by DM Sharp
Momma goes to the bathroom and Daddy slams the front door as he goes out. Sometimes he doesn’t come home for a few days. No one seems to notice that I am here like they used to so I take the magazine and find a blanket to wrap around me as I read. It says that the Carters are one of the oldest established families in Manhattan and made their money by selling gunpowder during the American Civil War, that they are listed in the Forbes Top 200. My other name is Carter, too.
Momma coughs more and more and there’s blood on her hands, in the bathroom, the towel has blood on it but we can’t afford any healthcare. Then one day, I come home from school and the man from the magazine is in our house, on the Reservation. He has a kind smile but very sad eyes whenever he looks at me. Daddy is crying as the kind white man with yellow hair wrestles me away from him, into the biggest black car I have ever seen. Daddy pushes me off, screaming at me to not make everything so difficult and to be good for my uncle who I am going to live with. He says Momma has died.
The movie zips forward to me and the very first friend I made when I arrived in Manhattan. It’s my Aunt Victoria. I’m watching the time when everyone in the apartment searched for me, panicking that I had run away, but she was the clever one who found me, reading with my flashlight. I was in my walk-in closet, which was larger than any room I had been used to.
“Olivia, little pumpkin, why on earth do you insist on spending all your time in that crammed space?” Her kind eyes and hands stroking me to coax me out.
“It’s so big here. I’m scared I’ll get lost.”
“But sweet child, we spoke about this. This is your house. All of it.”
My nose wrinkles at the thought of this giant adventure park being mine, making her smile.
“I tell you what, how about we discover a new room every day together, hand in hand? Maybe that way it won’t be so scary?”
“Okay.”
“And the flashlight? I’m sure it’s not very good for your eyes you know.”
“Daddy says we don’t have money to put the light on so I have to use the flashlight.”
Her eyes close and she takes a deep breath before pulling me out of the closet and I sit wrapped in her arms, my ear next to her heartbeat, her comforting smell making me feel sleepy.
Scenes of playing hide and seek with the son of the man who Uncle Preston is always meeting with in his study continue to roll on. In a land of people with pale skin and blonde hair, the little boy with the jet black hair reminded me of where I came from. We communicated with our eyes for a long time before we actually spoke. His name was Lucien and he spent a lot of time in my new house because his mommy was sick. He always said she was in the hospital because she had a crying sickness. My eyes would widen in horror at such a thought and even though I missed my parents and still couldn’t understand what had happened to my mother, I decided to keep my hurts to myself in case I got the crying sickness. It scared me to know that it was possible to cry and never be able to stop and I didn’t want to die like that.
Then fun times, laughter, Lucien making sure I was safe and settled in at my new school. Lucien always making sure I was okay, checking my homework and carrying my bags for me.
The movie reel is now showing my and Lucien’s first big bust up at his mom’s stables. It was because he said that I was Carter property and I argued back that I was a person and not a property. I’m sixteen now. I watch as he pulls out a piece of paper from his back pocket that he had found in his father’s study, reading aloud the words written on it.
“Preston Alexander Carter III is appointed by the court to take care of and manage the property of Olivia Cheyenne Carter (the ward) who does not possess the legal capacity to do so, by reason of age, comprehension, or self-control.”
“You’re so stupid sometimes Lucien. It doesn’t even say I’m a property.”
His eyes flash angrily as he walks towards me. “The natural guardian of a child is the child’s parent. A parent can lose this status by neglect or abandonment. In the case of Olivia Cheyenne Carter, the parents, named as Henry James Carter and Kaya Carter (deceased), are guilty of abandonment. They have failed to provide necessary clothing, food, shelter or medical attention, or other remedial care for their child. It has been found that the willful forsaking or forgoing of parental duties is such that the court decides to terminate the natural rights of the parents on the grounds of abandonment to allow adoption by Preston Alexander Carter III.”
“Don’t you dare ever mention my parents, Lucien Borgia.”
Tears stream down my face so that I struggle to see if I’m saddling the horse up properly, my hands shaking as I pull myself up. The words abandonment and neglect echo around in my head.
Lucien shouts in the background, “You’re not Carter property. You’re Borgia property. You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for my dad.”
I hear him screaming, “I own you, Olivia,” before the blood rushing in my ears drowns everything out as I gallop off irresponsibly, only to be thrown by the horse. I hadn’t buckled up properly.
By the time Lucien gets to me, the pain in my leg outweighs everything and he’s forgiven for what he said.
Scenes in the hospital with Uncle Preston and Aunt Victoria and for the first time realizing how much love they have for me. But it wasn’t just my leg hurting. Lucien getting mad at me, Lucien and I fighting beside the school swimming pool before he pushes me in. The feeling of the water. It’s been so long. It’s like heaven and I refuse to get out of the pool, swimming length after length. My leg doesn’t hurt when I’m in the water, so I spend more and more time there. Coach Duggan watching me day after day in the water. My first swimming competition. My first win and to finally find some peaceful place inside of myself.
Lucien and I fighting in his kitchen because I want to go home. My head feels funny after we drank some wine and I don’t like how he just kissed me hard on the mouth. He’s scaring me. Screaming. It’s me.
I open my eyes, and experience the pure whiteness all around me, I’m compelled to go forward and enter the light. Suddenly, my mother, Kaya Carter, is all around me. It’s like the light is actually her. I am completely known and completely loved.
Her smile glints as she kisses my forehead and walks around me, pure white light being transmitted to me at every part that she touches, “Olivia, my beautiful, beautiful child, don’t let go.”
It feels so good as I feel her soft hands on my face and head and smell her warmth. I know that smell. It’s the incense that my Cherokee Indian mother used to burn to ward off evil, and it surrounds, me comforting me like soft clouds. Her hand brushes my eyes so that they close and I allow myself to drift somewhere.
“Olivia, can you hear me?”
No more music. Other sounds now, harsh, intrusive sounds. Voices. Not my mother’s. Something is beeping, something sounds like it is printing. No more white light.
“Olivia. My name is Dr. Nathan Carmichael. Can you hear me?”
My throat hurts. Swallowing saliva past sandpaper and my head throbs like someone is banging it against a wall, time after time. Why is this stupid guy with the annoying voice who says he is a doctor poking me in the chest with his knuckles? Ouch, it hurts.
“Oh, thank God, she’s awake.” It sounds like my Uncle Preston. Go away.
I don’t want to open my eyes like last time. These aren’t the voices I want to hear. I want to hear and see my mother again. I need to hear that music and watch the movie about me again.
“Momma, please come back, don’t leave me, I need you,” I manage to rasp hoarsely.
I hear the other voices again. “Isn’t her mother dead?”
Fingers trying to pry my eyes open, shining some torch in each eye. I try to move my hand, but everything hurts so much. What the fuck have they done to me?
“Olivia, you’re in the hospital in Stamford. You’ve been in an accident,” says the doctor.
I manage to lift my head off the pillow for all of two seconds, looking a
t my left hand with two drips sticking out of it, hooked up to some liquid on a stand beside me. I make a pathetic, unsuccessful attempt to try and rip it out. I need to get out of here and find my mother again.
“Calm down, Olivia.”
I watch the doctor, my uncle and a male nurse all hovering around, way too close for my liking. The nurse injects something into my drip and I feel my eyes closing again.
Chapter Nine
Olivia Carter
They took the drip out of the back of my hand this morning. It feels like it’s been beaten with a heavy metal pole. Inside my head, it’s all fogged up and slow. Everything feels too heavy to even concentrate on what anyone is saying, let alone form a single thought about anything in my head so I just sit quietly most of the time and nod if required. This seems to make Uncle Preston and the kind-looking doctor forget I am actually in the room, so they continue to discuss me as if I am not even there. I don’t care.
Just before I close my eyes to shut out the world, I catch a glimpse of an angel sitting outside my room on a chair facing my room door. He must be all of twenty-five, the blondest curls framing his face like a haughty cherub, an air of distinguished brilliance about him. He’s sitting with his knees together, reading some sort of journal or magazine while making circles and underlining words with a sparkling silver pen. It must be the drugs. It looks like the sun is being reflected off his golden hair. I fight against my tired eyes that want to close, taking in his cobalt blue check shirt, faded jeans and dark brown shoes. I never realized that angels wore shoes.
As if he senses me summoning every bit of strength I’ve got to just focus on him, he glances up at me from his reading and as his lashes move upward like a set of large graceful butterfly wings. The bluest eyes I have ever seen looking straight into the depth of my broken soul. My strength deserts me, exhaustion overtakes me and my eyes close.
Chapter Ten
Gabriel Carmichael
My mood is as blunted and as dull as the weather here. The days have been morphing into one another with no sense of separation since I’ve been forced to help out my dad with his head cases as a means of medical community service. My father, Dr. Nathan Carmichael’s attempts at distracting me by involving me in his war against addiction have been somewhat amusing, but to be honest, my patience is right down at its reserve level. He’s the one that wears a psychiatrist’s hat, not me. I hate all that touchy-feely bullshit. I like to cut and not talk too much. I hope he doesn’t think I’m going to take over his rehab clinics, because the old man is going to be very disappointed.
I can feel myself scowling as I think of the irony of my old life, working as a surgeon in areas of the world torn apart by conflict, and now I’m sitting here outside some teenage girl’s room babysitting yet another rich junkie kid. One last trek using my outward bound skills with teens having withdrawal before I get back to a real job in Manhattan.
I use the silver fountain pen that Dad gave me when I got into med school to underline and ring around words on the crossword. Boredom, dullness, uncertainty, and indifference, shame these words don’t fit. Leaning harder and harder, the delicate nib bending, as I think of how I have borne witness to acts of crushing brutality: the five-year-old girl with her leg and arm hacked off in Rwanda, the Afghan grandfather with his leg blown off in a landmine, a bullet that ripped into the Sri Lankan soldier’s spinal cord that we had managed with next to no resources and makeshift theaters. Now I sit in a hospital corridor. In fucking Stamford. I take a deep breath to quell the anger and frustration that just sits bubbling below my skin’s surface.
Putting my earplugs in, Nelly Furtado starts singing about how all good things come to an end and I can’t help but think she’s singing especially for me.
I get the uncomfortable feeling that someone’s staring and look up, meeting a pair of sad, green eyes that temporarily stun me. They are the most extraordinary color—like green silk. Why is she staring at me like that? It’s like she can see right through me. Her face is sweet, untouched by the excesses of her affluent lifestyle, an unaffected innocence somehow. This one’s different from the rest of them.
Fuck, what the hell is wrong with me? She’s just another screwed up Abercrombie junkie whose had all she’s ever wanted. I need to stop my wayward thoughts right now. Alarmed at how I can’t tear my eyes away from her, my heart thumping in its cage.
She’s fighting with herself to keep looking at me.
Good, it shows she’s got strength against herself. She’s going to need that big time. This one’s fight is just about to start. It’s unnerving but I can’t stop looking back. Christ, she could be on a personal death wish for all I know, riding on a cresting, ugly new wave right to her death. I need to stay uninvolved.
I feel sorry for her uncle. He obviously really loves that screwed up kid, but he’s making a big mistake going against what my dad says. He’s just like all the others, in denial. She’s an addict, period. He’ll come back to my dad, like they always do.
Thank God for that, she’s finally shut her eyes.
I need to get out of here and get some air.
Chapter Eleven
Olivia Carter
I tried, I really did, but no television, no phone and the constant guilt of having Preston and Victoria’s frightened faces constantly checking me was just too much. Even Oreo kept his distance and as for Annie, well I couldn’t even look her in the face.
I wander into Preston’s study and try to log onto Facebook, but they must have changed my password. That was quite clever of them. Thing is, Tyler’s a member of Wattpad and had always said that we could contact him on there if we needed anything. Great, my Wattpadd log-in still works. Within five minutes Tyler has messaged back saying that he will pick me up from the woods. Ava is apparently at a ‘spa’ somewhere. That is usually parent-speak for rehab.
I just pull on my Uggs and grab a hooded sweatshirt from the banister, making sure to not even close the front door properly so I can slip out quietly.
*
It’s been 48 hours since I absconded from the Carter residence a few days after I got out of the hospital. I’m sitting in the back of a police car trying to make out what their walkie talkies are saying, but my mind is jumping again from the coke, booze and weed I’ve inflicted on it.
“Miss Parker, the judge is none too pleased at your little disappearing act. He’s had us out looking for you for the past two days. Frankly I’ve got better things to be doing with my time than wasting it on messed up little rich kids like you. Do us all a favor and get your act together.”
The officer has kind eyes and I catch him looking at me with a mixture of disdain and pity as we head up the curved drive to the house. The tall green conifer trees that line each side of the drive part to let me through and, as I look out of the back window, they seem to close in, making me feel trapped again.
I try to prepare myself mentally for everyone’s reactions at home but it just all feels like too much effort. I actually couldn’t care less. I just know that I need to find a way to get back out again as soon as possible.
The large heavy wrought iron front doors are already open with Uncle Preston standing on the front steps before I’ve even emerged from the car. I notice that there are two black sedans that don’t belong to us parked further up the driveway, but before I can distract myself anymore from avoiding his gaze, I hear the pain, disappointment and anger in his voice as he gasps, “Olivia, what in God’s name have you done to yourself?”
Huh? What’s he talking about? I walk straight past him into the large hallway of the house banging into his side and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I had looked in before I left two days ago … A large smile spreads across my face and a loud raw laugh escapes from me. I had forgotten about my image overhaul. OK, so I had been drunk when I’d done it, but even I don’t recognize the person in front of me. Jesus Olivia … All or nothing, huh? My long dark hair has been braided right from the roots in cornrows so tigh
tly that white bits of my scalp are visible, my eyes are lined thickly in jet black kohl and my lips are lined in jet black. Wow, what a bitch.
“Olivia Carter, I’m talking to you. Have you any idea how worried we’ve been about you?”
Aunt Victoria’s sitting on the large stairs wringing her hands anxiously, her fingers knotting themselves around her large rings, her red-rimmed eyes puffy from constant tears and probable berating and anger from my uncle. She looks up and catches her breath in shock as she sees me, and her left hand clutches at the base of her throat as if she’s going to keel over. Yeah, Victoria show your Upper East Side genteel ladies what the half-breed’s done to herself.
“What do you want me to say, Preston?” I hiss angrily, irritated at being dragged back like a naughty child.
“I’m not even going to ask where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing. Just looking at you and the state you are in paints quite a picture. Come and sit down please. We really need to talk,” he says.
Something about this picture feels all wrong, but I can’t put my finger on what.
As I consider whether to make the effort to go through to the large drawing room on the left off the hall or to just run straight up to my room and lock the door, I see the doctor who I had first met in the hospital. He is slowly walking towards me with two men in matching polo shirts and cream chinos closing in behind him.
“Olivia, do you remember me? I’m Dr. Nathaniel Carmichael. We met at the hospital in Stanford?”
His voice is soft and gentle, but I can’t help the nagging feeling that he’s trying to trap me in some way.
Nothing comes out of my mouth as my loaded, bombed brain can’t cope with trying to figure out what’s going on. I cannot coordinate my speech.