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Anna Goss
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This story is based on the myth of the Niobids as retold by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. I initially wrote this story for a fiction writing class during my undergrad. I thought I was fascinated by the myth of the Niobids because of the violence, but after I wrote it, and in each iteration of my editing, I realized that the more interesting spaces for me to inhabit were the characters. The Ovid version of the Niobid myth is just over 150 lines long, but within those lines the majority of what is given is dialog from Niobe, dialog from Latona, and then the slaughter of the Niobids (Niobe's children) by Apollo and Diana. So in my retelling I have focused much more on the individual characters, especially Diana (Diane), hoping to tell more of a human story than a myth.
~~~
It began with something as innocuous as a text message. Call me. Love Mom.
Diane sighed, wishing her mother would stop signing text messages. “It's my mom,” she said to Sarina, who looked confused.
She gave Diane a soft smile. “Do you want me to order us dessert?”
“You know what I like.”
Diane found a bench outside the restaurant, stretched her legs out into the paths of passersby, and called her mother.
“I haven't been able to get a hold of your brother. Where is he?” Tonya asked.
“Paul is on tour, Mom,” Diane said. Years of conversations with her mother started and ended with her brother; any expectations to the contrary were foolish.
“Will you call him, honey?” Tonya asked the question as though she and her son talked every day, like Paul hadn't stopped answering her calls three years ago.
Diane knew full well Paul wasn't going to answer a call from her any more than he would a call from their mother. Not while he was with Jacob.
Tonya continued without pause. “When you get a hold of him, let him know that I need to see him. And you. Both of you. Come on home. It's been so long since you've been home, and I miss you, Diane. I miss you and Paul.”
After Diane hung up, she tried calling her brother. The phone didn't even ring. After leaving as short of a message as she could manage, she sat outside for a few more moments, just breathing.
“I have to go,” she told Sarina.
Sarina frowned up at her. “But berry tarts.”
Diane hesitated, halfway to picking her purse up from the floor. “I can come see you in Atlanta.”
“You can also help me with these berry tarts,” Sarina said.
Diane smiled and slipped back into her seat, shaking her head. She smiled as they polished off two whole berry tarts and kissed goodbye on the curb outside the restaurant.
In the cab home she stopped smiling when her phone buzzed with a text from Paul: I hate Long Island.
~~~
Though it was the house Diane grew up in, Tonya Cavallo maintained a state of flux in terms of decoration; the home Diane remembered was constantly, even in her childhood, being subsumed to the construction of an ideal villa. Diane and Paul had shared a room from the day they were born until puberty, when their mother conceded that there may be a need for the two to have separate spaces. She brought in a construction crew who added a wall down the center of the old bedroom and connected the two with an annex inside what used to be the door.
Tonya liked it warm and humid. Tropical. Said it was better for her skin, and she didn't go outside unless it was over 70 degrees anyway. It disturbed Diane to think her mother may be right. Tonya Cavallo was probably just starting her sixties (age was a question Diane didn’t dare pose to her mother) but she looked like she was Diane's older sister. Diane's pocket buzzed as she shed her jacket; the good luck text from Sarina made her grin.
“Hello, Mom,” Diane said as she entered the sitting room.
The house was in a Palace of Versailles mode. Exterior light oozed in from every massive window, stretching across the dark wood floor, illuminating the marble veneers of the walls. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors embedded in the walls alternated with Baroque paintings in gilded frames. Tables and lounge chairs upholstered with a subtle mint pattern populated the room.
Tonya sat delicately on one of the chairs. She inspected her daughter with narrowed blue eyes as she had appraised many works of art and business deals. Even while sitting, her body gave the impression of perpetual motion, like a shark that would suffocate if it stopped swimming. Something about the bright sheen of her skin, especially in this room filled with refracted light, and the colors of her lips and cheeks and eyes proclaimed an eternal youth boiling underneath the surface.
Diane sat in a chair across from her mother, crossed her legs at the ankles out in front of her. Tonya smiled. Sitting in silence, Diane watched as her mother tensed and relaxed muscles all over her body. Since Tonya wore what amounted to an evening gown, pale peach, sleeveless, Diane could see as she progressed from forearms to upper arms, to pectorals. Tonya relaxed for a few moments and rolled her shoulders back. She fussed with her hair then looked at Diane and rubbed her fingertips together.
She rubbed her fingertips together with all the zeal of a fly about to settle on a carcass.
“Paul here yet?” Diane asked.
“No,” Tonya replied, her tone demure. “But how have you been, darling?”
“Fine.”
“You know, honey,” Tonya said, “I really think you should consider running the company.”
“Company is a generous term for your business, Mom,” Diane said and realized her mother wasn't looking at her anymore.
Paul had entered the room.
Diane hadn't seen him in person since he left on his most recent tour, so she stood up from her chair and turned around to greet him as Tonya rose from her couch and embraced her son. She rested her chin delicately on his shoulder and he bent his head over hers. Diane watched their hair, indistinguishable in shade, mingle. Diane had always been jealous of her brother's hair. Diane had hair the color of a potato. Paul had hair the color of spun gold. And blue eyes that glistened with secrets. He looked like their mother—more than Diane did, anyway—the same feminine curve of the jaw, the same long straight nose, the same iridescent skin. His cheeks were always soft with downy unshaven hairs that had never turned into a beard. He looked several years younger than Diane.
“Mother. Diane.” He gave her a smile. “I hope you haven't been waiting long.”
Diane shook her head. “I just got here.”
Paul rolled his eyes at her over their mother's shoulder, his relief evident. “What do you need, Mom?” he asked, following Tonya as she resumed her seat on the couch. He sat next to her. She held his hand in her lap for a few moments. Diane sat down and stretched her legs.
“Oh, honey, I'm so glad you asked.” Tonya summoned a secretary who brought a covered tray and set it on the coffee table in front of the couch. “I was hoping the two of you could take care of something, if it's not too much of an inconvenience, of course. I would hate to get in the way of your careers.”
“You have people for that, Mom,” Diane said.
The polite smile Tonya used now differed so much from the maternal smile from Diane's childhood that she wasn't sure she was looking at the same woman. Around when Diane and Paul turned twelve, Tonya realized her children could be useful rather than just present, and the maternal facade fell away. When she smiled, it was like the skin peeled back from her teeth, every grin a skeletal grimace of flayed skin revealing bare bones.
“Honey, if this was business, I would have the business people take care of it. But this is personal, and I know you and Paul can handle it.” She lifted the cover of the platter, revealing a thick stack of paper and folders.
Diane picked up the top folder. “God, Mom, you killed a tree,” Diane said, hefting the dossier in her right hand.
“The tree was already dead, Diane,” Tonya replied, her tone crisp and cut.
Paul took the other folder. He laid it on his lap and flipped through the first few pages of the first file. “Who are these people?”
Tonya clucked. “Paul, you know better. I can't believe you've forgotten everything I taught you about tact.” She sighed, exaggerated the movement of her shoulders. “But since you asked, these are the Bardakis.”
Diane tensed. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“This needs to be taken care of, Diane. I want it taken care of.” Tonya smiled again. “You need to understand these things if you're going to run the business.”
Paul looked at Diane, and Diane looked back at Paul, shaking her head, her lips pressed tightly together. He glanced sideways at their mother. Diane shook her head more fiercely this time, her hair flying into her eyes. “I have a job.”
“Honey,” Tonya said. “Darling, just trust me, okay?”
Diane closed her eyes and the dossier. “What are you doing?” she repeated.
“I have taken care of everything. I just need you and Paul.” She squeezed Paul's hand. He looked at Diane. “I just need you and Paul to take care of the problem. No one else can take care of it for me.”
Paul stood.
Tonya hugged both of her children. “Thank you for taking care of this. I couldn't imagine having anyone but you two do it.”
Paul grimaced. Diane forced her lips to smile.
~~~
It wasn't the first time Diane had flown under an assumed name, and she doubted it would be the last, given her mother's propensity to interrupt the lives of her children. Diane stuttered once while giving a name she hadn't used in years and produced the corresponding identification that had been wedged in the back of a box on the top shelf of her closet. She kept crossing and uncrossing her arms while waiting in the security line. Paul grinned into his phone and only hung up when he had to put it through the scanner.
At the gate Paul reached for his phone as Diane's started to ring. She answered without looking and asked Paul, “Can you stay with our stuff?”
“Our stuff?” He gestured at his suitcase set and her messenger bag. He sighed and shook his head when she glared at him. “Go.”
Midway through a conversation full of half-answers, Sarina asked, “Are you okay?” She was frowning. Diane could hear her frowning.
“I don’t know,” Diane said.
“You just couldn't say no to your mother, could you?”
Diane walked down the terminal, paused to smell fresh pretzels baking.
“Now you have to come see me in Atlanta.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, you know.”
“I know.”
Diane waited for the silence from the line to indicate Sarina had hung up. She swallowed, pocketed her phone, and began the long walk back down the terminal to where Paul sat. He barely noticed her return.
~~~
Diane could feel the minuscule spikes of the concrete roofing needling into her blouse at her belly. She lifted herself up on her elbows, her chin resting on the stock of her rifle. The roof put uncomfortable pressure on her breasts when she lay prone. She rocked from side to side to adjust the neckline of her blouse. Earlier she'd wedged her phone down the side of her bra and now it was uncomfortably warm. It had rung twice while they'd been waiting. She didn't need to look to know it was Sarina.
“Stop fidgeting,” Paul whispered.
Diane rolled her shoulders back and lowered her torso.
“Can we talk?” Paul asked.
“You just told me to be quiet,” Diane said.
“I told you to stop fidgeting,” Paul said. “I didn't say be quiet.”
Diane leaned her head against her rifle and looked at him. “What about?”
“Are you doing okay?”
She turned back to look through the scope into the square below.
“I'm serious, Diane.”
“Of course you are.”
“Why are we here?”
Diane grit her teeth.
“Fine.” He sighed. “That's them, isn't it?”
Across the square below them, a man and woman in tailored suits exited a building.
“That’s them,” Diane said.
~~~
The hotel room was improperly booked, containing only a single full-sized bed. Paul showered while Diane phoned their mother. Diane could hear the feral grin in her mother's words.
“You and Paul are doing a wonderful job, honey.”
Diane sighed away from the phone. Watched the steam pouring out from under the bathroom door.
“Darling, you know how much it means to me that you and your brother are taking care of this.”
“I know, Mom.”
“You tell your brother he's doing a great job, okay?”
“I will, Mom.”
“But I just wanted to say, just a small thing, really,” Tonya's voice oozed out of the receiver. “I think we really need to take of the entire problem. You understand, darling? Can you do that for me, honey?”
The line clicked off. Diane cleared out of the call and pulled up her texts. Missing you, said the most recent text from Sarina. Give me an ETA to Atlanta?
Paul opened the bathroom door wearing light cotton pajamas. “Your turn.”
“In a minute.” Diane stared at the screen, her fingers hovering above the keys. Her feet tucked behind the rung on the bottom of the chair.
“You could text her back.”
By the time she finished her short personal hygiene routine, Paul was curled up on his side in the bed, eyes closed.
As she walked towards the bed she shucked her pants carelessly, stepping out of them as she shuffled. She pulled her sweater over her head and threw it at the desk where she had been sitting earlier.
“You could fold them,” Paul said.
Diane stopped, turned around, wriggled a foot under the pants, and kicked them through the air to the chair in the corner. She came up to the side of the bed.
“Scoot over.”
Paul reluctantly rolled over and reset himself, lying on his back, hands at his sides. He grabbed at his pillow as Diane lifted the sheets and crawled in. Lying on her side, her face was uncomfortably close to his.
“Do you have to sleep like that?” he asked.
She yawned. “It's how I sleep.” She wrapped her arm around the pillow under her head so he could only see one of her eyes.
They lay for several moments in silence. Diane's breathing deepened. Her eye remained immobile, watching him.
“Diane,” Paul said.
She blinked. The half of her mouth he could see bared her teeth.
~~~
They caught a red-eye to save money, which also meant seats in coach. Paul slid into his seat, took one look around at the milieu, clamped his headphones down over his ears, and fell asleep. Or pretended to fall asleep. Either way it was a long flight, and Diane wasn't going to deprive him of time to rest.
Diane didn't sleep on planes. She never had. Instead she leaned back in the seat, her elbows resting on the armrests, the heels of her feet touching the bar beneath her seat.
As soon as the haste of takeoff settled into a relaxed climb into the sky, Diane found her computer in her bag and pulled up the e-mails her mother had forwarded. One linked to an audio file. Diane slid earbuds in and let the audio play.
“You know the importance of family,” Naomi Bardaki said. Her voice was rich, deep, and thrummed out of the earbuds. Diane turned the volume down. “I know the importance of family. Family is everything. And you trust your business to a woman who, frankly, is uninvested in her family. Look at her children. Two, and not even in the business anymore. But look at me. Twelve children, all of whom are as invested in this business, in our business, as I am. Twelve highly intelligent children who can be anywhere in the world you need them to be to make sure your business with us runs as smoothly as it possibly can. The Cavallos are much too small in this big world to make the difference you need. If you go into business with me, my family is your family. And my family is six times Tonya Cavallo's.”
Diane shut her computer. Her phone buzzed with a text from Sarina coming in over the WiFi. Safe flight! Can't wait to see you.
“Who is it?” asked Paul
Diane clicked the screen on her phone off.
“You can talk to me, you know.”
Diane pulled a folder from her bag and slapped it open on the tray table.
“You want to tell me?”
“Her name's Sarina.” She flipped the pages of the file.
“Sarina?”
Diane stopped flipping the pages and tapped a photograph. “Sarina Bardaki.”
Paul leaned over the armrest. Diane pulled her elbow to her side. “Diane,” he started to say something and couldn’t finish.
She leaned away from him, looking down into the aisle. Her arms crossed over her chest. Sarina's picture stared up at her.
~~~
Paul fielded a call from their mother the next morning. The phone rang as Diane stuck her toothbrush in her mouth.
“Paul, darling,” Tonya said. “I'm so glad it's you. Has Diane told you I am so happy with the both of you?”
“What do you want, Mom?” He pulled on his shoes. The phone sat on the desk, broadcasting Tonya's voice into the hotel room.
Diane leaned against the bathroom door jamb, toothbrush hanging from the corner of her mouth. and frowned.
“Honey,” Tonya said. “I just called to say how well you're both doing.”
Paul thought of the folder, the picture of Diane's Sarina staring at him. He looked at his sister's phone and saw the list of unread messages on the lock screen. Sarina. Sarina. Sarina.
“Paul? Are you there, Paul?”
Diane turned to spit in the sink.
“I'm here.”
“Now, Paul, I love you very much and I am so glad you're taking care of this for us, for our family. I don't know what I would do without the two of you.” Tonya sighed into the receiver, transmitted across the country as static. “There's just one more, Paul. One more. I know I don't have to remind you how important this is, honey.”
Paul watched Diane's screen fade to black, taking the ended call and the unread texts with it. He walked over to the desk chair and pulled his jacket off it. The leather was cool to the touch.
Paul straightened his jacket, looking at himself in the mirror above the desk. He could see most of the hotel room in the mirror, the rumpled sheets of the beds, the several towels he had used for his showers the previous night and this morning, Diane's sparse toiletries clustered on the counter by the bathroom sink.
“Now you're just being vain,” Diane said. She glanced at herself in the mirror, tucked a single hair back into her bun, then looked at him. She picked up their briefcases, held his out with her left hand.
He took it, let it swing in a controlled arc down to his side, felt the cold metal grip against the flesh of his palm. He raised his eyes to her and didn’t recognize the smile on her lips. Diane swiped the car keys from the desk where they had spent the night under her sweater. She didn't touch her phone.
Paul hesitated at the door when he realized her smile reminded him of their mother.
Tonya's words rang in his ears as he took the keys from Diane. “I know I don't have to remind you how important this is, honey.”
~~~
“Does it make you nervous that Sarina is the last one?” Paul asked. His hands, in soft leather gloves, gripped the wheel.
“Does Jacob ever ask where your money comes from?” Diane asked.
The car grew silent. Paul fiddled with the radio dial. The radio was off.
“She seems like a good person,” Paul offered.
Diane rubbed her fingers together.
“You know, we don’t have to do this,” he said.
Diane ran her hands over the smooth metal case in her lap, flipped the catches with her thumbs.
Paul looked down at the gear shift.
His sister clicked the pistol together. Holding it first in one hand then the other, she examined the mechanisms, ran her fingers across the metal.
A gray sedan led them through the curves of the road. Paul followed at a discreet distance. Ahead of them the sedan pulled onto a small side street nearly hidden by dense foliage.
He parked behind it and turned to his sister. “You don't have to do this.”
The metal case rested on her lap. She had her ankles tucked up against the seat. “I asked her to meet me.”
“Diane.” Paul blew out a breath.
She thumbed the bullet at the top of the magazine. In her eyes was something Paul had never seen before, and he realized how small she had become in the past weeks. He saw their mother in her smile.
She opened the car door and stepped out. Paul watched as Diane crunched along the gravel to the sedan, held the gun through the window, and fired.
