Chapter Text
It starts with a death in the family.
Which seems to be a recurring pattern in Ophelia’s life. Or so it feels, at least. Ophelia has more memories of being at funerals than she thinks any one person needs, especially at her age. Still, it’s been a while since there’s been such a life-changing death in the family. The most recent one she can think of are her parents; the very event that had left her in her aunt’s care to begin with.
This time, it’s her aunt. The great Olive Specter herself. It’s something that Ophelia hadn’t seen coming at all. For as long as she’s known her aunt, she’s always seemed indestructible. Even in her old age, it had been very hard to see Olive as someone who would just … die someday. Even as the inevitable drew close.
It’s a hard death to process because of that. She’d still been in the middle of trying to figure out how exactly she feels about her aunt, and all this does is make it harder. It always seemed like she had all the time in the world to figure it out; to eventually settle on something concrete instead of fleeting emotions of gratitude and affection. It’s weird to say that she doesn’t know how to feel about the woman she’s been living with since she was twelve years old, and weirder to say that she isn’t sure if she’s grieving or not.
When asked—because god, there are so many people who feel the need to ask—she’ll say she feels sad, but if she’s honest she feels empty, mostly. Worried, too, but Ophelia hasn’t stopped feeling worried since turning thirteen.
It helps very little that she gets almost no time at all to actually grieve; to sit with her feelings and try to figure them out and maybe even work through them. Olive’s body is barely even cold before all the trouble with wills is brought up. It’s hard to call it an exaggeration, either. Olive’s body has only just settled in at the morgue when there’s a knock on her door and a woman in a well starched suit and hair in a too-tight bun is standing on the doorstep of the Specter house, briefcase in hand. She’s an attorney, she says. Olive’s specifically.
She feels like a child’s picture of a lawyer in some ways. She has a practiced smile on her face that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, one that’s trying to express sympathy while remaining business-like and nonthreatening all at once. Ophelia invites her in, because she looks like she expects to be invited in. Ophelia ushers the woman to the kitchen and offers a drink, which she refuses politely. It’s just as well, too. All Ophelia has is bottled water.
She introduces herself as being in charge of things relating to Olive’s estate—for now. She puts a lot of emphasis on the for now, as if it would be nothing but the greatest pleasure in the world for her to not have to deal with any of this. She launches into this clearly rehearsed spiel about what’s to come next and Ophelia’s part in things, and Ophelia sits and tries her best to listen.
As far as Ophelia can make out, everything is left up to her, an adult now in the eyes of the law, to deal with, being the closest living relative anyone can find. She’s in over her head, something the lawyer picks up on quite quickly. Though initially she’d seemed eager to pass the baton on to whatever poor relative would have to handle it all now, she looks to have resigned herself to helping Ophelia with the process. It’s clear she isn’t happy about it—the politeness in her smile is slowly becoming more strained.
“To be quite honest,” she tells her, “I didn’t quite expect just how young you would be. I was thinking her last living relative would be someone much older…not a teenager. You’re barely eighteen.”
Barely is much truer than she realizes. The timing of Olive’s death is something that could be funny to a less paranoid person…happening just days after Ophelia’s birthday. It feels almost as if Olive had been waiting for the exact moment Ophelia turned eighteen.
“Now lucky for you, your aunt already had the details for her funeral planned and paid for. That means I—and you too, of course—have very little we need to do there.”
Ophelia thinks she says that’s good, then. She can’t be sure if the words actually leave her mouth, and if they do, she isn’t quite sure that they’re audible. The more she thinks about it, though, the more she begins to hope that she hadn’t actually said anything, because ‘that’s good, then’ starts to feel like a heartless thing to say in response to news like that. Over and over Ophelia plays the words in her head, tormenting herself with the same two questions of did i say it, or didn’t i? did she hear, or didn’t she?
The lady in the suit doesn’t react, so either the words never get said, heard, or she simply does not find it as weird as Ophelia thinks it to be. Rather, she moves from that topic and on to the next swiftly, completely unconcerned with Ophelia and whether she has any input.
On one hand it is refreshing to not be expected to actually say anything. On the other, the lady moves through conversations at such a fast pace that Ophelia is not sure she would be able to interject even if she did have something to say.
“Our next order of business, then, is sorting out the will. Really, you should be the one doing this, since you’re her next of kin, but given the circumstances—”
And then she loses Ophelia completely. She launches into a long explanation of what should come next, one that does very little to actually explain anything to an eighteen year old girl still in shock over her aunt’s death. Every other sentence that leaves her mouth is one that requires clarification that Ophelia doesn’t ask for, both because she’s a little too stunned to speak and because she’s too nervous to interrupt. By the end of it, Ophelia has managed to make sense of some of what was said, namely that once everything on Olive’s will is sorted on, then Ophelia ends up with…
Nothing, pretty much.
‘Nothing’ is a bit strong. But it’s close to nothing. She gets a little money—just a little. It’s enough to maybe get her through a semester or two of college, should she decide to go. But just about everything else—the house included—goes to a cousin Ophelia hadn’t even known about.
“Did you get all that? Now the important thing here is tracking down her son—do you know who that is?”
Ophelia, too used to this conversation being dominated by the lady in the suit and her unwillingness to let the other person get a word in, is caught off guard for a moment. It takes her a second or two before she realizes she’s actually expected to answer, and that for once the lady will not quickly fill in the gap in the conversation on her own.
“I… No. I… I didn’t know she had a son,” Ophelia says, voice coming out much softer than she’d like.
The lady looks at her as if she’s not quite sure Ophelia is telling the truth. She can’t seem to wrap her head around it. The question forming in her mind is an obvious one: how can two people live together for six years without the topic ever coming up? But her aunt Olive was always a sort of secretive person, and Ophelia had been a child. It’s not the sort of thing Olive would have ever shared with her, even if they had been close enough to talk about things so personal.
…She’d always suspected something, though. With that in mind, maybe it’s not exactly true to say she hadn’t known. Once Ophelia had gotten old enough to piece certain things together, the thought of ‘i think aunt olive might’ve had a child once’ had become a recurring one in her mind. She hadn’t asked, though. It only made sense not to. If Olive refuses to talk about it, and there’s very little to suggest that another child has been here before Ophelia, then it’s clearly not a story with a happy ending.
Ophelia shakes her head, and tries again with something a little more believable, “...No. I mean I… I don’t know where he is.”
The lady hums. “Hm. That’s an issue. We’ll need to confirm he’s at least alive.”
If Olive has left him in her will, then he must have been at some point. Meaning he hadn’t died as a child or anything like that, like Ophelia had always assumed. But if they can’t find him now, then that always leaves that possibility. The possibility that he’s died since then. That Ophelia has gained and lost a family member all at once.
It’s all too common. The Muendas, Nigmos, Specters—whichever name they end up with—and the way that death follows them, closer than it does any other person. It’s as if their family and death itself seem to be engaging in some kind of dance; some sort of routine. It both fascinates and terrifies Ophelia.
“Not much came up when we searched for him. We did find information about him being taken by a social worker at some point. If that’s the case, he may have been placed in one of the homes near here.”
Under her breath Ophelia mutters—or she thinks she does—“that makes sense”. It’s not as if she has to, because the lady in the suit is still just as unconcerned with Ophelia’s input now as she was at the start of the conversation. She does it anyway. Just to feel as though she’s contributing.
If the lady hears, she makes no indication of it. Instead she begins to gather her things—all her documents and what not—and stuff them back into her briefcase.
“Alright. You’ll have to sort that out, then. You can handle that, right? Just finding him, or information about him. Where he is, if he’s alive or dead, that kind of thing. Then you report back to me, and I’ll sort the rest out. That should be easy enough for you, right?”
Ophelia nods. It does not sound as easy of a task as the lady in the suit makes it out to be, but compared to all other things, it’s the only thing that Ophelia can realistically do. And besides, at this point in the conversation, Ophelia is sure she would’ve nodded along to anything at all, just to get things over and done with. For now. She feels half-awake, like everything happening to her now is only a distant memory she’s somehow reliving, or a dream that’s a little too real. The sort of thing that feels like reality as you know it has shifted slightly, just enough for you to start to question things.
Is this really happening right now, or is it not? Or maybe it has all already happened, and if it has, then the question becomes one of ‘did this occur while asleep or awake?’
When she leaves, Ophelia feels like she’s come out of a trance of some sort. The minute the door closes, it’s as if she snaps awake immediately, and everything around her is suddenly much clearer than before. She can hear—louder than she thinks she should be able to—the sounds of heels clicking against stone as the lady in the suit walks to her car, and Ophelia comes to the realization that she hadn’t ever asked for her name, nor had she provided it.
It does little to help how surreal the encounter feels. It begins to feel as if Ophelia had simply made the woman up; had just willed her into existence without meaning to. All her fears and anxieties following her aunt’s death taking on a physical form. Ophelia tries to picture the lady in her mind's eye once more, but finds that details of her face are now hazy. She can barely remember anything that’s been said in any proper detail, either—all that remains are bits and pieces of information that have stuck in her brain. Find your aunt’s son, and plans for aunt Olive’s funeral are already underway are the two that seem to have stuck with her the most.
Maybe this is a dream. Everything, and not just the meeting with the lady in the suit. The past thirty minutes, the past couple days—all of it. Any moment now, Ophelia will jolt awake and find that there is no lady wearing a well starched suit—there never was one and never will be, either—and her Aunt Olive is perfectly fine, and always will be, too.
She’ll be sitting out in her garden in her garden chair like a queen on her throne, like she likes to do. Or perhaps she’ll be in the kitchen, quietly making them both breakfast with the same slightly cross look she has on her face very early in the morning. Maybe neither. Maybe she’ll be doing nothing. But at least she will be here to do it.
Ophelia closes her eyes tight, and tells herself that once she opens them, that will be exactly the case. She’ll count to ten very, very slowly, just to give it enough time to be true, and then the weird dream will be over and done with, nothing but an uncomfortable memory. A reality she won’t have to actually deal with for hopefully a long time.
It’s hard—and has always been hard—for her to know how she feels about her aunt. Even now it’s hard to say for sure that she really misses her. Even now, when all she wants more than anything in the world right now is for her aunt to be here, alive, and for things to be back to how they used to be. Even now, when she has her eyes shut so tight it almost hurts, wishing for the return of an aunt she isn’t sure she loves with an intensity far greater than anything she’s felt for her while alive.
Ophelia counts, and she hopes with all her heart. Things will be different when she opens her eyes again. Things will be normal.
When Ophelia opens her eyes again, the only thing that’s changed is that her cheeks are wet with tears.