“Really? Well, what’s your backup plan, then?”
Nikki winked. “I’m just going to see how this goes.”
Her aunt hated doing dishes and kept big stacks of paper plates lined up on the counter for whenever she was feeling too tired or lazy to cook properly, and since even a phone call to the bank tended to make Nikki feel tired or lazy, this meant they ate on paper plates quite often.
Nikki was only ten years older than Noelle, and fifteen years older than Nadine, and despite her age of thirty-six, she often felt more like a big sister than a parent. Lack of culinary skills aside, Aunt Nikki had trouble holding onto more serious jobs and spent entirely too much of her own money on things like video games or concert tickets.
Not that they had ever been in any real danger of poverty. Noelle and Nadine had their inheritances and Aunt Nikki could always findsomethingto do because she was pretty and people liked her until they found out she had zero work ethic. No, Nadine knew how lucky she was. How lucky theyallwere, given their situation. There were so many horror stories of orphans falling into the hands of wicked people who burned through their inheritances before turning them out to the streets.Or killing them, her brain whispered.
Going to her sister’s wedding had made her realize that they were less comfortable than she had previously thought. It made her realize, also, that her own idea of comfort might be different from her sister’s. Maybe Noelle hadn’t liked the idea of living in a boxy condo with her young aunt and even younger sister, as if the three of them were acting out a hokey ‘90s sitcom. Maybe she wantedmore.
During Nadine’s preteen years and early adolescence, Noelle had often seemed embarrassed by her. In that time, she had grown closer to Nikki—first out of necessity, then out of habit. And in that time, she had gotten to know her aunt in an intimately personal way that a real parent would not allow. Nikki was fond of cheap wine and one of the ways she dealt with stress—and possibly also the reason she had trouble holding onto jobs—was by drinking herself into the occasional stupor. “Liquid courage,” she liked to say. Nadine thought it was more likeliquid oversharing-and-then-falling-asleep-on-the-couch-and-drooling-on-the-cushion.
Not that she blamed her aunt for taking what meager pleasures where she could. She hadn’t signed up for this. Any of it. She had taken on the guardianship during a vacation that Nadine herself was too young to remember. The five of them—Nadine’s parents, Noelle, Nikki, and a baby Nadine—had rented a boathouse on the shores of a manmade lake five miles south of the Sierra foothills, only a few cities away from where Noelle would have her wedding.
“I agreed,” Nikki had confessed to Nadine one night, drunkenly. “But nobody ever expects something like that to really happen. I thought your mother was going to live forever. I didn’t know that they were going to die in a couple years.”
Nadine’s mother had been named Natalie. Natalie and Nikki were also, coincidentally, ten years apart. The same age gap between Nikki and Noelle. Nikki had been the surprise child, unprepared for and also unexpected, though welcomed into the fold just the same. Their mother—Nadine’s grandmother—had been very interested in all things spiritual, from wuisim to the kabbalah, and it was from this latter that she had gotten the idea that N-names were good, strong names tied to rich spiritual growth. “Strong women need strong names,” she’d allegedly said.
“Shewas the strong one,” Nikki had gone on to say, speaking of Nadine’s mother. “She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it, whether it was your father, a new car, or you. God, how she loved you. There was never any doubt in her mind that she wanted to be a mother to you two.”
In that same drunken conversation, Nikki had gone on to confess that she had never wanted to be a mom. That she felt too much like a kid herself to eventhinkabout bearing the responsibility for being a parent. Maybe that kind of honesty could be a good thing in hindsight, a notable insight for someone to come to on their sixth therapy session, but Nadine hadn’t wanted to hear that when she was still hurting herself. It made her feel like a burden that had ruined her aunt’s life.
She wasn’t strong, either. She was needy, uncertain. She wore her heart on her sleeve.
She was going to get hurt.
I need a job, she thought.A real one. Now that Noelle’s left, I’m here all alone, and I’m sure Nikki can’t wait to have her place back to herself after all these years. She loves me, but she doesn’twantme. Now, I need to find out whatIwant.
I’m so tired of dragging everyone around me down.
“The golden tofu is good,” Nikki said. “Have some more of the chicken curry.”
“Oh, I’m good, thanks.” She took some of the fried oyster mushrooms instead, watching her aunt load up on the curry affectionately. That was what Nikki did. She offered you up the one thing she secretly wanted the most, hoping you wouldn’t take her up on it.
Maybe that was why she had agreed to the guardianship in the first place. She had loved their mother so much that she had offered up her freedom, and fate had been cruel enough to take it. There was probably a lesson in that.
After dinner, when all the plates and the takeout boxes had been put into the green waste bin, Nikki asked if she wanted to watch TV. But Nadine wasn’t in the mood forMystery Science Theateror oldStar Trekreruns. She felt gloomy, restless. “I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
“Okay. Well, take your phone.”
“I will.”
Nadine pulled her mousy brown hair back into a ponytail and slid her arms into a hoodie, zipping it up so it covered her tank top completely. Pineview was safe enough but she felt even safer with her feminine silhouette erased in the dark. At a distance, she was tall enough that people might mistake her for a man.
There were bad people out there. People who saw women as synonymous with prey. As things to hunt and own and maybe even kill if they so chose.
Nadine cinched the drawstrings, hiding her face.
“Bye, Nikki!” she called out, on her way out the door. She didn’t stay to hear an answer.
Twilight had always been her favorite time of day. She loved the way the sky looked like a faded velvet dropcloth, providing the perfect backdrop for the stud-like glimmers of the first evening stars. As the light leached from the sky, the silhouettes of the trees looked like old Victorian cameos. Even the air felt different, laced with the petrichor sharpness of the creeping dewpoint and the promise of another day.
Nadine went around the block, crossing the street to cut through the hushed silence of an elementary school. There was a fenced-off walkway bordering the edge of the grass field, barred by a swinging metal gate that was never kept locked. If you went down that path, it eventually took you to a baseball field and a public rec center, but the path there was so long and isolated, shrouded by the long shadows of cypresses, that it was easy to imagine yourself in an enchanted wood.
The woods in Argentum were like this, she thought randomly.Dark and full of secrets.
The baseball field was empty but the stadium lights were on, making it hard to see the stars from here. Nadine stared at the bleachers instead, watching an owl crest above them—a black streak against the periwinkle sky. Streetlights were starting to flicker on, dotting through the gaps in the trees like burning orange fireflies, and the ache of having no one to share this moment with gaped like an open wound in her breast.
