There are white picket fences and tricycles and fluffy puppies that look more like stuffed animals and screaming gaggles of children running through the streets. This neighborhood isn't nothing like anything I ever had. My mother settled only in the most posh of places- with the cold older couples next door who drank wine like it was water and hosted snooty parties where all anyone ever did was sit in tense silence and pretend to be smarter than the person they were seated next to.
I suppose it's only karma feeling guilty that they live here now, in such a perfect little suburb so unlike anything else in the shattered remains of my family.
I walk past a flower-painted mailbox to walk up to the front steps. There's a cat's entrance below my feet when I knock hesitantly on the wooden front door. At first there's no movement from inside but then the knock turns and the door swings open to reveal Michael's familiar surfer-dude self.
"Maya!" Michael states, seemingly pleasantly surprised. He's barefoot and clad in a faded green The Cure tee and khaki pants. My brother-in-law steps back and aside, waving me inside. I walk stiffly into their lovely home. Carpeted staircases. Framed pictures of a child's handprints. Sloppy kid paintings of stick figures and suns above them that look like toothpicks stuck in a ball. Normal. So much normal.
"Miracle, honey? Your aunt is here to see you," Michael calls up the carpeted staircase, looking so much more relaxed than he did at my mother's funeral. I can't stop staring at him and I hope it doesn't freak him out. All I can think is: he married my sister. I know, big realization of the century, right? But... he's almost all of her that I have left. My sister chose this person right here. He's a little hard to get along with, but my sister chose him out of all of the boys who chased after her. I can't help but want to know why.
"Aunty Maya!" I hear a squeal, and then the charging of feet down the staircase. A whirl of blonde hair rushes at me and almost sends me straight into my back.
"Woah, kiddo!" I grimace slightly as my stomach flares up angrily, but I can't help but smile when I see Mira's excited face.
"But Dad said you probably weren't ever coming back!" Mira states bluntly. I look accusingly at Michael, and he meets my gaze evenly. Fair enough.
"I told you I had some unfinished business to take care of, love. I took care of it. And now I can finally see you again," I tell my niece. Her head tilts almost imperceptibly, her eyes wide and curious. She examines me closely, her eyes calculating like her mother's were.
"There's blood on your shirt," she finally says, eyes fixated on my stomach. I look down and internally sigh. The bandage must be soaked through already, even though Dave found some new gauze and helped me change the dressing this morning. It's leaking out onto my Snoopy shirt and causing a gruesome red blob.
Michael eyes me curiously, probably wondering what the hell I've been up to. He probably thinks I'm in the mafia or something sketchy like that, what with all of the meager evidence I've given him that I deal with violence and mysterious shit like that.
"Oops. Hey, um... Where's your bathroom at?" Michael rolls his eyes slightly and points down the hall. I feel Mira watching me with curious eyes boring into my back as I turn and walk down the hall. I'm further assaulted by more photos of Mira growing up- birthday pictures, hugging friends I don't know, amazing vacations I will never be a part of. It's makes me feel horrible to know that I missed all of that. It was worth it to keep her safe, the rational part of my brain convinces me. Would you have rather been known as Constantly-Drunk Aunty?
I find some gauze in the medicine cabinet and use sports tape to fix it to the stinging wound on my stomach. I roll the used, bloody gauze up in toilet paper and bury it at the bottom of the trash can. When I stand back up fully, I meet my expression in the mirror. My skin is pale and makeup-less, my blue eyes tired but content. My blonde hair is limp and still slightly damp from the shower I took this morning, and overall I basically look like I put no effort into my appearance whatsoever. Good. It makes me feel human.
When I finally leave the bathroom, Mira and Michael are gathered in the kitchen. Mira's seated at the breakfast bar and sipping at a glass of milk and Michael's speaking to her in a low voice beside the fridge. When I enter the room, they both go quiet and turn to look at me. Mira's expression is that of complete joy, while Michael just looks carefully unambiguous.
"Would you like anything to drink?" Michael asks me. I shake my head and he shrugs in return.
There's an awkward silence before Mira finally pats the upholstered stool next to her, giving me permission to sit. I accept gladly.
"So... how's life?" I ask dumbly. "Still aspiring to be a fairy princess when you grow up?" Mira grins again, her smiles making the kitchen seem a few shades brighter each time.
"Actually, I want to be a marine biologist," the twelve year-old tells me. "My best friend, Katie- her mom is a marine biologist and she's super cool. I would love to pet dolphins and stuff like that."
"Are you in any sports?" God. This is awful. How do I not know all of these things about my own niece? I sound like a complete stranger. This is the girl I used to have fairy tea parties with. She's Chrissy's daughter. My niece. How was I not a part of her life? It was all to keep you safe. Do I believe that, really? Some part of me wonders if it wasn't just because I couldn't face any reminder of my sister after she died without having a complete mental breakdown. Was I being selfish when I left my only niece in a coma and didn't come back for six freaking years? (Well, when you put it that way...)
I just don't want you to turn out like me, I think when I stare at Mira. And that's the pathetic truth. I've been avoiding her because she reminds me too much of me when I was at a point in my life where everything was going wrong. I'm just a selfish bitch for thinking that I could avoid my perfect little niece for so long just because she brought back some memories I'd rather not face. It's not Mira's fault I'm so screwed up.
Mira's prattling on about some soccer league she's joined, and she accentuates her one-sided conversation with swooping hand gestures and bright expressions. As I watch her I think about how every single part of her is a shadow of my sister. And you know what? Maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.
"What do you do, Aunty?" Mira asks. She glances at her father when she says this, and when I follow my niece's gaze to him he blushes a little bit. It seems I've been the topic of conversation before in the Price household. He totally thinks you're in the mafia, my brain whispers.
"I help people," I answer vaguely. I meet Michael's eyes and hope he knows that I'm telling the truth this time. I'm not a danger to him or his daughter anymore. I'm worthy of the Aunty Maya title.
"Are you a superhero?" She bats long eyelashes and looks completely serious. It almost renders me speechless. I finally decide to tell the truth. It's a new thing I've been trying.
"You got me there," I reply nonchalantly, resting my chin on my fist and blinking slowly like I'm bored. Michael's eyes widen and immediately flicker to the bloodstain on my shirt and then up to my face to see if I'm telling the truth.
"No way!" Mira squeals. She practically rocks the stool she's sitting on back and forth in her bubbling excitement. Her milk glass is quickly abandoned. "Are you really?"
"How else can I do this?" I dance my fingers around for show, and then make a tiny pink flower sprout up on the countertop before where she's sitting. She immediately shrieks with delight. A glowing smile overtakes my face. I used to hate these abilities. I thought of my illusions as a curse. But now that I can control them, I see them for what they really are: a gift. An opportunity to create something beautiful. (I totally win the cheesy quotes contest, by the way.)
"You're... that Guardian Angel lady, aren't you?" Michael asks carefully, staring at the counter long after the flower evaporates back into the air. Mira looks at me like I'm a ten foot-tall stuffed unicorn.
"In the flesh," I reply. I look back down at Mira after Michael continues to stare at the countertop in disbelief. Am I really trusting a twelve year-old with my secret identity? Yup. She's not just any twelve year-old, after all. She's my niece.
"I have a poster of you!" Mira gushes. She grabs my hand and before I can even stutter out a proper reply to that bizarre statement, she's dragging me off my stool with surprising force and over to the staircase.
"They make posters of the Guardian Angel? I didn't even think she was popular," I protest as I follow the hyper girl up to her bedroom. I have to admit- I'm pretty excited.
"See! Some guy was selling posters of all the superheroes at the Farmer's Market. Yours was the coolest so Dad bought it for me. He says he likes that a kid can have a female superhero role model person that isn't dressing like a Victoria's Secret supermodel," Miracle says in her typical no-nonsense way. She opens her bedroom door and immediately I see the life-size poster hanging above her bed.
It's a drawing of the Guardian Angel standing on the city sidewalk, her hands in her hoodie pockets and her face shadowed by her hood, her head tilted toward the ground and a faint smile visible on the lower half of her face. A stray lock of brown hair escapes from her hood and falls over her shoulder. But the most magnificent thing about the poster are the wings.
"Artistic license, I suppose. I asked Dad about it," Miracle explains. I'm too busy staring at the poster. Huge silvery angel wings burst from my shoulders like I'm the girl from that one James Patterson series. I look crazy badass and cool. I look like someone's guardian angel. I told myself I wouldn't become a superhero for fame in anyway, but I never said things like this weren't nice.
"Is this how Birchwood City sees me?" I walk over and touch the poster, just to make sure it's actually real.
"I mean, without the wings, obviously." Miracle grins. I can see superhero memorabilia smattered all over her room- on her shelves, her desk, her walls- even her wastebasket has local superhero emblems all over it. "I'm a bit of a nerd," she explains with no embarrassment whatsoever.
"You are so much like your mother," I tell her without even thinking. Chrissy was also a huge nerd, is what I want to say also. She loved that stuff too and it killed me because after I got my own "gifts" I hated superheroes because they could control their abilities and I couldn't.
"Thank you," Miracle replies, jerking me from my thoughts. Before I know it, she has her skinny little arms wrapped around me and her head buried into my shoulder. (Yes, I'm that short.) A single tear runs down her face, and it's sooner joined by another. I feel my own eyes welling up and soon we're both crying quietly into each other's shoulders like a pair of mourners at a funeral. This is not how I imagined this going, my brain says. But would I really want it to go differently?
No, I think as I hug my niece tighter. I glance up through tear-blurred eyes at the poster of the Guardian Angel and her magnificent wings. No I would not.
YOU ARE READING
Super?
Adventure"Stop pretending to be an idiot, idiot." Ouch. It burns. "You're starting to sound like a dear old friend of mine," she adds, her tone implying that her "friend" isn't so much of a "friend" as a mortal enemy who she probably also dragged into an all...
