Margot Travers
On every street in littletown America there always seemed to be that one family that just didn't quite tick nearly as happily as the other families did. The number of these increased in the less affluent neighborhoods of any city you went to, and Portland Maine was no exception. Along a street of squat little one-story bungalows sat the Travers household. This consisted of a single mother in her late forties and had a teenage girl at home with her who had just graduated high school. She had a son too, and he was constantly in and out of that house-- he'd go out and find an apartment or vanish for a couple of months and then come back home when he had nowhere else to be.
The girl would be leaving in the fall. She was a very smart thing, in spite of her upbringing. She had been accepted at the several schools she applied to and even had academic scholarship offers from a few. She hadn't made up her mind yet, was thinking of accepting one nearby, but did have plans to get out of that house and its smoke-yellowed wallpaper rooms and move on with her own life. Even if she did feel a little guilty about leaving mom at home alone.
Mom struggled with depression sometimes. She fought a lot with her son, who was constantly on and off different kinds of drugs . When mom got drunk and screamed at him from the front lawn while he was trying to drive away in his truck she yelled about how he was exactly like his broke-ass father. That was perhaps a part of why he made her cry so much.
Margot Travers, the daughter, wanted away from it all. She was too smart for any of this bullshit to keep happening around her. Her mom was out on a date with some local fellow she'd met through a work friend, and her brother was out on one of his 'I'm gone away and not telling you where I am' kicks. Margot took the opportunity to bust into her mom's pot stash and smoke a little before going into her bedroom to sit on her bed with a busted up old laptop and read about college options on the internet.
griezelig
An uneasy sort of calm lies over the house today.
It's the sort of calm born of a gray sky on a warm day. Fierce wind as a portend of rain though days have passed without a storm and the Atlantic waters lap dark and unhurried against the shore. Portland hugs the ocean. Salt spray over everything and it takes a lot of effort to keep up the buildings and the machines this close to the shore.
This has always been her home. Melancholy is a constant companion to the young. An ancestor to nostalgia and it's hard to feel homesick for a place she hasn't left yet but as she starts the pot on its inevitable journey towards resin Margot has the acute and urgent feeling that she is missing something. Like she's gazing at a copse of new trees and realizing they will not survive the summer. Sadness and linging in the pit of her and she cannot identify their source.
By the time the pot has mellowed so has she. Margot is lounging on her bed considering her future when she hears the rumble of an aging truck turning onto their street and pulling into the driveway.
Luke is home.
Margot Travers
About an hour and a half later Margot was laying on her twin bed in her cramped little bedroom, arms folded behind her head and eyes up at the blank ceiling. She was feeling okay, considering life in the different locations that she could go to school. There in Maine would be nice-- less expensive and she could still come to the coast to see the sea and taste the salt.
First she heard the low rumble of the shitty old truck's engine, and then the headlights cut across the ceiling and wall through the small window in her room. She creased her brow and groaned. Closed her eyes and then scrubbed her hands up and down and all over her face.
"God damnit," she grumbled. There was almost always drama whenever Luke came home from one of his benders.
She didn't get up to go greet him, but laid on her bed with the door a third of the way ajar and listened. Her lamp was on but the ceiling light was not. Maybe he'd just go back to his room across the hall and pass out in peace.
griezelig
Sometimes his bedroom is the first place he goes. Thinking he can sneak off and continue his leveling out behind a closed door without their mother nagging at him.
She hasn't bothered nagging at him for some time. No point and nothing ever come of it. Luke was a willful child. May well be where Margot has picked up some of her own stubbornness. Her brother taught her how to stand up to bullies but then he turned into the thing he'd taught her how to fight. The nights their mother cried outnumber the nights Margot cried because of something someone at school did.
It's the meth. Meth and whatever the hell else he's putting into his body to cope with the things he does not tell the women in his life about.
Margot knows his girlfriend. Her mother knows her even better. She's just as strung out as Luke is and on the occasions that he goes off the grid she has come here looking for him and she cries even more than their mother does. Tears are a staple in their kitchen.
The front door blows open. Like someone is after him. Instead of going straight to his room he barrels into the kitchen and starts throwing open cabinet doors.
Margot Travers
When things began slamming around up the short hallway Margot growled aloud at the ceiling.
"Argh!" It was a sound of frustration, exasperation as well, all expounded by the drama that was an 18-year-old girl. She clenched her hands into fists and smacked them into the matress on either side of her, then sprang up into a sit. The laptop was slapped back closed and dressed in her sweatpants and T-shirt and socks she stomped her way out of the bedroom and into the mouth of the short hallway between it and the kitchen.
"Luke!" Her mascara was flaking off and sitting on her high cheeekbones. She was scowling hard with heavy dark brows at him with one hand up on the wall.
The last time he had come back it was to stay for about ten days, and during that time he was sick and tired and broke and miserable. He left on a sour note, of course, but only once some friend of his confirmed another bed to sleep in elsewhere.
"What in the hell are you after, man?"
griezelig
No one has ever been able to answer this question. Neither her brother nor anyone in his life has been able to say what in the hell Luke is after.
In the amount of time it takes for Margot to drag herself into action the slamming about only intensifies. He can't find what he's looking for in the cabinets by the stove. Pots and pans clatter as he rummages around. His name hollered from his sister's bedroom slows him down but only because he had for some unknowable reason had thought the house was empty.
He's high. He came in high and he's looking to leave high.
When Margot leaves her bedroom to investigate she finds her brother standing skinnier than he was the last time he came back. Last time his body had been screaming for a substance he could no longer afford to consume and he had been terrible company. Their mother had made him soup and kept the path to the bathroom clear. Had filled his prescriptions and lied to Margot about his prognosis.
This date she's on tonight is with a man who lost a son to heroin overdose. He understands. He understood the note of anxiety in Heidi's voice when she felt the buzzing in her handbag and pulled it out to read her son's name on her caller ID. Had promised to call her tomorrow. Their parting tonight had none of the forewarning that would allow them to recognize that they would never see each other again.
Skinnier than the last time and paler. Hollows carved under his eyes and a lankness in them besides. The gray sweatshirt he wears is stained and drapes his torso. The knuckles of his left hand are scabbed over. He startles when she comes out of her room and asks the eternal question and that quick-fear turns to anger.
"Shit, Maggie, go back to bed."
Margot Travers
"No way man, I've got a diploma on my wall now, I stay awake and get involved in the grown-up shit now." She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder to where her bedroom was. "Did you even remember that I graduated this year, Luke? Jesus."
She shook her head and instead of going back into the bedroom she went out into the kitchen along with him. He was high-- this was written all over his face and his big wide eyes and how he jerked and grabbed and rubbed and scratched. Maggie had never been afraid of him, though, never afraid to stand up. He was her big brother, after all. For as much as he and mom fought, they didn't have too much to argue about between the two of them beyond the obvious issues he was going through.
Instead she went to the kitchen window, moved the curtain to look out front.
"Mom's out. On a date. Does she even know you're home? God, you look like such shit. Let me get you some water."
griezelig
It takes eighteen minutes to get home from downtown Portland on a good night. On the best nights the highway is clear and tourists are not driving five below the speed limit trying to find their next turn and the state troopers don't have speed traps set up. Margot has been home all night and has no idea what the roads look like.
Yet she knows from looking at her brother that the answer to Does she even know is yes. If not that he's home that he's homeward bound. Their mother is not far behind him. The urgency in his earlier slamming and the unspent energy in his bones speaks of a debt unpaid or an incoming toll. Neither one of which he can outrun.
"I don't need any FUCKING WATER." Hard to be a loving brother and an addict at once. He does love her. But he doesn't know how to love without violence and that isn't anything he learned from their mother. The absence of a father in a young man's life is as much a teacher as anything else. That their father is a shithead only served to bolster Luke against Heidi. "Get out of my FACE, Maggie, FUCK."
Back to rummaging. The island cabinets don't give him what he wants either.
Margot Travers
Shouting wasn't uncommon in this house, no more than tears were. This was the same house they've lived in all their lives, and the walls and furniture were caked with the woes of hardship. Around the small round kitchen in particular the ceiling and wall had gone yellow from nicotine soaked into the walls from years of nervously smoking cigarettes in front of the window, waiting for men who wouldn't come home.
Margot wasn't unaccustomed to hearing Luke shout, but it still never failed to jar her heart and bones a little bit when he roared across a room like that. Her hands went up right away, palms forward, in a posture that clearly said Fine.
"Fine. Fuck you too, then, you dick."
And she spun around and went back to her room, slapping (but not quite slamming) the door closed behind her.
griezelig
His quarrel isn't with her. It isn't even with their mother though their mother is the one who has caught the brunt of his quarrels over the years. Margot is too young to understand what goes on in the mind of an addict. When he was her age Luke was too young to understand his own mind and the onslaught of depressants has only stunted his already dwarfed ability to know himself. Hasn't done shit for his ability to know anyone else.
Margot has seen him in the grips of withdrawal same as she has seen him fresh-high and blind with it. She knows better than to argue with him when he's like this. When he's like this she's just arguing with a drug and drugs want nothing but to consume the essences of those who invite them in.
Her invective and exit are answered by her brother grabbing a cutlery drawer and yanking it out of its tracks. Cacophony.
Time passes as it's wont to do and another vehicle pulls onto their street. This is the fuel-efficient engine of her mother's sedan. It does not pull into the drive with as much freedom as had the truck. Preparation in the reduced speed. Not until the driver's-side door slams does Luke realize their mother is home.
Numbed footsteps carry him out of the kitchen and into the room across the hall. The door collides with the opposite wall. Furniture drags across the floor. Their mother's key scratches in the lock and finds it disengaged. Margot only has a few seconds before the front door opens. Luke slams his.
Margot Travers
Slamming, clattering, and then quiet followed Margot's back and were then muffled through her bedroom door. All the while she paced angrily in front of her bed. She wasn't destructive like Luke could be, so she wasn't slamming things around or hitting the wall. She clenched her fists and stewed instead.
When their mom's car rolled up to the house, announced by a more efficient engine's purr and another cut of headlights across her bedroom, Margot stopped and looked out the window. Gauged their mom's face through the windshield.
She listened as Luke slammed his door around and then dragged furniture around as well. She presumed he was barricading himself in his bedroom and sighed heavy and angry. She hated nights like this, and they felt like they were far too frequent and predictable. She didn't want to have to call the cops on her own brother again. She didn't like the dispatchers getting familiar with her voice.
The front door sang the song of being unlocked and opened, and Margot went to her own door and opened it up. She was going to greet their mom and explain what just happened before she got past the kitchen.
griezelig
But the noises in her brother's room are the result of a search and not an attempt to avoid capture. Some part of his brain has him convinced that he needs something in this house and needs it before oblivion can grab and submerge him. That need is intercepted by their mother's return home.
Margot and Luke exit their rooms at the same time. Luke has paranoia and restlessness on his side but Margot has always been quicker.
Nothing recognizable in his red-rimed eyes when he looks at her a second before he grabs for the doorknob to haul it shut on her.
"Luke?" their mother calls. Like she's coming home to a normal night and not hers and her daughter's dissolving in a pool of drug-madness.
Margot Travers
Luke came out of his bedroom at the same time that Margot did, and they wound up staring each other in the face for half of a second there while Luke tried to decide what to do next and Margot tried to read those bloodshot eyes for what poor decision the mind behind them was making next. He looked to the door and gave himself away when he started to reach for it. He was going to try and wedge her back into her room by her bedroom door, but Margot wasn't going to have it. He may have taught her to stand up for herself, but she'd always been quick and sure on her feet by nature itself.
She managed to dart out of her room and do a sideways leap out of his reach up the short hallway.
"Mom," she called out to her mom, not alarmed yet but sounding cautious and skiddish all the same. She didn't like that Luke was trying to keep her out of the picture, and felt an uncomfortable creeping anxiety in her gut tonight.
Something wasn't right. Nothing ever was.
"He's tearing the house apart, mom."
griezelig
Their mother has always been thin but the thinness started to eat at her around the same time Luke's addiction did. She was not a large woman to begin with. A hair above average for an Anglo-American woman and slight of build. Now her husk screams what she herself did not in life. That she needed help and received none and had only her daughter as a beacon of hope in her final moments.
She had dressed for a date with a man with whom she had no hope of intimacy that night. Little black dress made grownup by the blazer overtop of it and the no-nonsense pumps on her feet. Makeup meant to conceal rather than accentuate and she looks tired standing in the half-light of the entryway. She sighs and sets her clutch atop a pile of unopened mail.
It's in both their natures to intervene. Their mother could not save Luke from himself but so long as they both have breath in her lungs she will not stop trying. In that moment Heidi is more concerned with protecting Margot from Luke than from saving her son.
"Shit," says Heidi. "Where is--"
Which is when Luke comes out of his room.
"Where is it!" he asks.
"Where is what?"
"WHAT'D YOU DO WITH MY SHIT?"
Heidi steps forward. Holds an arm out like to draw Margot to her though they are some distance apart now. Luke drifting back into the kitchen like a specter incapable of deviating from its path.
Margot Travers
The hallway wasn't a super long one for Luke to have to stalk through to reach the two women in the kitchen. Her mom was tall and looked exhausted and worn away. Margot and Luke both shared features similar to her-- face shape, perhaps, just that little something about their noses and mouths. Margot herself wasn't particularly tall, having picked up that recessive gene from somewhere in their father's lineage. It wasn't much of an effort for their mother to grab and move her despite the wasting mother's build.
Margot let herself get pulled to her mom protectively, but soon enough she was stepping out from around her and to her mother's side instead. Furrowing that heavy brow at Luke and yelling right back at him.
"Why the hell would she touch anything of yours, Luke?? You probably fucking lost it or sold it or left it in somebody's glovebox. Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down!"
griezelig
"YOU CALM THE FUCK DOWN!"
At this point the neighbors have learned not to intervene. Years ago the retired warrant officer who lived across the street had knocked on the door and the presence of a larger male figure who would not back down from his shit had quieted Luke for the night but the man tired of knocking on the door after the third time the cops showed up hours after his attempt to deescalate the situation. He died last year of lung cancer. Even if he were still alive nothing would have changed. Heidi had convinced him to mind his own business long before the cancer did.
Even in a neighborhood quiet as this one folks have taught themselves to ignore the things they cannot change. The Travers family was one of those things. No one is going to knock on the door tonight.
So Heidi puts an arm across Margot's chest and steps between her children.
"Luke," she says. "Listen to me. Whatever you're looking for is in this house somewhere. I haven't--"
"THEN WHERE IS IT?"
"Luke." He hadn't checked the pantry. Luke throws the already-flimsy door hard across its track and disappears into it. Heidi starts towards him. "Sweetie, I don't know what you're looking for, but if you just--"
"God DAMN IT."
A box of cereal and a box of Mason jars hit the pantry floor.
Margot Travers
For the moment, at least, Margot quieted down. Not on account of Luke's screaming at her, but on account of her mother's arm across her chest. She pulled a face so sour you'd think she just sucked down five lemons, but stood quiet and let her mom take the steering wheel and try to use her Soothing Mom Logic voice on her son.
It didn't work, and he shouted further and started tearing apart the pantry. Margot jumped violently when the mason jars hit the floor and several of them shattered.
"That's fucking it!"
Margot threw her arms up and stomped to the front door. Threw it open and slammed it behind her when she went outside. Her phone got pulled out of her front pocket as she was walking down the slouching wooden front steps and into the front drive.
9-1-1 was punched out on the touch screen and she brought the phone to her ear to wait.
griezelig
That breath of change in the air. That sea change she felt before she took that first short-lived hit off the pipe and retired to drift on what she thought would be calm. Clouds choke the sky. Blackness to the east and pink light pollution to the north and the west where the city bellows out its existence to a universe that does not care. That will still be here and live and changing even after Earth has ceased to exist.
Beneath her feet Earth is yearning for her. Margot can feel a nudging in her bones. That hazy dissonance of dreaming deep and knowing oneself to be asleep and yet existing whole in that dream. This is not a dream. It feels like a dream though. Something that has happened before and will happen again.
As the phone rings and the cell towers work to connect her to the switchboard the world tilts in the kitchen.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP," says her brother.
Her mother screams sharp and then loses her air.
Margot Travers
Margot felt as though her feet were humming, like the earth beneath them was vibrating some kind of warming electricity up into her bones. She thought it must be something electric to do with the stormy looking clouds that were rolling in and soaking up the light of the nearby city as well. She listened to the phone ring with an elbow cupped in the other hand and paced around in the front yard, out in front of the kitchen window.
Only as she heard the first 911 what's the address of your emergency did the roaring rise up from her brother again. She began, "759 Yale--" but was cut off by her mother's scream. She's heard her mom snap and hollar and scream back at her brother, but this was different. This was blood-curdling danger screaming.
It was the sudden quiet of air running out that made her guts turn to icewater and her ear stop working on the receiver. She told them, "Hold on," and took the phone down from her ear as she speed-walk-trotted her way to the front door. She whipped it open quickly, hands shivering and movements sharp and panicked with worry and fear for what she may find.
griezelig
And she opens the door to find her brother holding their mother by the throat.
The drugs have permeated his cells by now. The drugs have taken over what little sense was left in his brain and every action he takes now is because of the drugs but that will not excuse him. Nothing that can happen now will excuse him and he was not looking for excuse or forgiveness or salvation when he walked into his childhood home tonight. He was looking for a sock filled with twenty-dollar bills and a rock of crystal meth that he had hidden behind the fucking washing machine last time he was here.
He didn't think to check behind the fucking washing machine. That was the first time he attempted a new hiding place thinking Heidi would go through his room and confiscate his shit like she had done on one isolated occasion months earlier when she thought for sure that he was dead or otherwise not coming back three weeks being the longest he had gone AWOL and she just wanted to clean his room in case he did come back. Found his stash then and got it out of her house not for his sake but because she didn't want it in her house. Not with Margot still in high school.
So her brother has their mother by the throat. Whittled away as she is she could not restrain Luke on a good night. Luke is bolstered by stimulants now.
His thin back does not block out everything but Margot does not have an unobstructed view of the moment her brother slams her mother's head into the countertop and drops her to the floor.
That only turns the pulse in her ears to the drumming of a warsong.
Margot Travers
Margot thought that the sound of air being cut off through a window and wall was bad, but she had yet to hear the sound of a skull breaking on a countertop.
Crr-rack!
The noise was wet and terrible and never before hard Margot known that a simple sound could make you want to puke so violently. Her ears rushed with blood and pulse that slammed and pounded. It was a steady noise, deep and hard and consuming and soon it started to sound more like it was coming from outside of her head just as much as inside of her eardrums. It sounded like real drums. War drums.
"NO!"
The shout boomed and the cupboards rattled and a picture of Luke from the fourth grade fell off the wall. Her body, muscle and skin and all, seemed to hum with that energy that was soaking up through the earth, drawn there by the storm. She felt it buzzing in the air around her, in her ears and eyes. Her hair was charged with static and tried to float up off her shoulders (but didn't make it to far, honestly). When she looked from where her mother lay unmoving on the floor to where Luke stood her pupils had bled over into her hazel-colored irises. She was crying, with tears streaming from those big eyes and all the way down to her neck.
She dropped the phone and it was left forgotten on the floor. The dispatcher was asking 'hello?' repeatedly, with increased urgency each time. They would have to ping the address off the cell phone, and honestly didn't have to take too much of a guess at which house officers had to go to. This address had a long list of records in their database.
The phone had been abandoned not so much for shock but to free up her hand for another task. She reached forward into the air and closed her hands as though she was physically grabbing something that wasn't there. Except it was-- she was in essence grabbing and squeezing Luke from a distance. This wild wash of power was unrefined, though, and her aim was not good. She managed to get a hold of Luke's arm with this power and squeezed it hard-- crushed the bones and burst the vessels and savaged the connective tissue. He would have only a second to realize what had just happened (as much as he could through the haze of drugs and shock of what he'd just done) before he was whipped like a rag doll through the kitchen and into the oil-caked hood of the stove.
"Mom!" Margot wept, tear-choked, and rushed over to where her mom was laying. She dropped onto her knees and hovered her hands helplessly over the woman, wanting to turn her over but scared to death of what she'd see, what she'd find. Needing to reverse what had just happened and ignoring whatever noises Luke may be making behind her.
The drums were too loud to hear through anyway.
griezelig
For a moment Margot is not an eighteen-year-old girl stood in the house where she grew up too fast.
She has always been a goddess of victory. She has not always risen to meet this destiny but it has always been within her. It has always been and so it is now its resurgence up through her core flooding her consciousness with the smell of blood-drenched earth and the echoing of rallying cries and the rattling of spears against shields.
It is her brother she grabs from across the room. In that moment he is the enemy. An affront to home and hearth. He cries out in pain and confusion and when he connects with the wall so far opposite his place in the kitchen that the police will not be able to explain the distance the cracking of his skull against the drywall does not kill him.
Later surgeons will not be able to save Luke's arm. It will have gone dead-black by the time the ambulance arrives and the paramedics package him for transport. For the moment he lies stunned and silent on the floor. In the space where a door leads to the basement and another door leads to the back deck where their mother has smoked cigarettes late at night thinking the kids were asleep and wouldn't know any better.
By the time Margot reaches her Heidi has coated the linoleum in her own blood. Natural-red hair stained dark by a venous leak and she is breathing weak and hollow. Warning. These are her last breaths.
Drums can rouse to heal as much as they can to hurt.
Heidi's hand twitches like to shield Margot a last time before she closes her eyes.
Margot Travers
"No," she said again, this time softer and with disbelief and utter sadness. She shook, every inch of her. People whispered at school that this would only end in tragedy one day. They'd always guessed that they'd find Luke overdosed or killed by officers after trying to rob a gas station or some such idiotic shit. Nobody would have guessed that this would end in this much violence. They were always going to be that disfunctional family halfway up the street from all the decent neighbors, weren't they?
Later on the news would tell this story consistently over several days. They'd also follow the brief trial that Lucian Travers received.
In this moment, though, as officers rushed to a familiar address to greet the scene, Margot felt her mother's blood begin to seep in through the knees of her sweatpants while she hovered, stuck in shock, still buzzing with electricity and hearing the pounding in her head and ears and bones.
"Wake up," she whispered the words at first, and then said them with more resolution. Expectation. Demand.
"Wake up!"
And something would wake. Mostly her mother, but nothing that she wanted.
griezelig
In this moment the only person who can truly came to be awake is Margot. She does not know it yet. Not with the same focus as she knows that her mother is dying because of her brother.
Her brother is just now starting to come back into himself. He is injured to the point that he cannot find his feet. All he knows is pain and that pain is realer than anything he has felt in ages yet he cannot explain how it happened. The doctors will try and sort out if it had something to do with his drug addiction. Like he may have suffered a bad fracture weeks ago and never sought treatment though they will be unable to find proof of an infection.
Compartment syndrome. T79.A1 if one is billing under the ICD-10 code. That is as real as the pain.
At the moment she kneels beside her mother and screams for her to come back from the skull fracture that aims to kill her Margot cannot say what is real and what is not. The real and the unreal feel about the same. That drumming not so much in her head as in her blood.
Her mother lies still for a moment. Lies still and would lie still forever had Margot not screamed for her to wake up.
A ragged gasp. A fluttering of blue eyes. Cold Death and the spark that aims to stave it off and Margot stares right into it. Time does not stop but for the moment it curls itself around the girl and her mother. She can no more stop Time than she can stop Death but she doesn't know that yet.
Margot Travers
The police officers would arrive shortly after, but Margot would still be in shock. When she demanded that a mother she knew to be dead wake up, the woman gasped a raspy ragged breath and fluttered her eyes open. Blue eyes, a recessive gene that the daughter did not inherit. For a second Margot was shocked and frozen, disbelieving that this could happen. Her mom was gone, but now the body was back with a beating heart and working lungs once more.
"Mom?" The question wavered in the air while Luke groaned on the other side of the kitchen. When she got no response Margot tried again, and again, louder each time. She grabbed her mother by the shoulders and shook her a little.
When the officers showed up Margot was slick with her mom's blood on her knees, shins, and the palms of her hands, and she was clapping them over her mom's head like that would do something to summon a consciousness forward. An officer would have to drag her away weeping from her mother, and she would spend the next hour and a half sitting in the back of a police car in shock.
Ultimately, eventually, she would be interviewed but it would be sympathetic and never accusational. She was never considered a suspect in the attack, of course it was Luke that delinquent scab of society. Of course it was his drug abuse that crushed his arm impossibly, not his little sister's forceful Awakening into what existed beyond the curtain of ignorance. She would be released as soon as she was deemed stable and well-- her grandfather had come to pick her up the next day from a city several hours drive away.
Within five weeks she had selected a college most of the way across the country and was getting ready to move and start her first semester of college. Somewhere else, anywhere else, just to get away.
