“You’re drunk,” Maude said, surprising herself. She’d said the words before they’d even crossed her mind. She wasn’t mad, not yet; she wasn’t even sure she was awake. It could have been a dream, one of those ones where you’re naked in front of a lot of people. Only she was the opposite of naked; she was overdressed. And her inebriated fiancé was laughing much too hard at an unfunny age-old idiom that meant he didn’t want to marry her. At any moment, she would flap her arms and fly away in the phone booth, and then she’d wake up on her wedding day and chuckle about it to herself, and maybe she’d tell Richard all about it later—on their honeymoon. They were going to Canmore. They had a honeymoon suite. They were going to drive into Banff one day and take a cableway ride to the top of Sulphur Mountain.
“No!” yelled Richard, laughing again. “Well . . . yes. Yes. That is true.” He was hysterical. “I have to go, Maude. This whole thing . . .” He hung up.
So there stood Maude in a phone booth on Scarth Street, utterly confused and abruptly overdressed. She was not heartbroken, but that would come when the shock wore off.
This whole thing . . . absurd.
Well said, Richard.
It was not Maude’s wedding day after all.
She sent the photographer home and canceled the ceremony, and then she went home, too, and changed out of that stupid dress—as embarrassing a thing as it had been to put on in the first place, taking it off and trying to fit it back into its pretty box were downright humiliating.
Then there was nothing to do but wait for Richard to sober up and call her with an apology and an explanation for his bizarre behavior, but he never did. There would be no cableway ride to the top of Sulphur Mountain.
She knew she wasn’t the first person to be left like that; leaving was what people did best and most often. But the abruptness of this leaving, the unexplained nature of it, was torture, and it came as close to killing her as anything ever had. Her body became bloated with questions; she felt them in her feet when she walked, and they flowed through her veins and whispered in her head at night. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. It was strangely—punishingly—similar to being in love. It was awful, and it made her awful.
Mackenzie and Tanya
“But it’s my birthday.” Mackenzie stood in the bedroom doorway. She was trying to feel angry so she wouldn’t feel hurt.
“Was. Yesterday.” Tanya’s voice floated in from the tree just outside the bedroom window. She’d been on her way down when Mackenzie caught her and now she was perched on a branch, her bone-white skin glowing in the moonlight so she looked like a ghost hovering there.
“That’s not how it works.”
“That’s exactly how it works. It’s two in the morning. It’s not anyone’s birthday.”
“Pretty sure it’s a bajillion people’s birthday.”
“You know what I mean. Not yours.” Tanya glanced down the tree, not to see who was down there but to indicate to Mackenzie that she wanted to join them.
“You just don’t want to admit you’re ditching me to go hang out with someone you like more on my birthday.”
“Again: your birthday was yesterday. Go to bed.”
“Wow. Thanks.” Mackenzie tried to look hurt without pouting.
But Tanya could only care about one thing at a time, and right now, Mackenzie wasn’t it. “Kenz. Chill out. We had a party. We had fun. That was your birthday, this is something else. We don’t have to share everything.”
“I’m sorry you’ve had to share anything with me. I’m sorry that’s been so sucky for you.”
Tanya smiled impatiently. “Mmmkay, well. We gotta go. You’re not going to tell, right? Be cool.” Tanya was always telling Mackenzie to “be cool.” Like it was something she had control over. Like she’d chosen, at birth, to be a loser.
“Obviously I’m not going to tell,” said Mackenzie, trying to appear indifferent rather than devastated.
“Awesome,” said Tanya, indifferent without even trying.
She whispered something down the tree, and a whisper came back up to her. She twisted her body toward the tree trunk, reaching in the dark for an invisible branch, trusting it would be there even though she couldn’t see it. Mackenzie realized in that moment how familiar this escape route had become to her sister.
“I don’t think you should go,” she said quickly. One last attempt.
Tanya drew in an exaggerated breath.
“Mom would hate it if she knew you were going off with some guy you barely know.”
This got Tanya’s attention. She changed direction and hauled herself back in through the window, climbing over her dresser and jumping onto the floor in front of Mackenzie. She landed without a sound, somehow, like she was a shadow instead of a person. If Mackenzie were to attempt the exact same thing, everyone in the household would wake up and come running to see if a tree had fallen on the roof or if there had been an earthquake.
“What do you know about it?” Tanya wasn’t indifferent anymore.
Mackenzie knew she had the upper hand now. She didn’t want the upper hand, though; she just wanted to be invited. Not because they were threatened by her or because they felt like they had to invite her, but because they wanted her around. She stared at her sister, her eyes welling up with tears, trying to decide how to play it. Should she mention the things she’d read in her sister’s email in-box? The crazy amount of money she knew Tanya had in her purse right now? The fact that she knew exactly where Tanya was going and who she was meeting? “Nothing,” she said finally, staring at her purple toenails.
“Why’d you say that then?”
“It was a guess.”
“You guessed that I was going off with a guy I barely know?”
“You’re always going off with guys you barely know. You’re always going off with everybody, and you never take me with you.” She didn’t want them to invite her because they felt sorry for her, but maybe that was just what it was going to take.
Tanya relaxed. Her eyes became bored again. She was neither empathetic nor concerned. “Later, Mackenzie.”
She climbed up onto her dresser and slipped out the window into the dark, and that was the last time Mackenzie ever saw her in real life.
But she showed up in Mackenzie’s dreams almost every night after that and often began to materialize in her periphery in public places, looking just as ghostly and shadowy as she had the night she disappeared, only to vanish when Mackenzie turned her head.
Sunna and Brett
The stove might as well have blown up. The bathtub from the apartment above might as well have fallen through the ceiling and onto the dining table with a naked neighbor in it. The chicken they were eating might as well have reassembled itself and run screaming out the front door. The fight had had that kind of quality to it—it was shocking, surreal. Unprecedented. Something they never thought would happen to them—and it did feel like something that had happened to them, not something in which they had agency. They’d been having supper together, and then they were yelling at each other, then screaming. Who had started it? Who had become angry first? And why? Neither party could remember afterward.