From Whence She Came

It is quiet here. Dust motes float in the shafts of light filtering through the slats in the shutters. Spider webs adorn the top of the doorway, and Breanne ducks slightly to avoid entangling her hair.

She sits on the one chair she trusts, causing some of the dust motes to dance, and arranges the tea-towel on the dusty surface of the table. She reaches into her yellow satchel, and pulls out the brown-paper bag, emptying its contents with gentle precision: bottle of grapefruit juice, one egg-salad sandwich on brown bread, one Spartan apple, one slice of cheddar and two ginger-snap cookies. She folds the bag neatly, returning it to the satchel.

The fireplace still has ashes and some charred pieces of wood, and on the mantel, she can see the faint gleam of an object. She moves to pick up the pocketknife, not new, but it doesn’t look old enough. Sitting again, in the creaking chair, she takes out the bottle of hand wipes and cleans the knife, and then her hands. The broken blade explains why it had been abandoned, but not why it is here. He hadn’t had a pocketknife. She lays it beside her tea-towel tablecloth.

She looks over to the stairs. Dare she go up there? Braving termites, spiders and who knows what else?

She wonders if there is any trace of her there: any of her clothes, her books, her secret friends she’d fashioned out of corncobs and rags. She almost smiles at the thought of Sara, naming that almost doll Sara, not even remembering why, or where she’d heard the name, until years later, finding out that that had been her mother’s name. No wonder he’d been so upset, kicking over his chair, throwing the rag-covered corncob in the fire, leaving immediately, not to return that night, nor the next two nights.

She felt the shudder deep inside, moves to stand. And stops, her hand braced on the table, as she sees the broken picture frame on the floor half under the broken sofa. She makes herself move to take it, turn it over.

Empty. What did she expect? A picture of her mother? She’d no recollection that there had ever been one of “that woman who’d just up and left us, because her daddy called, and got herself killed on the bloody railway crossing.”

The only pictures that she’d ever seen on these walls had been from the free calendars the local gas station gave out every year, and the pictures he’d collected from some magazines at the barber shop, some of women, some of cars, some of motorbikes, and one of the Enterprise, “Best damn ship in the Navy. Should never have left her. Only did because of your damn mother, and then she leaves us. Damn her, damn you.”

She looks at the stairs again. Maybe there was something of her mother up there. Then again, probably not. She’d seen the bonfire; gone outside to warm her hands that chilly November morning; watching as he’d thrown in the burning barrel clothes and “those damn books your damn Ma kept getting from the damn library. Well, she aint reading that damn trash no more.”

After the hospital, she’d sat in the car with that nice lady, who’d given her that stuffed bear to hold. “Your aunt is looking forward to meeting you.”

The aunt, her mother’s older sister, who had never stopped reminding her that her coming was “what had messed up my little sister’s life.”

At least Aunt had never hit her, nor starved her.

Had told her to get out at eighteen. “You get a job, I’ve done my duty now.”

She sighs softly. Had done that. Got a job at the library, cataloguing, working with books, finding all her friends in those books, slipping into their lives, their dramas. She’d taken comfort in their successes, empathized with their pain, learned from their growth and felt jealousy over their loves.

She looks to the window. Should she go out to the shed and the burn barrel? She turns back to the stair. Maybe she should dare go up there to see if there were anything of his, anything of hers.

No point really. She hadn’t come to explore, she hadn’t even come to gloat. It is more a… a, and she surprises herself, feeling the tear slide down her left cheek while her eye fills again. She takes out the little packet of tissues and wipes her cheek.

It is a closure.

She has come back here, albeit twenty-two years later. She has come into this house, and will eat this meal, this communion with the frightened little girl who had wondered what she had done to cause it, and why she could never stop it, and how could anyone ever hate that much.

She looks down at her meal.

Stands suddenly. There is one more thing to do. Above the sink is a small square of mirror. She takes a handwipe, and cleans it, repressing a shudder at the parts of spiders and the carcass of mouse trapped in the sink. He had shaved with that mirror, his eyes had looked in there. She holds her hair back with one hand, staring with her left eye, angling her face to see it all. To see the scar, to see the unseeing right eye, to see the damage. A long time she stares.

“I let it affect me too long,” she says, the sound of her voice shattering the dome of despair.

She looks at her lunch.

“You are never ever to eat before I get home,” he had screamed. “How many times do I have to tell you?” And two days she’d waited, before desperation had driven her to have one piece of stale bread and one slice of cheese.

Fighting the tightness in her throat, she sits again, determinedly eating one egg-salad sandwich, one Spartan apple, one slice of cheddar and two gingersnap cookies, washed down with one bottle of juice.

And then I smile.