Seraphina Nova Glass

Nothing Ever Happens Here

Chapter 1
Shelby

It’s a death omen.

The words pierce the evening air and then are lost in the surrounding laughter and chatter. The words are meaningless to me as I hold my wineglass against the light of a flickering candle on the table and examine the hairline fracture in the glass. It’s a brisk October night, but in northern Min­nesota that means heavy coat weather and a rush to enjoy any­thing outside before six months of winter, so it’s a perfect excuse to have a girls’ dinner at Groucho’s—the kind of place with a showy outdoor pizza oven and heat lamps on the eclectic back patio with its mismatched tables and chairs and cozy fire pit.

When we clinked glasses—cheers to Rowan, headed back to school in Boston after the Christmas break—my glass cracked.

“Death omen?” Mack repeats.

“Yeah. If you break a glass during a toast, someone’s gonna die. It’s a thing,” Rowan says. “I’ll take it for you.” She holds her hand out for my glass. Mack slaps it down.

“Not twenty-one until September, no you may not, and is this what I’m paying tuition for? You’re learning about death omens?”

“Yep,” she says, and then a horrified expression blooms on her face when I still sip out of the glass of wine. “Don’t drink it for God’s sake! You’ll shred your intestines. See, death omen. I told ya.”

“It’s a tiny crack. Shhh. You’re freakin’ the girls out,” I say, because my six-year-old twins sit eating cheese pizza with plas­tic bibs and coloring mats next to us. Fine, they’re paying no attention, but still.

“Right.” Rowan smiles and I motion for the waiter to replace my glass. After many years and more of our life savings than we could afford to spare, I finally got pregnant at forty-one. And yes, I absolutely make sure it’s known far and wide—from Fargo to Duluth—that those girls are God’s most perfect cre­ations. My miracle children. They can joke that it’s surprising that I don’t have an actual bullhorn to make daily announce­ments within the town square about how these girls are un­fuckwithable. But it’s nice, actually. You make a big enough deal about something for long enough and it has a ripple ef­fect. People treat them like they are made of glass, and it’s just the way I like it.

“Well, Leo promised to not get drunk at the Royal Oak to­night and to be home on the couch with popcorn popped by the time I get back,” Mack says, scanning the QR code on the bill to pay the tab.

“Do you know nothing about PFCs?” Rowan asks.

“Yes, you told me,” Mack replies, sipping the last of her wine and standing, so Rowan aims her soapbox lecture at me instead.

“They’re the carcinogens in microwaved popcorn bags. You’re literally eating cancer when you make that shit.”

“Language,” Mack says, nodding to the twins. “She’s tak­ing an ecofeminist class.”

“I see. Well. I think it’s past someone’s bedtime anyway,” I say to the girls, and Poppy shakes her head and looks like she might start to pitch a fit. I give Rowan a side hug. “The wind is picking up too, so get home before that storm gets going.” Mack kisses me on the cheek and before they make their way out of the courtyard, suddenly June is in full hysterics because she left Bertha the stuffed badger at the cafe earlier. I flag Mack back over, but she doesn’t hear me, so I take the girls by their arms and rush out to the lot before she can drive off. Thank God, because the thought of June without Bertha for the night makes me shudder. She’s already pulling away from me to lie face down on the ground next to Mack’s car and howl.

“We have a badger situation,” I tell Mack. “She put Bertha in a highchair at one of the booths. Sorry.” Mack slips the cafe key off her ring with an amused smile and tells me to leave it under the mat when I’m done.

When I pull up to the Firefly Cafe, a chilly wind kicks up dust in the parking lot and makes a whistling sound through the bending trees. I leave the car running with the heat on and whisper to the girls that I’ll be back in thirty seconds, even though they are both fast asleep already. I jog up to the front door and use the flashlight on my phone to see the lock. It takes some fiddling before I manage to get it open. The wind be­comes so strong, I practically fall into the front entry when the door pushes inward. I see Bertha right away. She’s in a booster seat with a plate of blueberry pie still placed in front of her. I’m sure one of the college kids Mack hired must have closed up, because she wouldn’t have left all that there overnight just to be cute. I start to rush over to grab the stuffed animal when I suddenly stop cold.

There’s a figure behind the register. The file cabinet under the counter is open and papers are pulled out.

“God, you scared the shit out of me,” I say, assuming it’s Leo. Because who else would have a key? The door was locked. And who else would be going through their files? But the figure doesn’t respond. When he steps out of the darkness and into the beam of my phone light, I see he’s wearing a thick ski mask and he’s dressed in black, and my body begins to tremble uncon­trollably. I hold Bertha to my chest and take a step backward. I look to the front door, assessing quickly if I could sprint to it before he could get me, but what if he has a…And then, with gloved hands, he points something shiny and metal that I can scarcely see in the darkness, but I get enough of a glimpse to know it means I’m seriously fucked.

“Turn that light off!” I blink at him in shock. “Now!” I obey. “Get back there,” he says, motioning to the kitchen and glanc­ing toward the front window to make sure nobody is there—no cars are passing.

“Leo?” I say one more time because, for a moment, I think it sounds like it could be him, although the voice is too dis­torted to tell. His clothes are baggy and oversized so it could be anyone. I can’t tell from the shape or size, and for just a brief moment I think maybe this is a joke.

“Fucking go!” he screams, and then the panic officially sets in. I’m not dreaming, and it isn’t a joke.

“Please!” I start to plead. “Um… Do you…? What are you looking for? What do you want? I know Mackenzie—Mack. And, and, and Leo—the owners. They’ll—I know they’ll give you whatever you want if you just don’t… If nobody gets hurt. I know they will. Just tell me what you want.”

He doesn’t reply. Instead, he starts slowly walking toward me so I am forced to move—to walk toward the back kitchen like he wants. My whole body shakes as I look out the front window at my car with my babies sleeping in the back seat. I swallow down a sob and put my hands up as he moves toward me. I expect him to just direct me to move, but he suddenly grabs me by the arm and pats me down, looking for a weapon or something like they do at airport security. Then he pushes me hard through the double swinging doors to the kitchen, where I lose my footing and barely catch myself before I fall.

The kitchen is dim, lit only by the small lamp on Mack’s desk on the back wall where she keeps her cookbooks and recipe cards. The lamp’s base is made of brass and shaped like a mouse reaching up and screwing in the lightbulb. It was a white el­ephant gift that she ended up loving. I stare at the familiarity of it in this strange moment with longing, as if it can somehow help me. As if it can stop whatever terrible thing is about to happen. Adrenaline surges through me. I keep my eyes on the man, confused about what he wants. He seems unsure himself about what he’s going to do.

“Take your clothes off,” he says suddenly.

“Oh God. No. My babies. My babies are outside,” I whisper because the words are barely able to come out of my mouth. The reality of what’s happening is choking me.

“Do it. I don’t have all night.”

“Please,” I beg. Tears are starting to roll down my face now. “Please, anything you want. I—whatever you came for, just tell me and I’ll…” He slams the gun down on a steel prep table, and the sound is deafening. He points it at me again, and I think of sweet June and Poppy and how, maybe if I just do what he says, he’ll let me go. I can’t see his face, so that’s good, I think. That means he might let me go, because I could never identify him. That’s giving me a flicker of hope, so I have to do what­ever he wants. The girls are, impossibly, only feet away from me behind this cafe wall, asleep to the sound of the humming car motor and a sleep story I put on in the car, “the Pumpkin Pie and the Blustery Day.” It always makes them sleepy. Oh God, the thought of them makes me start to hyperventilate. I try to control it. I push away any thought of them waking up and trying to find me. I can’t bear to think about them at all in this moment or I’ll snap, and that will be the end of me. I’m not the one with the gun. I just have to make my mind a blank space and let this happen as quickly as possible.

I pull off my denim jacket and then, through uncontrollable tears and shaking hands, I pull my black sweater dress over my head and let it fall on the ground. He leans against the bak­ing table, pushing aside Mack’s favorite blue mixing bowl, and watches; he doesn’t speak. When I leave my underwear on, he just waits me out. He still doesn’t say anything, which is be­coming more unnerving, making him feel more dangerous and unpredictable to me. I can’t see his face. He doesn’t grab me or throw me down or anything else that I expect to happen at any second. He just stares until I slowly, painfully take off the rest of my clothes and stand in front of him naked, covering myself with my hands as much as possible, weeping and wait­ing for the worst.

He walks over to me slowly, looking me up and down. Should I try to fight? If I let it happen, I might see the girls. I might survive this. If I fight, he fights back and then… I might not. This question is on repeat in my mind, along with every possible outcome, and all the thoughts whirl in my head. But it’s only a matter of seconds and then he is right in front of me.

He still doesn’t grab for me or touch me. He picks my clothes up from the ground, and my head swirls with confusion. He takes a few steps back, and then he laughs. I don’t understand what’s happening.

He throws my clothes at me, hard, and shakes his head.

“Look at you,” he says. “Absolutely sickening. Pathetic. Put your clothes on. Jesus.” A stab of humiliation cuts through me—a shame so unexpected, yet so deep, it steals my breath for a moment. I hide myself behind my armful of discarded clothes and have no idea if I should run or scream or beg—what is happening? I have no idea what is happening.

“What do you want?” I ask again, my voice trembling.

“You weren’t supposed to be here, and you fucked up my plans,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Then just let me go. You can do whatever you—you can… I won’t even tell anyone I saw anything. So you can just let me go and…whatever your plans were, you can just…”

“I can’t have you reporting seeing someone here tonight.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Do you know who I am?” he asks, taking me by surprise. I stare again at his size and clothes, and try to discern his voice that’s so soft and muffled, it’s impossible to decipher.

“I… Leo?” I say again, tilting my head, staring as hard as I can through my tears and dizzying confusion, looking for anything about him that would give his identity away. But it can’t be Leo. It makes no earthly sense. He doesn’t answer, of course. If it’s not Leo, maybe this man will let me go now that he knows I’ll report to the police that it’s Leo I suspected. Un­less it really is him, and he’s secretly turned into some sort of sick monster. God help me, I’m in a fucking nightmare.

“See, you fuck up the timeline if you report seeing someone here at this time looking through these records. And of course that’s what you’ll do. Don’t keep saying you won’t because you want me to let you go. Of course you will, and I’m sorry, but I need to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“What? No…what do you mean, I…” I hold up my hands, because he still has the gun aimed at me.

“If you tell anyone I was here, I’ll…you know what, I won’t even kill you. I’ll just make everyone around you pay and make you watch. Ya got that?”

“But I won’t—I don’t even know who you are! Who would I even tell? I promise, I…”

“I think you know. If you just thought about it, you’d know who I am. You’d know why I’m here.” He stares at me, maybe looking for some spark of recognition in my eyes, but there is none, because I don’t know. “Fuck it, I can’t take that chance.”

“No, wait,” I whimper, and he picks up Bertha from the floor where I dropped her and looks at her face.

“This is what you came here for, a fuckin’ weasel, huh?” he asks, and I nod. And it’s stupid that I want to correct him that it’s a badger, not a weasel, and that a thought like that is even crossing my mind right now.

“That’s too bad. Shitty timing,” he says, and then he grabs me by the arm and pulls me to the back of the kitchen past tower­ing rows of plates and wineglasses, past the pantry and the back delivery door with pallets of flour and cane sugar piled against it. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if I could break away from him and run through it—just push out the back door to free­dom in hopes he’s just a scared thief and not a murderer. And then I think of getting shot in the back in front of my kids in the car and I don’t run. I let him pull me until he stops, and when he does, my heart falls like a stone in my chest and the blood drains from my face, and all I hear is ringing in my ears.

“I’m sorry, but I need to make sure you don’t fuck up my plans. You were looking for this,” he holds up Bertha and tosses her into the walk-in freezer. “You found her in there when the doors snapped closed behind you. At least that’s what they’ll assume when they find you, I’m sure. And I was never here.”

He pushes me into a small room that’s stacked with icy shelves of packed chicken wings, and berries for pies, and ice cream buckets. I scream and try to rush to the door, but every­thing happens in a blink—in a blur—and I’m trapped before I even knew what was happening. It’s negative ten degrees, and he’s locked the door behind him.

I stand in shock for a few moments, and then my heart is rac­ing so fast and I’m crying so hard, I can barely see through the tears to pull my clothes on. I shiver and shake violently from the cold as I dress. My feet are already freezing to the metal floor as I try to pull on stockings that will do nothing to pro­tect me from the extreme cold. There is nowhere to hide, no way to escape, no window, no place to even sit and curl up, no one looking for me. Just a metal, airless ice box. I came in to get a stuffed animal. How is this happening?

I scream. I scream and wail, and beat at the door. I scream for so long and so hard that a spattering of blood from my bat­tered throat mists the glossy metal door, but there is nobody to hear. After what seems like hours, but is maybe only minutes, the cold begins to turn my hands colors—a deep purple blue, and I can’t bend my fingers. The numbness starts to morph into an ache, a full body weakness, and I have to kneel on the fro­zen metal floor. I can’t pound on the door anymore because I don’t have any strength. It’s leaving my body.

He’s left me here to die, and I think about them. My babies, just outside, sleeping to the sounds of a cozy pumpkin pie story I put on YouTube, holding their new, fuzzy reindeer blankets to their chest, waiting for their mother to come back to them. I touch my fingers to the door.

“My babies,” I can barely whisper now, but I cry out to them until there is nothing left inside me. “My babies, my babies.” Everything goes dark.