Play nice, p.5
Play Nice, page 5
part #1 of 2025 Series
“Make sure what?”
“That the demonic activity remained dormant.”
“Ah.”
“Your judgment is wasted on me, I’m merely the messenger,” Helen says. “I didn’t approve. Didn’t think it was good for her mental or physical health to be there. Turns out, I was right. But so often, being right means nothing but winning a round of a losing game. What an empty victory. My sister is gone. The house is still there. And it’s yours now. And Leda’s and Daphne’s.”
The thought of the three of us going back, pulling up to the end of that sleepy suburban street, up the long, cracked driveway. Seeing the house waiting there, shaded among the trees. That clunky 1970s shed-style split-level with such uninviting sharp angles. Narrow windows that didn’t let in enough light or air. The uneven stone pathway that led to the splintered stairs, wooden railings always wet, stinking of rot. The front door painted black, heavy and thick, but like all the other doors at 6 Edgewood Drive, it would allegedly open on its own and slam itself shut. How many mornings did I wake to find that front door wide open, a dead animal on the welcome mat? Offerings from the stray cats we would feed, which Mom took as proof. She thought that the cats were making sacrifices to the beast within the walls. That they could sense the sinister supernatural presence.
“Well then. I should probably go see Roy about that vial of holy water.”
Helen laughs, then offers me her arm. “Shall we?”
7
I find Tommy downstairs getting his tarot read by a gaggle of fabulous hags.
“The Fool,” one of the women says.
“The Fool reversed,” says another.
“No, you’re looking at it upside down. It’s not reversed to him.”
“What does this one mean?” Tommy asks, wide-eyed. “The Fool?”
“Don’t be offended.”
“I’m not,” Tommy says. “Just curious.”
Such a fool, I think. I stand against the wall and observe for a few minutes before getting bored. It’s not as fun to hear other people’s fortunes.
Aunt Helen went to the bathroom, and now with Tommy preoccupied, I’ve been left alone to navigate the funeral, or “remembrance celebration” as they’re calling it. Left alone with the knowledge that I am now—or soon to be, officially, legally—a homeowner. I’d be the envy of everyone under thirty-five if only the house didn’t come with such a reputation.
I put my head down and slink out of the parlor, find my way to the kitchen, where there’s a little bar area set up on the counter. Liters of store-brand soda and bottles of cheap liquor. I pour myself a whiskey and cola in a clear plastic cup. There’s no ice anywhere, so it’s warm, and flat, and pretty disgusting, yet somehow exactly what I need. I down it and pour myself another.
The kitchen is miraculously empty, so I linger while I drink, skimming the printed-out flyers on the fridge for paranormal conventions and psychic fairs. One of them is in Milwaukee, and it reminds me of my friend Sarah, who was on my dance team in high school. An angsty bulimic who wrote poetry and had a Maine coon the size of a German shepherd named Frankie.
Sarah and I fell out of touch after she moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern, but we follow each other on Instagram. She got married a few years back and moved to Milwaukee. She bought a fixer-upper there and renovated the whole thing herself, documented it on her page, got herself thirty-five thousand followers in the process. Not anywhere near as many as I have, but nothing to sneeze at.
“There you are.” It’s Roy. “We’re going to have the circle of remembrance now. Will you join us?”
“I didn’t come all the way here to miss the main event.”
He smiles at me, then holds out a small satin pouch. “You can open it later.”
I accept it, whatever it is. Slip it into my bag. “Thanks, Roy.”
“I’m here for you, Clio. You and your sisters. If you ever need anything. I hope we can all sit down someday.”
I kiss his cheek in lieu of a response. I doubt I’ll ever see or speak to this man again. In six months, he’ll move on with a psychic medium, probably one with a bad dye job and a name like Misty or Rainbow, and his beloved Alexandra, his partner of the last fifteen-plus years, will become an afterthought. Men are all the same, Mom once told us, but it’s the ones who try the hardest to convince you that they’re good that you really have to watch out for. My mother was wrong about a lot, but not this. How many times have I witnessed a man declare he was outraged over some indiscretion that he himself was later found guilty of? How many proud gentlemen revealed to be wolves?
I top up my drink, and then Roy leads me into another room where there’s a broad circle of chairs set up around a small end table with an urn on top. It’s a pretty urn, white marble with gray veins. I pretend it’s empty.
People filter in and take seats. Roy pulls out a chair for me. I save the one next to me for Tommy, who finds his way over a few minutes later.
“So, what’s your fate?” I whisper to him.
“I should be more open to the unexpected,” he whispers back. “I got a something-of-Cups, a Fool, and the Hanged Man, which didn’t look great, but they said it’s more about perspective.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Mariella sweeps into the room and starts lighting candles as she monologues about death. Maybe it’s the whiskey or the weird vinegar smell or how many people are here or how many of them are wearing hats or just general overstimulation. I can’t pay attention.
I think about Sarah and her massive cat and her before-and-after Reels. I think about the shaggy beige carpet at the house. The horrible linoleum in the kitchen. The sunken tub in the downstairs bathroom. My tiny bedroom with the window up high on the wall, my view of dead grass. Leda and Daphne in the big room upstairs, directly above mine. Sometimes I could hear them, up late, whispering secrets to each other. I would hold perfectly still, hold my breath as I listened, trying to make out what they were saying, if they were talking about me, but it’s like they were speaking another language, one I couldn’t translate, in voices not theirs. No one sounds like themselves through the floorboards.
I haven’t thought about their late-night gossip sessions in years.
I’m hot in my sweater again. I sit up and gather my hair, yearn for a butterfly clip.
A woman wearing a birdcage fascinator like a courthouse bride shares a memory of Mom bringing over lemon bars on a random Tuesday.
The mother I remember was a terrible baker. One year she botched Daphne’s out-of-a-box birthday cake so badly we ended up going to McDonald’s for apple pies and McFlurries instead. On the drive home, sugar high, I declared my love for McDonald’s in song and dance, kicking the back of the passenger seat. Leda complained. Daphne asked me to sit still, so I leaned over and licked her. She screamed. Mom slammed on the brakes after nearly running a red light.
“I shouldn’t have taken you there,” she said, pounding a fist on the steering wheel. “You’re going to be chubby. Do you know how hard it is to be a chubby girl in school? Do you want that for yourselves? To get bullied? You know what? Go ask your dad how he feels about chubby girls.”
The light turned green, but she didn’t go. She wasn’t paying attention; she was too busy yelling at us.
The driver in the car behind us laid on their horn, and so Mom hit the gas. The tires squealed.
Thinking back on it now, I suspect she was drunk.
Haven’t had a McFlurry since.
I become aware that the room is quiet and that there are eyes on me. I like to be looked at, but not like this. Like I’m Godzilla rising out of the sea.
It takes me a minute to realize that I just made it my turn to share a memory, that I just relayed the McDonald’s story aloud, and that it has not gone over particularly well.
The cup in my hand is empty, the whiskey gone, but I lift it anyway.
“To my mom,” I say, smiling sunnily, attempting to recover the crowd. “And the tough lessons delivered imperfectly. And her great hair. Okay, that’s it for me. Who’s next?”
* * *
—
Tommy and I stick around until the end of the remembrance circle. It goes on for far too long. All the stories are about someone I don’t know. That I never knew and never will. This version of Mom is theirs, not mine.
Ideally, I’d just quietly up and leave, but Tommy has a conscience, so we say goodbye to Aunt Helen.
“I’m sorry I talked about McDonald’s,” I tell her, going in for a hug.
“Grief is strange animal,” she says, rubbing my back.
“You have my number, yeah?”
“I do. If it’s all right with you, I’ll be in touch,” she says, pulling away. “I’ll be taking her ashes, unless you want them.”
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Thank Mariella for us,” Tommy says.
On the walk out to the car, I have Tommy take a few pictures of me on the sidewalk. The outfit is too good to go to waste, and no one outside my family will know where I wore it or for what occasion. Aside from maybe Ethan, and if I cared about his judgment, I wouldn’t have kicked him out of the Uber the other night. He’s already texted me twice since. Men love when you’re callous.
Tommy hands me back my phone and I scroll through the photos. “These are good. I should hire you.”
“It was nice to hear all those stories. About your mom,” he says, sniffling. He wept during the sharing circle.
I shrug. “That’s all they are. Stories.”
He opens the car door for me, and I slide into the passenger’s seat. I notice him admiring his parking job. He comes around to the driver’s side, gets in, buckles his seat belt. I wait for him to start the car, but he doesn’t. He turns to look at me.
“I’m married to your sister, you know.”
“I’m aware,” I say. “I have a hideous bridesmaid dress still hanging in my closet to commemorate your wedding.”
“I have years of practice reading a hard-to-read Barnes woman. It’s okay not to be okay, Clio.”
“That’s very after-school-special of you, Tommy. But I’m fine,” I say, crossing my heart.
He nods and starts the car.
“I’m not Leda,” I say. “I’m not repressed; I’m genuinely unemotional.”
“I think you do have emotions, Cli. You choose not to feel them,” he says. A little sassy, for him. A little bold, for Mr. Kowalski.
“All right. I did almost cry in there,” I say. “Okay, I did cry. Upstairs with Aunt Helen. Are you happy? Does my transient display of vulnerability excuse me from whatever heart-to-heart you’re teeing up?”
He pulls out onto the street. “Tears can be cathartic.”
“I find they mostly just ruin my makeup,” I say, cracking my window. “Did you know about the house? About Edgewood?”
He doesn’t respond. He pretends he’s watching the road.
“Pleading the Fifth?”
“This is a conversation for you and Leda.”
We’ve got two-plus hours back to Jersey; he’ll cave eventually. “Was she planning on telling me?”
“Telling you what?”
“About the house,” I say.
“I love you, Clio,” he says, “but Leda is my wife.”
“Fine.” I lean against the window, and he turns up the music, the same playlist as this morning. It’s “Freak on a Leash” by Korn. I don’t object. What’s the point? It’s been such a weird day already. Why not?
About an hour into the drive, he pulls off to get gas and we stop at a Burger King. Notably not a McDonald’s. We go around the drive-through and eat in the car.
“Cheers, Tommy,” I say, lifting my giant cup of Diet Dr Pepper to him.
“Cheers,” he says. He bites into his burger, and ketchup oozes out the sides.
I savor a fry. All I ate today was that muffin, which is probably how I ended up drunk at my mother’s funeral.
“So, how bad was it?” I ask.
He’s got ketchup on his glasses, now. He doesn’t ask me to clarify, which is an answer in and of itself. “I knew that story. Leda told me.”
The sun sets over the parking lot, bathing the grim capitalist landscape in divine light. At this hour, the parking lot is holy ground, the distant Target Valhalla.
“I’m proud of you for showing up,” he says. “I’m proud of you for speaking your truth.”
I pop another fry into my mouth. “Woof. This is worse than you just telling me that I messed up. Do you want a nugget?”
He takes one. “Worse than me telling you that I think you should give therapy another try?”
“No, not worse than that,” I say, passing him the barbecue sauce.
He dips his nugget. “Leda didn’t know about Edgewood.”
“She didn’t?”
“Not until Aunt Helen called and told her about your mother’s passing.”
“So she did know? She knew Mom died there.”
“She knew Alexandra passed there, yes. But before she got that call, she had no idea your mom kept the house all these years,” he says. “She’s upset about it.”
“I bet.” I fold over my bag of food and drop it at my feet.
“It’s going to be a pain to sell,” he says. “Real estate is a headache.”
“That’s the reason she’s upset?”
“She doesn’t want anything to do with the house. Doesn’t want to go there. Doesn’t want to see pictures. Doesn’t want to transfer the deed, that whole rigmarole. She doesn’t want to think about it. And now she has to think about it.” He wipes the ketchup and grease from his face with a napkin.
“What if she didn’t?” I hand him another napkin because he needs it.
“Hmm?”
“Leda’s assuming that she’s going to be the one to take care of house stuff because she’s the oldest and most responsible and fancies herself the most intelligent and competent. But she doesn’t have to,” I say, with visions of before-and-after photos, of me in overalls holding a paint roller, of selling the house in a few months for a pretty profit and investing that money in a property somewhere in the Hudson Valley that I can put up on Airbnb for passive income whenever I’m not spending time there creating bucolic content. “I can handle the house.”
8
We hit traffic and don’t get back to Dad’s until after nine. Leda and Daphne sit at the kitchen table drinking tea. They pretend like they weren’t anxiously awaiting our return.
Tommy kisses Leda on the top of her head.
“Hey, honey,” he says. “Awful traffic. There was an accident. Hope everyone’s okay. We saw an ambulance.”
The TV is on in the family room, Dad and Amy watching an episode of a sitcom they’ve probably already seen a thousand times before.
I sit down and steal Leda’s tea. Daphne drinks hers black—same with coffee—to be cool and low-maintenance, and to never have to put anyone else out by asking for sugar or cream. Leda takes hers with a splash of milk and a packet of stevia, the same way I like mine.
“Excuse you,” she says as I take a sip. The tea is cold. They’ve been sitting here awhile.
My sisters are both dying to know what it was like, but they don’t want to admit it, to have to ask. I could be mean and let them squirm in their curiosity, but that would be a strategic misstep, considering where this conversation is headed.
“It was fine, since you’re wondering. I saw Roy. He’s good-looking for an old warlock. Everyone there had lovely things to say about Mom. No one tried to cleanse my aura or anything. No one tried to convince me of the supernatural. No one brought up the demon. Tommy did get a reading, though.”
Leda and Daphne’s heads swivel to Tommy.
“I need to be open to new experiences,” he says, pulling out the chair next to me and sitting down. “That’s what my reading said. Though I suppose I was open to the new experience of getting my cards read…”
“Why would you subject yourself to that?” Leda says.
“What? Like you’ve never looked up your horoscope or whatever?” Daphne asks, spinning her mug around for something to do with her hands. “It’s harmless. Not like the trash Alexandra put us through.”
“It’s a gateway drug,” Leda says.
“Chairman of the D.A.R.E. program over here,” I say.
“Oh, idiot off, Clio.”
It’s harsh, out of character for Leda to curse at me like that. I turn to Daphne, her jaw hitting the table. This is why I like having two sisters. There’s always a witness.
“I’m sorry,” Leda says. Even more shocking than the curse, an apology!
“It’s okay.” It’s easy to forgive her because she’s obviously not in her right mind. Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. “I can admit it was harder than I thought it’d be. Seeing Aunt Helen again. Seeing Mom in an urn. But it wasn’t a circus. No one offered me Kool-Aid.”
“Must not have been too traumatizing since you posted a picture,” Daphne says.
“Don’t shame me for doing my job,” I say.
“I wasn’t.”
I give her my meanest look. Tommy shudders. He can’t handle it. Neither can Daphne.
“I wasn’t!” she says, hands up.
“Good,” I say, smiling. I take another sip of Leda’s cold Earl Grey and slide the mug back across the table, then stand up, push my chair in. “Only development post-funeral is that I will be taking the lead on the house we now own.”
Daphne closes her eyes, which is proof that she already knew about Edgewood and that she’s not prepared to fight over it. She doesn’t have the energy. Plus, she sucks at fighting. She prefers peace.
“Clio,” Leda says.
“You knew I’d find out from Helen at the funeral. Is that why you didn’t want me to go?”
