WIDOWMAKER

Bailey rarely thought about it – the incident – but when she did, it felt like something heavy had crashed down on her from the sky. She hadn’t seen her grandfather since then, and good riddance. Her mother had known that something wasn’t right as soon as she picked her up from the cabin after what was supposed to be a fun weekend with grandpa when Bailey was six. She’d never said a word about it, never spoken the truth out loud, but after that she was never brought back to the cabin again.

Twenty-five years later when she learned that he had died, she was taken aback to find that she felt nothing. Nothing, that is, besides a vague sense of surprise that he had left the cabin in the mountains to her and her alone.

The sky was thick with clouds as Bailey drove up the winding mountain road with her phone GPS propped on the dashboard. It was autumn, moving into winter, and the weather at this elevation was much colder than she’d expected. She’d picked up the key from the estate lawyer, packed a weekend bag, and stopped at Walmart to fill her trunk with cleaning supplies. She knew this was her ticket out, and she wasn’t going to let something as ephemeral and stupid as childhood trauma stop her from taking it.

Just one weekend. That’s all it was. She would shove everything in trash bags, clear the place out, and be gone by Sunday morning. It would suck, most likely, but then it would be over. She would find a realtor on Monday, sell the place to whoever wanted it for whatever they were willing to pay, and use the money to start a new life in a new city someplace where nobody knew her.

A certain song came on over the Bluetooth and Bailey felt her body tense. She needed to stop putting the damn thing on shuffle; it never ended well. She quickly switched it over to something that wouldn’t make her think of her very-recently-ex wife Jess, and focused on the road.

As she approached the turnoff to the village, a prickling sensation crept across her skin, and she fought a visceral urge to turn the car around. She knew this place. She’d hoped she wouldn’t remember it this vividly, but she did. The crisp air, the towering pine trees. All of it. Just one weekend. She repeated it to herself like a mantra and continued driving.

And then there it was: 1414 Conifer Drive. Her grandfather’s house. It looked worse than she remembered. The faded green shutters hung lopsided off the windows. The yard was overgrown and littered with old tires and trash. A rusty, dinged-up rowboat with holes in the bow sat on cinderblocks in the driveway. Bailey’s jaw clenched and she felt a rare stab of anger as she put the car in park. She pushed it down and swallowed it like a pill. She had no time for that type of thing; if she let herself start, she might never stop.

The front door creaked in a way that was both pitiful and violent, which made sense considering who it had belonged to. Bailey dropped her weekend bag on the floor and let her eyes adjust to the dusty, stagnant living room. It was like she’d stepped through a portal to her own nightmares; the house was exactly as it always had been. The dirty jute rug, the carved wooden mallards on the fireplace mantel, the camo print curtains that hung limp across the windows. Bailey left the front door open and drifted through the space. The smell of must and cobwebs and everything elderly clung to the fabric of the house, overpowering her. Down the hall from the living room, she pushed open the door to the tiny guest room, barely more than a closet, where she’d slept as a child. Same furniture. Same quilt on the bed.

Bailey felt her throat constrict and backed out of the room as the walls of it seemed to swell, threatening to consume her. She stumbled to the living room and out the open door. On the weed-choked walkway she closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, letting the sharp resin scent of the pine trees wash over her.

Just one weekend.

With her emotions carefully tucked back into their usual storage compartment, Bailey opened her eyes and strode to the trunk of her car where the trash bags and cleaning supplies were waiting.

#

Bailey had always liked cleaning. It was one of the few things, possibly the only thing, that had made her a good wife. Sure, she had attachment issues out the ass and a chronic distrust of monogamy, but at least Jess had always come home to a clean house. 

It had been difficult at first, stuffing her grandfather’s life into trash bags, but now that she’d been doing it for several hours she was in the groove. The living room was nearly empty; the wooden mallards on the fireplace were all that remained. She shoved them in a full bag and dragged it to the curb to join the dozens of others. The sun was setting, and the sky was an abstract painting swirled with pinks and purples. The sight of it, combined with the crispness of the autumn mountain air, fortified her ever so slightly. She still needed to clear out the guest room and the master suite, but she’d made good progress today and deserved a reward for all her efforts. And if she was being honest, she deserved a break from being in that house.

She stuffed her keys in her pocket, shut the front door, and headed down the driveway to make her way into town on foot. As she passed her car parked on the street, she froze. Smack in the middle of the hood was a dent so deep it could have served as a birdbath. Bailey groaned and looked around the car for the culprit. And there it was, just beside the front wheel: an enormous pinecone, nearly two feet tall and with giant, painful-looking spikes.

Widowmakers, her grandfather had called them. It came back to her suddenly and without warning: the image of her six-year-old self proudly lugging a pinecone half the size of her body into the house, and her grandfather telling about her how in the old mining days they used to fall off trees and kill the miners. She hadn’t known what a widow was then, but she knew that these pinecones could make one. Later, after the incident, she would imagine a pinecone falling from the sky and killing her grandfather before he could come near her. She’d felt guilty about how badly she’d wished for it.

Bailey kicked the giant pinecone away from her car, feeling sick.

#

The Grizzly Paw was your basic mountain dive bar: pool table, cheap whiskey, lots of guys in flannel. Bailey chose a seat at the bar and watched the bartender as she chatted with some regulars at the other end. She was a tall, tattooed, no-nonsense kind of woman – exactly Bailey’s type. She’d met Jess at a place like this too. Crazy how you can go from a bar booth to the altar to divorce court all in the span of three years.

But she didn’t want to think about Jess right now, so she pushed all that into the storage compartment.

Bailey caught the bartender’s eye and the woman made her way over.

“What’s the vibe tonight, babe?” the bartender asked. Bailey loved women who called everyone “babe.” It was so silly and endearing.

“Whiskey’s always the vibe,” she said, and added a little tilt of her head and the briefest flicker of a look towards the bartender’s lips, then back to her eyes again. All the usual tried and true moves. The bartender smiled in a way that let Bailey know she wasn’t new to this.

“Rocks?”

“Neat.”

“You got it.”

The bartender poured a glass and slid it over to Bailey.

“What’s your name?” Bailey asked.

“Marina,” she said, and leaned both elbows on the bar, bringing herself closer to Bailey.

“What’s fun to do around here, Marina?”

“Depends what you’re into. What brings you up the mountain…?”

“Bailey. And I’m just here for the weekend.”

“That’s lucky. It’s a life sentence for me.”

“You might need to check in with your parole officer later tonight,” Bailey said, and took a sip of her whiskey.

“Maybe so. What do you do for a living?”
“Parole officer,” Bailey teased in a low, seductive voice.

Marina smiled.

Sometimes it really was that easy.

#

They walked up the hill together after Marina’s shift. Bailey loved this part, the preamble of it all, the period of time where it was all just games and didn’t mean anything, where you had no idea if the sex would be good or if the girl would wind up breaking your soul into pieces. The part where it was all for fun.

Marina was taller than her, but Bailey wrapped an arm around her waist as they walked, both of them tipsy and flirtatious.

“You always hit on bartenders when you’re in a new town?” Marina asked.

“Only when they look like you.”
Bailey stopped in the street and grinned at Marina. She moved in until they were a fraction of an inch apart. Marina gave a little teasing smirk as if to say I dare you, and Bailey never could resist a dare. She kissed her. Marina’s lip gloss tasted like watermelon; her lips were soft, and her cheek felt smooth under Bailey’s thumb. She wondered what Jess was doing right now – no.

Just one weekend.

No thoughts, just this.

“You’re a good kisser,” Marina whispered in her ear, and Bailey chose to believe that it was true.

Bailey took Marina’s hand and led her the rest of the way up the hill. But as they approached the house with its dilapidated yard and rusted rowboat, something almost imperceptible shifted in the way Marina’s presence felt beside her. As Bailey moved to head up the walkway to the house, Marina suddenly froze. She turned to look and found her staring at Bailey with an expression of alarm.

“You’re staying here?” Marina asked.

“Just for the weekend.”

“You know whose house that is?”

“It was my grandfather’s,” Bailey said, hoping her voice sounded as level as she was desperately trying to make it.

Marina stared at her. All traces of fun and flirtation had evaporated.

Without a word or warning, Marina turned on her heel and hurried away back down the hill, her tall form disappearing quickly in the darkness. Bailey didn’t call after her.

#

The living room couch was like a torture device, but Bailey would’ve rather slept in the woods, or on a bed of nails for that matter, than in the guest room. She laid awake and stared up at the nicotine-stained ceiling, waiting for her heartrate to slow.

It didn’t.

Somewhere around midnight, she dragged herself up from the couch and walked in a near-dream state down the hall to the guest room.

The moonlight fell gently through the dirty widow and onto the quilt that she remembered from her childhood. Bailey took a dried-up Bic pen from the cup on the desk and dug the tip into the fabric of the quilt, tearing a small hole. She pulled at the hole, trying to rip the thing apart –

But a sudden pounding at the front door made her freeze.

For a single, insane second, Bailey spun around expecting to see her grandfather standing over her in the doorway. She shook the thought from her head and made her way back to the living room, where the pounding on the front door continued.

“Who is it?”

“Marina.”

Bailey opened the door and sure enough, there was Marina, looking just as tall and beautiful as she had earlier, but now infinitely more distressed.

“Do you know who your grandfather was?” Marina said. She seemed feral with rage. Her fists were clenched at her sides and her eyes were blazing.

Bailey felt the floor loosening beneath her, threatening to send her falling into an abyss, but she fought it back and kept her voice even.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said quietly.

“He was an evil man,” Marina said. “Did you know that?”

“It’s late. A pinecone fell and hit my car. I’m just here for the weekend.” Bailey heard herself listing out these unrelated facts and knew on some level that they were irrelevant to the conversation at hand, but they were also things that she knew to be true, and that felt safe to her.“He was evil,” Marina repeated, and Bailey was mortified to see tears forming in her eyes.

For a fraction of an instant, a possible path for the immediate future flashed before Bailey. She could tell Marina that yes, she knew her grandfather was evil, that she had seen it for herself. She could say she was sorry for whatever he had done to her, and confide that he had done it to her too. She could reach out to this stranger in front of her who it seemed had lived a version of the exact same painful life, and maybe they could do something for each other that nobody else could do. Maybe they could fix something in each other that he had broken.

But that would require a lot of her.

That would require speaking it out loud.

And Bailey had never spoken it out loud.

“It’s late,” she repeated, her voice hollow and superficial.

Marina’s face clenched up in rage. For a moment Bailey wondered if she might hit her, or scream, or try to burn the house down. But then she turned on her heel and once again disappeared into the darkness.

Bailey shut the door and stood stock still in the musty, silent living room. Her body knew before her mind did that she was not staying for the weekend. She had already grabbed her keys and her weekend bag and was moving towards the door when her brain began to register this.

#

The mountain road was pitch black and treacherous with only the light of the moon and her headlights to guide her. Bailey drove too fast and left the windows down. Her eyes watered and tears streaked her face, but she told herself it was only the cold air from the open window.

She plugged in her phone, swerving a little on the narrow road, and prayed for the stereo to drown out her thoughts. Dammit – that song again; the one that reminded her of Jess. She felt like she might vomit. When would she get to stop remembering things? When would she get to just be silent? When –

A heavy mass catapulted down onto the windshield. Bailey screamed. The glass shattered in front of her and she swerved violently to the side of the road, just barely missing the edge of oblivion and a sheer two-hundred-foot cliff.

She sat breathing heavily for a long moment. Her knuckles were white on the wheel. The moonlight danced through the pine trees overhead and glimmered across the shattered windshield.

Bailey clambered out of the car and looked back towards the scene of the incident. In the middle of the road, a widowmaker sat on its side, its sharp spikes taunting her in the darkness.

#

Amy Monaghan is a queer Los Angeles-based writer with an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Witness Magazine, Chaotic Merge, Cagibi Lit, Mulberry Literary, and others. In her free time she enjoys road trips to towns with one gas station, reading books about tragedy, and collecting pinecones in the park. Learn more at www.amymonaghanwrites.com.