Imperative Fate (9 page)

Whether it was sugary juice or love, he’d give me everything Mama chose not to. He reassured me that I was no curse, burden or beast when Mama alleged me to be a cause for vexed faces and lost appetites.

In Daddy’s arms, I was the epitome of a child.

As such—as I promised him—I must put these tart and morbid feelings away. In my porcelain teacup of trinkets, behind my tongue and outside the shadow my mind. It is the only way to honor Daddy and the Mama I wished to have had.

I don’t dare let any dribs of decadence dot my lashes; I let them keep my irises company, but no more. My grieving ends today; it is to be put beneath the tiles of my childhood palace, to death.

I give my bedroom one last look-around, studying the dark pink walls that have become clinical in age, the pristine vanity with the dozen unused perfumes, my collection of sentimental stuffed animals, and fear my stifled whimper will turn into suffocating sobs.

Getting up from my lavender desk chair, I was about to grab the pink-bowed sheep sitting on my bed—the last plush gift Daddy bought me before abandonment—when a slender man in a sleek, black hat barges in.

“Ready, sweetheart?” the smartly dressed chauffer asks me. “Mr. Winchester wants you in Waco well before dinner.”

I let my hands fall at my hips. “Alright,” I compose my voice like a drab, classic song. As vulnerable as it makes me feel, I decide to bring nothing with me. Not even Daddy’s wedding band. I swallow and give a minute nod in the wrong direction, checking my face in the mirror for any emotional blemishes and my white-gold curls to see if they’re inline for my new Daddy.

“I’m ready.”

Daddy used to tell me nerves are the most pointless evil, to be conditioned and quickly cancelled. He always knew the prettiest thing to say; people threw money at him for it. (How else do you think he got to the top tiers of Congress?) He was rarely wrong, but that didn’t make practicing his philosophy any less strenuous.

As I watch stately trees scroll past my window, I realize the interior of my stomach must look as knotted as the old oaks do. Like a crazy or important person (what’s the difference, I ask you?), I keep checking the time on my charm bracelet. Assuredly, the metallic, little sheep and elephants chime no ETA. I groan quietly and put my face in the bowl of my hands, my thumbs immediately picking at the white, loose-knit gloves.

“Excited, honey?” the car man queries, peering at me from the skewed back-view mirror.
“The wait got you in a ramble?”

I twitch a thin brow, the driver’s disagreeably chatty nature and effeminate dialect whetting my agitation. “Not exactly,” I return a bit sharply. “I’ve known Mr. Winchester for years; it should be fine . . . I just miss Daddy,” I murmur retroactively, rubbing an itch under my ivory sweater jacket.

Out of commiseration or embarrassment, the chauffeur quiets and lets me test “zen” breathing exercises.

Despite how I’ve known and encouraged this day to come since Daddy left me without a proper ally, obese sweat beads still crown my forehead and staple my ears. Six months seems like splinters of seconds when the shadow of Mr. Winchester’s estate covers me. My heart looms from a point as tall and precarious as the top of the brown brick turret he promised would be mine.

My hands as clammy and shaky as egg yolks, I wish I was home, that Harold and Daddy could live with me there, doting to me and amicable to the other. Alas, to Daddy, Harold was more of a freelance babysitter than a friend. Subsequently, I place a referendum on all Harold sacrificed to get me here, and grit my teeth, monitoring my breathing for any tell.

I cannot be meek and disparaging. I told Daddy I’d be a good girl and Harold I’d be an astute one who won’t run off from him, flinch at distress.

“This is the last stop, m’ lady,” the driver speaks again. “Hope it’s as magical as it looks. Mr. Winchester should have some time spoiling you.” He opens my door, reading my face, trying to keep that pretentious smile, and walks me to the door (about a mile trip up the peach brick steps).

In my haste, I feel poor for misjudging the driver as bothersome. Under other circumstances, I would’ve found him to be a polite, cute elderly man. He could’ve just as easily ignored me and departed before we knew the place wasn’t vacant.

“Come in; it’s unlocked” came from a pretty distance inside the McMansion.

“This is where I get off. See ya, princess,” the black-capped dandy bid as farewell.

“Thanks,” I was sure to say louder than anything else I may’ve mumbled in the car. Once his footfalls evaporate in the smoke-scented air, I control my cagey breath and turn the crystal knob.

The inside is warm in color and temperature, lit peach and cream like an upscale Christmas even though it’s a good nine months off. The rooms are open with just a suggestion of structure, the furniture is clean and classy; the carpet is downright art. It amazes me, in our four–year friendship and
eight–month romantic one, I’ve never been here, nor have I thought much on it.

Following my adoptive father’s voice leads me straight to the edge of the jutted kitchen counter space. During, my eyes helplessly water from the fragrance of reed and citrus.
My long and lonely status.

His deep, dark brown eyes smile before he does. “We meet again,” he greets cordially, a smirk wrinkling his subtly tanned skin. He scratches a freckle on the edge of his handsome face, sets a few papers on the Oreo brown dining table, and steps into clear view, looking pleased but very tired. “You’re mine now,” he jokes with a degree of truth and the triumphant shake of his fist.

I nod, proffering a frivolous hum as response, wiping my clammy hands on my pale pink dress. “I suppose so. I suppose it’s better than anything else I could do.”

He’s not sure how to react to that, amity and hesitance playing tug-of-war in his eyes. “Did you have any trouble getting here?” he asks, fixing an upraised section of his nice, blond hair. He’d gotten a trim. Before, a wave of gold dusted his left brow. Now, all was uniform in length and quite military, quite boring. “It’s been unreasonably hard to reach you,” he notes.
“By pen, by telephone, by slim chance in the Capitol.”

I shake my head, my heavy eyes at my white Converse. “No, I didn’t have much trouble. Your driver was nice. I wish I’d brought something to tip him.” I swallow, looking to his curled, meaty hands. His wedding band had a curious habit of going missing. Not today. “But of course it’s hard to get a hold of me, like a flame toyed with by the wind. You know Rudy won’t take responsibility for me—God knows where he is—and Mama’s family isn’t keen on me,” I say before he can interject. “They’re happy to be rid of me. They sent me home a couple hours before your car. Alone.”

Lowering his bushy, marginally gray brows in halted censure, he said in a less even shade, “Did you sleep well?” He has a roundabout way of getting to (or avoiding) unpleasant topics. He’s a politician after all.

“What is
well
?” I laugh like a maniac, feeling how tight the tendons in my shoulders pull. Even though the Prices had enough beds open, they made me sleep on the couch. They hold a hatred for Daddy that fails to transcend me.

My new caretaker ignored that as well; his expressive eyes, edged with age and sympathy, fill with biting urgency. His arm quickly rises, pinpointing me, a meter away. “I missed you, darling,” he blurts, padding as elegantly as a Japanese hostess under the small chandelier between the dining room and kitchen.

I think he’ll kiss me, but he just takes the wooly, blue coat from my arms.

As he walks to the rack in the room abreast me, I see he’s slimmer than I recall; he was never fat, but he had some solid weight on him like most healthy men his age. This weight loss coupled with his pure black suit jacket made him seem taller, a good 6’3.

“I missed you too, Harold,” I say reticently, as if wary of a hidden microphone. “Just not in the same way. Obviously, I wish we were together for a merrier occasion.”

He comes back, frowning, and swipes his cool fingers under my chin, inadvertently coloring my cheeks. “I hope you don’t sound as sad in a few months,” he whispers seriously. “I’ll make you happy, darling.
We’ll
make you happy,” he alleges, gesturing to the six or so family portraits in a golden case off to the side. “I won’t let you feel let down or hurt. Don’t you know that?”

I feel chilly and like I might already humiliate myself, weeping for his kindness and my former life. Wrapping my
fingers around his, chipped by D.C. breezes, I pull down on them and step closer. “I know you’ll do that,” I assure, glassy-eyed, my shoes mingling with his.

He plucks a peck off my forehead and pulls me to his chest, rubbing my cashmere shoulder. “You’ll know you’re home soon enough,” he coos into my hair jostled and stiffened by the outside wind. “You’ll know all this darkness is just a precursor to the light, Ellie Anne. I love you.”

~
***
~

Harold’s firm grip around my hips as we walk up the steep steps to my room, I recover my poise.

If I knew the owner any poorer, I would’ve thought the small tower I was to lodge in was a gratuitous and masturbatory display of wealth, but sweet, inattentive Harold probably never even noticed. (In his days as a freshman Congressman, it took him an adorable time just to learn elementary parliamentary procedure FFA students routinely master before they hit puberty.)

He gets the door for me and keeps just the storybook theme he said we’d never achieve: “A queen bed for my princess,” he kids, rubbing my cheek a bit too hard, trying to enhance my mood.
“Should be enough for you and all your plush pals to thrash about.”

I follow him in and admire the clothed bed twice the dimensions of mine at home. (Even though Daddy undoubtedly financially bested Harold, he was averse to flaunting it where unneeded.)

Harold ambles over to the closet and parts the doors. “And let’s not even
pretend
there’s enough space in here—or the garage—for your monstrous shoe collection. But we can put your skirts in here, your favorite jackets, and purses.” He bites his lip. “As for your dresses, you have dressers to your right, and that ottoman before the bed doubles as a trunk. What you cannot store can go in my wife’s closet. There’s a little bathroom through that door with generous cabinetry.” He points left before touching his chin. “Um, and—” He looks around my room and person. “Where
is
your stuff, darling?”

I grow timid again, strumming my fingers, tilting my chin forward.

“You didn’t bring anything?” he says in short surprise. “That’s alright,” he starts to say with stumped eyebrows. “I can send for your things right—”

“I didn’t want anything to remind me of Daddy,” I defend myself in a sheepish peep.

“Oh,” reverberates sadly around the circular walls like an organ’s final notes. “Well . . . Well, we’ll just have to replace all your items and memories with cheerier ones. Better ones,” he promises.

I hold my face in chagrin and confess, “I’m a difficult child, Harold. I don’t mean to be. I don’t mean to complicate everything in your life, honestly. I’m scared you signed up for a thankless, menial job. I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“
Hush
,” Harold beseeches, already seemingly uninterested in my plight. “The only thing difficult here is your kneejerk self-criticism.” He stills and gazes at me, the cerise bridging my cheekbones. “Do you
want
to end up like your mother, killed by her own sword or heart she hid?” he wonders clearly and rhetorically.

“No,” I sniffle, untangling one of my daffodil yellow locks to avoid meeting his eyes.

“Would you like to stay with her wretched family? Or your father’s?”

“No,” I say with more assertion, pale eyes darting between him and the eggplant-colored rug.

“Do you still keep true to your reply to me last month? You love me and wish to honor your parents, give up the indulgences of self-hate and drinking?”

“Of course.
Of course I want to do all of that,” I retrace my voice, my pinky tracing my bottom lip to see if there’s any gloss left. There’s not. “Just like you wrote you wish to take care of me and harbor me like a little criminal. A little lark.”

He smirks and extends his hand. “I never said
criminal
.”

“You’re always careful not to,” I affirm, doused in a memory, the visual mist of Mama bedridden three months ago washing over. When I’d watch over her like an owl watches over the shrew on the forest floor at night, vigilant and ineffectual until the strike of famine. But I was already gorged enough on my own appendages to last a fortnight, not that that’s what Mama paid attention to. She averred I was the cause of her deteriorating health.

To her, my existence was a crime, a bacterium.

Never mind how I scarcely entered the house after Daddy’s death; afraid of her profanity, and then, her deathly profile. How I was spending all my time with Harold and friends to take
away the steady sting my parents left.

She assumed as much. She was never above reading my mail or eavesdropping on my phone conversations. Because of that, perhaps she reviled Harold as much as she had me.
Because he brought joy where she planted hatred.