The Watchers

The Watchers

Lynnie Purcell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Lynnie Purcell

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Chapter 1

The sky behind us rippled angrily with dark
thunderheads as we raced toward the blue horizon. Despite the
darkness chasing us and the beauty of clear skies to the front, I
was upset. My sour mood, especially my sour expression, did not go
unnoticed. Ellen, my mom – though I was seriously considering
giving her up for adoption – glanced over at me from where she was
driving.

“Clare, didn’t your mother ever tell you that
if you make an ugly face, it’ll freeze that way?” she asked lightly
in to the heavy silence between us.

“No,” I said, “you have better sense than
that…I mean, really, how would my face freeze unless we were in
Antarctica? Even then, I’m sure something would fall off before my
expression would freeze. The idea, the mere thought, of a bad
expression freezing is more ridiculous than this ridiculous
move.”

Thinking I was being silly, she started
playing with the radio of our car, flicking between stations
erratically for one that was actually playing music. Beyond her,
the trees, which had been a border to the small two lane road for
the past hour, gave way to the first vestiges of humanity. Car lots
and burger joints sped past us in a blur, their bright colors
contrasting to the brown of the forest surrounding them. I watched
her play with the radio, trying not to look at the rundown
buildings and cow pastures beyond us.

“I thought you weren’t holding a grudge about
moving,” she said after a moment, finally giving up on the radio,
and her attempts at cheering me up.

“I’m not holding a grudge…I’m profoundly
irritated. There’s a difference.”

“I’ll just have to owe you one,” she
said.

“A very big one,” I muttered darkly.

“It’s not like we haven’t moved before,” she
retorted, the dimples in her cheeks disappearing with her
frown.

That was the understatement of the year. We
had moved so many times in my life that I referred to our station
wagon as ‘the caravan’ and to Ellen and me as ‘the roving gypsies’.
Before we had always moved from one city to another, jumping from
coast to coast like jack rabbits, never settling in one place for
longer than two years. Our mainstay were cities and towns large
enough to get lost in if we wanted to, which we did. It was how we
hid. Even though that didn’t sound like a very appealing way to
live, I had grown accustomed to alleyways and rooftops of the
cities, to the ebb and flow of the crowds, and the rhythm of places
like New York, Chicago, or L.A. It was home. Another long row of
thick trees and even thicker undergrowth momentarily dominated the
landscape, the car lots and burger joints disappearing behind us. A
person could get lost here as well, but only if they took a long,
blindfolded, walk in the woods.

“This isn’t the same,” I said.

“I know,” she agreed quietly.

We’d been over this several times since she
had told me we were moving. She understood how it felt to be here
more than I did. She knew how it felt to hate the place we were
headed toward.

She turned to me, her eyes wide and full of
hurt. “Trust me?”

I sighed and rubbed at my forehead
thoughtfully, the scowl disappearing.

“I trust you, Mom. It’s just…” I trailed off,
thinking about the real reason for my irritation.

Tomorrow, I would be forced into the tiny,
miniscule, thing they called a high school here. While I was
certainly used to first days – going through five public high
schools in the last three years meant that the stares, the
questions, the not fitting in were second nature to me – I’d never
been to a school like this one. Ellen called her old school
‘quaint’. I called it hell.

The clouds, which had been trailing us
dolefully since our entry into North Carolina, thickened, hurrying
us along as the trees gave way to the first row of brick buildings
of the deserted downtown. I looked at the cheerfully quaint
buildings, with their cheerfully quaint awnings, as we passed, and
was suddenly glad for the clouds. They were perfectly dark, a
contrast to the frightening cheerfulness of the awnings and the
buildings.

“Oh! I love this one!” Ellen exclaimed
suddenly, startling me out of my dark thoughts.

She turned the radio up louder at the sound
of Stevie Nicks belting out throaty lyrics. A smile lighting her
face she started singing along and dancing in her seat, already
forgetting about our argument. Singing happily, one arm flailing
dangerously around the small space as she danced, she made a right
on to a small road packed with cars.

“Sings a song sounds like she’s singing whoo
whoo whoo…”

I laughed at her despite myself, her natural
cheerfulness bubbling over and filling the car with good humor.
Ellen’s happiness was irrepressible. Wanting to be a part of her
joy, even for an instant, I started singing along. Smiling at me in
encouragement – glad I had stopped scowling – Ellen made another
turn on to a smaller dead-end road overflowing with parked cars. As
she slowed down to avoid hitting the cars, I looked at the houses
that lined both sides of the cluttered road.

The houses were old and stately and looked as
if they had been around forever and would continue to exist when
everything else on the Earth was gone. Large, leafless, trees
crowded the grassy yards, adding to the charm and stateliness of
the houses. Even though the grass was brown with winter, I could
tell the yards were well-loved and manicured. I wondered how the
houses would look in the spring or summer; if the trees shaded
everything, creating a natural tunnel of green across the road, or
if the empty flower boxes were a riot of color and heady
scents.

“And the days go by…like a strand in the
wind…in a web that is my own…”

I stopped singing as we pulled to a slow stop
in front of a gothic-style white house set back from the road and
away from the other houses. It was the last house on the dead-end
road and was completely bordered by forest to the left and back.
The house was larger than I had thought, with sharp angles and
painted eaves accentuating the gothic style of it. I stared in
amazement, not able to wrap my brain around the idea that this
house, of all houses, was really ours. It was something out of a
dream.

“But the moment that I first laid eyes on
him… all alone on the edge of seventeen…”

“Is this it?” I asked over the song.

Ellen turned the radio down. Her eyes moved
over the white house, the many windows, the screened-in porch, even
the stray cobwebs along the porch, as a thousand memories of
growing up flooded into her brain.

“Yeah, this was your grandparents’ house.”
Her hands moved to turn off the ignition. “Our home,” she whispered
softly, as if she couldn’t believe the words she was saying.

Home. I couldn’t believe it either – it was
such a foreign word to my gypsy nature – but I knew the word had a
different connotation for her. This was the house she had been born
in, the house she had grown up in, the house where she had
experienced all her formative memories. It was the place she would
always consider her original ‘home’ no matter what city we ended up
in. I envied her that.

Her home wasn’t just a place of fond
memories, though. It was also the home she had run away from at
fifteen. No one thought she would make it two months after she
left, but she hadn’t touched foot here in almost eighteen years.
Her parents hadn’t talked to her since her disappearance, not even
when, two years later, she had called to tell them they were
grandparents of a baby girl. It took a family friend and three
phone calls to tell them about their granddaughter. The fact that
someone outside the family knew just made it worse. They never
forgave Ellen. I don’t know if they ever forgave me – I’d never met
them.

Why did they leave it to me?
They couldn’t have forgiven me,
I heard Ellen say very
softly, mirroring my thoughts.

I looked over at her, curious about her words
for multiple reasons. Had she really said anything or was it the
voices in my head again? She had tears in her eyes, though her face
didn’t give me any hints if she had said the words aloud or
not.

“Are you okay?” I asked softly, putting my
hand on hers.

She wiped away the tears with a quick hand.
“Just old memories….I can’t believe they left it to me after all
this time. I thought…I thought they hated me. But this….”

I patted her hand in comfort, trying to
suppress my own feelings. I
had
just heard her thoughts again. I knew she hadn’t said the
first part out loud. Plus, she had sounded different, the way
people sounded in their thoughts. It was something I was still
trying to come to grips with.

Her physical voice was stronger, less echoed,
but confused, as she spoke again. “I mean, how did they even know
where we were, Clare?”

I could only shrug in response. I didn’t
understand it either. She hadn’t told her parents what city she was
in, hadn’t tried to contact them since she had told them about me,
yet her father had left her the house in his will. It had come as a
total shock when their lawyer, an old friend of Ellen’s from
school, had tracked us down to tell us her dad had died and had
left her the house, the money, everything. She had stayed away for
two months, on edge and unsure of what to do, a part of her wanting
to come back, another part terrified to. Thinking about it, I
silently promised myself to not scowl again in front of her. She
was going through enough without my childishness added on top.

Collecting her thoughts she said seriously,
as if she thought she could will her promise into being, “I promise
it’ll be different this time, Clare. It feels different, like we’re
meant to be here, like we’re meant to stay, you know?”

I resisted the urge to laugh, knowing she was
being sincere. Ellen put a lot of stock in her feelings. She relied
on them more than she did her brain. Even when her brain was
telling her the logical thing to do, she went with her gut instinct
without hesitation. It was maddening. I loved her for it.

“Sure, Mom,” I agreed easily.

She wiped the last of the tears away and
glanced at the old house again, her eyes uncertain. Shifting the
keys in her hands, she turned to the back seat full of our
belongings then back to the house. She didn’t move to get out of
the car and I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know she was
stalling.

I laughed at her. “Did you want to go inside?
Or did we come to stare?”

“I’m scared to go in,” she admitted.

“I know…I’ll be right here,” I promised.

She nodded and inhaled a deep, calming
breath. I turned and shoved at the passenger door – having to throw
all of my weight against the rusty door before it budged – and
stepped over the curb. I automatically pulled my leather jacket
tighter around my shoulders, not expecting the way the wind cut
through me. New York had been cold in the winter but this cold was
deeper, bone chilling, like an icy knife tearing into flesh and
bone. It would be something else I would have to adapt to.

Shivering, my breath curling up to the
heavens in response to the cold, I turned to wait for Ellen. As I
did, I noticed several faces peeking out at us from the houses up
the street. I tried to return their stares, to show them I didn’t
appreciate the gawking, but they melted out of sight when they
noticed me looking. The occasional twitch of a curtain betrayed my
audience as they switched to a more covert form of surveillance. I
felt the scowl returning despite my promise to keep it at bay. I
hated being spied on.

Ellen joined me quietly, her eyes not
straying from the house once; not noticing the curious eyes on both
of us. I let her lead the way up the path and resisted the urge to
turn back and return the stares. She stepped absently up the broad
steps as if they were old friends and opened the door to the
screened-in porch with a practiced motion.

Just as absorbed by her thoughts as she was,
I looked around the small porch we had walked up to. Despite not
wanting to get attached – we would move again soon enough – I
couldn’t help but love the small swing and the wooden rocking
chairs, which rocked slightly in time to the wind. The attraction
to the swing and chairs was amplified by the fact that this place,
this house, was a part of Ellen’s life I had never gotten to share
with her. It was like walking into one of her memories.