Inherited

The gas station smells of cigarettes and coffee. Meg walks through the aisles, unsure of what she wanted, but certain that she needed to put something in her body soon. It was nearing mid-afternoon, and a sleeve of Ritz crackers for breakfast can only sustain a person for so long.

She settles for a bag of pretzels and a bottle of lemonade. The condensation on the glass is a wonderfully cool distraction, and she’s suddenly so thirsty she just wants to down the whole thing and cry it back out. 

“$6.36,” says the cashier. His plastic name tag is smudged around the edges, the bottom of the first letter chopped off by the wear of time. Jim or Tim. He whistles through the chorus of Bennie and the Jets as Meg rocks back and forth on her feet, waiting for him to finish counting her change. Why is she the only one in a rush? She wants to vault over the counter and count the bills for him.

“Have a good day,” Jim/Tim says with a gap-toothed smile. He’s nice. He could be good moral support, offkey Elton John and all, if she does end up stumbling on the body of her dead brother. Maybe she should beg him to come with her. Trauma bonding!

As her legs were carrying her out the door, she wondered if she had said “thank you” or “you too” or anything of the matter. 

In her beat-up Chevy, she alternates sips of lemonade and bites of pretzels and wonders if she’s losing her goddamn mind.

Meg’s nerves are so shot with anxiety and sleeplessness that the ring of her phone causes her to jolt. Lemonade cascades down her fingers, smearing on the screen as she tries to check the caller ID. 

It’s Emma. Surely she could’ve figured out feeding Pickles by herself, right? She sighs and picks up anyways.

“Stop studying and get drinks with me later,” Emma says. Their TV blares in the background. “Please, oh my God. I hate my boss, I hate working, I hate capitalism, I want to quit. Tell me to quit, tell me I can marry a rich man and everything would be okay.” A pause. “Hello?”

“No drinks, remember?”

“What? Finals aren’t until next week!”

“That’s not what I mean.” Meg balances her phone on her shoulder and wipes off the sticky lemonade residue, grimacing. “I’m in Maryland, about to check on my brother. Sound familiar?”

A pause. “Oh, right! Yes, I need to feed Pickles. Meg, I am going to spoil him so hard.”

“Please don’t,” Meg mutters tiredly. “Our food budget’s already tight enough.”

“Ask that rich brother of yours for a loan then! I searched up his house on Zillow, and it’s worth a ton.”

“Yup,” Meg says. “Bye.”

There’s already the very possible chance of James slamming the door in her face even without her asking for a loan. They were hardly close even before he became the sole inheritor of their grandfather’s estate, and the last time they had spoken was two months ago. Really, the last time she’d spoken to either of her brothers was two months ago. They got into a shouting match minutes after she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and then Erik grabbed his jacket and left and got into a car accident so bad their parents insisted on cremation.

James didn’t show when they scattered his ashes into the sea. Meg called twice, shaking from anger. Of all the people who didn’t show up, James hurt the most.

She had stopped trying to contact him until the nightmares started. 

A tear drops into her lap. She leans her forehead against the steering wheel, finally letting exhaustion wash over her. She’s so tired. 

She doesn’t sleep—hasn’t slept at all in the last two days. Whenever she closes her eyes, all she sees is James in the foyer of their grandfather’s mansion. He wears something different every dream—a robe once, a turtleneck, a modest button down that almost made him seem like the sharp, smart brother she once knew—but he always feels close enough to touch.

Time passes strangely in dreams. Sometimes, it would be minutes before James started choking, but there was one where it took hours.

In that one, James was wearing a gray sweater. Dream-Meg stood in the foyer, casual, like she belonged there even though she hadn’t been there in ages. Dream-Meg struggled to register the details, so the foyer was all a blur of bits of golden chandelier and scraps of blue rug. 

Hey M, James called. Come into the living room. 

Dream-Meg obeyed. 

In the living room were fuzzy paint swatches. Dream-Meg imagined that they had names like Soft Lavender Petals or Broken Eggshell White. They fanned out about her brother, who was suddenly seated amongst the little rectangles. 

I’m renovating the east wing, James said. Help me pick a color for the walls.

Dream-Meg obliged, kneeling down and inspecting the pile. There were so many. James had always been meticulous; in high school, he spent days compiling every single person, date, and event of interest into a massive timeline spanning the AP United States curriculum. Each term had a built-in link that took the viewer to a definition. Meg had sat across from him as he did it, glancing up from her algebra homework occasionally to watch him work. 

From her place on the floor, Dream-Meg looked at her brother over the Lily Whites and Seaglass Summers, looked at his chewed lip and slight furrow of his brow. It felt familiar. It felt safe. Maybe they could be good again.

And then something grabbed him. 

James screamed. He thrashed. Dream-Meg was glued to the floor, paint samples in her hands. One of them was blue, like the back of a blue jay, and she stared at it when a splatter turned it red. She kept staring at it, stunned, until the sounds stopped. 

Emma had slapped her so hard in an attempt to wake her up, it bruised. Meg didn’t know how to explain her shaking—didn’t want to—so she lied and said it was about their cat running away. It was easier. 

Their dynamic was complicated. James was the first born, the brilliant one. Erik realized he would never measure up, so he dropped out of a top college and started painting. Their parents basically cut him off. Meg, angry but scared, hung in the fragile balance. 

When their grandfather died, she inherited a box of tangled jewelry that was as ugly as it was heavy. James was signing new paperwork for the mansion, parents on each side to help him fill out some of the more tedious questions. 

After she had gotten home, she kicked off her shoes, sat down on her couch, and called Erik as she popped open the box’s lid. He picked up on the first ring.

“Let me guess,” he said wryly. “James got the estate?”

“All of it.”

“You got something from that asshole, right?” Erik asked. “You deserve it, Meg. You really do.”

“It’s not fair,” Meg told him. “You deserve something too.” She started sifting through the box. A lot of it seemed like odd belongings and regifted gifts; strings of pearls, gems on chains, a stray brooch glimmering with stones of pure black. And then: “Oh!”

“Hm?”

Meg fished out the ring with two fingers. The round, blue stone was surrounded with spirals of intricate silver leaves. The tiny fragments of green gem embedded in each leaf glittered when she held it up to her lamp. She wondered, dazedly, if her hands were clean. When was the last time she washed them? She placed the band on the table and stared at it from a distance. “Erik, I think I found Nana’s ring.”

“Wait, what? No shit?”

“It’s in the box that was left to me. I found it at the bottom.”

Erik laughed softly. “This is fate. Nana is smiling down at us as we speak. I bet she planned this behind our grandfather’s back ‘cause she knew he was secretly psycho.”

“She would’ve loved you and Peter,” Meg murmured. The ring seemed to glow on her end table. “She was always insisting that you marry a musician.”

“What, are you telling me she wouldn’t have called the police on our wedding? Because that would be ungrandparently behavior? Crazy.”

Meg said, “I want you to have it. The ring.”

The line goes silent. “No,” Erik said, finally. “Sell it. Or buy an apartment in the city or whatever. Or keep it, give it to someone special.”

“I have other stuff to sell,” Meg told him stubbornly. “I don’t even like wearing jewelry, but you do. Or give it to Peter. Propose to him again! Have a redo wedding.”

“Megan Simons.”

“Erik Brown.” To drive home her point, she said, “I’ll be at your apartment next week. I’ll yell really loud at your door until you open it, or until your landlord evicts you.”

“Meg,” Erik said. She could hear the smile in his voice, bright and gentle. “I love you, you know that?”

Meg lifts up her head from her steering wheel. The world comes back into focus, piece by piece—the gas station building, the blue and brown dumpsters, the man in front. He looks sad and familiar.

Terror seizes her chest. 

Bang. Bang. Despite herself, Meg looks at him. James gestures to her car door. Open up, he mouths. He mouths something else too, but she can’t make out what he’s saying. His face is turning more frantic by the second. Her arms are stapled by her sides. 

Bang. 

He gasps for air. She sobs.

BANG BANG BANG BANG

“Oh my God,” Meg gasps. Her head flies up from the wheel so fast, it hits the headrest with a thump. Her heart hammers against her ribs. She whirls to the left, half expecting a corpse to stare at her with its dead eyes.

It’s not. It’s Jim/Tim, the gas station cashier. The employee of the gas station she is still parked in front of. He looks at her with so much pity and worry, she wants to disappear into her seat and never come out again. 

“You okay, Miss?” Jim/Tim asks after she rolls down the window. “Sorry for scaring you like that, but you looked…” 

Meg’s already buckling her seatbelt. She gives the man a wobbly smile. “Thank you for waking me up. I have a very important thing to see to now. Thank you. Bye.” 

The way to the mansion took her through a series of open country roads, so Meg drives thirty miles above the speed limit whenever she can. A forty minute drive becomes twenty three. She pulls into the massive driveway, almost running over some hedges, and rushes out. 

James answers after she knocks until her knuckles are red. He stares at her, body angled behind his door, like she was some crazy stalker and not his younger sister. 

“What the hell?” He demanded. “Megan, it’s a Sunday afternoon. Why are you here?” Then he frowns, opening the door wider. “You look terrible.”

Meg wordlessly accepts the invitation in. She wants to collapse with relief; James looks rosy with color and life. 

“Go sit down.”

Meg obliges. James disappears through an elegant archway, returning with a glass of water. She chugs it, lowering the empty glass to James’ stare. 

“Aren’t you going to school in New York?”

“Yes.”

“That’s, what, six hours from here?”

“Yes. You weren’t answering your phone.”

“...Because I got a new one?”

Suddenly, she feels stupid. She could’ve just gotten a therapist, checked herself into a psych ward, done a sleep test or something. Surely there’s a diagnosis for disruptive nightmares.

Meg, more self-conscious than she’d like, says, “I just wanted to check on you.” 

James’s eyes narrow. He was always so excellent at seeing through people, and Meg was always so transparent. “Why would you need to check in on me?”

He’s folding his arms across a light gray T-shirt. She’s oddly relieved; she doesn’t think he was wearing that in any of the dreams where he got killed. It’s familiar, reminding her of her plain older brother who had four shirts and rotated between them every week. Erik used to tease him about that, and how he never wore jewelry. 

James traces her gaze. He starts to turn away.

“Show me your hand.”

James’s frown turns into a scowl. “What? Why would I do that?” He tucks his right hand deeper under the crook of his elbow, but it was too late. Meg stands up, more furious than she had been at Erik’s funeral. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” She whispers. “Getting the estate wasn’t enough for you?”

“The ring was our grandmother’s,” James says, voice infuriatingly even. “It belongs in the family.”

“That was Erik’s decision.”

“I’m sorry, but Grandfather was in possession of the ring, and he didn’t include him in the will. The ring wasn’t meant to be his.”

“Ever think of why?” Meg snaps. “Why Erik was the one left out?”

James looks beyond her head, into the golden lights of the chandelier. He is quiet.

Something wet drips into her collar. Meg wipes her face with the heel of her hand, throwing open the door and storming out of the mansion.

James watches her go. The mansion seems emptier than before, hollow. Something unsettling rises in his chest, and he glances around, eyes narrowed.

The ring twinkles on his finger.