Cathy burst into the rented house, peppering Toni's and Amy's faces with kisses without hesitation or the question of consent. Cathy and their father lived states away now, a fact for which Toni was not sorry, but it did mean that she could never get Cathy to understand that kisses were too personal for what their relationship was.
Her father was less effusive. There had been a time, fifteen years ago, long before her death at his hands, when Toni would tug on his shirtsleeve to be picked up and held. It might have been that he no longer felt that he had a right to her affection -- which was true -- but Cathy presumed it so plainly that the contrast struck Toni as awkward.
He hugged her, but it bordered on the terse one between acquaintances. She assumed that he loved her as a biological default and because she knew herself to be inherently loveable. The spark of their relationship had been snuffed out so long ago that Toni remembered it only hazily. It was a detail of her childhood that now seemed silly, like her sincere five-year-old certainty that the only reason her cats wouldn't speak to her was that she hadn't told them fairytales enough to earn their trust and guidance.
The hug might have been so abbreviated because it had nothing more to say.
Ever the diligent lieutenant, Amy jumped on the grenade and led Cathy and her father into the backyard, near the tent, for some wedding business to which Toni did not care to be privy.
Toni had once been a secondary character in an epic marital story. Though, to be utterly fair (and perhaps she didn't have cause to be), it was only epic because it ended in divorce without significant bloodshed. Though, depending on when the story was told, it could read more like the tale of a family annihilator.
Toni almost could not blame her father, Robert, for how his marriage to her mother Anne had turned out. He wanted the story where he could get what he wanted and not seem like the worst person in the world, particularly to Cathy. Spider-Man lacked his birth parents and Uncle Ben. The Punisher swore vengeance for his murdered family. Superman lost his whole planet. There was precedent for these things.
Toni did regret that her father had chosen to become a hero by killing her off. She wasn't murdered all at once. First, he killed her mother -- at least according to what Robert had told Cathy to justify why he was single when he very much was not. Anne had died of something tragic but nonspecific, a nebulous disease that might as well have been Inconvenient Wife Syndrome.
Amy and Toni fell shortly after. Toni couldn't remember what had killed them -- she hadn't wanted to hear it twice -- but assumed it was a traffic accident. Nothing too traceable and certainly nothing preventable. With a dead family -- God having taken them tragically soon -- her father became completely available for Cathy, a woman he had met on a business trip.
Or rather, he was utterly available until something went wrong in his relationship with his paramour. Robert and Cathy had fought -- over what, Toni hadn't the foggiest -- and he returned to Anne. Toni's mother knew by this point that he had been cheating, though she didn't know about her lingering death that her husband was brave for having suffered through. It might have been enough to say that he and Cathy had not worked out, that it was a foolish mistake, that he had not been thinking at all. Toni assumed her mother and father could have worked it out under those terms -- or they could have divorced more healthily and honestly -- but Robert has his dramatic flair. Although, it had to be said, not a particularly original one.
Cathy died, according to her father. This was from cancer, something in the breasts or ovaries to strike at the feminine roots of his infidelity. In a sense, wasn't he doing the right thing in staying by Cathy's side (on alternate weekends when he told his family that he was working late nights) until she passed so that she did not do it alone?
Miraculously, within a month, Cathy too rose from the dead, so thoroughly revived that she was unaware that she had wasted away. At that point, Robert cut his losses, the only murder being his marriage.
Toni preferred being alive, though she might have liked that jolt of adrenaline of being yanked from the precipice of death. That was the origin of a real hero, not the dead family. Instead, she was left a plot contrivance that would not have cut it on a soap opera.
She understood stories. This one had gotten away from its author. Her father only knew the one ending: a woman or women extinguished at his feet so he could be less guilty. Stories did tend to get wild if they were not pruned back regularly. This isn't to say that Toni forgave Robert for reducing his fatherhood to this, but she could comprehend the instinct to fiction over fact. She wondered if he had taught her that or whether it was woven around her double helices.
Even if she struggled with fictionalizing her life, one could hardly blame Toni for preferring the story where she at least was permitted to survive to the last page. Toni found it rude that the power of a story had been brutally weaponized against her and doubted that counted as the death and rebirth section of the Hero's Journey.
It did make it something of a chore to look Cathy in the eye, this woman who had secondhand mourned Toni's death only to now smile at her wedding. Toni would have liked being a fly on the wall when her father had divulged the truth that he had not actually managed to kill any of them, but it must have been convincing enough that Cathy not only stayed but married him in turn. Toni had been a flower girl at the wedding, which was more baffling and funnier than outright galling.
Cathy was not an evil stepmother. It would almost have been a relief had she been the sort of spidery schemer who had wanted her father for his wealth. Her father had no particular money -- more than her mother made, but not the fortune that would have inspired a triple murder (even in fiction). Cathy was never without an article of pink clothing, which never coordinated with her fiery red hair. Wherever she had been, she briefly left the olfactory ghost of lavender and talcum powder. When Cathy wrote birthday and Christmas cards to her stepdaughters, she dotted every "i" with a heart and every "o" a smiley face. Toni, whom she insisted on always calling Antonia though no one else in her life did, had to suffer one of each. Even when Cathy spoke her name aloud, Toni swore that she could hear the heart and smile.
Cathy was perfectly nice, the sort of woman who would own a Christian greeting card store -- which was, in fact, her highest aspiration in life. When Toni first found out about her, she pictured some femme fatale who must have had astigmatism and low self-esteem to set her sights on Robert. (Objectively, Toni granted that there was nothing particularly wrong with her father. He was a little short, but he had all his dark hair and a sense of humor and earned a steady income. However, as his daughter, the idea of him as a romantic or sexual being was abhorrent, even if she happened to be physical testimony that it was so.)
It might have been the red hair more than the Russian roulette. Toni knew about Cathy's hair and her own death before she knew anything else about the woman who had stolen her father away, equating redheads with seductresses.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
