Alison Clement

My mother died when I was sixteen years old, and they sent me out to Oregon to live with my aunt, Bonnie, who I hardly even knew. Bonnie was a school teacher. She read too many articles about teenagers, and she worried about everything. Later I’d figure out what to say and what not to say around her, but that first year I didn’t care enough to bother. I just acted however I felt like acting. I said whatever I wanted. I didn’t keep secrets. I told her flat out that I believed our family had a curse. I believed it was the family curse that killed my mother, and I intended to do whatever it took to get to the bottom of it. Bonnie could only see my theory as something about my mental health, a red flag I heard her tell a friend.
She would not even stop to look at the facts: one day my mother went for a swim in the ocean like she’d done a hundred times before and she drowned. My grandma died in a house fire, and like that wasn’t enough, my great- grandma died in a dust storm in Oklahoma. Death by water. Death by fire. Death by earth. Get it? Three of the four elements. Water, fire, earth and air.
I wanted to know how the Oklahoma grandmother’s mother died. I wanted to know what kind of death it would be, if it involved the air element. Suffocation? Poisonous fumes? I once heard of a boy who choked to death on a piece of orange. Or you could fall asleep in your house with the gas stove on and never wake up. There were lots of ways you could die by air, but it’s the kind of list you should keep to yourself, I found out.
I wanted to hunt down whatever it was that killed my mother. I thought of it like a person. I thought of it like a serial killer, like a stalker, waiting and watching and planning. It killed my great grandmother Leotia Prince in a dust storm in Oklahoma when she was nineteen years old, and it killed her daughter in a house fire in Georgia thirty-six years later, and then one day while I sat on the beach looking at the sky, it killed my mother, and some day it would come for me too. I didn’t even care about that last part. I wasn’t afraid. I only wanted to make it pay for what it did.
Leotia Prince’s grandmother or great grandmother, or somebody back there, was born in France and she had a sister. My mother told me that story once, but I forget the names. Two French girls. And they came to America. Prince is not a family name, of course. It’s the name of Leotia’s husband.
Aunt Bonnie said I was morose and depressed. She said I needed to get out more, join clubs, make friends, start being a normal teenager again. She said this because she never knew me before. I was never a normal teenager.