In the Image of Grace

by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

  In the Image of Grace

  By Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

  Text copyright © 2011 by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

  Cover photograph © 2011 by iStockphoto/cc-stock

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this ebook, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can learn more about this author. Thank you for your support.

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  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual

  persons, places or events is just mere coincidence.

  http://caschlobohm.wordpress.com

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  I would like to thank Heather Bon

  for believing in the truth.

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  ..................................

  This story is sold as fiction,

  But it’s all true.

  It was supposed to be a memoir of sorts,

  But nobody would believe me,

  So fiction it is claimed to be.

  ……………………..

  Chapter One

  Everything started with the death of Elizabeth. Elizabeth always had a sense of doom and somehow we knew her life would end too soon. She took it herself, by her own hand. I found her in the guest bathroom on the second floor, leaning up against the bathtub with her head bent back as if looking up into the heavens she had planned on entering. The scene was quite serene, a look of peace and gentleness on her face.

  Her cuts were neat and precise, two vertical cuts, one on each wrist up against her pristine white skin, the skin that seemed to belong to a porcelain doll. Perfect and delicate even in death.

  I knelt down next to her not caring that I was kneeling in the pools of blood that collected under each wrist washing over the entire bathroom floor, coating the octagonal white ceramic tiles, staining them pink for a lifetime. The blood ran through the thin vein like spaces between the tiles where grout once was, carrying it through the body that was the floor.

  I wasn’t shocked when I found her. I was deeply saddened, but somehow not entirely surprised. Her whole life Elizabeth was haunted. Almost every night she would wake up screaming. A woman screaming haunted her in her dreams and in her waking hours. We weren’t sure if that was what caused her depression or if her depression was an entirely separate state. I think they just worked hand in hand.

  When she was younger she had tried to take her own life several times. The doctors said they were just accidents while she was sleepwalking. She might have been sleepwalking, but they weren’t accidents. The first incident was when she was about five. I don’t recall too many memories from that time period because I was only four, but I do remember that day and that she was a very young sad child. As she grew older the sadness grew and was soon accompanied by her sense of doom.

  It was late at night, probably around midnight. I was awoken by a cool breeze sweeping over me. Isabelle and Clarissa were asleep in the other room. They were just toddlers. It took me a while before I opened my eyes because I was enjoying the breeze over my face trying to incorporate into my dreams, but then I heard a snapping sound, like someone stepping on a twig, that finally made me open my eyes. Everything in the room was illuminated by the moonlight. Our white four poster canopy beds glowed. The material from the canopy softly blew around in the breeze. Our dressers were in the spotlight of the moon, the trinkets of carousel horses and music boxes proudly on display. I loved that music box that sat on my dresser when I was younger. When you opened it a little ballerina popped up and it started playing a sweet symphony. A gift I always pretended that my mother gave me, so I could always remember her.

  I looked over at Elizabeth’s bed and realized she wasn’t there. I softly called her name. Perhaps she just went to use the washroom, but then I heard her voice softly riding on the breeze into the room. That only meant one thing. She was on the roof outside the window.

  I looked out the window and there she was with her back towards me, her body outlined by the moon. Her nightgown and hair gently blew with the breeze. She was whispering, “As I lay me down to sleep.” At the time I didn’t know it was a prayer because we had never even gone to church. I called out her name, but she just continued on. “Elizabeth,” I called again. She responded by bending her knees and pushing off with her toes, sailing into the night sky.

  My scream was loud enough to wake everybody. Isabelle and Clarissa instantly started crying. Our father ran into the room where I just stood pointing at the window. “Jesus,” he said somehow realizing what had happened. Somehow Elizabeth escaped uninjured. We were on the second floor, but she managed to fall limp enough that nothing broke, or was barely even out of place. She lay neatly sprawled on the front lawn, looking like she was asleep. A look of peace, it was like how I found in her the bathroom, when her death actually did happen for real.

  When she was nine we found her in the bathtub in the middle of the night, floating there in her nightgown and her hands crossed over her chest. The paramedics were able to revive her. Another case of sleep walking is what the doctors said. When she was thirteen it was the bottom of the stairs and when she seventeen, when she was finally successful, in the bathroom with a cut on each wrist. I reached up and touched her neck. There was no pulse. All her blood seemed to of already all drained out. There was nothing to stop. I placed my forehead on her chest and softly wept. My older sister was gone. She was only a year older than me, but the closest thing to a mother that Isabelle, Clarissa and I had. We never knew our mother, who she was, what her name was, what she looked like, we had the slightest idea.

  Growing up Elizabeth was the one who answered any of our questions about the world or life. She bathed us and she gave us attention. I use to always like when she would brush our hair, so it would lay perfectly smooth and in place. If she came across a knot she would sit patiently and piece by piece pull all the hairs out of the little knotted wad. She would then have us open our hand and she would place the little tumbleweed of hair that once was the knot in our palm. All things our father took no part in. We rarely saw him. At times it felt like it was just us four girls living in that big house alone.

  Our house was an old Victorian sitting at the end of the street which was mostly made up of brick apartment buildings built in the twenties. There was another house to the left of ours, a smaller Victorian where an elderly couple lived. There was one other house across the street that was surrounded by a garden of wild flowers and a white picket fence. A polish woman with a crown of fluffy hair lived there with her daughter who was just barely done with being a baby.

  Our house kind of stood out even though it wasn’t at the front of the lot. It was pushed back with two swatches of neatly trimmed green grass on either side of the walkway that led up to the porch steps. A tall wrought iron fence surrounded our property. You could only get past the gate if you were buzzed in. Once past the gate and up the cement walkway you got to the covered porch that spanned the length of the front of the house and wrapped around it to the left. The left hand side of the house also had a turret that extended an extra story up past the actual height of the house. The house was three floors not counting the basement and attic.

  The first floor had the main living space. You came into the main foyer when you walked in with the stairs to the right and to the left was the living room or parlor as I’m sure it was
once called. It was a dark room with brown leather sofas with gold upholstery tacks. The end and coffee tables were a deep mahogany wood with ornate carvings on the legs. Some tall potted plants were in the one corner of the room near the windows. The windows were draped in a heavy velvet maroon. The room seemed out of place. To me it looked like it should have been in a university library or something.

  There were French doors that led into the dining room. You could also access the dining room if you continued down the foyer. A great stained glass window rose above the buffet that held the china that was said to be priceless. I can’t even say family china because we were unsure that our father had any family. We couldn’t imagine anybody ever being his mother because he was so cold it seemed he never received any love that a mother would give.

  In the back of the house was a large room, where most people would use as a family room and watch TV. We had couches and armchairs in that room, but no TV. There was also a long wooden table with wooden chairs with the straightest backs one probably would have ever seen on a chair. That was where we ate our meals. Off that room was the kitchen. It was a small dark space. The sink, stove and cabinets were on the left side. If you looked straight in you saw the refrigerator and to the right was an old white wooden back door, a small wooden table with two stools and a little rectangular window above that table. Out past the back door was a small covered porch with three steps down and a small pathway that led you into the garage. The garage was made of stone and until recently had the original carriage doors from when it was first built. It was only a couple years ago that my father had an actual modern garage door put in.

  If you went back to the front of the house, the stairs would take you straight up almost the whole way, until where there was small landing and to the left was the last seven stairs. Once at the top of the stairs was the hall guest bath, where I found Elizabeth. At the end of the hall to the left was the room Elizabeth and I shared when we were younger, as we grew older I moved to the room to the right of it. It was the room with the turret. In between the two rooms was a washroom.

  Next to the hall bathroom to the right was a laundry room and next to that were the stairs that led you to the third floor. Staying on the second floor if you went to the right past the stairs were the other two rooms with the same setup as Elizabeth’s and mine. The house was slightly modernized when we were younger. That’s how we got the bathrooms between the bedrooms because in the house’s original state there was just the one bath, the one we grew to call the guest bath.

  The top floor of the house was where our father slept and where he also had his office. We never saw the attic because you had to access it from the third floor and our father told us to stay off of what he called his floor of the house. He always said there would be severe consequences if we went up there and we believed him, so we never did.

  We never saw the basement either just the top wooden steps leading down into it. That was where we sat if ever asked a question about our mother. Our mother was a topic one just did not talk about in our house. If we asked something like, “What was our mother like?” Our father would instantly grab us by our delicate little wrists, open the basement door and say, “Go sit with the demons.” Needless to say we were always too frightened to go beyond that top basement step because we feared there really were demons in the basement.

  That was the kind of man our father was. He had no problem putting fear in his children’s hearts. We really didn’t see him all that often. He left early in the morning and came home late at night, even on the weekends. Our father was a professor and researcher at Bradwell University. He was highly regarded in his field and had many published papers in journals and even a couple books. We weren’t exactly sure what he did. Elizabeth always said his field was blasphemy. Whatever it was, it seemed more important to him than us. He just had us kept in the house. We never even left the house that much before Elizabeth died. The only occasion we would really go out would be to some event where it seemed important that his children made an appearance. We’d make our appearance and then we’d be shut back up in our prison of a house.

  We didn’t even go to school. We had a private tutor we called Mr. Carl. Mr. Carl was a younger man. I’d say about twenty-five. He was thin with dangerously sharp elbows, always was garbed in corduroy and his hair was a sandy blond color in tight little curls that clung closely to his head. He wasn’t one for talking. He tutored us for a few hours a day and then was gone. The only other person we saw during the day was Ms. Dunderfeltz. She did all the cleaning. She would leave after dinner. She always stayed so she could do the dishes. Elizabeth generally cooked the dinner, but Ms. Dunderfeltz always offered her gentle guidance. She mainly kept to herself. She had a quite nature and thanks to her the house was always immaculate.

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  Isabelle came and peered into the bathroom as I was weeping for Elizabeth. She started to scream like a banshee which drew Clarissa in whom I quickly sent out to call 911. Elizabeth was pronounced dead by the paramedics who came with hope in saving her. After Elizabeth was taken away I noticed sitting on the bathroom sink was a picture from the newspaper. I left it sitting there as I went to the laundry room to strip off my clothes and grab a bunch of towels. Somebody had to clean up the bathroom. While I cleaned up Clarissa and Isabelle were shut up by themselves somewhere in the house mourning and I was left with the sign of life that Elizabeth was alive not too long ago.

  When I was done cleaning up I took that picture and went to my room. I placed it on my bed and went and took a shower. I turned on the water as hot as I could take it and let it run over my body, where inside pain was welling up. I sat down in the tub and hugged my legs and wept, hoping the water would wash away my pain.

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  We knew her life would end too soon. We just weren’t prepared for when it actually happened. The three of us stood in the middle of Elizabeth’s room. It had only been a couple days since Elizabeth decided to end her life. The same white canopy bed from when we were younger stood proudly in the middle of it. Everything was perfectly in place. All the books were lined up neatly according to height on her shelves and the pillows and stuffed animals on her bed were perfectly displayed as if the bed was in a store window. Her room seemed lifeless without her in it, just as lifeless as she had become. Isabelle, Clarissa and I sat down on the floor.

  I showed them the picture that Elizabeth had left on the bathroom sink. It was a picture of the four of us standing in a row from shortest to tallest. It was cut out of the newspaper, a picture that was taken while our father was receiving a reward for something. Each of us had long black brown hair, a round face, almost shaped like the face of a barn owl and an empty look in our almond shaped eyes. Elizabeth always said we had that look of emptiness because we had no souls. The pale iridescence of our skin gave us an almost ethereal quality. We were all dressed the same; white knee socks, a khaki pleated skirt and a navy corduroy blazer covering our upper body. The only thing that was different was that the Clarissa was wearing black Mary Jane’s, where Elizabeth, Isabelle and I were wearing flats. Underneath the picture the caption read, “The Schlobohm Children; Clarissa 11, Isabelle 12, Charlotte 13 and Elizabeth 14.” The picture was a few years old. As we sat in Elizabeth’s room I was sixteen, Isabelle was fifteen, Clarissa was fourteen and Elizabeth was no more.

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  At Elizabeth’s funeral there was not one face that I recognized besides the obvious; Isabelle, Clarissa, our father, Mr. Carl and Ms. Dunderfeltz. We had no relatives that we knew of, so we didn’t know where all the people came from. When people viewed her body they politely looked down at her and went on their way. Clarissa, Isabelle and I stood in the line behind each other. Clarissa was the first to look upon our dead sister. Clarissa kissed her fingers and placed them upon Elizabeth’s lips. When Isabelle went up she started
sobbing. Clarissa came and hugged her shoulders and led her to the side. I don’t know what I felt as I looked down on Elizabeth, everything perfectly in place like she had been frozen in time. I wanted to kiss and hug her, but I also wanted to scream at her for what she had done. It felt like she left us to fend for ourselves. I longed for her comfort and guidance and just her mere presence.

  I looked over at our father. He was at the root of it all. Our father stood in the back dressed like he was going to work. He wore khakis and a white buttoned down shirt with a blazer, not even a full suit. He didn’t seem to have any feelings over the death of our sister, his daughter. My sisters and I didn’t even see him cry, before or after the funeral. He just stood there with a stoic look on his face. In retrospect nobody seemed overly emotional or emotional at all. Everybody was wiped clean of any feeling.

  Our father never identified with any religions, so it seemed odd that a pastor said a few words’. I didn’t know what he was a pastor of, but he claimed to be one. I didn’t listen until he asked if anybody wanted to say anything and the place was silent. I didn’t want to say anything at first because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle it, but I went up because somebody had to say something about Elizabeth at her own funeral. I got up from my seat and went up to the podium that was set up. I cleared my throat and looked around at all the blank faces staring at me.

  “Elizabeth was always there when we needed her. We could always depend on her. Who are we going to depend on now?” I couldn’t say anymore. I looked at all the faces watching me. Nobody even blinked. I walked away from the podium and out the doors and to the lobby, where sitting on a table with thinly carved legs was a picture of Elizabeth when she was around eight. She looked very sad. Her eyes were empty and her mouth was drawn down in a frown. It was from when our father had a photographer come to the house and take pictures because for our father picture taking wasn’t something you went to a photo studio for.