Everything Happens for a Reason

"Everything happens for a reason."

Everything happens for a reason should be the city motto of Cadmea, Joanna thought, as she and the gray-haired, hunched-over, but surprisingly sprightly woman who happened to be standing next to her when the church collapsed ran for shelter behind a school bus that had just pulled over on Lay Street, waiting for the next gaggle of pupils to board.

"Everything happens for a reason," the little old lady, now out of breath, reiterated, which seemed a bit premature to Joanna, since in this case, everything was still in the course of happening: The church tower one short city block ahead of them had finished collapsing, for sure, but the church was still expelling its innards along with several members of the congregation and a priest. If there was a reason for this, or good to come of this, it wasn't yet obvious at all, especially not to the maimed and bleeding bodies now scattered all across Lay Street, enveloped by a gray, growing, and foul-smelling cloud of dust.

Joanna noticed that the school bus was headed to Edie's school, but Edie wasn't on it, because Edie preferred to walk, especially since the accident (runaway train, malfunctioning railroad crossing barrier) that had killed three of her classmates and injured five. Edie's walk to school was nearly an hour, but she was a big girl now, or at least almost a big girl, and she said she enjoyed watching the birds in the trees, or at least the trees that were left after the last blight, and the birds that were left after the last epidemic of avian pox, and stopping to smell the flowers, such as they were.

Joanna peeked through the open door of the bus. A couple of the younger kids looked panicked, but Charlie, the bus driver – who had only one eye, after the last crash, and a patch with a smiley face on the other – just shrugged. "Another beautiful day in Cadmea," he said to Joanna, and "All aboard!" to the kids who were already aboard, but he said it anyway to cheer them up. He waved to Joanna, shut the door, and drove off towards Saint Vibiana's Elementary, depriving Joanna and her elderly companion of their protection from the settling debris.

Joanna wiped the worst of the dust off the woman's shoulders.

"Where you headed?" Joanna asked.

"To church," the little old lady responded. "But maybe I'll go to the grocery store instead. Or the pub."

That evening, when Edie arrived back from school, tired but alive, just after sunset, Joanna was going to tell her about the church collapse, how Mrs. Davies next door who'd always baked them shortbread cookies hadn't made it, but before Joanna had a chance, Edie asked about her father. Again.

"We've had this conversation," Joanna said. "Many times."

"The kids at school keep teasing me about it," Edie said, opening the refrigerator and looking for something that was still edible after the power outage. "So do the teachers."

Joanna sighed. "Your father was a good man," Joanna said. "Mostly."

Edie sat down at the kitchen table, which Joanna had set for dinner. Edie dropped a slab of beef jerky on her plate. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands and pouted. "I don't even know his name," she said.

Joanna placed a glass of beet juice – Edie's favorite, inexplicably – in front of Edie. The juice reminded Joanna of congealed blood, which wasn't a good look for this town. "How was your walk to school and back?" Joanna asked. "Anything untoward?"

Edie took a swig of beet juice and licked her lips before answering. "I'm not Little Red Riding Hood," she said.

That you're not, Joanna thought. "And how was school? Has Ms. Schuyler's face healed?"

The glass of beet juice smashed into a thousand shards against the refrigerator door before Joanna knew what was happening. The juice oozed down over the family photos and Edie's childhood drawings Joanna had stuck to the refrigerator with cute little cartoon magnets she'd bought cheap at an estate sale.

"Edie!" Joanna yelled. She ripped off a wad of paper towels and wiped the ooze from the refrigerator, but there was no saving the photos, mostly of Edie, and of Joanna and Edie, although there was also one of Joanna's parents before they died, or Edie's drawings, mostly stick figures in distress or with body parts missing, one apparently being tortured in an iron maiden, but that was open to interpretation.

Edie stared at Joanna. "I'm not answering another stupid question until you tell me about my father."

Joanna didn't look at Edie or say anything for a long while. She mopped up the juice and threw the bleeding paper towels and the ruined photos and drawings in the trash.

Then she sighed. Edie would never be old enough to know the truth, but now was as good an age as any. Joanna didn't want to have to keep buying drinking glasses.

Joanna went to her bedroom. She opened her closet and moved her blouses and sweaters to one side. She keyed the square root of Edie's birthdate into the keypad and opened the safe. She took two small, identical wooden boxes out of the safe and brought them back to the kitchen. Edie was gnawing on the beef jerky, staring at her. Joanna placed the wooden boxes on the table in front of Edie, where the destroyed glass of beet juice had been.

One of the boxes was labeled "Robert", the other "Blake", with Post-its. Joanna normally had terrible handwriting, but she was proud of how meticulously she'd lettered the Post-its.

"This is what's left of your father," Joanna said.

Edie looked back and forth between Robert and Blake. She opened the Robert box. Inside was a tuft of hair, straight and black. It looked like a bit of scalp might still be attached. Edie touched the hair – it felt like the goats she used to pet on her way to school, until there were no more goats. She opened the Blake box. Inside was another tuft of hair, indistinguishable from Robert's.

"Well, which is it?"

Joanna sighed. "Could be either. And his name probably isn't Robert or Blake. I just made those up."

Edie continued to look back and forth between the remnants of her father and some other random man, neither of whom was named Robert or Blake.

Edie looked up. "You scalped them?" she asked, unable to conceal her admiration.

"No no no," Joanna said. "No. Not on purpose. It's just... well, back then, when I was young, I could get pretty wild when I was excited."

"When you were fucking."

"Edie!"

"You're the one who ripped their hair out," Edie said. She touched Blake's tuft again, and then Robert's. "So they were both at the same time, or..."

"Edie!" Joanna paused. Admittedly, that could have been fun. "A couple days apart. I never saw them again, and you were born nine months later."

"Just like Mamma Mia!" Edie said.

"The song?" Joanna asked.

"The movie," Edie said.

"The musical," Joanna said.

"Whatever. Amanda Seyfried didn't know who her father was, either, because Meryl Streep slept around so much."

It's really more like The Omen, Joanna thought, but okay. "Something like that," she said. "Either of them could be your father." She shrugged. "I didn't know much about them. You remind me of both."

Edie looked at Robert's hair and then Blake's hair. "How do you tell them apart?" she asked. "You certainly had a type."

Joanna reached into the boxes and touched Robert's hair with her right hand and Blake's with her left. "Robert's is a bit coarser, maybe. But it doesn't matter," she said. "What matters is the DNA. Someday, if you want, you can get a paternity test." Joanna hesitated. "If the DNA is still intact. But I think it should be fine."

Edie pushed the two boxes away from her. "What good will that do? Then I'll just know that my father had straight black goat hair and probably wasn't named Robert or Blake," Edie said. "But I know that already, even without a paternity test."

"There's more," Joanna said. She bit her lower lip.

She bit it so hard, Edie thought it might start to bleed. She hoped it would bleed. Edie looked at her mother, intrigued.

"I thought you didn't know anything about them," Edie said.

"Well," Joanna said. "I'm pretty sure Robert was the devil."

"Metaphorically speaking," Edie said.

"No," Joanna replied. "The actual devil."

Edie raised her eyebrows. "As in Lucifer? Satan? The prince of darkness? The ruler of demons? The father of lies?" Edie paused. "Does that make me the Antichrist?"

Joanna stopped biting her lip, much to Edie's disappointment. "Not necessarily," Joanna said. "There's a roughly 50/50 chance."

"Great," Edie said. "This is not going to help me deal with the teasing at school." She looked at the tufts of hair again, torn out in a fit of passion. Ick.

"Wait," Edie said. "How do you know Robert was the devil?"

"A woman knows such things," Joanna said, remembering her one wild night with Robert. She stared off into space and smiled. Her night with Blake was equally wild, but he definitely wasn't a goat, or the goat.

"If a woman knows such things," Edie said, "how does she not know which one's the father of her child?"

Joanna shrugged. "He's not called the deceiver for nothing." She often wondered what happened to Robert, afterwards, after all the screaming and flailing and thrashing, all the blood, whether he'd moved on, whether he still remembered her, whether he'd been with other women. Joanna doubted it. He seemed loyal, in his own way. Blake too.

Edie poked at the beef jerky with her finger. "I thought you said he was a good man."

"Mostly," Joanna said. "Good in bed, at least." She hesitated again, looking at the splotches of beet juice she'd missed on the refrigerator. "There's more," she said.

"Lovely," Edie said.

Joanna cleared her throat. "There's a chance," she said, "just a chance, that this is why everything in our town is so fucked up."

"Because I'm the Antichrist?"

"Well, you might be. You might be the reason bad things happen here. But you might not be. Especially not if your father's Blake."

"You're saying the town is cursed, because of me?" Edie shook her head. "You've been watching too much Widow's Bay."

"Oh no, it's definitely not cursed. At least I don't think so. It's just that if Robert's your father, all that evil in your DNA, it has to find an outlet, somehow. Nothing supernatural about it. More like a bodily function. Just biology run amok."

Edie pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes, like the expressionless face emoji. "This is not helpful," she said.

"Hence, I wasn't going to tell you," Joanna said. She closed the two boxes. "Forget we ever had this conversation."

Edie's hands shot forward like lightning and grabbed Joanna's wrists before Joanna had a chance to pick up the boxes. Edie's hands felt cold and hot at the same time, like hell frozen over.

"No," Edie said. "They're mine."

Joanna extracted her hands. They felt sunburned. "Okay," Joanna said. "They're yours."

Edie got up, opened the drawer by the sink, and took out a very long carving knife.

"Edie!" Joanna said. "I said they're yours, take them. You don't have to fight me for them."

Edie peeled the Post-its off of both boxes. She opened Blake's box and took his scalped hair out. She did the same with Robert's box and tuft. Like the shell game she'd seen a guy play on a sidewalk downtown before he was struck by lightning, twice, she mixed up the boxes and the tufts of hair until even Joanna couldn't tell which was which. She took one of the boxes, dropped it on the kitchen floor, and stomped on it until it was just a scattering of splinters. She took the remaining box and, with the knife, carved "DAD" in capital letters into the top of the box. The writing wasn't as pretty as Joanna's, but it was definitely permanent. She put both tufts of hair and scalp in the box and closed it. She threw the remnants of the other box and the Post-its in the trash, went to her room and hid the consolidated box in her sock drawer, underneath her socks.

She came back to the kitchen, whistling Mamma Mia, the song, and sat down. She looked at Joanna. "Just like the movie," she said. "Amanda Seyfried doesn't care who her father is, either."

Edie finished her beef jerky and asked her mother for another glass of beet juice.

Bad things still happen in Cadmea, but maybe not quite as many. The bodies from the church implosion were eventually pieced together and buried, and the church was rebuilt as a cinema that shows a mix of cartoons, horror, musicals, and documentaries about natural disasters and cryptids and plane crashes. Charlie lost his other eye in another school bus accident, but everyone blames him now, not the devil or a curse or simply bad luck, and no pupils were killed, even though one bratty little girl in Edie's class never learned to speak again. Edie still walks to school and back, and every once in a while, a bird will tweet at her, knowingly. The trees have grown their leaves back, at least some of them, and flowers bloom when they feel like it. Sometimes, a kid or a teacher will still tease Edie because of her unknown father, the mystery man without a name, but Edie will just smile, and more often than not, the kid or teacher will come to regret it.

When they do, Edie shrugs and reminds them that everything happens for a reason, even in Cadmea.