Every night we get drunk on a dead woman’s wine. We run eucalyptus bubblebaths to sooth our over-worked bodies and lather ourselves in her lotions and creams. We eat canned spam on nearly expired crackers and finish fancy mustards by spreading them on box mix pancakes. You can’t donate open containers and the idea of a landfill belonging to Em’s mother is more real estate on this earth than she deserves. She’s already got a casket six feet deep in a cemetery. How much more space does she need?
I’m applying the dead woman’s cherry red nail polish to my too short fingernails when a word pops into my head. Losers. It’s directed at us, I can tell. We want our nails to match our wine. I guess it’s not what a CEO would do. But it looks bomb with the garnet cuff bracelet Em inherited. The stones wink across at me in the low lamplight.
An upright piano waits in the corner. I quit in third grade, but my hands play a song that sounds like Chopin. Deep and sad. Burden.
“I didn’t know you still played,” Em says.
Yanking my hands away from the keys, I knock over the bench trying to get away. “Careful!” Em chides. Sheet music spills from the mouth of the open bench, covering the floor in loose leaf labeled Nocturne. I can’t look as I stuff them back in. Weakling. The word echoes in my head. It’s not my voice.
“We should get that appraised,” Em says. There’s an eyeroll in her voice like I’ve fucked up again and have been fucking up this whole time, which isn’t exactly fair.
I nod and grab a red wine glass. “Want some?”
We’re downing port like it’s the regular stuff and not 20% alcohol. Nibbling moldy cheese as if we’re enjoying it.
“Your mom was faaaaancy,” I say. Hick.
“Fucking fancy,” Em corrects with an index finger in the air. We already posted our dueling manicures to IG. #twinsies
“Why’d she buy this house again?”
Em shrugs. “The old house had too many empty rooms.”
Her mom always seemed like the kind of person who buys a new build because they can’t tolerate any ghosts except their own.
Em stares into her glass. Her lips plummy. “She died here, you know, in her bedroom.”
Her words settle in my throat like a stone scratching its way down. “I thought she died in the hospital.” Idiot.
“She hated hospitals.”
The house with its sky-high ceilings and big wall windows suddenly seems closet-tight and air-strained. The beige walls are the bars of our cage. We know this now but don’t speak it. Naming things only gives them more power. Silence is all we have to arm ourselves. We’re in the midst of something that grief doesn’t cover.
“Did anyone open a window after she died?” I ask, remembering a fraction of a story about souls needing open windows to escape to the afterlife. Ignoramus.
“It was the dead of winter, remember?”
“Right, right.”
The port appears thick, lighter in color, metallic in smell. It’s blood. It’s fucking blood. I drop the glass and its contents spill all over the beige suede couch. Birdbrain.
Em looks like I’d slapped her. “Jesus, Maddie! What the fuck?” Bolts up so the wine can’t soak her Fleetwood Mac shirt as thoroughly as it’s soaked her grey sweatpants. That over-sized cream shirt with her long dead dad’s favorite band is all she has left of him. Now port is creeping up its side. She looks like she’s been fatally shot.
I don’t see her arm wind-up. Only feel the sting on my cheek. Hear the slap of skin meeting skin in a hurry. My cheek puffs and pinks. Like a child I touch where it hurts to make sure it’s real and hiss in surprise when it is. Step back instinctively because my body knows to fear something old, something new. I’m not sure what she is anymore. The person with the red palm, that’s not Em. It’s her mother. We eye each other warily and wonder who will make the next move.