Unbound, page 2
“Where did everyone go?” I was trying to connect the pieces, but I felt thick and unreasonably calm, as if hold ups at the local convenience store were all part of a typical day.
Instead of answering, Sam left me standing on unsteady legs and peered out the front door, his head swinging back and forth as he looked up and down the sidewalk. Satisfied, he stepped back into the store. “They left.”
“Who were they, Sam?” My heart jumped in my chest, pushing against this inexplicable tranquillity, trying to find its usual panicked rhythm.
He shook his head. “Bad men.”
“What about the other customer? The tall one? Where is he?”
Sam locked the door and moved quickly towards the back of the store, still avoiding my eyes. “I don’t know Rashelle. He left too. But you’re okay? Not hurt?”
I felt numb, as if my emotions had been wrapped in cellophane, but I wasn’t hurt and I told him so.
“Shouldn’t you call the police?” I felt curious about my lack of anxiety as I said that. Why wasn’t I more frightened by what had just happened? Was this what shock felt like?
“No police,” he said, shaking his head.
Nodding as if this was a perfectly reasonable response, I unlocked the door and left the store. Standing on the sidewalk, I looked up and down the street, just as Sam had. The rain had stopped and the last of the morning’s commuters had closed their umbrellas and loosened their jackets. But the person I was looking for, the one I always looked for, was gone. Again.
A surge of disappointment pushed itself forcibly into my cloudy thoughts and I sagged a little under its weight. The thought of going back to work, of spending one more minute trying to make the best of this already horrible day, was so unappealing that I reached for my cell and called Jane as I walked in the direction of home.
“Rachel!” Her voice beamed motherly concern at me through the phone. “I thought you’d gotten lost. Where’s the milk?”
I cursed silently as I realized the milk was still sitting on the counter at Sam’s. Guilt bloomed up in my chest, riding shotgun to the uneasiness I was beginning to think had made a permanent home there. “Hey Jane. Um, I’m not feeling well?” It came out sounding more like a question than I’d intended it to.
Fortunately, Jane’s maternal instincts were in overdrive and she didn’t seem to notice. “You did look flushed this morning,” she said. “Poor you! Where are you? Do you need help?”
“I’m around the corner. I um, didn’t make it all the way to the store,” I said, sounding as pathetic as I felt. “I think I just need to go home and rest.” I slumped my shoulders and then felt ridiculous as I realized she couldn’t see me.
“That’s probably best. You don’t seem yourself at all today. Take care, okay kiddo?”
I thanked her, grateful for having an understanding boss and knowing that trying to concentrate on my work would be pointless. It was always like this after I saw him. Days could pass in a stupor, filled with half formed ideas and unanswered questions.
Throwing myself on my bed when I got home, I crawled underneath my blankets and felt just as sick as I had told Jane I was. The unnatural sense of serenity had fled and was replaced by pangs of anxiety and self-doubt, mixed with serious questions about my sanity. Reaching down, I pulled the paper out of my pocket and twined it through my fingers, tracing each number with my eyes, committing it to memory.
I felt weary as the tears came, tired of struggling so hard to do what others did without trying. Tired of being different, tired of being so broken. In a flash of irritation, I wiped my eyes and sat up, grabbing my phone. Fingers shaking, I dialed the first few digits, then stopped, staring at the black screen. What if being normal also meant losing him? I hit cancel and put the paper under my pillow and flopped over on my stomach. I promised myself I’d call tomorrow, knowing that this was only the lie I repeated to help me get through another day.
As I felt myself drifting to sleep, I tried to recreate that last moment in the store, the moment he had turned around and I had seen his eyes. Eyes that I had first seen when I was five years old.
* * * * *
“Rachel! Now please.”
That morning, my mother had stood at my bedroom door, arms folded. “I’m going to start counting.”
Leaving my motley crew of stuffed animals stranded on my bed, I darted to the hall closet, pulled my coat off the hanger, jammed my feet into my boots and quietly slipped under her arm towards the sidewalk.
A late November wind ripped the few remaining leaves from the trees to mingle with the garbage that coasted along the curb in front of our house. Realizing that I’d forgotten my mittens, I shoved my hands into my pockets and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
We stopped at the park on the way, sitting on the cold, hard bench while she drank her coffee, watching as the squirrels scurried across the ground, foraging the last scraps of the harvest while the weather held.
My mother and I filled in the long hours until my father came home as best as we could. Like toys discarded in the playroom, we only truly came to life when my father walked through the door at the end of the day. Busying ourselves with household tasks, we allowed the minutiae of ordinary life to distract us for as long as possible, until – with the banking done and the dry cleaning dropped off – we would wander over to the park to wait. And watch.
That day, the first time I saw him, we hadn’t stayed at the park for very long. My mother had grudgingly begun her overseas Christmas shopping that afternoon, hoping to package up and ship off the gifts for her Scottish in-laws ahead of the holiday rush. Thoroughly uninterested in helping her pick out pyjamas for my cousin Dawn, I trailed behind her as she impartially flipped through racks of polyester nightgowns. With my eyes squeezed tightly shut and one hand stretched out in front of me, I used the belt of my mother’s winter coat like a lifeline. Fumbling along cheerfully, I was pretending I was blind.
Eventually growing tired of my game – mostly because my mother had stood in one place for so long – but also because my arm was starting to ache from holding it out in front of me, I let my eyes slide open and turning my head slightly, was stunned into stillness.
Past the racks of children’s clothes, near the entrance of the department store, lay a Christmas village built completely out of gingerbread. Almost as tall as I was, the walls of the houses were stacked upon cotton candy snowdrifts – the crystallized sugar a fair mimic of ice warmed by the sun. The warm smell of cinnamon wafted under my nose as I gazed in wonder at the chocolate wafer streets that had been patterned like cobblestones and lined with candystick light posts. At the end of the street, a licorice car was stopped at a cherry red lollipop stop sign.
Captivated, I drifted towards the village, staring at the snow-capped peaks on the roof. Was it icing? Tentatively, I reached out with one finger to touch the outer edge of the sugary wall and stopped, suddenly aware of the slack in my other hand. Looking back, I stared uncomprehending at the tan belt that lay on the floor like a sick snake, no longer attached to my mother’s coat. No longer attached to my mother. She was gone.
Looking around wildly, stomach clenched and eyes stinging with soon- to be- shed-tears, my hands fluttered up from my sides like two startled birds from a hedge. With a sickening lurch, I realized I was alone. I caught a glimpse that day, understood the fragile wall that stands between our sense of security and anonymity. Between being loved and being annihilated by loneliness.
Seconds before I melted down into a hysterical, I want-my-mommy kind of panic that only young children are capable of, I felt a hand rest comfortingly on my head. Gazing up, I saw a man with kind grey eyes staring down at me. He wore leather gloves that were soft on my hair and he smelled really good, like new wool and musk.
Looking back, I realize I should have been scared. Instead, I’d admired the long tartan scarf he wore loosely wrapped around his neck, underneath his long dark coat. I had almost reached out to touch it as he knelt down beside me, wondering if it was as soft as it looked. The man with the grey eyes that smiled, even though his mouth did not, said, “Don’t be afraid,” and I realized I wasn’t.
Something about his deep, warm voice was familiar and I thought maybe he knew me, or maybe he was a teacher at my school, because I wasn’t really feeling shy, like I usually did. Instead, it felt like he liked me. I think it was because he looked right at me, and not through me, like most adults do with kids.
As I looked silently back at him, he reached for my hand and placed it firmly in his own. We walked to the counter of the department store together, this tall man with the nice-smelling leather gloves and kind eyes. He waited his turn in line and then smiled at the clerk and inquired politely if she might make an announcement.
Glancing up at him, I’d felt completely safe, as if nothing had ever been more natural than to be hand in hand with a stranger in the mall. I would have left with him, if he’d asked me to.
Instead, he had leaned down to me and whispered, “Stay safe, Rachel, I’ll be watching for you,” and then he walked away, leaving me with the department store clerk. She looked very disappointed that he didn’t stay.
But the reason I remember that day so clearly, the reason I think I remember this at all, is because I am sure, certain in fact, that I never said a word.
I never told him my name.
* * * * *
My eyes were open for a full second before I remembered where I was. What day it was. The evening light cast pale shadows across my walls. I sat up, stunned into a stupor from a nap that had stretched through the afternoon and into the early evening. Turning lights on as I moved through the apartment, I checked the front door and noticed my mother’s work shoes weren’t on the mat where she usually put them. More than likely she’d picked up a double shift at the hospital. She did that all the time. Why not? It’s not like she had anything, or anyone, important to come home to.
Moving into the living room, I stood by the window staring out at the streetlights and early evening traffic, watching for her car and knowing it wasn’t coming all at the same time. I could feel gloominess wrapping around me like a blanket and shaking my head, I moved swiftly to my bedroom and changed quickly into my running clothes, fearing that losing any more ground today would be disastrous.
On the street, I felt better almost instantly. Hardly three blocks into my route and my thoughts were clearer, my mood less grey. I concentrated on my foot strikes on the pavement, counting rhythmically as I tried to drown out my regrets and worries, tried to listen only to my breathing and my heart as it pushed blood through my veins. When I felt like this I could almost forget everything that felt wrong in my life. Everything that had been wrong since my father had died.
Our house had always been quiet, but the year I turned thirteen it had become as silent as the grave. My father’s grave, actually. That October, my father’s constant indigestion had turned out to be colon cancer. It was over quickly – six months from start to finish. And in that short time my mother and I had slowly and silently withdrawn into our own grief. After he left us, we wandered the house like strangers, as if my father was the sun that had held our family in orbit for all of these years, and without him, we were no longer connected in any meaningful way.
Nights were the hardest, dinners non-existent. Neither of us even wanting to pretend we had the energy or the appetite to make pleasant companions. I grazed throughout the day and my mother simply stopped eating for a while. Noticing her jeans sagging around her hips one morning, I looked at the dark bruises under her eyes and began to worry. About her health. Her heart. Her sanity. Whenever I confronted her about my concerns, she gave vague reassurances that sounded indifferent, at best. Sometimes she said nothing at all.
That was worse, I think.
She didn’t sleep well. For months, I would wake in the night and pad silently to her room to find her sitting on the edge of her perfectly made bed watching reruns of some old sitcom. She would barely glance in my direction before returning dead eyes back to the ghostly flickering light of the television screen. Every so often I stayed there, watching her, waiting for her to move, to cry, to react. To comfort me.
She never did.
Money became an issue. I knew that my Dad had left enough to give her some breathing room, but the stack of bills teetered precariously in the front hall, unpaid. Telephone messages from the director of the hospital clogged our voicemail: at first gentle requests, then more insistent, and then finally, reluctant ultimatums. I didn’t think she could work in the state she was in. She could barely face her own life, never mind saving others. It was as if she’d gone missing. I think she was waiting for him to bring her back. I think I was, too.
Aching and angry, I did my best and tried to hold things together. My mother had lost a husband, but now both my parents were gone. When my dreams woke me in the night I stuffed the blanket in my mouth to prevent her from hearing my sobs. I don’t know what was harder during those first few months, waking up from my nightmare without the comfort of my father or waking up to the nightmare that he wasn’t ever going to comfort me again.
My grandmother stepped in, finally. She showed up unannounced one day to find me pleading with the hydroelectric company to extend the deadline for payment while folding laundry and burning dinner. Taking one look at my mother – her thin, pale arm flung over her eyes as she napped on the couch – she had simply announced that she was coming to live with us.
And it helped. Sort of.
Although her arrival meant I was able to give up many of the adult responsibilities I’d adopted, I didn’t seem able to let go of the adult-sized anxiety I carried like a backpack. It felt safer to brace myself, to wait for the inevitable loss and heartbreak that I knew was to come.
My own grief – foreshortened by mother’s breakdown – didn’t really resurface in any observable way. Instead it went subterranean, feeding on the parts of me that others couldn’t see. Leaving me hollow. Eroded.
One of the few bright spots in my life had been my best friend, Lacey. Born smack-dab between six brother and sisters, Lacey knew middle kids were supposed to be screwed up, so she used her position in this dubious birth order as permission to be as outrageous as possible. She was the girl who barely needed a dare to do something wild. The girl who was quick to laughter and to tears. I both envied and admired the way she thumped through her life, bold and brave. I think I also envied her family, as crazy and chaotic as she complained they were.
Thinking of Lacey, I felt a smile pull at the corners of my mouth, knowing that she’d likely turn my morning into some kind of adventure. Only Lacey could convince me that a hold up at gunpoint was a lark that I was lucky to experience.
Picking up my pace, I began to sprint, eager to get home and shower and share my day with her. Of course, I’d leave out the part about the man with the grey eyes. Even Lacey didn’t know about him. No one did.
“Because he probably doesn’t exist,” I said under my breath. But Sam had seen him today, hadn’t he? Why hadn’t I asked Sam more questions? Why had I felt so…complacent? Irritated with myself, my legs churned faster as I got closer to my street, trees flying by, dark leaves blowing in the crisp night air. Pulling oxygen into my lungs I felt a burst of adrenaline, my muscles humming with energy that felt powerful, however short lived. With a gasp of triumph, I leaped over the steps of the side walk that led to the front door of our building and jogged around the side, finally leaning against the large maple tree that I could see from my bedroom, chest heaving.
My blood rushed through my veins, and I walked in slow circles, feeling the sweat trickle down my neck and under my collar. Hanging on to the tree, I pulled my heel back to stretch and then stopped, trying to listen over the thrumming woosh of my heart. The lawn disappeared into the shadow of the other tall trees that bordered the building. Hearing a twig snap, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention like soldiers. I peered into the darkness, trying to distinguish what was shadow and what might be something else. Or someone else. The silence stretched until a cat yowled off in the distance and I could hear a car alarm a few blocks over. My lungs hurt and I realized I was holding my breath.
“Are you there?” I whispered. The night gave no reply. A gust of wind blew through my damp t-shirt and I felt a shiver run down my spine. My muscles already beginning to stiffen up, I took a step towards the darkness and stopped, feeling scared and foolish all at once.
Chilled, I moved backwards into the pool of light near the entrance and turned into the building, trying not to look back over my shoulder. Sprinting up the stairwell, thankful again we only lived on the fourth floor, I hurried down the hallway, and then stopped, one hand on the wall for support. The front door was slightly open and blackness stained the gap like spilled ink. Shit. Hadn’t I locked it when I left? Adrenaline rushed through my veins again, a familiar friend. Moving slowly towards the threshold, the door creaked slightly as it swung open into our dark two bedroom apartment.
“Mom?” I took a hesitant step inside, feeling my legs shake as I noticed her shoes were there.
“Mom?” Moving towards the kitchen I called again, my voice rising with each repetition. My throat felt tight. Images of my mother murdered in the bedroom flashed through my mind, her room ransacked, her body broken. As quietly as I could, I eased the kitchen drawer open, grabbed a steak knife and turned to move into the darkened hallway.
“Rachel? What the hell are you doing?” My mother stood in the doorway, staring at me.
“Mom!” My heart slammed into my ribcage as fear and relief mingled with anger. “Jesus! You didn’t shut the door behind you again.”
“Oh.” She screwed up her face. “Sorry.”
My hands shaking, I went to put the knife away. “There have been two break-ins this week Mom, not that far from here. You have to be more careful.”
She frowned. “You’re being paranoid.”
I inhaled deeply and turned my back to her as I flipped on the light in the kitchen and opened the fridge. A ketchup and a mustard bottle sat forlornly on the middle shelf, huddling together for comfort in the empty fridge.
