Blast | June 02, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  In Margaret Hawkins’s story of a young family on the road to their new home, a devastating tragedy emerges, almost between the lines, changing parents and children both.  This is Hawkins’s second appearance in BLAST. You can read her previous story, “Nothing Beats a Good Presbyterian,” here. 

The Sweet Short Life of Taylor Swift

Margaret Hawkins

Nicole and Brad Cortez, with their children, Delta and Bravo, and Delta’s goldfish, Taylor Swift, were moving from Nicole’s mother’s house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Jacksonville, Florida, where Brad had gotten a better job. Brad and his cousin Jimbo had already driven a truck full of their stuff down to Florida over a four-day weekend, taking turns sleeping while the other drove. Now Brad and Nicole were hauling what remained of their possessions in a trailer behind the seventeen-year-old Buick LeSabre Nicole had inherited from her grandfather.

Delta was seven, and Bravo, the boy, was four. Nicole was twenty-eight, almost six months pregnant. They planned to name the baby India if it was a girl, Charlie for a boy. Brad and Nicole had met in the army, and the day they got engaged they came up with the idea of naming their kids after the NATO phonetic alphabet. The joke, which they told over and over, was, “What will we name the twenty-seventh?”

Everyone kept asking Nicole if she was all right. They meant moving when she was pregnant. She’d done most of the packing, too—her mother had helped, but she had a bad back, and Brad had worked overtime until three days before they left. Nicole was fine, she said, recently a soldier. What choice did she have, really? Besides, until this morning she had been fine.

Nicole held the baggie on her lap. Delta had begged for a pet for her seventh birthday. She’d wanted a Labradoodle, but Brad had negotiated her down to a fish. It was supposed to be Delta’s job to carry Taylor Swift, and at first she had, holding the water-filled two-quart Ziploc baggie on her stomach with her hands folded over it, the way her mother sat. But when she’d left the fish in the booth at a Denny’s outside Indianapolis, after breakfast the first morning, and they had to drive back fifty miles, Nicole took charge. Now the plastic baggie sat on Nicole’s lap: one taut, warm, bulbous mound filled with jiggly fluid and life on top of another.

Nicole kept the little cardboard container of dry fish food in her purse. Twice a day she unzipped the bag and shook a few flakes into the water, and they all watched the fish flutter to the surface and vacuum up the food. Bravo always tried to poke the bag to make more food fall out, but Delta would grab his finger to stop him.

Everyone said the drive would be a nightmare, with two little kids, but Nicole was over the morning sickness and the kids were mostly good. As long as Bravo let Delta be the boss, there was peace. Nicole made up games. The kids’ current favorite was What’s His Name? The point of the game was to guess the name of the person in the next car. Sometimes even Brad played that one. He always said the same name, and the kids screamed it along with him, “Captain Tobias Floppy von Flubface!” Delta made up a game called What’s the Baby Like, the point of which was to guess what its favorite color would be or what TV show it would like best. She especially liked to speculate about the baby’s future relationship with Taylor Swift. “Taylor wants a little sister,” she told Bravo.

“Me, too,” Bravo said.

“You already have one,” Delta said, correctingly, turning the tables on him in that way she did sometimes that made him cry. He was trying to agree with her!

Delta was tired of him always imitating her. “Taylor’s your little sister, dummy. Remember?”

“Taylor’s a orange fish,” he said, soberly, unable to remember the word goldfish.

Bravo was a quiet boy and often sad, and now he couldn’t form the words to say what he was thinking, which was that he’d meant he wanted another little sister, though if Delta had said Taylor Swift wanted a brother, he would have wanted that, too. Having a sister like Delta was both a burden, one he would carry for the rest of his life, even after Delta died in suspicious circumstances in a hotel room at the age of fifty-nine, and a deep, warm engulfment of limitless, painful love that felt sometimes as if it might suffocate him. But he couldn’t express any of that. Delta didn’t think much about Bravo at all, except that he was a nuisance.

Nicole had felt great during all three of her pregnancies, and she’d had two easy births. Packing hadn’t bothered her at all. She was an organized person and thought it was fun, an opportunity to sort their possessions, give things away, throw things out. Even sitting in the car for the past two days hadn’t been bad. Lucky for her, her grandpa had bought himself the most comfortable car he could find. At first, after he died, they’d talked about selling it, but Brad had been the one to say no. “This thing’s like driving a bed,” he said. But now, despite the well-upholstered reclining front seat, Nicole had started to feel uneasy.

“You OK, Nic?” Brad could tell something was wrong. He and Bravo were the same that way. Nicole worried that when Bravo went to school he’d get mowed over by the talkative kids before he ever got a chance to become whatever he was supposed to be. Whatever that was. Kids already called him “weirdo.” When people spoke to him, he just stared at them. Maybe he was thinking what to say, but by the time he figured it out, they were usually gone.

Brad said it again. “You OK?”

Nicole prided herself on not being a complainer, but an hour later, somewhere in South Carolina, she asked Brad to find a motel, even though it was only three o’clock. At the Days Inn, Nicole changed the kids into their bathing suits. Brad took them to the pool.

When he brought them back an hour later, Nicole was in the bathroom. After a while, Brad went in too. Pretty soon, Bravo started to knock on the door, whining that he had to go. Brad came out and told Delta to take Bravo and get in the elevator and go down to the lobby and use the bathroom there. They both should go, Brad said. “I don’t have to go,” Delta said. “Try,” Brad said, more harshly than usual. He gave her three dollar bills and a handful of change and told her to buy whatever they wanted from the machines.

When they got back, Nicole was in bed and the lights were out. Brad was sitting in a chair.

Brad had thought they should go to an emergency room, but Nicole said what was the point now? Besides, she didn’t think their insurance would cover it. Brad was thinking that if they went to a hospital, maybe the doctor would keep her overnight. Then he could come back here with the kids and get some sleep. Because frankly, three people to watch was too many. She’d be OK, she said. Now all she wanted was to sleep.

Brad took Delta and Bravo back to the pool. It was getting dark, and the pool lights were on, and everyone had left except for one old lady. After a while, he asked the old lady to watch the kids for a few minutes and went up to the room to check on Nicole. She was asleep. He picked up the kids’ clothes from the floor and carried them down to the pool. He wanted to thank the old lady, maybe offer to bring her a drink or something, but she was asleep with a magazine on her chest. The kids were in the pool. Delta was holding Bravo’s head under the water.

He got the kids into their clothes and took them to supper at the restaurant across the street. They both ordered spaghetti. He ordered rum and Coke. While they ate, he picked dried blood from under his fingernails. Delta kept saying, “Where’s Mom?”

While they waited for dessert, Brad told them the baby had gone to heaven and now their mom was tired.

“You mean it’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“Is she sad?”

“Yeah.”

Bravo started to cry.

After they ate their ice cream, Brad took them to a miniature golf course he’d seen from the road on the way in. They played three games. Delta won all three, cheating.

In the morning, Brad went downstairs and got doughnuts and hard-boiled eggs and little boxes of breakfast cereal and milk and coffee and brought it back to the room on a cardboard tray. Nicole didn’t want to eat. She felt fine, she said; she just wasn’t hungry. She said they should keep going.

They packed their things. Brad wouldn’t let Nicole carry anything. Although, too little too late, he told himself. His father used to say it all the time, meaning he was a useless piece of shit. Brad slung the bags over his shoulders and around his neck, and they headed out. Two old people got on the elevator on the way down and smiled like maniacs at the kids, like they were some TV show about happy family life. When they were about to get out of the elevator, Delta screamed.

“Where’s Taylor?”

Brad looked at Nicole. Nicole put her hands on her stomach and closed her eyes. Delta looked back and forth between them.

“Where is she?”

Delta’s voice, which was low for a child and naturally loud, had gotten louder. The old people’s smiles wavered.

Brad led Nicole to a chair in the lobby. “Wait here,” Brad said to the kids.

He came back a few minutes later with the Ziploc bag, empty except for a few drops of cloudy water clinging to the inside. He leaned over Delta, put his hands on her shoulders. “Taylor had to go away,” he said. He looked at Nicole. She would have handled it better, but her eyes were shut.

“Go where?” Delta’s voice was husky.

“Home, Delt.”

Brad felt annoyed by his daughter. She was an annoying girl and would grow up to be an annoying woman, but he knelt in front of her.

“We’re close to the ocean. Remember, I showed you on the map?”

Delta frowned and crossed her bony arms over her Beauty and the Beast T-shirt.

“She told me she had to go join her people. You know, in the sea.”

“You said she was a freshwater fish.”

“Yeah. But they’ve got freshwater marshes here along the shore. Right next to the ocean.” He was making it up. It seemed possible, but he didn’t know for sure.

Delta kicked the vinyl couch.

Somehow, Brad got everyone into the bathroom one last time, then into the car and back on the road. Delta stared out the window. Bravo cried a little for a while but in a half-hearted whimpering way they were used to that didn’t disturb them anymore, like a dog in its sleep. Brad told the kids if they were good they could go swimming when they got to the next motel. Nicole fell asleep.

Later, Brad heard Delta instructing Bravo.

“When you die, they’re going to flush you down the toilet. Then you can swim to your heart’s content.”

“I don’t want to swim,” Bravo said.

***

Margaret Hawkins writes fiction, essays, and arts journalism. Her work appears regularly in Visual Art Source and the Democracy Chain.  Her third novel (fourth book), Lydia’s Party, was published by Penguin in 2015.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, ARTnews, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Art & Antiques, the Perch (Yale), Fabrik, the Missouri Review, Brevity, and many other publications. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.