Happy New Year, Hazel

Lena had strong feelings on the topic of New Year’s resolutions. In her dim, near-sighted eyes, resolutions were nothing but fodder for those useless members of society who felt the sudden urge to turn their lives around for all of two weeks. Of course, she always had to remember with some reluctance as she fiddled the piece of worn paper in her pocket, that she herself had made her fair share of New Year’s resolutions. From the years of ten to somewhere around twenty-four, Lena created goals glowing with grandeur with the best of them. Losing ten pounds had been the most recent, right alongside learning Swedish and baking every week. Lena hated to bake, and that goal had been killed most swiftly, ending with a kitchen fire and tears on January tenth. She still remembered a few phrases in Swedish, having continued her linguistic pursuits into the month of March where she burned all her notes in a fit of rage that resulted from her slow learning capabilities and ability to memorize nothing but a few blasphemes. The fitness resolution had lasted the longest, reaching until the next January and the next year. This happened to be because Lena had almost immediately forgotten about her resolution to lose extra poundage, perhaps in the same way that the mind will block a memory too traumatic and horrible to recall.

Still, Lena counted that year as her longest standing resolution. Past that, Lena began to resent resolutions, finding it more palatable to live her life exactly as she pleased and without an ounce of guilt along the way. Years passed with many a New Year’s Eve party, ranging from the exciting and flamboyant to the solitary and peaceful. Lena’s age mounted, and she began to pull away from the wild scene in which she had spent her twenties and early thirties. A man joined her life somewhere along the way, against a grief stricken resolution that a broken-hearted Lena had made at eighteen. Lena had either forgotten this, or chose to and it was with a soft smile that was rarely seen on her face that she stood at an alter and said “I do”. Fifteen months passed, and she declined an invitation to a party destined for December 31^st. Five months ago Lena had turned thirty-six, and only five days ago her daughter had turned six months old. Lena felt peaceful. More than that, she felt right with the world every time she looked into the russet eyes of the smiling child that she had so aptly named Hazel.  

Within a shorter time than either Lena and her husband could have ever imagined, Hazel was already celebrating New Year’s with them. Lena felt that she had only blinked when Hazel smiled at her parents and raised her first glass of champagne at 11: 59 on December 31^st. That New Year’s felt sour to Lena and with the cries of “Happy New Year”, the graying woman wondered where in the hell the last twenty-one years had gone. But she couldn’t be unhappy, and the sourness faded with every laughing glance of her daughter’s brown eyes. For after all, Lena reasoned, it didn’t matter where the years had gone. What mattered was the person that sat in front of her now, so different and yet so similar to the baby that Lena had brought into this world. The baby that had become an accomplished young woman who still had so many years in front of her.

Lena had been planning the celebrations for Hazel’s twenty-second birthday when her daughter would return home from college the coming week when the call came. She never had time to guess what the call was about and never would have guessed correctly had she thought about it, not with how engrossed she was in next week’s plans. She answered the call with a lilting tone, although she didn’t recognize the number. The officer’s voice carried just the right amount of sympathy on the other line, enough to give the impression that he cared, but cool enough to relay the needed information. He finished speaking and waited for the response of a shaken mother. The response formed in the succinct click of the telephone line. Lena knew she was too young to have a heart attack, but something seized her heart in a metallic claw, gripping and gripping until arteries popped and blood spurted, leaving a broken, torn husk of an organ. She began to rock back and forth, clutching her chest as though the tightness of her arms would relieve that breath-taking pain that washed over her in thick black waves. Words echoed in her head, bouncing off the walls and ignoring the screams for them to silence. Body found this morning. On campus. Foul play. No suspect yet. Murdered.

Lena’s husband found her laying on the floor, shaking with the sobs that had been coming for two hours and couldn’t be stopped. He stood over her; both of them wondered why he wouldn’t move to help her. It was as though Lena were drawing together both of their emotions, leaving him empty and dry and her rattling with the psychotic fervor that some call true sadness. Finally he sat and rested a hand on her shoulder, a hand that held no comfort other than weight. He waited for her to quiet as the sun began to fall below the horizon, casting long golden streaks across their living room. With the darkness that eventually obscured the windows and left them in a cold and dim shadow, Lena sat up. Her worn face was streaked with tears, her salt and peppered brown hair fell unkempt into her eyes. No words were exchanged as neither knew what could be said now. Falling on the reliability of routine, Lena rose to her feet and began to work on building their supper. Her husband retreated to their bedroom and changed out of his suit, replacing it with a pair of sweatpants. He sat on the bed and stared, listening to the clanks of Lena moving about in the kitchen.

They rejoined at the dinner table, neither of them moving a fork to even prod the spaghetti on their plates. The clock ticked the moments, the sound loud and echoing in the silence. When ten minutes had passed, Lena rose and cleared the table. Her husband picked up the paper and read without processing.

Both tried to stop their separation with little success. Three months had passed since the murder of Hazel, and neither could stand to be in the same house doing the same things with the same person. Not when there gaped such a large hole. Lena shed no tears on this matter, and she and her husband shook hands with all the warmth of two strangers. They no longer knew if they had ever loved each other, or if was their daughter that forced the appearance of love. Without her, they had neither. Lena moved without direction, ending up in her hometown in a small apartment near the town square. Another three months passed, and Lena thought without acting. She sat her kitchen table and sipped coffee, thinking. She stood in the shower, thinking. She lay in bed, her brain whirring too deliberately to sleep. On the morning of New Year’s Eve she had almost come to a decision. Nightfall found her standing in her living room, looking out the window toward the town square where people gathered to celebrate the coming year. Without yet acknowledging it, Lena had made her decision. Opening a notebook, she tore out a scrap of paper and sat down at her kitchen table. Clicking her favorite pen, she pressed tip to paper and in her careful, scrawling handwriting she wrote her first New Year’s Resolution in almost thirty years. Appointing a period to the end of the sentence, she folded the paper and placed it into her pocket. She left the next day without telling anyone where she planned to go.

Two days later she appeared at the college that Hazel had been attending. She stayed for several weeks and moved on. March saw her buy a small RV with cash. Time passed, and soon it was years before her husband realized that neither had checked in on the other. Upon calling her cellphone, he received a brief answer from the woman who had once been his lover. Her briskness would have wounded him had it not also been for the surprisingly pleasant tone of her voice. There was something else in it as well, and it took him some time to figure out what it was. Determination. Direction.  

Lena’s joints began to ache and when she looked in the mirror, she winced at the wrinkles that looked back and the gray that had overwhelmed any color left in her hair. But life remained in her eyes, a tiny flame reflecting her soul. Any time that flame began to die, she pulled that tattered piece of paper from her pocket and scanned the words. Despite the amount of time that had passed, Lena felt no worry. For the years had yielded a great deal, and the walls of her RV were papered with newspaper clippings, stolen police reports, and disjointed notes. Underneath the driver’s seat Lena had tucked a Colt .45. It was a simple affair, nothing fancy. She had limped into a gun store a month ago and paid three hundred and fifty dollars cash for it. The man behind the counter had seemed curious as to why a woman of her age would be buying such a weapon instead of yarn and knitting needles, but she didn’t feel the need to enlighten him.

A jolt had gone through her when she finally found the name. It took her another several months to check and double check and then check again. Her grief did not blind her to the mistake of dealing justice to one who didn’t deserve it. But everything added up. All she had left to get was the confession itself.

Lena stood now, leaning on her cane in the abandoned warehouse. She held her Colt in her right hand, and kept a recorder tucked into the band of her loose fitting jeans. The recorder had caught everything, including the confused but desperate confession of the middle-aged man that had avoided justice for twenty-two years after fleeing his black-hearted campus crime, and now found himself facing eternity in the eyes of the elderly woman that stared him down harder than the cold barrel of the Colt pistol against his forehead.

The shot had been louder than either of them expected, although the man didn’t have much time to ponder the fact. Lena dropped the pistol next to the man’s hand. She wasn’t sure what to expect now. Would it be grief, rage, shock at what she had done? Instead, it was nothing. Her mind felt clearer than it had in years. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew that worn scrap of paper, the words almost too smudged to be read. But she didn’t need to read them. She had memorized them the first time she wrote them. Pulling a lighter from her pocket, she clicked it several times until a yellow flame blossomed, mirroring the one that had burned in her soul for so long. She held the flame to the paper, watching it catch and hold before dropping it onto the still chest of the body beneath her. The paper curled and shriveled into a tiny pile of ashes that trembled in a faint breeze. For the first time in her life Lena had completed a New Year’s Resolution, exactly twenty-two years after it had been vowed. The watch on her wrist ticked the time, alerting her to the new year that had just passed. She closed her eyes and smiled, breathing her words into the night. Happy New Year, Hazel.