the distant sand.

The shore is something that, if you really love it, you don’t want to share. The breezy solitude of its off-season is meat for loners. And it infects you. You simply can’t get to this place, see this shore, it’s greatest form, if teenagers are playing chicken with the beer trucks, if frisbees fly hither and thither thrown by unseen, uncoordinated hands, if the Sherman’s and the Lee’s and the Callaway’s are all sitting around playing poker on their porches, guffawing while you try to have a God damn cigarette in fucking peace.

But before and after the season, the streets stay mostly deserted. You can stand right in the middle of Ocean Avenue and look up and watch the satellites slide past the stars with no fear of sudden vehicular manslaughter. There are periodic cabs, sure, and your year-rounders hustling to the highway en route to and from work, but they, a mere tenth of the summer population, are mostly manageable folk who keep to themselves. You’d hear their cars coming from a mile down the road.

Right now, it’s totally still and you can stand in the road and feel that you own it and all the land around you. You can casually be absorbed into the shore itself, into the air and the waves and the faintest glimmer of funnel cake smell carried down from Seaside Heights by the breeze.

She’d stand there forever if she had the nerve. But when something in a bush rustles too forcefully, Miranda’s senses steel themselves. Her heart begins to sputter, her shivering skin goes goose-pimply. She scurries away as quick as she can from the possibility of who-knows-what ambushing her from the shadowy roadside brush. Lest she forget, there are new fears with which she must wrangle. She runs all the way to the house. She does not look back.

Thank God, the front door key is in its usual spot: inside a fake rock under the doorstep hydrangeas. She always has a latent anxiety that someone will have removed it, that she’ll find the house resold or condemned or, worse still, containing her own family inside, the lot eating dinner at the dining room table. Mother will look up and see her through the window and whisper something to Father, who won’t move so much as a muscle, and dinner will either go unbated as if nobody saw anything at all, or Mother will shout “Sweetheart,” through the window, leaving Miranda no choice but to join her family for mealtime. Each possibility is somehow worse than the other.

As she fumbles with the lock, she notices a kitchen window she must’ve left open the last time. Here’s hoping no colony of ants or hornets has claimed this place as their kingdom in her absence.

And what a solemn kingdom it would be. The house itself is a stone soldier, no stucco in sight. Slate slabs are your pathways around its circumference, and igneous pebbles of faraway volcanic origin fill in the empty space between shrubs and walkways. There’s only a small square of sod in the back, a lone grass island adrift in a sea of stones.

It’s a grey and austere and purely parental temple, the peace of which no freewheeling child could destroy. It’s air of proscription was solidified in the abundance of rules written neatly on a chalkboard in the laundry-room. No jumping in the pool, no tracking mud or gravel in the house, no throwing balls or talking back. No yelling, demanding, or coming inside with wet feet. Voices down, towels folded, none of those pool noodles allowed because, inevitably, they’ll fracture from time or careless teeth and leave us infested with foam.

Inside the house, the thematic austerity is further explored. Like so many seaside abodes, this one also takes its design cues from a ship’s interior, although where many mimic a Hemingwayesque fishing boat — life preservers and coral and sandalwood pillars beside driftwood tables — Mother and Father went all in on the “Navy Destroyer” motif: slate walls and porthole windows too high up for juvenile eyes to peer through. Ships in bottles assembled in abstract countries are beached on every conceivable surface. A house like this demands awareness of one’s elbows. It’s not a welcoming place for children.

Maybe that’s why Miranda’s turquoise room, up the front hall stairs and to the right, is devoid of such seafaring paraphernalia, to coax her there and away from the fragile rest of the house. Its meager but sufficient space is filled some by a foam-cornered twin bed and the white woven rug of an indigenous ancestor, but mostly by the harem of stuffed animals lining the room like it’s some Parliamentary Chamber. It’s a cushy room, and nothing’s ever changed within it except the amount and location of the toys. Miranda was always clumsy, and Mother would not allow a single sharp edge within her space. Should she banish the girl to her room for tracking in mud again, she could rest easy knowing she wouldn’t find her daughter face down on the new carpet with a bloody gash engraved into her temple.

Now, in the night, it’s also the only room in the house in which Miranda feels safe. Even with the lights on everywhere, there is still an uncertainty re: potential hiding spots for horrible spirits. What could be waiting in the hall closet? Might some subzero spirit be holed up in the fridge? In her own room, Miranda is aware of all nooks and secret spaces. Nothing can sneak up on her here, whereas anything could be lurking outside her locked door. Bathroom breaks will have to wait until morning. The Wawa subs she forgot to take upstairs will remain disastrously uneaten. The bread will surely be soggy by sunup, the meat inedible; a true New Jersey Tragedy.

Even with her beat-up soul and general malaise, Miranda remains awake for hours. It’s far too frightening in here with the lights off, and every excited pipe’s clang within the walls nearly causes her to cry out in terror. She thinks she hears footsteps on the second-floor landing. She’s convinced there are voices conspiring within the air ducts.

Despite dread’s delaying it, Miranda is eventually soothed to sleep by the tumbling, onshore waves and the groan of distant acceleration on the parkway.

She soon wakes up in cold sweats. And then she does again.

In the morning, in the light, she skips stones, makes tea, and smokes on the front stoop. She tries reading a book on the patio, but can’t stop imagining demons climbing over the fence, so she reads it on the beach (but what if they come out of the water?), reads it in her room, gives up reading altogether, takes a shower to calm her nerves, and makes more tea. As the sun sets on an unsettling but uneventful day, Miranda lays on the pebbles in her backyard, watching the sky squeeze color from itself like juiced fruit onto the horizon, its nightly exhibition of self-mutilation. She only feels safe with her back against the impenetrable Earth.

But the body is tired, and a surprise sleep whacks her like a whiffle-ball bat.

“Miranda? Miranda! Hey, Miranda!” a voice in her dream says, but it’s too loud to be part of the dream, and she opens her eyes. In the glossy world of our freshly-awoken paranoiac, most any form would be frightening. Any individual looming over her would appear monstrous. Not only in their muddied, sleepy shadow, but in their intentions. Who knows what species of beast might be after her now? There might very well be three streets in the Upper West Side still aflame, and a mob could be marching on her safe space right now. They might have her goggles, they have her name. They could have the Twins hostage, forcing them to admit where Miranda goes when she isn’t in the city (not that they’d know), ransacking her room for mailing addresses and phone numbers. The universe has swiftly instilled in her a kind of omnipotent fear: everything is dangerous, everyone is an unknown quantity.

But not him. From any direction, with any amount of mental or visual blur, he’s familiar, unthreatening. An asshole, sure, but a well-known one.

They look into each other’s’ eyes, she squinting up at him, he wide-eyed down at her, and both begin to cackle. Wild people, they laugh and laugh and laugh, and he’s got his hands on his knees he’s laughing so hard, smiling so wide their cheeks begin to hurt. Like maniacs. Ranting, raving maniacs.

Look at those smiles. All teeth. Neither thought they’d ever smile at the other like that again.

These two, forgetting that they’re supposed to despise each other, laugh together by the sod in the backyard, not knowing necessarily why they’re having the reaction they are, but not wanting to question it. Sometimes, things are just so nice that to examine them would be a small suicide. Besides, take it from me, they both could really use a friend right about now.

Finally, they’re calm, settled into a shared sort of delirious joy. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asks.

“I should ask you the same question,” she says between yawns, pushing herself up onto her hands. 

“Let’s go inside,” he suggests.

“When did you get here?”

“Go inside and start a fire, I’ll be in in one second.”

And so she does. And then he is. This girl who hates taking orders, and this boy who can hold most any grudge unflinchingly close to his soul.

They’re inside and sitting by the fire, their toes extended and dry beside each other’s, and they wouldn’t have to say a single word if they didn’t want to, but lo and behold, they want to.

“I’m actually really glad you’re here,” he says. 

“‘Actually?’”

“Well, we didn’t leave off on the best of terms. I’ve been, ahh, hesitant to reach out.” 

She sighs. “I’m sorry about that. I was under a lot of stress. It’s been very hard.”

“I know. I should’ve been more brotherly. I haven’t been a good sibling to you. I’m not a good sibling to you. That much is clear.”

“Thank you for your honesty.” 

“And you yours.”

Ah, the easy silence of the soundly reunited. She lays her head on his shoulder, uncharacteristic, but she wants all of this feeling, this feeling of being close to a person. He shuffles nearer, hard for a man of his girth to do gracefully. The same flame licks both of their little toes. She confesses she could really use a friend. He says she has no idea how much he feels her on that. No idea.

“Things are changing for me really quickly,” she says.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He looks at her for a long time, his beautiful, big blue eyes and their lovely, unfair lashes batting lazily at her. “Not really,” he says. “I don’t know how you’d take it.” 

“Try me.”

“Maybe later. Want to tell me your thing?” 

“It’s not really that important.”

“You’re a terrible liar. I’ll start some dinner for us,” he says.

“There’s a sub in the fridge…” she offers. “Well, half of one.” Just the mention of food has made her stomach rumble. A soggy half-sub does not seem the tantalizing meal it did earlier in the day.

“I actually have some stuff in the car. Was planning on being here all weekend. And you know I usually eat for two anyways. We can go shopping again tomorrow…if you’re thinking about staying, that is.” 

“Not looking to leave anytime soon.”

“Great news.”

“You don’t have work? I’m shocked.”

“A bit of a lull. I expect it’ll pick up in a week or so.” 

“Heh, same.”

“I’m going to go start dinner.”

“Make sure you bring me the spoon.” Good memories come bubbling back to her. The orange cat and the sweet smell of sausage and how always, always, always, Caleb let her lick the spoon.

Caleb, for all of his faults, is a marvelous cook, having spent a wandering year in France studying under Jean-Paul Clavellete. Quite a talent with tongs, special with a spatula, he flips and turns, braises and slices with an adept’s precision. He was always an insanely helpful talent to have in a restaurant group, with equal-parts cultural knowledge and culinary skill. Of course, it made him kind of condescending towards the cooks, but no man is perfect.

Soon the house is hazy with the scent of roasting nutmeg, and a braising eggplant concoction spits little droplets of mustard over the nearby walls. He might have covered the pot before walking outside, but the allure of a cold beer with a comrade was too distracting. They laugh and drink out on the patio, the warm odor of baking spices wafting through a crack in the sliding door, and Caleb gets suds on his chin as the kitchen gets another new stain.

Looking at him now, smiling and calm, whistling off-key, hair just slightly amiss, apron wrapped around his thick neck and hips, she can’t help but love him through. He’s got such humanity, such an obvious collection of shortcomings and inaccuracies that, defiantly, he smiles through. There’s a charm to him, a finely-layered pheromone that emanates off his tucked shirts and cuffed pants, some trust-begetting thing. You look at him and can’t imagine how anyone would ever wrong this guy, this guy who’s, yeah, so often a prideful and selfish man, but always always so sincere about it. When he’s prideful and selfish, it isn’t something manipulated or fake, it’s really him. Maybe that wouldn’t be seen as a virtue in another generation, but in this world of Miranda’s, that type of sincerity is something seriously sanctified.

They’re singing along to acoustic covers of 90’s songs, and Caleb lets Miranda try the remoulade. Miranda excuses herself to the upstairs restroom. It takes her a few minutes of rummaging through cabinets to find an adequate tampon, and in none of those minutes does she feel herself in danger. Nothing bad can happen while Caleb’s here, she thinks. Beside him, she feels safe. Caleb, for all his faults, has and will always protect her. The thought makes her teary. She comes back downstairs.

She enters into a Hallmark moment: Caleb’s back turned to her, spices simmering in the air, cold beer frothing on the countertop; Miranda feels that she’s stepped out of her life. Hers is not a life of easy pleasures and safe smiles, of warm countertops and soft, familiar music. But there are smiles here. There are smiles here.

Caleb, not aware of Miranda’s current dietary-restrictions but aware enough of her capricious culinary whims, stays away from possibly offensive meats and starches and gluten, keeping his own sensibilities out of this meal. There are none of his usual lardons and fried bread-crumbs, no sign of bocquerones or veggies cooking in rendered animal fat, just a simple, tasteful meal, brightly flavorful and innocent to even the most militant of herbivores.

Dinner comes and goes and, like so many meals, the complexities of the cuisine do little more than add depth to the details of the meal itself. If there were smiles when the food was bubbling, boiling, baking, now there are laughs. The hearty laughs of the mutually nostalgic.

“What about the swingset?” Miranda says through a giggle, a fat piece of cauliflower on her fork, nodes of broccoli stuck between her teeth. “And when — oh fuck what was his name? You know who I’m talking about.”

“Dave Lipschitz.”“Dave Lipschitz! Yes! When he — HA HA HA — when he sat on the swing and the whole thing toppled over.”

Caleb holds back his laughter respectfully, only barely concealing his smile. “And we told him he was too fat for the swings.”

“God we ruined him over that.”

“I mean, he was too fat for the swings. Clearly,” Caleb says, slurping up a zucchini noodle.

“Jesus Christ. Poor Dave Lipschitz. We were so mean to him. Where do you think he is now?”

“I think…if I had to guess…I think he lives in suburban St. Louis, with a woman he thought he was going to marry but had merely impregnated; I think he weighs somewhere between 200 and 210 pounds, not altogether unreasonable for a man of his height, and I’m pretty sure he practices carpentry as his main gig, with a soulful business touching up antiques on the side.” And to the blank, Miranda Swami stare he replies, “We’re Facebook friends, he and I. No harm, no foul.”

After dinner, the two walk along the beach smoking cigarettes, ashing them into the sand and burying the burnt ends with their bare toes. 

“Have you spoken to them recently?” 

“No. Have you?”

“You know how Mother is. Likes when I check in. It’s a bi-weekly thing. At least.” 

“What a horrible fate hast thou befallen.”

“You don’t give her enough slack, Miranda. You do know you’re too hard on her, right?”

“Maybe,” Miranda says, lighting up another. “And maybe not. But in the very adult game of who’s-going-to-reach-out-to-who-first, she still has the onus of years upon her shoulders.”

“I think she misses you.”

“Do you think that because you’ve surmised so, or because she told you?”

Caleb thinks about this for a moment. “Why wouldn’t she miss you?” 

Miranda shrugs, “I don’t think she generally misses me.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit either. Do you hate all women like this, or just the ones you’re related to?”

“Oh, shut up!” Miranda yelps, giving Caleb a push with her shoulder. “I hold my sex to a higher standard. We display constantly the capacity for things you can hardly even keep in your skulls.” 

“Amen to that.”

“And how’s Father?” For discussions of Father, Miranda might metaphorically light two cigarettes.

“You know,” Caleb answers, “he’s him.”

The comment hangs in the air for a while, neither one addressing it. The silence they fall into is not a comfortable one, nor reflecting an absence of forthcoming speech, but because each party must process the best way to express what they both mutually know about this man who raised them.

Caleb proves braver. “He’s a bitter man. I feel sorry for him.”

Which is exactly the kind of thing Miranda wants to hear, for it gives her retort of “Yeah, tough life, what with the 7-figure income, the beauty queen wife, the fame, fortune and the two independent, successful kids, right?” a practiced, barely-containable feel to it. But what she says next is completely off the cuff. “What do you think went wrong with them?”

“What?” Caleb says, taken aback by this brief and obvious crack in the Miranda Swami armor. They’ve stopped at an abandoned life-guard tower about 50 yards from the water’s edge. It’s obvious Caleb is apprehensive about following Miranda up its ramp. She speaks down to him from six-feet-or-so above his head.

“They’re both such…so…what’s the word I’m looking for?” 

“Do you want me to —”

“No! I got it. They’re so…so…so…so fragile. It’s like they want every reason to believe the world is a terrible, corrupt place, that if their lives don’t follow the exact dictates they desire then everything will just fall apart or become awful or or or…I guess I just  don’t understand why anyone would want that to be the case.”

Miranda turns away from him, goes full silent-contemplative. “Miranda,” Caleb calls to her, but she answers not, turns not, acknowledges not. He comes up the ramp and is next to her. He doesn’t need to see the tear-stains beside her shoes, but simply takes her head into his chest, leaving it there, leaving her there, close. “Come on,” he whispers, kissing her head, “let’s go see about some ice cream.”

They leave Wawa with two bags filled with every sort of ice cream treat: Dippin’ Dots and King Cones and Klondike Bars, Haagen Daaz  and Ben and Jerry’s and Magnum Bars, too. All the goods laid out before them in the car, and Caleb’s hardly paying attention to the road that peeks out from over the Escalade’s big dashboard, and Miranda’s laughing, squinting, and when she looks up through the windshield, it’s just in time to catch something black and big darting across the road.

And Miranda fucking loses it.

“CALEB!”

Screaming, yelling, absolutely screeching murder, her shrieks so shock Caleb he almost drives off the road altogether. Swerving across the street despite there not being anything in the way at all, he shouts, “What the Hell is going on?!” which just incites Miranda more, incites her so much and so quickly it sends her into a full-blown panic attack, her face red and her bulging eyes swallowing forehead sweat, everything bloodshot and all the clothes constricting, she needs air so bad but out there is where that thing, where those things stalk and shuffle and watch and only in here, in this suffocatingly-small car compartment, is she safe. Still the screams flee from her mouth like of their own volition, and nothing in her power can stop them. Caleb is angry and then horrified and then his very soul starts to shake. But he can see her sweating and, not knowing what else to do, puts the A/C on full blast, places his big hands on Miranda’s shoulders, cooing quietly in her ear as they stall on the roadside. After a few minutes, she begins breathing more regularly, her hyperventilation reduced to just big breaths inward, and Caleb takes a proper break before asking, “Well what was that about?” 

“I uhm, nothing.”

“You can’t have something like that happen and not explain. Explain.” 

“I don’t want to.”

“I’ll sit here all night.” 

“Please don’t do this.” 

“Miranda. It’s important.”

And, as he says this, she knows it is.

“I’ve been having nightmares.”

Caleb considers his response. “Like, the old nightmares?”

“Yeah. Just like them. I don’t know why they’ve come back. But I’m, like, terrified of dark places and shadows and corners I can’t see around. I think it was a deer jumped across the road, or maybe it was just my imagination. It was like, like I was suddenly unsure whether I was awake or asleep and whether anything around me was real, and I looked over to the side of the road and I kept seeing all these eyes, horrible eyes, in the dark, and-and-and, I don’t know, everything just got tight.”

And Caleb only utters two syllables back. “Oh-kay.”

At the house, Miranda complains about being tired, and Caleb says, “Why don’t we sleep up in Mother’s room?” like they used to. Big California king bed, flat-screen TV, wonderful view of the ocean sunrise; together on opposite sides of the bed, in their respectively ridiculous pajamas (hers of cotton, his of silk), they sit watching old sitcoms.

Caleb needs to hear Miranda’s slow, shallow snoring before he allows himself to drift off, too. For this, he turns on David Attenborough nature documentaries, sets a sleep timer for just after sunrise, and lets himself fall into nothingness amid a sea of soft pillows.In the morning, Miranda will awaken to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. Caleb, a man of creature comforts, has thought of everything.

On the beach, smoking: “Miranda, what’s wrong? You’re far away.”

At the grocery store, examining spices: “Are you not going to tell me what’s bothering you?”

Home in the kitchen, as things burble on the stovetop:“You’re too private for your own good. That stuff will eat you from the inside.”

Caleb, perceptive as ever, clearly sees something gnawing away at Miranda’s cool façade. His sister should be violently angry that her beloved McGreevy’s Toffee, Taffy and More has been shut down to make way for something called The Banana Emporium, for example, but there’s nothing. All of that is too close, and she’s somewhere far away. She can hardly even see it from where she stands, on an island in the middle of a rough black ocean.

Daylight saving time has come and passed, so it’s pitch dark out by six. In the summer, the three extra hours of daylight allow you to sink into the end-of-day laziness slowly, softly, like settling into a hammock. But once it’s late autumn — and winter is even worse — the night just crashes down upon you, an always startling, always disappointing thing. Zaps your energy away. The sun’s shredded warmth dissipates, and on the shore, a wind always picks up. Miranda takes a cold beer out onto the patio. Caleb follows behind.

“Miranda, it’s freezing out here, you need a jacket.” 

“Remember how Mother used to talk about demons?”

“You don’t have blubber like I do; you’re going to get hypothermia.”

“You do remember, though, right? I mean, I don’t know, but when she said those things to you — and maybe it was because you were older by then — it always seemed like an inside joke. ‘Oh Caleb, better study for Algebra, otherwise the demons are going to take you flat out the window.’ And you’d both have a good laugh about it.”

“Yeah, I remember. You didn’t find the whole thing as riotous?” Caleb feels sweat forming under his arms, but behind the soft leather of his black jacket, he’s hidden from an exposé on his eccrine glands…

“It sounds so stupid. So, so stupid. But that shit has always stayed with me. They’re going to come out from under the bed and in the closet and through the crack in the open window, going to get me, eat me up, punish me for my misgivings…do you know what she said to me once? I think I was five. Five. And she says for every bad thing I do in a day, the demons will come in while I sleep and take a bite off my fingernails, and that’s how everyone will know I’m bad, because my stubby fingernails will never grow. She said that.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“Admittedly, that’s psychotic.” 

“Five!”

“Five. Crazy. So, what? You never sleep with your door open?”

“Never. I can’t sleep unless I know all the doors are properly locked. Sometimes, when my roommates get home late, I’ll sneak out of bed in a panic to make sure they locked the apartment door behind them.”

“Check under your bed for monsters?” 

“And in the closet.”

“And what do you expect to do if-slash-when you find something?”

Miranda thinks about this for a moment. “Hope the shock kills me outright, or at least keeps me from feeling what the beast is doing to me with its claws.” 

Back inside, Miranda stands by the oven to warm up. 

“I should’ve worn a jacket,” she says, shivering. 

“How often did Mother tell you these things?” “You’re not going to let this go, huh?”

“I’m just…confused is all. With me, it was always a joke. It was never actually weaponized against me. I don’t know, Miranda, I just want to know.” 

“It was pretty frequent.”

Caleb seems genuinely taken aback. He’s doing that thing he does where he places the back of his hand to his forehead, as if the heat of what he’s heard is making him woozy.

“The cruelty of it…that’s what really gets to me.” He says it like he knows, like he was there, like he was exposed to half of what she was exposed to, like he ever got any side of Mother but the one that reflected the sun. All she got was darkness. When she got anything at all, it was darkness. Any and all of the darkness within herself — and it’s there, she’s seen it, has felt it, has felt its wormy body in her veins and its tinny whispers assaulting her over bowls of cereals and from the crevice between movie theater seats, knows the horrible things it thinks and suggests and the terrible influence it has over the weak and suggestive rest-of-her; she knows it — was inherited from what shadows Mother exposed her to.

“It’s okay,” she says, having been told in mandatory therapy that blaming her Mother for actions she herself considered and planned and carried out is the kind of cop-out that sociopaths use to explain their murderous rampages, and sex offenders their stashing of kiddie pics. “She was doing the best she could. Well, maybe not…at least she was around.”

You can’t see the garage door from where Miranda stands, but you can hear it open, and you can hear a battalion of bootsteps march in, thick boots on tile. Miranda looks to Caleb, and Caleb pokes his head around the corner, and Miranda says, “Who is it?” but Caleb doesn’t immediately answer. Maybe she should be  more panicked, after all, there are clearly intruders here, trespassers, and who knows what they’re intentions are? There might be demons afoot. But it smells so good and Caleb is so calm, and-and-and, and there are smiles here…How can anything bad happen with so much goodness in the room?

The intruders are not outwardly demonic, just a twosome in chef’s coats, probably siblings seeing as unrelated noses don’t often share such pronounced ridges. They come into the kitchen, holding hotel trays wrapped in glimmering foil, visibly taken aback by what hegemony the dense, red-faced Caleb already has over the kitchen, their kitchen supposedly.

And then Jean-Luc’s heavy Samoan body enters in backwards, dragging a huge white cooler like a child might drag his Red Ryder. A shrill female voice, the bite of it sharpened by all the time it has spent correcting behavior, yells, “Please, Jean-Luc, you’ll scratch the tile.”

The big man, straight flexin’, flips the cooler up into his arms without so much as a grunt, brushing silently into the kitchen and setting the thing down by the patio door. He nods politely at the two Swami children. He’s known them for the better part of two decades, and still only ever a polite nod.

Then the female voice, bite withdrawn, shouts around the corner, “Surprise, young man! Surprise!” 

And finally, everyone, we have tonight’s entertainment:

Smiling like an idiot invalid, bedecked in so many jewels she refracts even the meager light around her, like some glittering peacock chimera, into the kitchen comes Heiress to the Klubelman Cookie fortune, Diana Klubelman Swami, better known to the house’s occupants as Mother.

Well, Mother is followed further into the house by stoic Father, and she kisses Caleb, and gives some orders to the cooks (very on-brand), and then, only then, once she’s kind of gotten comfortable in the space, does she turn to look into the living room, to the columns there, upon which leans a perpetually teenage daughter with half of her head shaved, the other half greasy and falling uncut past her shoulders, scrawny legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded aggressively, scowling, and with a mustard stain on her cardigan.

“Sweet-heart. What a pleasant surprise.”

“For us all,” Miranda snickers. Her heart, apparently wanting to see what’s going on out there, has lodged itself halfway up her throat.

“Honey, please. We just got here.” Father says, seating himself at the kitchen table. He must’ve come in with the Journal half-read because it’s open and already on to the stock ticker. 

“Arthur, you don’t have to —”

“Diana,” Arthur says, far sterner than necessary. Everyone in the room goes silent and still. “We just got here.”

The air thickens. Diana looks down at her dress. Miranda wants to scream so many things but can’t seem to find her voice. That has become a worrisome trend.

Miranda, will you be, ahem, joining us for dinner?” Mother asks, finally.

“I’m pretty sure Caleb…” she’s cut off by a look from her brother. It’s a pleading, begging look: just leave it alone, it says, it’s not worth it.“You’re pretty sure Caleb what, sweetie?”

“She’s pretty sure I just made all this eggplant,” Caleb says for his sister, drawing Mother’s attention. 

“Oh, just toss it. Victor and Ella here are from Carpaccio. They have a Michelin Star.”

Suddenly wanting to skin herself, Miranda grumbles something quietly and leaves the room.

“Was it something I said?” Mother asks Caleb, who turns away.

“Surprise, indeed,” Father says, then coughs, then asks Jean-Luc to put on some coffee.

“I think maybe I should bring Miranda some tea,” Caleb says.

“Extra-strong, Jean-Luc,” Father says. “Lots of cream.”

Mother leans on the granite countertop as Caleb slowly removes his apron; Father flips to the sports section while Jean-Luc removes a bag of coffee beans from the cooler. Victor and Ella speak rapidly to each other in Italian, flipping through settings on the oven.

“So lovely to have the whole family together,” Mother says, then looks down. She sighs and lifts up the hem of her dress. Someone has tracked mud onto the tile.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

Thankfully, the door to her room is thick, sturdy oak, and with Pearl Jam playing on an ancient Walkman dug out of a pseudo-sock drawer, Miranda can just about drown out the conversation downstairs. But Mother’s unusual voice has a way of circumventing even the best attempts to contain it. She won’t be thwarted by mere music.

So she can hear Mother’s cooing, sing-song voice through the headphones, through the walls, gushing about Caleb, laughing with Caleb, either talking to Caleb himself or simply babbling into the ether. No lack of listener will keep her from cawing about her beloved first-born.

Their only intended child: Caleb, the golden one, the tactical birth.

At the time of Caleb’s conception, there was only one way for an up-and-up like Arthur Swami to reach the inner sanctum of American politics, and it mandated being straight and white and eminently likeable. In this case, the lattermost dictate required 1) a loving, personable wife and 2) a lovely, young child in her arms or belly. Diana Klubelman, a bit of high-cheek-boned old money, allowed herself onto Arthur’s arm, thus checking box number one. Diana was drawn to the power game, asserting herself as a preternatural impresario to donors and snake-charmer to their wives. Her latent interpersonal power had remained dormant before Arthur, for despite all the hours spent honing a laugh and batting eyelashes at her reflection in the mirror, it’s hard for even Upstate New York’s elite to attract real glamour to their Hudson-side homes.

But everything Arthur Swami did dazzled. She would have undergone heart surgery for the man if it meant lunching with a swankier set in larger rooms, but there was no need for that. As it happened, all he needed from her was to get pregnant. What luck, she had planned on doing that anyway. Check box number two.

Arthur’s re-election was a cinch with a bun in his darling wife’s oven; and though Diana’s fatigue meant a sometimes separation from her beau, they were able to convene often enough on-camera and in print to craft Arthur the armor of the devoted pre-father. Meanwhile Diana appeared just the kind of spunky, flush, first-time mother that lights something in the proverbial gonads, the perfectly game political wife, all hips and tits and joking about her swollen feet.

It was a pure symbiosis. To Diana, Arthur offered passage into an incredible new world, which Diana made ripe for his political conquest. To Arthur, Diana gave her body, which Arthur made the most beloved body, by husband and then constituency, in the great state of New York.

Caleb arrived a week premature, excited perhaps by his father’s landslide victory the previous Tuesday. Strangely, wonderfully, conveniently, so much of the spotlight just beginning to shine on hot upstart Arthur Swami was repositioned onto his young wife, with the new baby in her arms, and the wonderful picture she painted of marital and parental bliss.

That spotlight only got brighter. She was in Good Houskeeping. She was on Oprah. She smiled, she laughed, she cracked jokes and danced. She told of Arthur holding a moist washcloth to her head while she lay in the throes of some feverish mid-pregnancy something-or-other. She embellished. She chided. She called the shots, she knew her place. She was superhuman. And she did it all while a golden-haired baby with Sea of Cortez eyes rocked placidly in her arms.

It was divine. Arthur wished nothing more than to go about his political wheelings from behind a curtain, and the more fuss Diana commanded on-stage, the less anyone seemed to care about him.

People wrote about her, they discussed her on daytime talk, they sent letters asking for child-rearing advice. To all those viewers, Diana appeared a quintessentially adoring mother, a being of such pure and unselfish affection that no matter her minor indiscretions, her ability as a mother, and thus the sincerity of all that adoration, couldn’t be called into question.

Beside her in the glare of that spotlight was only Caleb. Every coo was remarkable; the world closed in around them. So bright that light was, it turned dark all else. There was only she and Caleb. Caleb and her. She loved him like you love life, like you love the idea of a gondola ride, like a sailor loves the land which ends a voyage, dropping to his knees to kiss the ground beneath him simply because it’s there, and it hadn’t been for so, so long.

But lo, love, even a mother’s, isn’t unending. With everything in her, Diana loved Caleb. Truly. Cosmically. With the scraps left, she supported her husband as he travelled the country, drumming up party support in such faraway places as Boise and Ketchum. By the time Miranda was born, “Mother” was just about barren.

Less an accident than an oversight, the pregnancy was a curious thing that became known to the doer as it became known to the watchers, too. We’re ten years post-Caleb here. Arthur is a fifth-term Representative and bearer of much power, power he finally plans to focus on a senate run. It’s all happening, baby, finally happening. All possible futures are bright. All possible outcomes are known.

Diana ballooned almost overnight. Celebrities and politicians, everyone in the public eye can agree that the stressors of such a position might sometimes cause wonky body changes. Thus the weight gain was attributed to stress. And the professionally-done makeup, the already-messy circadian rhythm, the eating only when convenient, the long-ago hypothesis of her crack gynecologist that Caleb’s difficult delivery probably left her infertile, all of these facts masked the truth of Miranda’s subtle fomentation within her.

Then she’s on the air with Amanda Washington, so kind-hearted and dark-skinned and ambitious, who’s looked at her with this strange curiosity since she walked in, who waits politely until her guest has finished discussing her husband’s views on the Second Amendment and says, “Excuse the shameless pivot, but we’ve spoken enough about your husband, you’re as influential as he is —”

But the ever-instinctive Diana isn’t at her first rodeo and juts in, “It’s such a privilege to have the reach we do. And all our constituents in New York’s 18th know that Arthur and I have always used that reach to do good. That’s why Arthur and I have been staunch supporters of animal rights and the right of every person to have a warm bed waiting for them at home.” Cue the *applause*.

“Yes, yes we’re all quite aware of your impressive successes in New York’s 18th. But, as I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s talk that you’re having another child. Would you care to comment?”

There! There! Stop the tape! Look! Okay, let’s go frame-by-frame. Just for a moment, see the color dampening in her cheeks? The eyebrows slackening? She’d never do that on purpose. At this speed, you can really see her putting it all together: the snacking, the heaviness, the weight of her chest, the moods. And if you squint and look hard enough, there’s her tongue teetering along the trench underneath her teeth, traipsing up top then retreating, only producing the first half-syllable of the word that’s been ringing again in her head, heard  from all sides as an omnipresent excuse for all of the above symptoms — “stress.” In this rare but prime example, we see the conscious and subconscious minds coming to the same realization at that same time.

Cue these infinitely complex, minute mental reactions happening between nanoseconds: if I say I’m not pregnant and I am, it becomes obvious the child was a mistake, and there’s no recovery from that. But If I say I am, one of two options become available to me: either I have a little baby on the campaign trail, and the constituents flock for a glimpse of its forehead, or I have/fake a miscarriage, and the sympathy floods in through any open orifice, preceding teary letters and flowers from all the inspired would-be-mothers also struggling to conceive.

A prodigious candidate’s wife, she makes a calculated decision. “Well, I suppose the cat’s out of the bag. This old dress wasn’t as slimming as I thought. Yes, Arthur and I are having a second. Crossing our fingers for a little girl this time.”

Well, she was indeed with child, and, unlike with Caleb, this pregnancy was a doozy long before labor. Diana was constantly bed-ridden, made invalid by sweats and fatigue and phantom fears rising like sauna steam from the very floorboards insulating her bedroom. With her hormones in such insane imbalance, periods of weeks or more passed where a creeping paranoia — paranoia of armed men, rivals of her husband, coming to attack her and kill Caleb — produced delusions so powerful, one even required a thankfully-unpublicized sedation.

Dealing with a wife both mentally-unstable and pregnant was strain enough, never mind the normal psychological taxation of an election cycle. Arthur slipped in conversation before slipping in the polls. And with his wife out of commission, there was nobody to help woo donors, no master of spin to correct his comments, no connecting cord to constituents.

Despite the best efforts of New York’s 18th to turn out, Arthur lost his senate race to the republican incumbent. And having given up his former chair in pursuit of a more gilded one, he found himself jobless. At least there was a brand-new baby girl to brighten his spirits. If only she’d have stopped crying, maybe she would have.

But she wouldn’t, and Arthur Swami somehow fell further. In the weeks following Miranda’s birth, some intrepid reporter Arthur had once privately called a “fucking stickbug” published a revenge piece about how inattentive Arthur was to his sick, pregnant wife during the campaign, causing a veritable landslide of popular opinion to bury any future political hope. Though Diana drew considerably sympathy because of it, Diana was not a candidate. The Swami patriarch withdrew from public life altogether. Left without many other options, Arthur became a Wall Street lobbyist. His wife just became bitter.

And it was all Miranda’s fault, was it not? In a post-pregnancy daze, Diana had fitful fantasies of stepping back in time, going through with the fantasized backdoor abortion, faking a fall and forcing a miscarriage, being more careful with Arthur in the first place. For if any of those had been fortune’s favored footpath, Arthur Swami could have been careening towards a presidential bid within the decade. She might’ve been Diana Klubelman, First Lady of the United States, a title that would have etched her into history’s tableau, the ultimate dream of the ultra-rich.

Instead, she became a mother of two and a businessman’s wife. So unexciting and uninspiring, totally bland. Obvious.

Miranda, from even before her birth, was to be sidled with all the failed possibilities her germination represented. She and Caleb, the Omega and the Alpha:

He a symbol of all that could have been,

She a symbol of all that wasn’t.

Caleb was more than Mother’s son, and Miranda less than her daughter. They were relegated to motifs, to plot points. Since this was decided long before Miranda could question her circumstance, there was little outrage to be had. There was simply this circumstance, one that worked out for her in some ways, did not in others, but meant that her relationship with her parents would always be cold and rather unpleasant.

No love lost now that they’re all relegated to seeing each other only at the obligatory Seder, or even less actually, seeing as Miranda failed to attend even one night of ‘A Very Swami/Klubelman Passover’ this last year.

Maybe if she stays up in her room long enough, they’ll just forget about her, content to bask in Caleb’s afterglow and then leave, and everyone can avoid the terse, awkward conversation. If the clinking glasses and the hushed chortles, the clack-clack-clackclack of Mother’s acrylic fingernails on granite, are any indication, she might already be an afterthought.

They’ll be gone after tonight. Just make it through the night, she repeats, and the days are yours again. She turns onto her side as if to doze off, but there are footsteps on the stairs, and her blood freezes.

Face it, kid, they were never going to leave you up here.

The stepper on the stairs, announcing themselves, flicks the light on and off and on and off from the switch outside. Now, let’s be real for a second: who in their right mind puts a light switch outside a room? This ridiculous architectural quirk, ubiquitous in every room on the second floor, was the bane of bathroom visits, producing a fear that cruel Caleb might bathe her in darkness, leaving her locked inside and alone as he made crunching, gnawing demon sounds outside the door. What epitomizes their relationship better than that?

“Come in,” she sighs, and the brazen intruder, stripped of his apron, wearing a familiar suit of blue wool, hair slicked and attitude all-business, walks in, looking down at his phone.

“Dinner time, Miranda.” His eyes bounce flamboyantly around the room. He seems to recoil at the smell.

“Yeah, okay.”

Though that should be enough, Caleb stutters at the door. “Miri,” he says, resurrecting that decrepit old nickname again,“we’re okay, right?”

“Sure, Caleb,” she says. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

He takes a step into the room, entirely without permission, and grazes his finger over the walls. Because her dresser boldly blocks his circumnavigation of her room, Caleb stops in front of it, picking up the dusty family photos that are its crown, rubbing his thumb over them and smiling sadly. He looks up at her. “I just…you know I had no idea they were coming. This whole thing, I’ve got no fingerprints on it.”

“Caleb. Really, I know. Let’s just go and get this over with.”

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” he says quickly, almost desperately.

“Yes, I do,” his sister says, brushing past him into the hall, and down the stairs, and into the kitchen.

She moves so fast he can barely say, “Wait.” He certainly doesn’t have time to say the rest. For a moment, Caleb stays planted by the bureau. Slowly, he glances around the room, at the bed and the open notebooks atop it and all the stuffed animals. Did you know they all have names? He used to stand in this room and listen for minutes at a time as Miranda would introduce him, personally, to all the cotton-blooded dinosaurs and lemurs and panda bears she kept here. This is a world preserved, a world as it used to be. He leaves the room with the light still on, achingly aware of the symbolic significance.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

It’s been more than a year since the family was together, and the time away shows on her parents’ faces. Arthur’s recent commitment to CrossFit couldn’t sojourn the ceaseless marching of age, the crinkles and creases of so many practiced grimaces and squints now folded into his face’s fabric. Who’s to say when the younger Arthur, always trim and painfully well-groomed, finally surrendered to the greyblack stubble growing wild over chapped lips? Good for him, at least he’s given up thoroughly. At least he’s sincere about it.

And Mother. Her Mother. Ah, Her Mother. Her Mother’s latest ballgown a waterfall of indigo and Swarovski crystals, she dresses like the queen she might have been, or once was. Mother’s obsession with sparkles and tails was, in Miranda’s early youth, a fascinating and endearing quirk, something princess-like she’d wanted to emulate. Although when imitation, too, failed to get her mother’s approval, she gave it up, mimicry as a whole, leaving the braggadocios outfits to the professionally braggadocios.

But was her face always this thin? This gaunt? Instead of drooping with time, it’s tightened, so taut her skin just barely cloaks her bones. So sharp are her shoulder blades, so fatless is her pretty neck, so slight is the hair that flows down her back, all the greys within defying the best efforts of expensive dyes to mask them.

“Let’s start with the soup now, perhaps?” Mother calls vaguely to the kitchen. The male chef promptly sidles tableside, ladling heaps of a mauve chowder into bowls while his female compatriot follows with a grater and some pungent amber cheese.

Caleb nudges Miranda with his shoe under the table. “I thought we weren’t allowed to wear shoes inside?” she whispers to him.

“When yours are made of Italian leather, Mother will let you wear them inside, too.” 

“I hate you.”

“A lot of fennel,” Mother suddenly exclaims, putting her spoon down, introducing rather early the criticism portion of the evening.

“I think it’s great,” Caleb says even louder, hoping the chefs will hear. “Fennel and lavender, and dukkha?”

Father grunts. “It’s fine,” said without a hint of levity. 

Miranda isn’t hungry anymore.

“Such a sweet surprise having you both here,” Caleb says finally. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“We just wanted to say congratulations before the whole world was nipping at your heels. We wanted to be with you while you were still ours,” Mother pontificates, spoon spelunking through the soup. “Your brother is pretty impressive, huh?” she says to Miranda.

“Oh yes,” Miranda says. “Such a specimen.” 

“Miranda, don’t be rude.”

“Yes, Father. Sorry, Mother.”

“Miranda’s doing well, too, if you didn’t know,” Caleb says. “She just had an exhibition at the Eldred Apple Building. Very big deal.”

“You knew about that?” Miranda asks softly.

“Yes! Miranda! Of course!” Mother exclaims, mistaking antecedents. “So sorry we couldn’t make it out, dear, but you know how autumn is for your father. And how was your Apple show?” Mother makes a show of her apology.

“Fantastic, actually.”

“Well, that is wonderful. And classes are going…well, I mean your grades aren’t being, ahem, interfered with by the Apple business?”

“Of course not, Mother. I’m on pace to graduate a semester early.

“Well, well, sweetheart, that is quite the accomplishment. And to what do we owe the pleasure of your being here this evening?”

“I come down here sometimes,” Miranda mutters. “It’s usually quiet.” 

Cue a trademark Swami Family SilenceTM.

“Well we have two things to celebrate, then! To Caleb’s promotion and Miranda’s scholastic excellence! My wonderful children, huff, how lucky am I? Ahem, are we?”

With minimal enthusiasm, Father looks up from his soup, glass in hand to match his wife’s, and says “Here, here.”

“But really, Caleb,” Mother says, defining her toast, “this is such a crowning accomplishment. At 33, no less. Wunderkind!”

“Mother, please.” Caleb interrupts, “Really, let’s talk about something else.”

Mother’s eyes narrow a bit, and she locks hers with Caleb’s. He looks down at his soup, and Miranda sees all of this. Something is amiss.

“Miranda, dear. Caleb did tell you about his big news, didn’t he?”

Miranda shakes her head, no. One of the difficulties in being a man Caleb’s size is people are kind of always looking at you. A separate issue for men like him, with Adam’s apples like that, is that it’s really difficult to gulp discretely. As such, his gulp is not discrete, and everyone is looking at him.

“Mother,” he says quietly, “please.”

But Mother is still speaking to Miranda. “I was under the impression that Caleb had shared his successes with you, like we discussed, but I suppose not. Caleb would you care to, perhaps, illuminate your sister on the latest?”

Miranda feels the temperature drop like twenty degrees. The shivers begin in her toes and crawl upwards, freezing the sweat under her arms and on her brow and even her eyes are cold.

“Mother, drop it.” Caleb commands.

“Caleb!” Father yells, startling the chefs in the kitchen. How effortlessly he can commandeer a room. “You do not speak to your mother like that.”

“Arthur, it’s fine, really. Caleb, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how —”

“No, this is ridiculous. He’s a grown man.” Father swoops in like the angel of death, his scythe slicing the air, unaware and unapologetic, simply doing his duty, matter of fact and straightforward, separate are his actions from their consequences. He neither stutters nor slips as he says blankly to Miranda, “Your brother has been made CEO of his banana company.”

“Ba-na-nuh cum-pen-ee?” Miranda hears herself saying slowly. It’s a wonder she can even hear at all; there’s a hundred thousand nuclear devices detonating at once in between her ears. A noise somewhere between a steam engine and a comet breaking up upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, that’s the underlying sound which life (perhaps in perpetuity) adopts.

“There, was that so difficult?” Father asks Caleb.

“See, honey? It’s okay. Your sister is so happy she can hardly speak!”

“Ba-na-nuh cum-pen-nee?” The words repeat again and again in her head, sad, bored, metronomic, building speed and clatter like motorcyclers in a circus dome. She’s not totally sure if she’s speaking or simply thinking, and whatever control she has traditionally had over her eyes and mouth has been lost. She sees, at once, every inch of the room, and also the skeletons of the things in it; colors flash and her mouth hangs slack as she speaks. This is it, she thinks, I’m dead.

“Mer-an-duh, puh-leeze, don’t fuh-reek ow-wut,” Caleb says in slow-motion, but it’s not really in slow-motion, it’s just that time has completely collapsed. Miranda experiences her own birth and death, feels in her spirit the decay of all things, and the growth of mushrooms upon the wet, dead log.

“Suh-wheat-hart, wuh-hut is thuh mat-ter oo-whith yuh-who?” Mother’s voice, even slowed and numb, still bites.

Time, having finished flourishing for Miranda, returns to normal, which is hyper-speed by comparison, and Miranda juts her chair back into the serving elbow of the male chef who yells, “Aghhh,” or “Mamma mia!” or some other Italian outcry of surprise as his large cauldron of ashy, cream-covered pasta discards half its stomach onto the floor. The chef looks around mortified, the daughter looks around defiant.

“Jesus Christ, Miranda!” Mother shouts.

“How long?” she asks Caleb, directly, without edge, without emotion, as if she were asking when the delivery guy was going to get here.

“Miranda, come on,” he pleads with eyes and voice and forehead. She thinks maybe if she looks at him long and hard enough, he’ll explode, splattering Mother and Father and all this frilly fucking food with the world’s most traitorous blood-‘n-guts.

“Miranda, please, you’re being —” Mother tries to say.

“How long!?” she shrieks, inflamed by her brother’s evasiveness. Mother and Father sit silent, either stunned by the goings-ons or aware that something is happening completely over their manicured heads. The chefs pick up the pasta with large tweezers.

“Since June,” he says. Blunt as Professor Plum with the candlestick in the parlor.

“This whole time you were there?…And with Cindi Lapenschtall…you were there? With Gwami, too? At that church you were already there? You didn’t tell me that you were there why didn’t you tell me that you were there why wouldn’t you tell me that you were there!?”

Caleb doesn’t have a response, but that’s okay, she doesn’t want one. She knows she has command of this room, totally and inconsequentially, that if she flexed her might in this moment of weakness, she could get to the very root of so many things: how long he’s been there, exactly what he knows and what he wants, exactly how much blood is caked onto his hands–Cindi’s and Gwami’s certainly, and whoever else he had to bully, bludgeon, or bury to get that penthouse corner office. Caleb has never been the kind to puff out his chest in moments of tense confrontation, turning over by default like a submissive house pet. If she were a brash and brutal creature, she would take this moment to destroy him, destroy whatever ripped remnants of his soul still hang around his chest; she would reveal her alter-ego to Mother and Father and use the shock of that exposé to emphasize exactly the size and scope of Caleb’s betrayal. She would craft an off-the-cuff thesis statement on how she was right about her brother, about how all the coddling and care put into his upbringing turned him into a selfish, entitled, self-serving, insular, careless, sociopathic, pathetic, milquetoast piece of shit, asshole.

But Miranda isn’t brutal nor brash. She’s none of those things. She’s much more like her mother. Even if she wishes she weren’t, Miranda is in fact her mother’s daughter. Her inherited brain calculates right now a thousand possible responses in half-a-nanosecond, factoring into its decisions nothing more important than this: Big Banana is Gwami’s mortal enemy, they smote her and will smite Miranda if they can; and if it’s true, if Caleb really is their new CEO to be, if he too is dealing in forces stronger and darker than any he could imagine, if he’s been there for so long and if he had any hand in the situation with Cindi and Gwami, then they could, then they can, then they will. They most certainly will.

Miranda’s entire life has thus been compromised. From two fronts she must flee: from the mob and the militia both. The enemy knows everything there is to know about her, how much money is in her bank account, the contents of her crawlspace, the phone numbers of everyone she’s ever met. A very distant threat of violence against her has become incredibly real and violently close. Her responses right this second might, should Caleb have truly morphed into the worst possible version of himself, decide whether she’ll live to see the morning. Or the one thereafter.

There is no more time for shock or anger or existential dread. After she gets somewhere safe, maybe. Now demands calculation.

So, Miranda takes a deep breath, relaxes her shoulders, and says, “I’m so sorry everyone. I don’t know what came over me. Caleb, that’s amazing. I’m so proud of you, you’re going to do great. Mother, Father, you should be proud of him. I’m happy for us all. It’s a great day for the Swami family. Cheers,” and she raises a glass.

Here, here.

The family goes on with its meal, making polite talk about politics, about the new wars, about the coronation of Caleb Swami. He engages in long, sincere, apologetic stares at Miranda, who looks back and smiles with her eyes, like nothing’s wrong, like nothing’s ever been wrong in her life.

Miranda makes a very convincing show of eating. Look! She really chews and swallows!

“Excuse me,” she says, “Just need to use the restroom.” She leaves the kitchen, the chef comes over to fold her napkin, and she heads upstairs, esoteric familial code for which type of bathroom trip this is. How proper she is, how polite.

Polite talk continues in the kitchen, polite contained laughter and polite fork movements. Downstairs they eat Pappardelle, a very polite and proper type of pasta, while Miranda politely packs her bags, politely tiptoes into Mother and Father’s room to grab a few things and down to ground level, managing sufficient silence as she opens the front door, her backpack digging into her shoulders, her heart weirdly calm.

By the time they even notice she’s gone, she’s already in an Uber the Wawa cashier called for her, en route to catching the 10:14 northbound out of Manahawkin. She left her phone on her bed, on top of a note that says Fuck You, Caleb in black marker. In her tip-toeing, she unflinchingly stole twelve-hundred dollars in cash and a debit card from Mother’s purse on the bed. And she left her room light on, too; someone will have to go up there and turn it off.

She’ll be long gone by the time Caleb, forlorn, stands in the doorway, a flush of orange light behind him, and stares out onto the empty street. Mother’ll call after him, asking what’s wrong, but he’ll pretend not to hear. Slowly realizing his sister is gone, he’ll return inside, leaving the door open a smidge, letting in a draft as if to demonstrate his true level of distress. Miranda’s gone he will tell them. Mother might stand and make a show of making a fuss, but then she’ll sit back down, eat a marinated olive and tell herself it isn’t her problem. Father will see something unsettling in the paper but will decide against sharing it. Caleb will feel very alone, and then quite upset, angry, furious, even, and then he’ll push the whole thing away.

“So, guys…how was the trip down?”

And Miranda will be sitting on a train, flipping through the money she’s managed to make off with, counting it like it isn’t real, counting it in public, and then switching to a bus and then falling asleep. In her bumpy dreams, there’s a great open field, green and yellow with patchy banana trees and an endless blue sky shining down upon them. But storm-clouds start to convene from the west, the faraway sky lit blue and yellow and orange with primordial lightning. The ground below begins to swell and recede like a belching belly, and fissures like salt-flats open within the very earth. Alerted to danger by the fissures and the lightning, hundreds of laborers, sweaty and dirt-caked, stand up from their knees, look out from behind the trees, wiping their foreheads with their forearms, bountiful baskets of unripe bananas on their hips.

“¿Que es eso!?” A deep male voice shouts, and dozens of screams follow suit. Crashing towards the workers is a sky that has turned hellish by approaching flame, orange and crimson, and bright burnt splinters from charred trees rise up in the ash clouds before descending like hail. Running bodies caked in Vesuvian soot explode out from the thick smoke as those beings, the Banana Demons from Cindi’s video, begin to crawl out of crevices in the Earth, ridiculous looking, somewhat, but so terrifying now that they’re whole, uncut, unchained. There are hundreds of the beasts altogether, and with them literally pouring from the earth, the fire gets brighter, hotter, and the lightning strikes closer and closer, the storm rushing in with maniac speed. There are demonic snarls and so many pleas in Spanish for “¡Dios, por favor, salvame! ¡Salva mis niños!” So close the fire gets she can feel its flame and then it’s overtaken her and the heat is so real and so incinerating and there’s another crash of thunder.

The vividness, the smell and the heat, all of it is forgotten. The whole dream fades right away. Miranda opens her eyes as the bus comes to a halt at Port Authority, the sewage smell and dazed fluorescent glow waiting to greet her as she steps off. Outside, the city is enveloped in a fog either precluding rain or deposited by it. All the raincoats and hoods and umbrellas on the passersby obscure their faces, and Miranda takes the opportunity to hide hers, blending in totally as she makes for Grand Central.

On the way, Miranda stops at an ATM, correctly guessing at Mother’s bank pin. In deciding how much money to withdraw, Miranda has a few things to consider. Will she ever see her parents again? Something in her blood says this is a far more dangerous business she’s involved in than her mind would like to let on. How much money does one need to live at a hotel for a week? Without her phone, Miranda can’t check rates, but it’s better to be on the safe side, right? And with taxis, trains? Where is the cut-off between petty larceny and felony theft?

Miranda takes more than she was planning to, but in time Mother and Father will understand. At the very least, they will not see each other until after Miranda has helped end this current iteration of the world, and by then, who knows? Maybe hers will be the most famous face in Long Island. And you can’t put a price on that.Surely in that regard, Mother will understand.

Less than four hours after she left the dinner table in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, Miranda Swami steps into the brightly lit atrium of the Westchester Hilton in Rye Brook, New York, some 132-miles away. 

The Woman at the front desk asks for her name, and Miranda, who’d been thinking about it, tell her it’s Samantha Obama. Nonplussed at Miranda’s refusal to put a card on file, the clerk eases off when she drops a couple hundred dollars in cash (and a little extra for your kindness, ma’am) on the counter between them.

“That’ll do for collateral?” Miranda says sweetly, quietly a master of the smiling-with-her-eyes thing.

“That should be fine,” the woman says in a much friendlier tone, putting the money into her back pocket, but who’ll ever know? She’s the only one on duty.

“Here’s your key, Ms. Obama. Say, I’m sure you get this all the time, but are you related to —” 

“Cousins. By marriage. I do get it a lot.”

“Wow. Say hi for me, heh heh heh, enjoy your stay.”

“I hope to. Oh, uhm, actually, sorry, but do you have a computer I can use?”