Stronger for the Fire

Meghan watched the ripple of creamy silk flutter down the pillowy fabric like wind blowing softly over a milky pond. From her mother’s shoulder to the place where her apron cinched tightly around her narrow waste, the silk danced delicately as her arm moved the tea bag up and down. Steam unfurled in spindly whisps like a tiny chimney and Meghan imagined the look on her mother’s face to be wistful, but she knew it was more likely to be a scowl. 

She absentmindedly stroked her niece’s perfectly round head while she grabbed another rock with her chubby hand and carefully guided a paintbrush, thick with a glob of shiny, green paint over its surface. The vegetal smell of wet earth drifted through the air from her mother’s mug. Two tea bags and a tiny squeeze of honey to ensure that it was strong and bitter with just the faintest hint of sweet. 

It had happened in a flash, like it always had, taking everyone by surprise despite the regularity of such incidents. The icy glares, the escalating voices, the final, explosive rupture.

Some things never changed. No matter how old you become. 

Even when you are a mother yourself, you never just stop being a daughter. And Meghan had been a mother now for over eighteen years. Yet there she stood in her parents’ kitchen, and she could have just as easily been thirteen or nine or four. Shell-shocked and full of that hollow feeling that always made her feel like a burned-out forest. Achingly familiar in its charry emptiness. She always felt way more daughter here than mom. 

They had woken up before the sun that morning, poured canisters of coffee, and slung suitcases and presents in the back of the car. Meghan, her husband, and their two teenage girls had driven the sevenish hours so they could celebrate Christmas with her family.

She had arrived buoyant and excited, as she always did at her parents’ doorstep, like a bright-eyed golden retriever, tongue out, tail wagging. Ready, eager, and waiting to please. The door had opened and two, smallish, blonde heads had come tumbling out, throwing themselves into her open arms. She pulled her niece and nephew into an extended hug, where the three of them held each other tightly. 

The Littles, as they were called to differentiate them from The Bigs (two sets of grandchildren, nearly a generation apart), had been waiting to open their presents until everyone had arrived. So it was during the opening of presents that Meghan noticed the first flicker of what was to come. 

Amidst the raucous chaos, Meghan had tried, unsuccessfully, to create some sort of order, to hand out a gift to each person and then pick someone to open. But she soon realized, with genuine amusement, that she was fighting a losing battle. Once the little kids had been granted permission to (finally!) open their gifts, the levees of patience that had been holding strong all morning gave way and their childlike impulses took over. 

Paper was ripped, torn, and tossed aside and the entire event was over in a very short and somewhat anticlimactic amount of time. 

The adults and teenagers had opened their gifts more slowly, with little fanfare, holding up each gift and hollering a “thank you!” toward the giver. Meghan had noticed her mom’s small pile of unopened gifts in a teetering stack behind her. Her mother had spent most of the time busying herself with things that were unnecessary but with an air of importance and a hard set of her jaw that challenged anyone to suggest otherwise.

“Mom, why don’t you sit down and open your gifts,” Meghan suggested in a tone that she hoped sounded light and not irritated. 

She had long grown tired of her mom’s passive aggressive moments. Control and self-pity masquerading as selflessness. Always the martyr.  

“I will in a minute. There’s just so much to do here,” she said in an exasperated tone as she waved a hand in front of her. 

Meghan looked around at everyone, happily occupied. She watched her do exactly nothing while implying that she was doing everything and wished that her mother knew how much joy she robbed in each of these moments. Like sucking the marrow from a bone leaving it dry and empty. 

“Hun, sit down and open your gifts,” Meghan’s father’s voice cut sharply through the rustle of paper, the football game in the background, and the hum of conversation around the tree. The words were kind, the tone was not. 

Meghan wondered for the first time if this was what her mother had been waiting for. She had baited the hook with a fat, wriggling worm, dangled in the middle of the living room, and the biggest fish had finally grabbed on.  

Meghan shot her brother a look. Patrick hadn’t seemed to notice the exchange between their parents and when he saw her looking at him, he misunderstood and said softly, “When I get my next paycheck, I’ll send the girls some money for Christmas. I’m really sorry, it’s just… really hard right now.” 

“Oh, gosh—no, Patty, that’s not what I— It’s okay. Please don’t worry about that,” Meghan faltered.

She had been hoping to share one of those looks that she and her brother had shared thousands of times. She had glanced at him out of habit, only realizing what she had been searching for when it wasn’t there. That silent and almost imperceptible understanding. The kind of look refined over decades of living in the same house with the same parents. A string tied between them. An entire sibling conversation had with the flick of their eyes. 

But as she looked at Patrick, his eyes filled only with shame, she realized that there was no longer anything special connecting them, no private conversation left to have. She wasn’t surprised, their bond had been fading away for a long time. 

The last time she can remember feeling close to him was when she had spent the better part of a year doing marketing and social media for a company he had started. Until they took a business trip. The morning of the convention, he never showed up. When he finally did, he was still drunk from the night before, wreaking of alcohol, and slurring his words. 

He stumbled around awkwardly, knocked over their product display, and had a very long and one-sided conversation with a potential client that Meghan thought looked more like a hostage situation. When she finally got a moment with him and suggested he go sleep it off, Patrick exploded in a very public and very drunken rage.

The company, like every other job and relationship that came before it, couldn’t survive Patrick’s drinking and it folded. A remarkable amount of talent and charm and potential washed away by an ocean of booze. Patrick spent the years following, blowing through his entire savings, getting a divorce, and living in their parents’ basement. 

Several months ago, he had gotten his own place and a job making bread in a factory. His first steady job in over four years. Meghan was cautiously proud of him. But his mottled, puffy face and a faintly sweet but noxious odor that occasionally wafted from his pores continued to betray his words that he was sober. Sober enough to blow into the breathalyzer that allowed him to enter their parents’ house. 

But not sober-sober.

So that tie that bound them was no longer there. She glanced toward her husband and then quickly to her daughters. They were involved in other conversations, wouldn’t have even thought to look up at the sound of that particular dialogue between her parents, that certain tone.  

She looked back at Patrick, who was lost in himself, eyes sad and downcast. Her heart squeezed. In that moment, sitting several inches from her only brother, in a room full of family, she felt entirely alone. Like an only child, adrift and lost. 

It was finally her grandchildren who got through to her, who got their grandmother to finally sit down and open her gifts. But not before she shot Meghan’s father an icy look. The one that said, since you’ve been doing nothing but opening your own presents, I’ve had to do everything else. As usual was the exclamation point at the end of that look.

Maybe that’s why she’d lured him there with that fat worm, Meghan wondered, so she could rip the hook through the soft flesh of his cheek. They have their own silent language, Meghan realized, their own string of connection. But theirs was covered in hooks and barbs and things that burned.

Meghan knew more than she should. Which was probably why she always noticed the most subtle shifts in tone, eyes sliding into a chilling stare, the hurtful things that were said without words. She had been watching this play out her entire life. And since she had been an adult, she was her mother’s greatest confidant. 

Her mother had been simmering and stirring a special brew of resentment for decades made of if-onlys and ugly truths. It wasn’t something Meghan wanted to share or carry, but the ugly truth was only for those who spent their lives bearing witness to it. The bubbling cauldron of bitterness was too filled with her own shame and regret. Meghan wondered if her mother realized that every time it boiled over, everyone around her got burned. 

By the time her mother was opening her gifts, most of the joy and fervor from moment had drained away and in its wake was something cool and brittle. 

And then the day did what days do. It went steadily along. As they swallowed mouthfuls of cold shrimp dipped in tangy cocktail sauce, crackers spread with cheese and mustard, and slices of pepper-rimmed salami, they talked of dinner and its timing. Someone made a joke about planning the next meal before the current one was finished. 

“I’ll take the tenderloin down to the grill and sear it now,” Patrick had said, presumably trying to avoid the frantic, last-minute, panic cooking that was the inevitable fate of every holiday meal since Meghan could remember. 

But despite her brother’s culinary degree and formal restaurant experience, they all knew who was really in charge. And so, Patrick didn’t sear the tenderloin just then.

Instead, they waited.

And so did the giant hunk of beef, a long, thick rope of pink flesh, melting onto a large square of brown butcher paper, eventually seeping its blood into small pools that turned into thin rivulets that pattered quietly onto the floor like a soft, red rain. 

Once the shrimp had warmed to room temperature, their curved bodies turning limp and flaccid, and the hunks of cheese and salami were dotted with condensation, Meghan’s father put everything into the refrigerator. Dinner was in full production mode and the late afternoon light streamed in through the expanse of windows, making the kitchen hot and stuffy, despite the freezing wind just outside. 

Once the charcuterie had been haphazardly stuffed away, Meghan’s mother yanked open the refrigerator door and a loud crash of breaking glass pierced the air. 

“What in the hell is this?” she shrieked. “Who put this in here like this?” 

Meghan wondered if she truly didn’t know who had been putting away the day’s snacks or if she was ensuring a public reckoning. 

Her father returned, explaining that he had just wrapped up all the sliced salamis and cheeses onto a plate for easier removal and serving. Meghan pictured the glass plate, teetering on jars and containers of different heights inside their too small and overly stuffed fridge and knew that it was most certainly out of laziness and not for purposes of reuse.

Her mother knew it too but instead of teasing or making a joke, a lighthearted language that had long ago dried up between them, she berated him for ruining not only the leftovers but also a plate. He growled something back in return. These loud, petty fights always felt so private and gruesome to Meghan, like she was watching them rip each other’s clothes off with angry, clawing fingers. She just looked away and tried to not hear. 

The making of the meal went as it so often did: her mother doing the better part of everything with a cacophony of loud sighing and muttering and banging that was just noisy enough to be noticed. Meghan offered to help but there wasn’t much for her to do. Or much that her mother would allow her to do. 

It was just so much easier for her to do it herself, especially when the unspoken goal was for everyone to know that she had done it herself. For everyone to swallow, along with forkfuls of delicious food, the almost imperceptible tang of something else. Meghan wondered if her mom meant to elicit gratitude from each morsel, but instead, between the sighing and the muttering that it would morph into the bitter taste of guilt. 

By the time Patrick said that the tenderloin was done and had taken it from the oven, everything else was running behind and there was a frantic frizzling in the air that felt palpable.

In an effort to help occupy The Littles, Meghan’s dad was pulling out the rock painting kit that Meghan had gifted to them. She had thought she was being helpful, getting the younger kids involved with something other than complaining of being bored or jumping on their dad, who had spent much of the afternoon napping in a chair. But she realized too late that she had stepped directly into the invisible barbed wire of her parents’ tangly and vicious argument. 

Her mom was whisper-yelling, shrill and furious that she didn’t want him to do this right now and that he was ruining everything, as usual. And he was responding in his brash, roaring voice, like a steam roller, that she could go to hell. 

Meghan saw the round faces of her niece and nephew, all wide eyes and open mouths, unexpectedly shocked into the kind of silence that only this kind of fear can cause. 

The eager excitement jolted to a sudden and jagged stop. Their innocence curdled and hardened into something else. In those young faces, Meghan recognized the shock, the fear, the hardening. 

Patrick, suddenly by her side, called to the situation by pure instinct and memory. And then, siblings once more, they were murmuring words to diffuse and calm. They would manage the painting and the cleaning up, not to worry! 

Meghan didn’t have time to even register the absurdity of the situation. The raw and savage anger about what? Painting rocks? It wasn’t the mess, she knew, her mom was so easy about paint on the counter, knicks in the floor, smudges on the wall. 

It was something else, something primal and she knew that even though it had nothing to do with the kids or the rocks or even her, that there was no way for any of them to escape its heat and wrath. 

Meghan felt as though they were invisible, her parents hurling fiery, angry word missiles at each other, each one landing and detonating on its intended target. She felt her insides liquify, hot with fear and anxiety and a searing anger of her own. 

These explosive moments so familiar, and yet she could never see them coming so they were always a painful, ripping shock. Tiptoeing through a field of buried landmines. She never knew where the trip wires were or what would set them off, and then suddenly: Boom! There was no time to duck or flee. There was just the ragey, burning storm that followed. 

She and Patrick tried their best to distract the little hands and faces and turn them toward the miniature tubs of paint and the steel gray rocks, heavy and smooth. And before they could even fill the water cups and arrange the paint brushes, there was silence. 

Sudden, chilling quiet.

It was over. 

Meghan shivered in the chill that always follows a flash of bright heat. The familiarity of the moment, the ease in which she and Patrick slipped into their roles. 

Always still children no matter how old you get.  

Maybe there still was a sibling connection there after all, Meghan wondered. The gossamer thread was thin and worn, but it had held. Perhaps it would thicken in the coming years and she and Patrick could again share a wordless look, a silent laugh. Maybe it never goes away and they were connected like this forever. She glanced at Patrick, asleep again in the chair. She hoped so. 

Eventually, the rocks were painted and dinner was served and it was all forgotten.

Except not really.

Those moments stay with you, like tiny scars seared into your insides.

Meghan wondered how it hadn’t burned her from the inside out. 

Then she thought about how after a fire, the new growth is healthier and stronger than before. She wondered if that was actually true. She looked around the table, at the tender faces of her daughters and her niece and nephew, her mother sipping her strong, bitter tea, and caught her brother giving her a look, that look.

And she knew it would be true.