She remembered there being a little white coffin. It was a false memory. Her little brother, Otto, had been cremated. Her parents were practical people—her mother, Aoife, a pharmacist; her father, Thomas, a veterinarian. They’d known Otto might die since he was one and a half years old. It started with what Aoife had thought was a stomach bug; the doctor hadn’t initially been concerned. When the vomiting persisted, they rushed him back for more tests. His digestive system, it turned out, was fine; he was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumor.
The seizures started in the hours before his first surgery. Orla, then almost six, remembered being scared and confused, but mostly because her regular life was upended when her parents took turns staying with Otto at the hospital. It was as if they’d gone from a family of four to a family of two, in rotating pairs. But eventually things settled into a new routine in which they all treated baby brother like a featherless bird who’d fallen from a nest.
Young Orla didn’t think it was weird that her baby brother always seemed like a baby. He crawled instead of walked, babbled instead of talked, even when he was three, then four. Her parents said it was because he was sick, and the chemotherapy was Very Serious Medicine. Otto was like a living doll, and Orla had loved him way more than either of their two cats. They’d all thought the Very Serious Medicine would fix him, but later her parents sat down and told her baby brother’s Very Bad Cells couldn’t be fixed.
She was eight when he died. Everyone wept quietly at the funeral, like they were afraid of making too much noise. People spoke with lowered voices; they even moved slowly. Judging by the adults around her, young Orla thought death must be a most precarious situation, one in which the newly dead could easily become unsettled. His little urn was surrounded by massive bunches of flowers, every color of the rainbow. Still, Orla always recollected seeing a white coffin. He couldn’t fit in the urn, even all curled up, even though he’d always been such a small and delicate boy. In her mind, she gave him a coffin with squishy toys and soft blankets. She even left lots of extra room, in case he grew.
People said things to her like “He just wasn’t meant to be here very long”—which made Orla wonder where he was meant to be, and if he would grow up there with new parents and someone else as his sister. She thought about that a lot when she was still little, in elementary school, and sometimes it made her sad that Otto had left them for another family, and sometimes it made her happy that maybe he wasn’t as dead as everyone seemed to think.
For months after he died, relatives and random old people would tell her, “He’s watching you from heaven now.” If her mother was present, she’d purse her lips and narrow her dark eyes and say, “I know you mean well, but please don’t confuse her.” If her father was present, he’d look at his shoes and not say anything. They couldn’t, at that point, find a way to explain to one child why another had died. As Orla grew a little older she figured it out for herself—there was no rational reason for his death; it was no one’s fault, and no one could have prevented it, neither doctors nor priests. She couldn’t voice it to her parents, ever, but she’d understood then, on some level, that Otto had had a defect—something wasn’t right in his head. His cells grew altogether wrong and pushed on his brain and that’s why he could only act like a baby. And never grow up. A fatal defect.
It was only after Eleanor Queen was born that Orla came to fully appreciate what her parents had endured. She’d doubted then her own ability to carry on if anything happened to her heart—and that’s what her daughter became the moment she was born, Orla’s heart, on the outside of her body. As Orla grew up, she and her family never forgot about Otto, but he became less a part of their everyday lives. When she was ten, they stripped the carpeting out of his old room and put up a mirror and a barre so she could practice dancing whenever she wanted. By the time she turned thirteen, they didn’t talk about him much anymore; he was pictures on a wall, a birthday, a death-day.
She was so busy with dance, and her parents were so supportive. Only later did she wonder if they threw themselves so fully into her interests as a distraction from their pain. But they arranged their schedules to pick her up from school early every day and drive her to her preprofessional dance classes. One or both of them went with her when she auditioned for competitive summer programs. And her parents saved up their vacation weeks, and they all traveled as a family to San Francisco, Toronto, and, finally, New York City when she was accepted into each of those competitive summer programs.
It hadn’t struck her as odd or exceptional that they never complained about the cost of her training or the money spent on airfare, hotel rooms, and new leotards and shoes. On her own in New York City, she came to understand how financially blessed her upbringing had been and how advantageous it was to have endlessly supportive parents. When she had roommates, before she lived with Shaw, she’d tried to keep the refrigerator and cupboards stocked with food and never asked her roomies to pitch in. Some of them kept crazy hours—taking extra dance classes, working extra jobs—trying to make their way in the city. She’d held more than one hand at Penn Station or Port Authority, kissed more than one wet cheek, as a friend or soon-to-be-former roommate packed it in and went home. The city was merciless in its mangling and disposal of dreams.
Orla never forgot that her talent might not have been enough, nor her hard work; her parents—and their support—had been the magical element of the equation that made her life, her dreams, possible. Her parents came to see her in every new role, a weekend here, a weekend there, every season, until she retired. How many costumes had they seen her wear for different roles in ECCB’s jazzy Nutcracker? Her whole life, they made her feel like she was everything they’d ever wanted—and never the only child they had left.
Orla thought about these things as hours passed into days. They were wretched days. She heard the hacking cough again—and knew it wasn’t Tycho. It wasn’t Eleanor Queen either, as she was always nearby and the coughing came from the second floor. The house had started to smell bad too, but in her morose state, Orla couldn’t tell if it was them—their unwashed bodies and clothes—or…something else.
They couldn’t risk trying to flee again, and a part of her didn’t want to leave Tycho behind. He would haunt this place, and it might be the only bit of him she’d ever have. The powerlessness of their situation weighed on her, but every time she caught Eleanor Queen concentrating, trying to communicate with the spirit, Orla severed her connection. She’d shake her or clap angry hands in the girl’s face. Eleanor Queen insisted that they needed answers, that it was the only way, but Orla couldn’t let her channel such a dangerous entity anymore. She told her daughter she’d think of something. She told her the tree would die soon and they would be released.
What was she still missing? This was tormenting her too. The imagery in Shaw’s paintings. The pentagram in the hand of a dying girl. And the more visceral things. The coughing. The sickly stench. When she got too bored, Eleanor Queen would sniff along the walls, searching for a dead rodent. She never found one. But the puzzle pieces were everywhere, as fragile as cherry blossoms in a strong wind. None of Orla’s theories stuck together, and Eleanor Queen maintained she had no sense of a girl. The thing that was tormenting them might be female, but She wasn’t human.
In her worst moments, Orla wondered if Eleanor Queen had told the spirit—on purpose or accidentally—that they were running away. Maybe some part of Eleanor Queen hadn’t wanted to leave, the part that still had compassion for the thing and Her plight. Or maybe She had sensed them leaving the land when they passed the invisible threshold at the mailbox.
They subsisted in the living room like two forgotten prisoners; their supplies dwindled, but no one came with the key to set them free. They were often sleepy, weakened from lack of food. Eleanor Queen made the couch her territory; from there she read her books and kept a watchful eye on her mother. Sometimes Orla sat in the ugly plaid chair. Sometimes she lay sprawled on the mattress. She’d scold herself in her mind—Figure something out!—but then succumb to absent staring and thinking about the past. Too many times, Tycho became Otto, and she saw herself as a little girl playing with a baby brother who talked and walked and looked like her son. But he still ended up insectival, curled up in an urn with his Tinkertoys spine.
Inevitably, it also made her think of Shaw. And Ziploc bags full of freezer-scorched meat. Is that what he would look like if she went out and lifted the tarp? And what of Tycho? The best she could hope for was that he’d fallen asleep, slipping into death while his fingers and toes burned with the false heat of hypothermia.
She shut her eyes and clenched her fists, the invisible once-smooth worry stones now jagged; her palms bore the bloody half-moons of her fingernails digging too often and too hard. But it was the only coping method she had to keep from continually bursting into tears in front of Eleanor Queen—though her daughter was too aware not to know what was going on.
She felt it as Eleanor Queen perched beside her on the ugly plaid chair’s arm. “Mama.”
Orla peeked at her. Then she squeezed her nose, as if her emotions were just looking to drip from somewhere. Eleanor Queen pulled her mother’s hand away, glanced at the red hieroglyphs etched on her palm.
“We can’t hide forever.”
She nodded, because her daughter sounded so reasonable. She wanted to scream, not at Eleanor Queen, but at the cruel hopelessness of their situation. The thing out there was unreasonable; It had proven that (and maybe It didn’t deserve a gendered pronoun). Sometimes Orla wished she could let herself drift into an endless sleep. Who had she been to assume for so many years that heaven was a fantasy, a fiction? Why couldn’t there be a marshmallow wonderland where a billion souls reunited? She wanted to try it, dying. Would Tycho be there? Shaw? Otto? Could she be one of those mothers who sacrificed their children first and then committed suicide?
The thought punched her in the throat. No. There were more things they could try. And this wasn’t how her company of graceful warriors would behave, nor the women who’d earned spots at the table—or on the floor—of The Dinner Party.
Orla swept Eleanor Queen onto her lap, enveloped her in her arms. She felt ribs, bones, through her daughter’s dirty pajamas. They’d been surviving on disgusting things. Brothy soups made with water, dried oregano, and garlic powder. Salad dressing swirled on a few mouthfuls of rice. Orla felt it in her own body, the eating away of her muscles. She’d been strong, but eventually her energy-consuming organs would run out of things to siphon calories from. They were running out of time. She chastised herself for taking those two days to mourn Tycho—or had it been three? And could she really call it mourning? It wasn’t like she’d been sitting shiva as her Jewish friends did or doing anything practical to honor the dead.
No. She’d let herself fall into a quicksand of slimy, sticky self-pity and inactivity. Her eyelids drooped; she wasn’t sure she had the strength to climb away from her misery. Maybe it was the lack of nutrients. Everything was so cloudy, so nebulous and hard to follow—time, her thoughts, her movements.
Wake up!
“Is it Christmas Eve?” she asked her daughter.
“I think so.”
“Okay. Okay.” She wasn’t certain what she was going to do, but she was going to do something to salvage Christmas, and her daughter’s future. “You should go to bed early, so Santa will come.”
Skepticism made an aged and doubtful mask of Eleanor Queen’s increasingly narrow face. But she kissed her mother’s cheek and acquiesced.