The House of Singing Swans

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Frankie

Closing time at the library was my favorite part of the day. After gently escorting the last of the patrons out and clicking the heavy deadbolt into place, the silence finally belonged to me. I could turn on the music, a soft acoustic backdrop to the rhythmic work of restocking shelves and straightening chairs. It was peaceful. It was perfect. It was the kind of predictable normal that the rest of my life never seemed to make space for.

I finished wiping down the reading tables and made one last round of checks to ensure the world outside was locked away. Grabbing my purse and jacket, I headed to the staff entrance, my mind already drifting toward the weekend. I was twenty-seven, but my idea of a wild Friday night was a hot cup of tea and the new hardback I'd managed to tuck away on a high shelf for myself.

The drive home was always too short. It never gave me time to prepare for whatever was waiting on the other side of my front door. I still lived in my childhood home, a necessity since my paycheck was the only thing keeping my mother afloat. But lately, the house had grown crowded. My aunt Katherine and her daughter Louise had moved in after Katherine's latest relationship imploded in a spectacular mess, right in the middle of her breast cancer treatments.

My cousin Louise and I were used to the wreckage. We'd grown up watching our mothers burn through marriages, engagements, situationships and flings with reckless abandon. We were born in the same month and looked enough alike that, in the right light, people mistook us for twins. But that was where the similarities ended.

Watching my mother's heart break over and over again had taught me that the only way to find peace was to avoid the game entirely. Louise, however, was determined to repeat every single one of our mothers' mistakes, and probably invent a few new ones just to keep things interesting. Peace wasn't something Louise prioritized. In fact, I wasn't sure she even knew how to spell the word.

Walking through the front door, the familiar rhythm of a card game drifted from the kitchen. My mother and aunt were already at the table, the sharp snap of cards against wood punctuating their laughter. They heard the door click shut and called out in unison for me to come in. Their wine glasses were full, though the bottle between them was dangerously close to empty.

"Hello, dear," my mother cooed, looking up with a bright, wine-flushed smile. "I hope you had a good day at work."

Despite her spectacular inability to maintain a relationship with a man, she was a good mother. She never let her romantic wreckage interfere with our bond. It was the reason she went to such exhausting lengths to keep this house through every breakup and legal shenanigan.

I gave her a distracted, one-armed side hug as I mumbled something that could have meant anything from "it was fine" to "it was hell." My aunt Katherine watched us, her lips pursing as if she were tallying up a small slight, so I leaned over and gave her a quick hug, too. Katherine loved my mother, but she couldn't tolerate being left out of anyone's affection for more than a few seconds.

I scooped some dinner from the pan my mother had left warming in the oven and sat with them for a few minutes. I listened as they played their game, trading stories of past adventures and gossiping about every available man within a fifty-mile radius. Neither of them was willing to admit defeat in the game of love, even if the scoreboard suggested they should have retired years ago.

After my third yawn, I cleaned my plate and started toward the stairs. I walked slowly, careful not to spill a single drop from the hot cup of tea I carried. All I wanted was to disappear into my big, fluffy reading chair with a story of pirates and revenge.

Time passed in a flash while I was reading. I had no idea how late it was until the front door slammed open, the heavy thud announcing Louise's arrival. Friday nights, when she was between romances, were reserved for prowling local clubs with her single, and single-presenting, girlfriends. When we were younger, she'd tried everything to drag me along. She'd cajoled, bribed, and flattered, but my steadfast refusal to entertain men who looked at us like packaged meat had eventually earned me the title of "ultimate buzz-kill." She didn't ask me to go out anymore.

That suited me just fine.

Watching heartbreak second-hand was exhausting enough; I was certain that experiencing it first-hand was a special kind of hell. I made it a point never to put myself in the line of fire. I declined dinner invitations from library patrons and perfected the art of the cold shoulder for men who approached me in public looking for easy prey.

Men in books were so much easier to live with. Their lack of integrity didn't cost me anything personally. I could escape their schemes and their selfishness with the simple snap of a cover. The pain they caused was ink on a page, and the chaos they created was confined to a life that wasn't mine.

Usually, I only had to deal with that chaos when Louise or our mothers brought it home with them. I was the professional shoulder to cry on, the bearer of the tissue box, and the designated listener. I was the one who would coo that the next time would be different, even when I knew it wouldn't. I was a walking rehab center for the broken hearts of the women in my family.

I listened as Louise stumbled up the stairs, her footsteps bouncing unevenly along the hallway until she found her door. I heard her half-fall inside her room, a muffled thud followed by silence. She would need ibuprofen and a gallon of water in the morning. Taking that as my cue to call it a night, I closed my book and clicked off the lamp, drifting off to dream of adventures that stayed safely between the lines of a story.

The next morning found me in the kitchen, the rhythmic sizzle of pancakes on the griddle providing a steady beat for the heavy silence at the table. The other women in the house were nursing varying degrees of hangovers with strong coffee and buttered carbs. I hummed quietly to myself, flipping a golden-brown circle of batter while Katherine began to grill Louise about her exploits from the night before.

Katherine shouldn't have been drinking the night before. She was still in recovery from breast cancer treatment, and alcohol was no friend to her immune system. But sometimes she and my mother treated themselves anyway, a desperate reach for a "normal" that had long since slipped through their fingers. Katherine's brow wrinkled, her eyes sharp as she pressed Louise for details on her late night.

It was clear Louise wasn't in the mood for a confession. She was evasive, offering vague mentions of the usual friends and the usual haunts while staring into her mug. Katherine's attempt to live vicariously through her daughter's nightlife was being thoroughly thwarted, much to my aunt's consternation. In her mind, what was the point of having a beautiful young daughter with an active social life if she couldn't relive her own heyday through her?

I finished the last of the pancakes and brought my plate to the table. I could feel the tension rising, a familiar spark that usually led to a full-blown fight. They needed a distraction, so I stepped in. I told them about a library patron who had tried to sneak a tiny orange kitten into the building in a backpack, and soon they were laughing at the antics of our furry little trespasser.

The fire was out, at least for now. We finished breakfast, cleaned up the kitchen, and went our separate ways to enjoy the rest of the weekend in a fragile, hard-won peace.