Daughters

“Can you keep a secret?”

Alma whispered this after a half hour in the closet. Margo, her older sister, was battened down in the far back corner, knees held up to her body and nervously folding her pajama pantleg to alleviate tension. Their closet wasn’t big, forcing them to sit amongst dangling clothes and Alma’s collection of cartoon plush toys.

“I already know you peed,” Margo said. “Why do you think I moved so far away from you?”

“What?!?” Alma replied, almost shouting. “Don’t try to pass the blame on me!”

It was past midnight when the power went off. The storm had been increasing in intensity as the evening wore on, making the house’s old walls and shingles creak. Despite these events, the girls were left largely unaware, asleep and dreaming impossible things – Alma of fantasy worlds overflowing with tired tropes, Margo of having friends and a father that loved her, and so on. Impossible things.

They had awoken earlier when the door to their room slammed open. It was their mother, and the girls could tell through the glimpses of her face captured by Alma’s dim nightlight that her face was warped into a fearful visage.

Without saying anything, even as Alma spattered out incoherent questions, their mother took them one by one into the closet. What she said after closing the door didn’t help much to elucidate matters.

“I love you,” she said from the other side. She paused, trying to find the right words, but nothing came as she failed to hold back her wheezing, mania-fueled gasps. “I love you so much. Don’t leave the closet no matter what.”

And from there on out, they had been engulfed in an unyielding darkness. They could hear their mother weeping as she paced around the room, but soon after, she left.

“All right,” Margo said, “what did you really want to tell me?”

“Nothing,” Alma replied. “It was stupid.”

“Mom didn’t tell you anything before she dragged you in here, did she?”

Alma shook her head. “It’s just that… I think I know what happened.”

“So why does it need to be kept secret?” As irritated as Margo was, she was willing to listen to any potential insights or theories.

“Because I’m pretty sure all of this is my fault,” she said.

Margo was already highly skeptical of this. “The hell do you mean?”

“Two years ago, I was playing alone in the backyard. Mom was working that day, and this was the summer when you were sick a lot.”

“Oh yeah,” Margo chimed in. “I remember spending most of my time in bed. Total borefest, I tell you. Nearly went mad.”

Alma continued. “I would spend hours out there. I had fun. It was one of the few times Mom wasn’t breathing down my neck. I felt like I could just be myself.”

Oh, poor, pitiful you was what Margo wanted to say, yet she held her tongue.

“But that simple freedom was taken from me the day I heard a voice from under the house. It was high pitched, like a child’s, but at the same time, it just sounded… off. I know I wasn’t supposed to go near the crawlspace. Mom told me it was dangerous, but for some reason, I didn’t care. I guess I was just excited to go on an adventure. I thought I’d make a friend.

“But no. It was the eyes I saw first, those red, glowing eyes. They scanned me, like it was waiting to see if I’d run. I couldn’t, though. I was so scared. I couldn’t move.”

Alma’s voiced grew louder, faster.

“I panicked. I needed someone to tell me what to do, but those eyes, they got closer. And then…” Alma spoke her final words through a fit of tears. “I passed out and cried for the rest of the day. I think I released something evil.”

Margo, in an uncharacteristic act of kindness, reached out to place a hand on Alma’s shoulder.

“It’s fine,” Margo said. “You can stop now. We’ll be okay.”

“Really?”

Margo grinned. “Of course. Monsters aren’t real. If anything, we have a murderer on our hands right now. He’s searching the house for us as we speak, probably itching to torture us.”

She would’ve loved to see Alma’s face when she said that.

“No…” Alma said, her voice barely above a whimper. “How could you say that? My monster is real.”

“No,” Margo said. “Red LED lights and recorded sounds from a horror movie. That’s all it was.”

A brief silence took hold.

“What?” Alma said.

“Geez, and here I thought you would’ve outgrown that by now.”

“Of course I didn’t outgrow it. Mom forced me to see a therapist. You were the monster?”

“If it’s any consolation, my plan kinda backfired. I didn’t expect you to react so badly to it, and because Mom sensed that something was wrong, she started spending even more time with you.”

“Why would you do that!” Alma said, almost shouting. Thankfully, her voice was mostly obscured by a synchronous clap of thunder. “Do you hate me? Or are you just so warped that you didn’t see anything wrong with what you did?”

“Do you remember what you did outside?” Margo said, ignoring her sister’s accusations. Alma, either out of rage or confusion, didn’t reply.

“This was after our school’s end-of-year talent show, the one where you sang ‘Hallelujah’ in front of everyone.”

Alma did remember. She had been blessed with a soft, beautiful, voice, one far more graceful than most her age had. Everyone loved it when Alma sang, and consequently, everyone loved her. She was talented, born with an innate skill that few could match, as well as a personality that others easily gravitated toward.

“You were so proud of yourself,” Margo said, “that you ended up singing that song a lot. It got annoying.”

Alma balked in disbelief. “You could’ve just asked me to stop!”

“Bzzt! Wrong answer. I didn’t want to risk you getting upset and telling Mom. I could’ve gotten into trouble for ‘stifling your creative spirit’ or something along those lines.”

“I wouldn’t have done that…” Alma said, once again close to tears. “Why do you do things like this all the time? You used to be nicer.”

“And you used to be your own person, not Mom’s little windup doll. Get over yourself, already, because for all we know, she’s dead.”

“Please,” Alma begged, “don’t say that… Mom loves us.”

“No. She loves you.”

“That’s a lie! She loves… she loves both of us!”

Try as she might, Alma couldn’t mask her doubt, but it was too late to take those words back. She squeezed a Totoro plushie and curled up further in her corner as the chilling realization grew clear. For all the singing camps she’d gone to, for all the friends she made, for every success she earned, where had Margo been?

“Ever since Mom learned you were the talented one, I became an accessory,” Margo said, “little more than a gift our dear mom felt obligated to use but ultimately ignored.

“Do you understand how frustrating it is to be your sister? People that know me subconsciously compare us, and every time, I’m the inferior – the girl who, despite being older, doesn’t have any of the skills or social graces you have.

“‘Oh! You must be quite the little star yourself!’ people tell me. I hate that. Or how about when someone mistakes me for you at school because they don’t know I exist? Sometimes, I play along, just for a bit, and for the few moments I keep the ruse up, it feels great. It feels like I’m actually wanted.

“Take what happened an hour ago before Mom stuck us in here: She thought I was you. Do you know what she did? That woman wept before me; I could feel alcohol coating her every breath as she poured her soul out of herself and into me. She got up to my ear and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, Alma. You’re too beautiful. You’re what I always wanted to be and more.’ She repeated that over and over, and I listened like the good little girl I was.”

Margo didn’t realize how loud her voice had gotten. The high she acquired from indulging in her purifying catharsis put her in a state of emotional instability. Calm down, she told herself. Breathe.

Alma was muttering something barely audible.

“What?” Margo asked. “Something to say?”

Alma didn’t raise her voice, and from her cadence, it was hard to tell if she even heard Margo at all.

“Hey! What are you saying?”

Margo leaned closer to her sister.

“I’m sorry I messed up. I’m sorry I messed up. I’m sorry I messed up. I’m sorry-”

Alma spoke with neither emotion nor inflection. Her speech pattern was flat, something so uncanny considering the kind of person she was. Margo backed away.

How many stressors and expectations can a kid realistically take?

“Stop saying that,” Margo said, a little freaked out. “None of this is your fault. It was never your fault that our mother wanted pets instead of kids, and it definitely isn’t your fault that I’m jealous of you.”

Her words had no effect. Alma just kept repeating the same sentence. Margo sighed, then reached for the closet door. No matter what was happening outside, this needed to end. It was getting hard to breathe in the cramped space.

Margo creaked the door open a sliver, allowing the dim moonlight to hit her face through the gap. After giving her eyes a few seconds to adjust, she surveyed the room. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but given her limited view, she needed to get a better look to be certain it was safe. She needed to leave.

“I’m heading out,” Margo said. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

It’s fitting, Margo thought, that the lesser of us gets to put herself in danger. Margo pictured her body, suspended in the hallway by an inhumanly long, muscular arm, getting slammed against the walls repeatedly until her appendages broke or dislocated, leaving her a lifeless ragdoll.

“Monsters aren’t real,” she told herself.

As she tried to leave, Alma tightly latched onto her arm.

“Please!” she shouted, no longer trying to keep quiet. “Don’t leave me! I don’t know what to do!”

“Alma!” Margo pushed her back into the closet. “You want to follow someone else’s orders? Fine. Follow mine: Keep quiet. Can I count on you for that?”

Alma nodded frantically. For the first time that night, Margo got a good look at her. Crying from fear, dressed in pajamas depicting a princess whose name she couldn’t remember, Alma really was just a kid. They both were.

Margo closed the door, and the storm gradually came to an end. The house was dead.

Walking across the carpet, Margo noticed just how damp the floor was. She glanced around to see if a window had been left open, but everything had been shut tight.

She carefully traversed the room, careful not to make too much noise as she tried to avoid the wet patches. This proved to be difficult, as it seemed most of the carpet was wet. Moreover, it smelled weird. In the closet, it had been harder to discern the smell since not much liquid passed beneath the door, but now, it was obvious. She knew what it was.

At that instant, a sobering dread shocked Margo’s nervous system, and she bolted for the door. She bound out of the room, tearing down the hall in a state of adrenaline-fueled anxiety. She knew what she would find, but a nagging question had stuck itself inside her head – Why were they still alive?

The hall stretched impossibly far, longer than it should’ve. She was tired, and the walls cluttered with photos of the faux happy family blended together into something she couldn’t recognize as she ran past them. She followed the liquid trail down the hall, and eventually, she did reach the end.

Margo found her mother in the living room. She was facedown, her head suspended on the glass coffee table. The table’s corner had penetrated her eye. Her body was still.

Margo collapsed on the spot, not caring as her clothes got wet. Near her mother were two items: a nearly empty gas can and a box of matches. At first, Margo hyperventilated, unable to comprehend what was in front of her. She grabbed the sides of her skull attempted to make sense of the disgusting incongruity. Home was supposed to be a place of safety. How could it have been so violated?

Then Margo rationalized it: Mom was drunk. The floor was wet. She fell. That’s it.

The fear died within Margo startlingly fast. She made a call using her mother’s phone, which was sitting on the kitchen table. She had one last thing to take care of.

She opened the closet door, and Alma, as expected, was still there, trembling.

“Is everything okay?” Alma stammered out weakly.

Margo nodded. “Yes, but we need to be quiet. If we want to be safe, do exactly what I say. Close your eyes, don’t speak, and let me take you out of here.”

“How long will this take?”

“We aren’t going far. Just come along.”

Margo reached for Alma, and with a shaky, sweaty hand, she took it. Together, they walked out of the house.