Inspired by Macbeth
Samantha Mabry
Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles.
—ACT 5, SCENE 1
The heater was on. The dryness of it was causing the edges of my lips to chap. The car reeked sour, like the beer someone had spilled all over Mateo just before we left the field. I was in the back seat, wedged between Lucy and Laurel, who didn’t smell like beer but instead smelled like woodsmoke from standing near the bonfire. Then again, they usually smelled like woodsmoke because of the essential oils they both were in the habit of rolling across their wrists. Duncan was in the passenger seat, up next to Mateo, messing with the old radio. He landed on a station, turned the volume way up, and cried out that this was his and Daniel’s favorite, favorite! song.
“Hang in there, Drea!” Mateo shouted back in my direction.
I was slumped forward, my arms wrapped around my stomach. Even though it had been over a month since the miscarriage, my body was refusing to accept that there wasn’t a baby growing inside of it anymore. I was still struck with sudden nausea and would wake up in the middle of the night with crushing headaches. We’d left the party early partly because of the worsening weather, but mostly because I was afraid of throwing up my drive-through dinner in front of a bunch of my classmates who either pitied me or snickered behind my back. Even now, the nausea still hadn’t passed, and the incessant thump of the music, of Duncan and Daniel’s favorite song, wasn’t helping.
Lucy, to my left, reached out with her smoke-scented hand and gave my knee a squeeze.
“Next time,” she whispered, “don’t let Duncan pressure you into going out if you don’t want to.”
Laurel, to my right, rubbed the upper curve of my spine in small circles.
“He has no idea,” she said. “He doesn’t know what you’re going through.”
“No one does,” Lucy added.
I let out a little moan of gratitude so quiet, I’m sure no one could hear it but me.
I’d asked for shotgun so I could take sips of cold air from the open passenger-side window, but Duncan had insisted on taking it for himself. He said he needed the extra space. Typical. Duncan always needed extra space. Physically, he was huge, but his bigness manifested in other ways, too: he was loud and always in motion, and when he talked, his skillet-sized hands gestured wildly in the air.
And now, Duncan was dancing in his seat, causing it to jolt back and forth on its squeaky springs and bounce hard against my shoulder. I could smell a fresh hit of stale beer as Mateo reached around with his right arm to try to hold the seat steady, but he didn’t turn down the music or ask Duncan to stop.
“I’m okay,” I muttered, even though no one had asked, even though it wasn’t true.
Duncan was in even rarer form that night: bigger and louder. Earlier that day he’d performed so great at practice—breaking every tackle, so light on his feet, he nearly flew—that the scouts from both North Texas and UT Austin had scheduled interviews with him for the upcoming week. To play football at either place would’ve been incredible—an honor, really, for any small-town kid—but he was gunning for Austin because his boyfriend Daniel had already been accepted there on early admission to major in architecture.
Mateo, the other starting running back for the team, barely got a second look from the scouts. Maybe he wasn’t a powerhouse like Duncan. Maybe he wasn’t quite as quick. The scouts couldn’t see what I knew to be true: Mateo was kind and thoughtful and acted with great care. The opposite of Duncan. In any spare moment, Mateo was studying plays. We’d be watching Netflix together and a three-ring binder would be open on his lap. He was captain of the team, a wonderful leader. He listened and would always pause before he spoke, as if he wanted to get his words just right. He would’ve been the best father. But Mateo didn’t demand as much, so he didn’t get as much, and he had a bad habit of deferring to others. He didn’t like to “cause problems.” So when Duncan insisted on shotgun, Mateo let him have it.
I was clutching my stomach, at the deep void there, while Duncan was bouncing in his seat, singing at the top of his lungs.
And then, there was the wreck.
Lucy gripped my thigh. Laurel screamed. Her scream was swallowed by a monstrous, roaring sound. At first, I thought it was actually a monster, but I later learned that the roar was caused by Mateo’s old Seville skidding, being thrown onto its side and scraping across black ice. Old cars like his were made entirely of metal, and when metal collides with pavement and ice, the sound is out-of-this-world loud.
I don’t remember when the noise stopped, or when the car finally slowed to a halt, or how I got out of the back seat—if I was pulled or if I was thrown.
What I remember next is standing in the field.
Mateo was pacing, taking long strides, trying to get a signal. He punched in some numbers on his phone and then held it to his ear. When that didn’t work, he lifted the phone up to the blurry night sky. Lucy and Laurel were standing a ways away, under the protection of the crooked and bare limbs of an oak tree. Their arms were linked.
I could see the road, State Highway 281, but it was farther away than it should’ve been. That didn’t make sense. We were just on that road. Mateo’s Seville—the car I’d just been in, the car that served as the setting to the biggest moments of my life, from losing my virginity to getting pregnant to getting engaged—was on its side, streaked in black, and smoking. A large clump of grass and mud was lodged deep in one of the wheel wells.
I noticed the clump of grass and mud before I noticed Duncan. Most of him was pinned under the car. He was only visible from his rib cage up. For once, he looked small.
“Are any of you getting a signal?” I heard Mateo shout.
He was the only one trying.
Duncan’s right arm was under the car, but his left arm was free, curled into a half circle above his head. He wasn’t moving it—or he couldn’t move it. Misty sleet was falling directly on his face, but he wasn’t batting it away. I said his name, but he didn’t turn his head in my direction. His eyes were open. Maybe he couldn’t hear me.
I walked around to where I was standing in his line of sight and crouched down. Duncan still didn’t look at me. He was gazing to the horizon and breathing really weird. There was a spot, dark and spreading across his chest, across the light-gray sweatshirt the scout from UT Austin had given him earlier that day.
“Drea!” Lucy shouted. “Is he okay?”
I glanced over to the girls, who were still under the tree, huddled close, and I swear I could smell woodsmoke from where I was, squatting in the grass, over the stink of exhaust and burnt rubber.
The mixed smells were awful, but I wasn’t feeling sick anymore.
“I’m going up closer to the road!” Mateo called out as he broke into a jog. “Drea! Is there something you can do? Hold his hand or something? At least?”
The dark spot on Duncan’s sweatshirt was spreading, getting bigger, the blood starting to leach into the orange threads of the embroidery. Duncan was still breathing, but it sounded like water bubbling. His trembling lips were gray with cold.
“Drea,” he whispered. “Help.”
“Drea!” Laurel’s voice boomed.
“What’s happening?” Lucy shouted.
“Help,” Duncan repeated.
In the distance, at the road, Mateo was shouting. He’d stopped trying to get a signal and was now trying to wave down passing cars, using his phone as a flashlight.
I stood up and started to run.
The soles of my boots crashed down on the crusted grass. A pair of headlights appeared around a bend just as I caught up to Mateo. I grabbed his arm and thrust it down so the light from his phone was hidden against my coat.
“Wait,” I demanded, thrilled and breathless. “Just wait a minute.”
I spent most of my time in the school’s rooftop greenhouse.
There was so much to do. In the days leading up to and immediately following Duncan’s death, I was there anytime there was even the smallest sliver of sun. I hammered together boards for some raised beds, revived old soil from the last round of crops, added mulch, and planted hearty vegetables like carrots, kale, and spinach. Early on, some of the plants showed signs of blight, but everything except a couple of the more delicate lettuces survived. Aside from that, my daily routine consisted of checking on the plants in the beds, making sure they were well-watered and bug-free, and then watering, repotting, and rotating the various tiny containers I had set up in rows on folding tables so they’d each get time in the warmest spots. I repaired tears in the hard plastic and rewired the metal structure.
Occasionally, I took breaks to stand out on the roof in the cold sun. Even though it took up most of my time, my work with the plants wasn’t for an official class. I did it because I liked it. It was rewarding. It helped me in the process of reconvincing myself that I was capable of creating an environment in which living things could grow and thrive. It wasn’t like I was going to graduate at that point anyway. I refused to go to class, and the counselors had urged my teachers and principal to let me take “as long as needed” to heal from my “traumatic incidents,” the first of which was losing the baby. The second was the wreck.
The original plan was that Mateo and I were going to get married in late June, a couple of weeks after graduation and three months after the baby came. I’d even picked out the venue online, a little farmhouse just outside of Stephenville that someone had done up all rustic-cute with lights strung from the beams and carpets covering the dirt floor.
Then, in the middle of December, during finals week, I collapsed in the hallway outside the cafeteria. By then, the baby had been dead in my body for days. The Friday after that, during the third quarter of the last football game of the season, Mateo went down hard and a player on the opposing team stepped on his ankle, causing it to twist. I was still in the hospital when it happened, but I’d heard later from Lucy and Laurel about how Mateo had refused to be taken to the locker room. For the rest of the game, he was over on a bench on the sidelines, clapping for his teammates and scowling at the packs of ice that were stacked up on his ankle.
Mateo’s doctors said he would heal completely and that he’d be back to normal in two or three months. But he didn’t have two or three months to spare. When the college scouts came, he was still a little slow. He couldn’t put pressure on his foot all the way like he used to, so his pivots were less graceful and his timing wasn’t as sharp. It wasn’t fair that Mateo couldn’t prove to them how bright he could shine.
Through my work in the greenhouse, I’ve learned that some plants thrive in even the coldest temperatures. I hadn’t known this before and had assumed all plants require sun and warmth. My favorite cold-weather plant isn’t one of the vegetables. It’s the echinocereus, which is also called the hedgehog cactus. The plant part itself is sort of squatty and small, but it has really big spines. Sometimes, I prick my fingers on those spines. I like the tingly feeling that follows, trippy like the tiniest buzz.
On a Monday morning, a week after the car accident, Mateo came up to the roof. I was working, crouched down and hacking at some stubborn soil with a trowel, and he waited in the doorway until I noticed him there.
“I saw Duncan,” he said.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this.
Almost immediately, Mateo had started blaming himself for Duncan’s death. On the night of the accident, Mateo wasn’t drunk or speeding, but it was his bald front tire on his old car that had hit a patch of black ice and sent us into a spin.
Now, Mateo hardly slept. When he did manage to sleep, he had dreams about Duncan. In those dreams, Duncan was standing in front of Mateo in an ice-crusted field. There was a dark circle of blood on his sweatshirt. Jutting out from his torso, from the jumble of soft organs right under his rib cage, was a jagged hunk of a passenger-side window, several inches wide and long.
In the hours after the wreck, the doctors at the hospital had told us that maybe they could’ve stopped the bleeding and stitched up Duncan’s insides if he’d arrived at the hospital a little bit earlier.
But only maybe.
Probably not.
Mateo clung to that maybe. It was destroying him, causing him to have bad dreams.
I clung to the probably not.
“It was just a dream,” I said.
“It wasn’t a dream.” Mateo leaned hard against the doorframe, causing the whole structure to shake. “It happened just now. In B-Hall. He was wearing that bloody sweatshirt and staring at me. Everyone else was swarming around. They didn’t see him. They were just getting their books out of their lockers, running to class.”
“Oh,” I replied. “I think that maybe you’re just stressed out?”
Mateo walked into the greenhouse then collapsed onto a stool in front of a row of small planters stuffed with wispy feather grass. His hands were trembling. I felt bad for him, but it wasn’t the best time for me to give him the comfort he clearly needed. I was in the middle of repotting. I was covered in dirt. I waited a moment for Mateo to realize this, but when he didn’t, I grabbed an old cloth from my back pocket and slowly started wiping my trowel clean.
“Of course, I’m stressed out,” Mateo said. “It doesn’t help that Daniel is freezing me out.”
“He needs someone to blame, so he blames us,” I replied. “That’s not so hard to believe.”
The night of the accident, seconds after I’d yanked Mateo’s arm down and muted the light from his phone, we’d both felt the whoosh of air from a passing car. Mateo had spun toward me, confused.
And then, under that dark sky, I’d said, “You can take his place.”
For weeks leading up to that moment, I’d felt this gnawing emptiness. I’d lost the baby, and then, almost immediately, Mateo had lost his chance to land on a good team. Our future was gone, but with Duncan out of the way, we could work to grab it—or, at least, some of it—back.
Things weren’t really working out that way, though.
“Us?” Mateo looked over his shoulder to confirm we were alone. “Daniel blames us? Me, Drea. Daniel blames me, when really you were the one…”
“No!” I thrust the tip of the trowel in Mateo’s direction. “You wanted it, too. I know it. You let two more cars pass until—”
“Shut up, Drea.”
“I was thinking about us!” I shouted.
“Shut up!” Mateo stood up suddenly, swatting my arm away and sending the trowel flying out of my hand and skating across the ground. “You were thinking about yourself. You still feel helpless, and I get that, and I think about the baby every single day. But it’s not fair that you are pulling me into your helplessness. Now, I’m the one being blamed. I’m the one being haunted. You have no idea what it’s like, that feeling—that itchy, awful feeling—of never being left to yourself.”
Mateo was waiting for me to reply, but I said nothing. I wanted to pick up the trowel and stab Mateo in the heart with it. And as I stabbed him I’d scream at him about how wrong he was. I knew what it was like to be haunted. My daughter had moved inside me. I’d played her music and felt her flip. Her tiny body was gone, but she was still here somehow. The nausea and the headaches still persisted. She was my ghost, and if I were honest with myself, I never wanted her to leave.
Mateo used to talk to the baby. He would put his hand on my stomach and say, “Sweet Little. Little Sweet.” I missed that so much—both of those things: his fingers splayed across my stretched-tight skin, and the sound of the baby’s nickname coming from his lips.
“You should go back to class,” I told Mateo. “I have a lot of work to do here.”
“I’m thinking about telling Daniel,” he replied abruptly, like this is what he’d come up to the roof to say to me in the first place—like he’d been scared to say it, up until now. “About what we did that night.”
I walked over to a nearby hedgehog cactus and tapped its spine with the tip of my finger.
“And what exactly did we do?” I asked.
Mateo glared at me and then got up and left without answering.
Two days later, Lucy and Laurel came up to the greenhouse. They brought me hot cocoa from McDonald’s, which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t really want. I waited for them to leave, but they didn’t. Laurel leaned her hip against a shelf and started tugging lightly at a bright-green bud of barely formed squash on the vine. Its smallness made her fingers look too long, spindly like sticks.
“Mateo looks bad,” she said.
“He’s not sleeping,” I replied.
“He’s scared,” Lucy offered. “Daniel keeps asking about the night of the wreck, like he thinks Mateo is holding back some important detail. Yesterday, after last period, Daniel full-on shoved Mateo into the lockers, and Coach Jones had to come and break it up.”
I sifted my hand through soil, poured fresh into a pot from a just-opened bag. New dirt smelled like air but also sour like decay. It was cat-fur soft and very, very dark in color, like molten chocolate cake. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would pinch some off and hold it to the tip of my tongue.
What Lucy and Laurel were telling me—this wasn’t really news. Over the course of just the last two days Mateo was clearly getting worse, wilting and going brittle, barely hanging on. If he were a plant, I could repot him in this new, chocolate-cake soil and water him, and maybe he’d take root and get a second life, but, unfortunately, Mateo was a boy, not a plant.
“Mateo gave us a ride to school this morning in his new car,” Laurel said, still fiddling with the squash with her clacking stick fingers. “And he ran over a jackrabbit.”
I looked up, startled.
“There was no way he could have braked in time,” Lucy clarified.
“Still,” Laurel added with a shrug. “It seems like a bad sign.”
That afternoon, I prepped the greenhouse for a hard freeze that was supposed to happen overnight. I covered all the beds in burlap and made sure the rough fabric was secured. Then I moved the smaller containers away from the surfaces that would get the coldest, off the ground and away from the plastic tarp walls. By the time I left, all the little plants were huddled together on a couple of tables in the middle of the greenhouse. I covered those tables in burlap as well. If I could’ve, I would’ve plugged in a small space heater, but I didn’t want to risk the old electrical system of the school. There was no guarantee everything would survive, but it was the best I could do.
The sleet started as the sun went down, just as I was driving home from school, and, that night, I fell asleep to the sound of ice pinging against the windows. The next day was Thursday, and school ended up getting canceled because the roads were too dangerous to drive on. I let my phone run out of batteries and took three baths in a row, draining and then refilling the tub with hot water each time it got lukewarm.
The school reopened on Friday, and I was up at the greenhouse before the sun was fully up. It was clear that something had gone wrong. The door was partially open, but I didn’t know how that could’ve happened. I’d locked the door when I left. Of course I’d locked the door when I left. When I entered, I saw piles of brown on brown—burlap and dirt and dried-up leaves and stems, all mixed up. Everything was shrunken, crisp, the deadest of the dead. One table was shifted into a diagonal, and the other was tipped completely on its side. There were empty planters all over the place. I took a few more steps inside, and that’s when I noticed the flash of color on the ground. It was out of place and the brightest blue: bird feathers—no, the entire wing of a bird—torn off and spread out. I crouched down, sifting gently through the dirt and lifting the loose pieces of burlap, but I couldn’t find the head or the body, just that one wing.
As for what had happened, I could only guess. The bird had flown in through the door that I’d somehow (how?) left open. A larger animal, like a squirrel or a cat or a raccoon, had rushed in after it. In the great, big battle that ensued, the tables had been bumped, and the plants had fallen. The burlap had come loose. The bird had lost its life and was probably eaten. The plants that hadn’t been knocked completely from their soil had been exposed to the cold from the open door. I glanced over and saw that the little squash bud that Laurel had been fiddling with the other day had shriveled on its vine.
I sat on the cold, concrete floor and cried for the plants. Then I cried for myself because just when I’d started to think that maybe I wasn’t terrible at keeping things alive, I was proven wrong.
Eventually, I heard movement at the door and looked up to see Lucy and Laurel standing there. Lucy was frowning. Laurel was holding a cup of hot cocoa and taking in the destruction.
“This is, for sure, a bad sign,” she said.
In all that destruction, there was a miracle: a hedgehog cactus, alive. Somehow, an empty planter had flipped and fallen on top of it, offering a perfect shell of protection.
The hedgehog cactus didn’t need sun and fresh air to grow, but I figured neither would hurt. Much of the roof was still covered with ice, but the outside temperature was warmer than it had been the last couple of days. I carefully slow-walked the cactus across the slick roof and placed it on a west-facing ledge. Then I took a step back to gaze at the bluebonnet-blue sky.
“What happened up here?”
I turned to see Mateo. He was wearing a green-and-black flannel, dirty and wrinkled and with a little white stain, maybe a smear of dried toothpaste, across the collar.
“Something got into the greenhouse,” I said. “I don’t know how. It’s a total wreck. That’s the only thing that survived.”
I pointed at the cactus, smiling, so clearly proud of the little plant that lived.
“I think there’s something wrong with you, Drea,” Mateo said.
That wasn’t what I was expecting him to say, but it also wasn’t a lie.
“Well…” I snorted. “Well … yeah.”
“You don’t regret what we did.” Mateo advanced toward me, taking steady steps on the ice. “Even now. All you care about are your plants.”
“And what did we do?” I shouted, repeating myself from the other day. “Duncan was already dying.”
“Bullshit!”
Mateo rushed forward, and suddenly we were close, less than a foot apart. It was closer than we’d been in a long time, and I could feel the raw emotion cracking brightly between us. We were yelling at each other, yeah, but it was something. It felt real.
“You didn’t see him like I did,” I said. “He was crushed and barely breathing.”
Mateo, clearly bothered by the word crushed, took a hard swallow and looked down to the space between the toes of our shoes.
“He was my friend,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
“We could have helped him.”
“No.” I put my hand, dirty fingers spread wide, on his chest. “He’s gone, and we need to move on.”
I said it as much for me as I did for Mateo. We were in this together. We.
Mateo wanted to touch me—I could tell by the way his fingers were fluttering at his sides, twitching in and out of loose fists. I was certain we were finally fusing together again after tragedy—two tragedies—had threatened to rip us apart. He was weak right now, but I could build him back up. I was ready.
One of my hands was still on Mateo’s chest, and the other one went to my stomach. I’d felt the kick there, under the scratchy fibers of my sweater, under skin and muscle.
“He’s gone,” I repeated. “This is our chance now.”
Mateo looked up to meet my gaze. He shifted his weight to the right, onto his bad ankle. The movement was subtle, but I knew what he was doing: testing its strength.
“I don’t know,” he said.
I moved my hand from Mateo’s chest to his cheek, and he leaned into me, nuzzling like a cat.
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
But then Mateo reached for my hand, the one that was against my stomach, and gripped it.
“Sweet Little,” he whispered. “Little Sweet.”
After Mateo left, I spent the rest of the day trying to clean up the mess. When I went back to the ledge to check on the hedgehog cactus, school had been out for over an hour, and the sun was already going down. In a far field, people were practicing for track—running sprints and jumping hurdles. They were bundled up in matching sweats, and I could see their breath against the dark. The winter air smelled like smoke from a chimney.
Something off to the side caught my eye—a person. He was standing near the bleachers and was wearing a stained, gray sweatshirt. Once he saw that I was looking at him, he raised his arm. He didn’t wave it, though—just held it up in a semicircle over his head. It looked like it had that night in the field, when it was lying limp in the icy grass.
I gasped and took an awkward step to the side. My knee knocked against the planter that held the hedgehog cactus, causing it to teeter and then tip. When I reached out to catch it, my midsection collided with the ledge, and I huffed, extending my arm even farther, spreading my dirty fingers for the air-bound plant. The entire building tilted.
Out ahead of me and down, I could see the tiny cactus, rotating in the cold dark, and as I reached for it again, I felt a sting in the center of my palm from where a spine had lodged itself deep. The plant was soaring. I was soaring with it. My whole world was going end over end.
Lucy and Laurel found me the next morning. They’d gone up to the roof with some hot chocolate, called my name around the greenhouse, and just as they were about to leave, saw an odd pile of loose dirt and some scuff marks near the western edge of the building.
Later that night, people from school gathered in the parking lot, just as they’d gathered for Duncan a few weeks before. They held candles speared through paper cups and said nice things about me.
“Poor Drea,” Laurel said.
Lucy nodded. “Yeah. Poor Drea.”
Everyone thought I’d fallen on purpose, finally weighed down by grief heaped on grief.
Mateo was there, standing next to the girls, but he wasn’t holding a candle. He was in that green flannel shirt from the day before, and when people would come by to offer him their condolences, he wouldn’t reply. He was still wilting, and I wondered if he’d ever recover.
I tried to get close and overlap myself with him or fold myself into him. I thought that maybe he could feel me the way I still felt my baby girl. Maybe I could be a flutter in his stomach.
Mateo was wilting, but he was also angry. I could tell. Losing so many things in a row—a baby, a teammate, a scholarship, a fiancée—can fundamentally change a person. It can make them feel like they’re hollow and filled to bursting at the same time.
I came even closer, so close, I could hear a series of clicks in Mateo’s jaw, like he was grinding his teeth. I tried to tell Mateo that I’d died trying to save a life—that instead of being angry, he should be proud. I don’t think he heard me, though. His hard gaze was directed across the lot, to a smirking Daniel. I knew that Mateo was going to act on his new anger, which wouldn’t turn out well.
Duncan had been the one who’d thrived on emotion. Mateo had always been the deliberate one. Because of that, I’d had to act for him. I don’t like to think about what might happen without me around.