by fallensea
When I reached my stop, I was reluctant to get off, but not as much as other days. It was a novelty coming into work so early. Usually when I arrived, the ambiguous dirt path that led off the road to the shelter was lit only by a soft twilight, but today the sun blazed above, making even the unsightly thorn bushes and gaunt saplings that lined the path look somewhat alluring, their branches inviting me into a secret hideaway few knew about.
About a mile up the path, beyond the harsh, deceptive brush, was a well-manicured lawn that rolled on like a green sea. At the heart of the sea was a guard of prim oak trees, their low branches interwoven, creating a ceiling of leaves that led to an old French manor—the shelter.
The property had been donated by an heiress, in honor of her grandmother, who had designed the peaked roofs, long-stretching windows, and elegant ironwork of the balconies of the manor. The balconies wrapped around every floor, held up by grand white colonnades. The rest of the manor was painted an unstately peach, providing warmth to the cracked souls who entered through its doors.
“I’m here,” I said to the daytime assistant, whose shift I was covering so she could leave early for her engagement party.
“Ronnie, hi,” she greeted, distracted as she thumbed through papers on the front desk. “I’m just finishing up. Give me a few minutes.”
“Sure,” I said, and I moved across the marble flooring to the gridded security gate that divided the foyer from the rest of the manor. French doors had once stood here, but they had been replaced by the gate when the manor had been converted into the shelter.
Narrow and without air conditioning, the hallways of the manor were stifling, especially wearing my black hoodie, which covered jeans and a plain T-shirt. There was nothing embellished about the way I dressed. Though the lack of air was suffocating, I refused to take my hoodie off, it was my armor, so I turned towards the kitchen in need of a glass of water.
I had worked as the nighttime assistant at the shelter for over six months, but I was still learning how to navigate the hallways. Pieces of the manor had been renovated to meet the needs of the shelter, such as installing the security gate and designating a wing to the infirmary, but much of the manor’s original features remained, including the hallways that seemed to zigzag rather than channel straight, forever twisting, taunting me like a mad labyrinth.
Thankfully, I knew the way to the kitchen much better than I did other parts of the manor. Once meant for servants, the kitchen was downstairs, its stairwell in the movie room, which had been converted from what was previously the formal dining hall. I entered the movie room eagerly, already trading the glass of water for sweet tea in my mind, but I stopped when I found a boy standing near the door to the stairs, alone and holding a small toy in his hand.
The toy was a plush wolf doll. Grey and white, a wolf was given to all who entered the shelter.
During the day, the shelter was a time of healing. There were activities and support groups and playtime for the children. There was laughter. The laugher was knotted with guilt and fear, but it existed. But some chains were hard to break away from. The night was different than the day. When the sun disappeared, so did the hope. It was hard to have hope when nightmares reigned. The manor was beautiful and strong, but it held a lot of heartbreak, similar to the women it protected.
A guardian, the wolf represented a higher, native force that watched over the shelter. There was a box full of them in the equipment room. They were effective. During my rounds on the nightshift, I checked on the women as they slept, and I saw them clinging to the wolves as strongly as their children did—as strongly as the boy in front of me did now.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, unsure of his name. “Are you lost?”
He shook his rag of brown hair. “Scared.” He glanced at the stairs. The door was open, lighting the stonework that descended down to the kitchen. “I don’t like the way my footsteps echo on the stairs. It sounds like there’s someone following me.”
“You have nothing to be scared of. What you hear is angels making sure you make it down okay.”
He moaned. “Angels? Really?”
Smart kid. I had never been great at selling what I didn’t believe. “Okay, it’s probably mice.”
He perked up, weirdly okay with that. “I like mice.”
“You do?”
“Sure. We have loads of them at home. I miss home. This isn’t home.”
“No, it’s not.”
No longer needing my inspiration—or lack of it—he bolted down the stairs. “Hey!” I called after him. “Slow down, kiddo! You’ll break your neck!”
I followed much more leisurely, taking my time down the stone steps. Around me, prisms reflected off of suncatchers the women had painted and hung from the stairwell over the years. There were flowers, stars, insects, and confectionary, but there were no hearts. There were never hearts.
The kitchen was where the women gathered to cook and do crafts, their supplies spread across the line of dated wooden tables as sunlight streamed in through the southerly window. Wicker baskets hung above the tables, full of basil and thyme and sometimes herbs that were not so fresh or legal, which the women hid beneath the soil.
“Ronnie!” Mrs. Danvers called to me. Round and formidable, Mrs. Danvers was the self-appointed mother hen of the shelter. “How nice to see you, my dear.” She held a patch of knit-work up. “Would you care to join us?”
“No thanks,” I said to her and the dozen or so women who sat around her at the tables. I only recognized a handful, and even less recognized me. That was the consequence of working the nightshift. Usually, I only saw the women when they were sleeping, an intruder to their nightmares. Those I did know were insomniacs, wandering the halls, unable to face what waited for them behind closed eyes.
“We’re weaving our fate,” Mrs. Danvers pronounced as I walked to the fridge and reached for a pitcher of sweet tea. “Just like the Norns of Norse mythology.”
“Powerful,” I replied before taking a sip of tea directly from the pitcher.
As I did, three kids ran behind me. The littlest, a tiny girl, smacked my butt as she passed. “You shouldn’t drink out of the pitcher!” she admonished. “It’s gross!”
I refused to look, but I could feel Mrs. Danvers smiling. She’d long given up scolding me for drinking out of the pitcher. When I was on break from my shifts, I came down to the kitchen, and I often found Mrs. Danvers sitting alone in the shadows beneath the baskets, looking out into the moonlit gardens. I think the kitchen brought her as much comfort as it brought me.
Resigning to her will, I grabbed a glass and poured the rest of the sweet tea in it. Then I set the glass aside and cleaned out the pitcher, knowing that within the hour, more tea would appear.
“Did you hear about the fire up north?” a woman with curly red hair asked as the group continued to knit. “My sister told me about it. It’s all over the news. An entire apartment complex burned down. Dodgy wiring. Eight people died.”
“I heard. What a tragedy,” Mrs. Danvers clucked. “One woman lost her entire family, the poor soul. But she’ll see them again, one day. Do you believe that, Ronnie?”
“Believe what?” I asked. I’d been listening, but I didn’t want Mrs. Danvers to know.
“That we see our loved ones again after we die?”
“Religion really isn’t my thing,” I mumbled as I dried the pitcher with a cloth, uncomfortable with the topic. Then, for the sake of my audience, remembering religion was the only thing helping some of the women in the shelter hold on, I added, “But I guess so. Sure. I mean, lots of people tell stories of talking to their loved ones after they die or receiving a sign that they’re near. A touch. A voice. A familiar scent. Some of it must be true.”
“What must be true?” Laney, one of the resident nurses, asked as she bounced into the kitchen.
It was a relief. This conversation was meant for Laney. With big Southern curls in her auburn hair, Laney was a sassy young church mouse—peti
te, loud, and extremely devout.
“That we exist beyond this life,” Mrs. Danvers informed her.
“Of course we do,” Laney piped. “We’re much more than we realize. Even science says so.”
Mrs. Danvers chuckled. “Science? I never thought I’d hear those words come out of you, Miss Laney May.”
“I’m a nurse,” Laney defended casually, admiring her bright purple nail polish that matched her scrubs. “That makes me a scientist, of sorts. I know prayer is only half the puzzle.”
“What do you mean?” a brunette woman asked her, setting down her knitting, curious.
“We’re stardust,” Laney told her. “I heard it in a documentary on the TV. We’re made of carbon, and the only place in the universe carbon is formed is in the core of a star. So we’re all made of carbon that has been released into the universe from a star that went supernova and died. We’re stardust.”
“Insightful,” Mrs. Danvers mused. “But what does that have to do with an afterlife?”
“God wouldn’t waste his stardust on us if our destiny was just to live and die. There’s something much bigger going on here. I know that doesn’t prove heaven exists, you have to have faith for that, but I like to think that it does indicate we are much more than we seem.”
Finished drying the pitcher, I left it on the counter to be filled and picked up my glass, ready to leave, too tired to think about anything too deeply.
“You frightened her away,” the brunette woman teased. “Those who wear black hoodies never like talking about church.”
“Are you depressed, Ronnie?” Mrs. Danvers asked.
I paused at the bottom of the stairwell, my hand tightening around my glass. I wasn’t offended, I was amused more than anything, but I didn’t like having the judgement of the room solely on me. “My hoodie is comfortable,” I said patiently. “And black shields against negativity.”
“So you are depressed.”
“She’s not depressed,” Laney said, coming to my rescue. “She just likes to be mistaken for a vampire.”
“Bye, kiddos,” I said, stepping away from the conversation. I swiftly made my way up the stairs, leaving the women to weave their fate.
***
A quiet settled upon the shelter as day waned into night. I liked the night. It had a reputation for bringing out the bad, but I thought it brought out truth. There was a calm to the night, a peace that existed beyond the fear. The sun was an invasion. The night was the earth in its true form.
Laney dropped a small pile of papers in front of me at the front desk then took a heart-shaped lollipop from a nearby canister—the only heart-shaped objects in the shelter.
“Do these need sorting?” I asked.
“It’s Melissa’s medical report,” she said, sucking on the lollipop. “It needs to go into her file.”
Melissa. She was the most upsetting case I had seen since working at the shelter. Many of the women who were admitted had bruises, but Melissa—her husband had nearly beat her to death. The police had brought her to the shelter after she was discharged from the hospital, and though she’d had several days to recover, she was still in bad shape.
“How did your date go?” Carl, the security guard, shouted to Laney from his spot on a recliner in the lounge of the foyer—a seating area full of secondhand sofas on white marble flooring, like paupers dancing on silk. At sixty-odd-years-old, Carl was a good-natured man with deep laughter lines in his black skin. I adored him, but his position was mostly for show. The security gate that divided the foyer from the rest of the shelter did most of the work in keeping out the ruckus.
“The date didn’t go,” Laney huffed. “I arrived early to the restaurant, just in time to see him take off his wedding band and hide it in his coat pocket.”
“I’m sorry, sunshine,” Carl said kindly. “But don’t give up. You’ll find a good man soon.”
Laney was far from discouraged, but she accepted Carl’s sympathy with a smile. “Are you sure you and your pretty li’l wife aren’t hiding a son away somewhere?” she chirped.
“Not that I know of, but I wouldn’t put it past my wife,” he answered, laughing heartily from the recliner.
Listening to the two chatter, I silently filed Melissa’s papers away, praying they didn’t ask me about Kyle. He had called me early in the morning, when I’d gotten home from working my previous shift.
“I’m home,” I’d told him, the strain I felt on the phone with Kyle evident only to me. I ran my hand over the weaving patterns of the Native American quilt on my bed. My studio apartment was cramped, the bed its centerpiece, but like the bus, it was one of the last places I felt truly independent.
“Just checking in,” Kyle claimed. “I’ll pick you up when I’m finished in court. I’ll be there early, before you leave again.”
I didn’t answer, but I didn’t need to. Kyle didn’t need an answer. He had our routine. After I slept, I went over to his, keeping my apartment to myself.
“See you soon,” he bid.
“See you soon,” I’d returned quietly.
“There are two reasons I’ll never do online dating,” Laney insisted, replying to a suggestion by Carl. “First, no good Southern man needs the internet to meet women. If he’s hiding behind a computer screen instead of sporting himself a good pair of boots and rattling his way across a dance floor, then he’s not worth a penny or a pig. And second, just because his profile says he’s thirty-two and Christian, it doesn’t mean he is. I’d take a church social over that social media nonsense any day. Jesus didn’t need Facebook to find his disciples, and I certainly don’t need it to find Mr. Right.”
“Carl, you know how Laney feels about online dating,” I warned.
“I know, I know,” Carl acknowledged, rocking in his seat. “But my youngest daughter found her Juliet online, so I just thought—”
The doors to the shelter burst open, and a dark-haired man of substantial height and bulk hurried a woman in. I assumed it was a woman. She wore a red blanket over her head like a cloak, hiding her face, but soft tendrils of pale blonde hair cascaded down from the cowl. Even though she was covered, it was easy to see how thin she was, her shape feminine but sickly.
“You’re safe now,” the man reassured the woman, but as he glanced behind his shoulder at the doors, he didn’t look so convinced. “He didn’t follow us.”
Carl jumped up from the recliner, a hand on his stun gun. “Do I need to call the police?” he bellowed.
“I hope not,” the man answered absently.
The woman was a statue, but the man shook with an unresolved fury, the type that arose out of fear for the wellbeing of a loved one. He was a threat to someone, but not to us. I waved Carl down. If danger did follow the pair in, like a dog late for the hunt, I had a panic button beside me at the desk.
“Who do you think might have followed you?” I asked, standing.
The man turned to me, his tawny brown eyes meeting my own. His leather jacket spoke of defiance, but there was an old soul buried in the leather. I did not feel as if I were looking upon a modern man my age, but rather a timeless man with all the wisdom and all the passion of the years.
“Her boyfriend…” he mumbled. “My sister needs help. Her boyfriend, he’s... She just needs help.”
“We can help,” I assured him. “What’s your name?”
“Dermott O’Brallaghan.”
“Dermott, I’m Ronnie. What can you tell me about what happened to your sister tonight?”
Again, he glanced at the doors, his fury growing. “That her boyfriend has a lot to answer for.”
I was getting nowhere, so I focused on the woman. “Never mind her boyfriend. Your sister is our priority right now. We can help her, but she’ll have to remove her blanket. I can’t let her through the security gate otherwise.”
“Aileen,” Dermott prompted. “It’s okay.”
Aileen did as I requested, letting the blanket drop to the floor. Wearing grey sweatpants and an o
versized baseball jersey that looked more like a pajama top than street clothes, she was probably about nineteen or twenty. Her absorbent blue eyes barely flickered as a black bruise formed on her high cheek bone and blood seeped from a split lip. She couldn’t feel the pain. I had seen vacant expressions like hers enough times to know she was coming down from some sort of high that numbed her.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said, hushed.
“Aileen, don’t say that,” Dermott reproached. He turned to me. “She knows she needs help, but she’s a bit out of it at the moment.”
It wasn’t my job to pity the woman, but I couldn’t help it. She was so fragile, as if her skinny bones were made of hollow glass. But I didn’t let my pity stand in the way of my job.
“Aileen, I know tonight has been difficult, but we have procedures here that have to be followed. You’ll spend the evening in the infirmary with Laney, who’ll check you over to make sure you don’t require emergency medical care. In the morning, you’ll be asked to fill out the necessary paperwork to admit you. You’ll be given a brief orientation, including going over the rules of the shelter, and you’ll be assigned a room. We don’t operate the same as other shelters. We like the women here to think of the shelter as their home. You’ll have a lot of freedom here, but the rules have to be followed. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to be here,” Aileen whispered again, but she nodded her head in acknowledgement, a single tear rolling down her bruised cheek.
Taking her cue, Laney approached her. “I’m going to take you to the infirmary now. Is that okay with you, Aileen?”
She didn’t respond.
“Aileen,” Dermott said. “Go with her.”
Persuaded, Aileen picked the red blanket up off the floor and turned towards Laney, soundlessly offering her compliance.
“I’ll take good care of her,” Laney promised Dermott, and she guided Aileen through the security gate.