The Women in the Walls by Amy Lukavics

black hole of grief and loss that never had the chance to develop from my mother’s absence has erupted into existence overnight. I’ve gone from having my aunt and cousin to having neither in less than a month. For the first time in my life, I’m acutely aware that my own mother is gone. In fact, I can’t seem to forget it no matter how hard I try.
    How would things have gone if she never had the brain aneurysm? What kind of person would I be today? Different? Better? Would Margaret and Penelope have been better off living in their tiny apartment in town, bitter about being left out of the will, rather than changing their lives to revolve around me and my father and the club?
    Likely, yes. Running through all the potential possibilities is driving me mad, but it’s still better than focusing on what’s real in my life now: Margaret is gone forever.
    I’m a different person now, I realize as I get back into my bed, the satin sheets as cool as the air in the attic was. The fireplace in my bedroom glows red from the dying embers piled over the stone. I don’t even know who I am without my cousin.
    Is her body still out there? I wonder as I pull the covers up to my chin, my eyes open and staring, unblinking, up at the ceiling. I think about the sound her head made when the tip of the black iron fence exploded through the back of it. Would my father have taken her down from the fence while he waited for officials to arrive?
    What officials he called remains to be seen. Who do you call for something like this? A paramedic? An undertaker? I wonder if Vanessa is still awake, if she’s told her mother about Margaret yet, how Miranda took the news. My father insisted that I go back to bed while he took care of things. I hardly even remember climbing down out of the attic, or making my way back to my bedroom on the second floor. Somewhere in between I stopped to wash my face and hands with scalding water.
    I can practically feel the emptiness of Margaret’s bedroom behind the wall my bed is pushed up against. Tomorrow I should go through her things, take everything I could possibly want before my father hires someone to clear it away and donate it all. I wonder if he feels guilty for ignoring what I told him about Margaret. I hope so.
    After a few deep breaths, I finally gather the courage to close my eyes. I struggle to keep my brain from replaying the events of the night, and the events leading up to it, and the vision of Margaret becoming impaled on the fence with her blood pouring all over the cobblestone and the grass.
    Just a handful of hours ago we were in fancy dresses, eating roast chicken and listening to stupid Gregory Shaw lay into my father about his future with the estate. How did things take a turn so quickly?
    Margaret told me that Penelope had explained things to her about the cemetery in the forest, the same one she went to tonight before she killed herself. When she first saw the place, she freaked out, but this time she had gone all by herself in the middle of the night? It doesn’t make any sense. She must have already lost herself to whatever sickness had awakened in her mind.
    I remember hearing the sound of Margaret through the wall, crying in her room late at night before things went from bad to worse. And how she cried again when she tried to tell me what was going on with her. More clues I should have taken to heart: she never cried.
    I can almost hear the crying now. In fact, uncomfortably so.
    Impossible , I think to myself without opening my eyes. She’s dead. That’s not her crying you hear, it’s just your own messed-up mind remembering the memory too vividly...
    But I do hear it—the sound of Margaret crying in the other room. I must be asleep; there are no ghosts, no matter how much my cousin may have believed otherwise. She was so sure she could hear Penelope, or maybe she just needed to believe it.
    But then I remember something that’s