Genie out the Bottle

There was a dark splotch on one of the ceiling tiles in the basement. Claire supposed Mom hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared enough to fix it in her last few years. She adjusted the black dress she was wearing and tried to swallow down the feeling rising in her throat. Mom had always said that funerals were for the benefit of the living, not the dead, but Claire felt no benefit from milling around with strangers that pretended to love Mom when none of them ever helped her. 

Claire itched with the need to do something other than ruminate hopelessly, so she dragged over a chair under the splotchy tile to fix the problem Mom never could. Claire lifted the tile up with the pads of her fingers, trying not to touch the ruined area. The dusty surface refused to budge. Frowning, Claire pushed harder—still no give. She lifted the tile on an angle and pushed and the tile skidded faster than Claire thought it would, making her lose her balance and fall off the chair she had been tip-toeing on.

Claire landed hard on her back, and pain bloomed under her skull. Sprawled on the floor, she wanted to scream. Frustrated, Claire kicked the chair from her position on the ground, which only served to make her foot hurt. Eyes swimming with tears, she almost didn’t notice the shadow in the ceiling from the tile she had just knocked out. Curiosity getting the hold of her, she dragged the chair back under the new opening and stomped on the chair vengefully. Claire reached up into the dark square she had just made, and her hand met something smooth and rectangular. Perplexed, she pulled whatever the thing was out, revealing a plastic box with what had to be 30 battered spiral notebooks lined up neatly. She climbed down the chair, box in hand, and set it on the couch. Claire ran her hands over the tops of the notebooks and took in their aged, yellowing condition before plucking out the first one. It had a white sticker on the front that said “27”. At first, Claire thought it was the 27th of the 30 or so books that were in the box, but upon further inspection, it was clear that there were actually closer to 50 notebooks, and they went in chronological order starting with 24 all the way up to 76. The age Mom was when she died.

Pieces for a puzzle Claire had a feeling she wasn’t ready to see started coming together as she flipped through the contents of the notebooks—dates, events, times. It was a diary. Many diaries. A collection of the written thoughts and feelings of her enigmatic mother for the past 52 years of her life. Claire’s breath caught at the significance of her discovery. These 52 notebooks were a gift from the world. They were the unfiltered, gory details of the story Claire had been waiting her entire life to hear.

That night, Claire dreamt about the nights she and her brother Jaime would spend cuddling up to Mom, listening to her tell stories larger than life. Stories of a princess trapped in a tower or a princess that lived with her evil stepsisters, but also stories of a princess that had cruel parents and how the princess ran away from her palace to live a life of adventure. Stories of a young adventurer that got caught up with an evil seamstress that forced the adventurer to work 12 hours a day. Stories of a battered little family that found a genie lamp that made all of their wishes come true. After finishing her stories, Mom would kiss Claire and Jaime on the head and assure them that one day, just like the family in the story, they would find their genie lamp. Even from the tender age of 9, Claire had stopped believing in miracles; still, she would indulge in Mom’s stories and the comfort they provided, however fictional it may be.

Claire woke up with one distinct thought: those notebooks were going to be her genie lamp. She scrubbed away the tears that had dried on her face and started writing the story from her dream down in a journal, along with any other stories she could think of. Claire had always suspected those stories were laced with truth, but any attempts of hers to ask Mom about what she was like when she was little were met with a, “I’ll tell you one day”. A day that would now never arrive.

With the remaining three days of her bereavement leave, Claire pored over what she had taken to calling the Diaries. They were exactly that, diaries written by a pained woman about the grim state of her life. Each notebook started with an entry on Mom’s birthday, June 16th, and after that had sporadic entries from days when things had occurred in her life. Sometimes, there were multiple entries per day. Other times, there weren’t any entries for months. Claire was actually glad for those gaps in time, because it seemed the only happy entry for any of the Diaries was Mom’s birthday. Thankfully, most of the Diaries ended before the last pages were reached, so there weren’t whole notebooks filled with the pain of a single year. Diary 28 in particular was only a third of the way full; Claire hoped that meant Mom was happy when she was 28.

Unfortunately, the Diaries weren’t proving to be as miraculous as Claire originally thought. In fact, most of the writing was completely indecipherable because of the excessive use of codes for people and places. There was Songbird, who seemed to be Mom’s best friend before the Lantern—which, by the use of the article “the” and context, appeared to be an event rather than a person—when Songbird and Mom had a falling out. Then, there was Jax, who broke Mom’s heart in Diary 25 and had been the topic of much self-loathing for the next two Diaries. Angrily, Claire had scoured Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social media site she could think of to hunt down a Jax around Mom’s age, but came up with nothing. So either Jax didn’t have social media, which was possible since Mom herself only had Facebook, or it was another codename. Claire resolved to go to Mom’s school and look in their yearbook.

After going through all of the Diaries once and only having dozens of half formed theories to show for it, Claire pulled out an old whiteboard half her height, sticky notes, and dry erase markers to get to work. She made a sticky note for each person and event, and stuck it on the board. Then, she wrote down all the relevant information about each sticky surrounding it, and took a step back to try to view the narrative objectively. Claire had no idea why this was so important to her, only that Mom had always struggled. It was so apparent, especially now as an adult, that she lived for her two kids. Claire thought that by doing this, by piecing together Mom’s existence before she gave it away to her children, Claire could breathe some of the life back into her dead mother.

Eventually, Claire had to return to her office job as an accountant. She thought she was prepared, but she would start filing taxes for someone who was Mom’s age and the wave of grief would sweep over her, sending her into a spiral for half an hour. Her mind would inevitably turn to the Diaries and who all the codenames could be. Claire was especially focused on Jax, the only person that seemed to have retained their own name. Claire left early that day with a container of soggy muffins and empty platitudes from her co-workers, and drove to Riverview High School to hunt down Jax.

Claire met with the receptionist, Sally, who looked to be in her 60’s. She tried to hold herself together as Sally guided her over to the library and to the yearbook section, leaving her there with the warning that she had to be out by 5. Even though Claire arrived at 3:30, she stayed till the last minute looking through every dusty volume and only turned up with a Jackson that would have been a grade older than Mom. It was a stretch to think that Mom stayed in contact with friends from high school and dated them when she was 25, but it was all Claire had and she latched on to Jackson’s thick eyebrows and bronze skin like a lifeline.

The next two weeks passed in a routine for Claire. She would go to work at 8:30, leave at 3, and spend the rest of the day decrypting Mom’s past. She skipped going out with her friends on Thursdays, entirely occupied with her new task. She was sure they wouldn’t mind. She was completely engaged with her new lead of Jackson and the information she had gathered about him, and had to employ her kitchen counter and fridge as new surfaces for Mom-solving. 

She had managed to wrangle down a good theory that she really believed in. Mom had left home as soon as she graduated high school and went from Riverview to a nearby town called Portsmouth. There, she met Songbird and Maple, who introduced her to Truffella, Mom’s boss until she was 22. Mom likely worked as a secretary at Zhang and Brown, a local legal firm, under Truffella. Claire was looking into Zhang and Brown (now Zhang, Wilson, and Ziegler) to identify Truffella but had little luck and had to let that thread go. After leaving Zhang and Brown, Mom had a really hard time, being forced to live in her car for a year till she met Jax and moved in with him when she was 24. This was the same year the Lantern happened, which was when everything went downhill and Songbird abandoned Mom, Jax became distant and angry, and Mom had no one to help her. Claire’s heart sank every time she thought about Mom in Diary 24, and was never able to read it in one go.

One day, as she was surveying the kitchen that was now littered with sticky notes, Claire had the most amazing idea. She could feel the lightbulb flicking on in her mind. Some of her best leads had been through the stories Mom had told Claire and Jaime. So, even though they hadn’t talked since the funeral, Claire called Jaime to see if he remembered any of Mom’s stories that she hadn’t.

“Hello?” Jaime’s gruff voice answered the phone.

“Jaime, hi, hey. How, uh, how’re you holding up?” Claire winced. That question was long overdue.

“Fine,” he said curtly. He sounded the opposite of fine, voice tired and rough in a way that could only happen due to crying, and a lot of it. Claire almost asked about it, but she was too eager to get her answers.

“So um, I was just wondering if you remembered any of those stories Mom told us. You know, like those ones that she always said were fairy tales but were obviously about her life instead?”

“Yeah, I remember some. Claire, why are you asking?”

“Nothing,” Claire hurried to amend. “I just found some notebooks, and they’re Mom’s, she’s written about everything in her life in those things.” Claire laughed awkwardly. “I was trying to piece togeth-”

“Stop it. You’re going to drive yourself mad trying to figure it all out. God knows I already have,” Jaime said darkly.

Claire’s eyebrows furrowed. Had he already tried to figure it out by himself, and not told her? Claire frowned into her phone, wounded. “But-”

“Let sleeping dogs lie.” Jaime hung up the phone. Claire stared at her phone in shock. How dare he? Her anger built slowly. Clearly, he didn’t care about Mom as much as she did, otherwise he would help her. He didn’t even ask about what she had found, or what she had discovered about their mother. Didn’t he want to know? Claire fumed. Wasn’t it important to him that Mom’s story be known? If Jaime had already tried to figure out Mom’s past before, why didn’t he tell her? Claire marched over to the kitchen scowling. She did not need Jaime or his stories or his stupid theories that he refused to tell her. Claire would figure it out on her own. She started going over the story in her head again. Once Mom left home, she went to Portsmouth. There, she met Songbird and Maple… 

Two months had passed and Claire was steadily making progress. Sure, she slept no more than 5 hours every day, and weekends went by in a frenzy of research and hunting through memories, but she had made progress. Her most exciting revelation was the theory that Jax was actually her father. Mom had never mentioned why her and Jaime didn’t have a dad, and Claire had grown not to mind it too much, even though it had stung when she was little. Claire could even see the similarities between Jaime’s eyes and Jackson’s, a bit. Claire was really starting to get somewhere, was about to unravel the mystery once and for all, until her manager threw a wrench in all her plans.

“Claire,” her manager Richard greeted, monotone as always. “Listen, I know you’ve had a hard time recently, but we’ve got to let you go. As I’ve said before, you just cannot keep leaving early every day, and you’re not achieving the goals we’re looking for from someone in your position.”

Richard kept blabbering on and on about how she was a good employee and how he wished her the best of luck, but Claire filtered it all out in favor of the indignation boiling inside her. Sure, he had told her to stop cutting hours at the end of the day, and she had tried for a bit, but it was useless! She couldn’t stop thinking about the Diaries long enough for the time she did stay at work, let alone the whole workday. He just didn’t understand how important this was to her, how groundbreaking this would be once she figured it out. Still, with her accountant mindset, Claire couldn’t help but calculate how long she would be able to survive without her job. Even considering that she had started eating 5 meals in as many days, with all of her bills and rent, she would only make it for another month. Claire felt disoriented, like the floor she was standing on had suddenly been yanked out from under her.

In a daze, she went home and reflexively went to the kitchen like she had been doing ever since Mom died. Instead of her gaze immediately being drawn to the notes scattered around her kitchen, it fixed on the mirror she kept under one of her cabinets. Claire had circles under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises, her hair was greasy and her face was pallid. Worry lines had wormed their way across her forehead and she looked a decade older than her real age. The kitchen where she had spent the past month of her life was filled with garbage, plastic wrappers strewn everywhere and the sink overflowing with dishes. Claire’s immediate thought was that it would take her a week of dedicated work to clear everything out. She tried to come up with everyone who could help, and realized that she had estranged her friends, Jaime would be angry that she had continued searching for answers, and the only other person in her life that would have helped her was Mom.

Claire tried not to panic as she assessed her situation: she was out of a job, lived in a dump, and had no one to turn to. The notes stuck over the cabinets, fridge, and counter made the space look like it had been possessed by a madman, and maybe it had been. Looking at the shambles she had left her life in, Claire hysterically thought of the stories she would tell her kids. Of a princess that got caught in the stories of her mother, and threw her life to the vultures.