Chapter 8 - The Avalanche
The first week of January brought a bitter Arctic inversion that settled over the Salt Lake Valley, trapping a thick, gray soup of smog and freezing fog between the mountain peaks. It was the kind of weather that made you want to stay indoors by the fireplace with a thick wool blanket and a steaming mug of tea.
On January 12—three days before the scheduled trustee sale of the Oakridge Lane property—my doorbell rang at 7:00 PM just as Sophie, Toby, and I were finishing up a batch of homemade pizza.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and walked to the front door, peering through the peephole.
It wasn't a courier. It wasn't the police.
It was Dana.
She looked like a ghost of her former self. Her blonde hair, usually styled to perfection, was pulled back in a greasy, haphazard ponytail. Her face was bare of makeup, her eyes ringed with dark, purple bruises of sheer exhaustion, and her oversized winter coat was zipped crookedly over a stained sweatshirt.
I opened the door six inches, keeping the security chain firmly latched across the frame.
"What do you want, Dana?" I asked, my voice devoid of warmth.
Dana looked at the gap in the door, her lower lip trembling violently. She didn't try to push her way in. She didn't start screaming. She just sagged against the doorframe, letting out a ragged, ugly sob that sounded like air escaping a punctured tire.
"Margaret... please," she whispered, her voice cracking into shards. "You have to help us. Just... just talk to the bank. Or lend us twenty grand. Mark filed for personal bankruptcy this morning. The house is gone. The bank rejected our injunction filing this afternoon. The sheriff is coming on Friday morning at eight o'clock to change the locks."
I looked at my sister—the golden child, the perpetual victim, the center of my parents' universe for thirty years—and felt nothing except a cold, heavy emptiness.
"Where is Mark?" I asked.
Dana flinched, looking away down the dark suburban street. "He... he packed a bag on Sunday and went to stay with his brother in Provo. He said he couldn't handle the stress."
A humorless laugh escaped my lips. "Of course he did. Mark loves your family right up until the exact second the bills come due."
"Margaret, please!" Dana begged, sliding down the doorframe until she was kneeling on my freezing porch mat, clutching her face in her hands. "Mom is having a full psychiatric breakdown. Dad’s heart monitor has been beeping for three hours. We have nowhere to go! We're going to be living out of our car by the weekend!"
"Dana," I said, my voice dropping into a tone so calm and absolute it made her stop crying and look up at me with wide, terrified eyes. "Do you remember Thanksgiving?"
She blinked, startled by the sudden shift in subject. "What? What does Thanksgiving have to do with this?"
"I drove four hours through a blizzard with two exhausted children," I said, every word crisp as winter glass. "I brought a twenty-four-pound heritage turkey I paid for out of my own pocket, side dishes, pies, and wine. When I got to Mom’s house, she locked the door in our faces. She looked at my children—her own grandchildren—and told us to go away because you and your husband’s family were already eating inside. She treated us like stray dogs."
"We... we didn't mean—"
"And then, when I found out that for four years you and Mom had been using my eleven-hundred-dollar monthly subsidy not for Dad’s medication, but to bail out Mark’s failing car dealership through a second mortgage, you called me to scream at me for cutting off the money."
Dana opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her face flushed a deep, sickly crimson.
"You built this house of cards, Dana," I continued, my gaze locked onto hers. "You and Mark and Mom and Dad. You spent forty years believing that you could lie, manipulate, and bleed everyone around you dry while hiding behind the excuse of 'family.' Well, family doesn't lock children out in the snow. Family doesn't steal Thanksgiving. And family certainly doesn't treat each other like parasitic hosts."
"We're your blood!" Dana wailed, a desperate, pathetic screech that echoed down the quiet street.
"Blood stopped meaning anything the second Mom slammed that door," I said.
I reached out, pushed the heavy front door shut with a slow, deliberate motion, and slid the deadbolt home.
May you like
The click of the lock was the loudest sound in the world.
Through the frosted glass panel, I heard Dana pounding once, weakly, against the wood before her footsteps shuffled away down the porch steps, lost in the falling snow.
