by E. M. Parker
Fiona’s head started spinning again. “I don’t understand. What am I supposed to know?”
“The truth of what happened.”
“To whom? Donald Tisdale?”
“Not just him.”
“Who, Olivia? Tell me.”
“I can show you.”
“What?”
“If you let me come over, right now, I can show you.”
Fiona felt a wave of panic rising in her chest. “But your mom…”
“She’s not here. But I don’t have much time before she comes back. If you want to see me, it has to be right now.”
Fiona heard her cell phone ringing in the kitchen. She ignored it. “Okay.”
Olivia’s voice brimmed with excitement. “I’ll be right over.”
Fiona heard light, eager footsteps as Olivia ran out of her bedroom. She followed suit, quickly making her way out of her own bedroom and into the living room where she stood in front of the door. As she stood there, she heard a ding from her cell phone. Whoever called had left a message.
Fiona was determined to stay put until Olivia arrived, but after a few moments, her curiosity won out. She walked into the kitchen to retrieve her phone. She swiped the home screen fully expecting to see Paul’s name. What she saw instead made her entire body tremble with dread, sadness, and hope, all at the same time.
She barely heard Olivia knocking on the door as she listened to the message.
The sound of Jacob’s voice managed to drown out the entire world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“HI MOMMY. IT’S JAKE. HOW ARE YOU?” His voice sounded just like Fiona remembered it. Mature and articulate, but with the perfect amount of bashful charm. “I’m good, and so is daddy. We really like it here so far.”
After a few seconds of silence, Fiona heard Kirk’s voice in the background, coaching a tentative Jacob on what to say next.
“Do you miss mommy?” Kirk asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Then tell her.”
Jacob was back on the phone. “I miss you mommy. I hope you miss me too.”
“Oh honey, I miss you every day.” Fiona spoke the words as if Jacob were right there to hear them.
“Tell mommy that you’ve been thinking about her,” Kirk instructed.
“I’ve been thinking about you. I want to see you soon.”
Fiona tried to respond, but the heavy emotion that rose in her chest did not allow her to speak.
“Anything else you want to say?”
“Uh… no.”
“Okay, then tell her goodbye.”
“Bye mommy. I miss you and love you, and I can’t wait to see you.”
“Bye honey. I love you so much. I’ll see you soon. I promise.” Fiona thought the words, but she wasn’t sure how many of them made it out of her mouth.
Jacob’s voice was suddenly replaced with Kirk’s. “Um, hi Fiona. How is it going? Jake has really been asking to talk to you, so we called.” His voice was just as tentative as Jacob’s had been, but Fiona was thrilled to hear it nonetheless.
Out of her other ear, she heard the knocking on the door.
She had been aware of it for the entire time that she’d been listening to the message, but she couldn’t move to answer it.
“I know things got a little heated between us the other day, and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I know I could have handled it better, and I…”
“Are you here, Fiona?”
Olivia’s muted voice briefly rose above Kirk’s, then faded.
“…really meet up again, this time without the lawyers if that’s possible. Just let me know if…”
“Fiona? Why won’t you…”
“Sorry if I’m rambling. But again, I’m sorry. Talk to you soon.”
The moment the message ended, Fiona replayed it. She breathed in the sound of Jacob’s voice – every phrase, every word, every syllable – until it filled her entire being. It was the best feeling she’d had in years, and she wanted nothing more than to stand there and bask in it until she worked up the courage to call him back. But as soon as the message ended again, her attention suddenly fell on Olivia.
She quickly walked to the door. “I’m so sorry. I’m coming right now.” But when she opened it, Olivia wasn’t there.
“Oh shit.”
She stepped out into the hallway. No sign of her. Fiona was prepared to go back inside with the hope of reaching Olivia through the bedroom wall again, when she glanced over at her apartment door.
It was open.
She walked up to it without giving herself a chance to rethink the notion. There were no signs of movement inside that she could see. The television was off, as were all the lights, except for a single beam emitting from the back hallway. She took a single step into the doorway, knocked, and listened. Still no movement. By the time Fiona took her next step, she was inside the apartment.
“Hello?”
She waited for a response. Hearing none, she advanced a few steps further, allowing for her first real glimpse into the lives of the people who had come to dominate so much of hers.
Her first sensation, of course, was fear. The second was light-headedness, possibly the result of the marijuana smell that permeated the apartment. It was legal here, as it had been in her home state, but that didn’t give them the right to smoke it in front of Olivia. Fiona was aware of the irony of her judgement, considering the perilous situation she had put her own son in. But it didn’t matter. All she could think about was the cruel injustice of a world that gave these monsters free rein to be horrible parents while she had to fight with every ounce of her being for the chance to even talk to her child.
Pushing the useless thought aside, she continued in, walking past a living room cluttered with fast-food wrappers and empty soda and beer cans, and a kitchen filled with dirty dishes and an overflowing trashcan.
On the walls were various pictures of two young girls. They were together in some, standing arm in arm during various events: birthday parties, Christmas mornings, Halloween costume parades. In others, they were separate. One was older than the other by a few years, but they were spitting images. One picture in particular captured Fiona’s attention. It showed a much younger and happier Natalie in her hospital bed with a newborn baby in her arms. Next to her on the bed stood the older sister, much smaller than she was in some of the other pictures. She had a mane of flaming red hair to match her face full of red freckles, and her smile, equal in warmth to her mother’s, revealed the growth of a first tooth. Fiona concluded that one of the girls was Olivia, while the other was the sister who Iris claimed now lived with her father.
As her eyes drifted along the wall of pictures, Fiona came upon one that stopped her cold. It was in its own space, away from all the others. If she hadn’t been looking closely, she might have missed it altogether. But now that she’d seen it, nothing else seemed relevant.
Natalie was in the same hospital room that she’d been in in the previous picture. But this time, she was sitting in a rocking chair, and there was not one baby in her arms, but two, both wearing the same pink and white beanies. The older sister stood off to the side, with only half of her tiny body visible in the frame.
Fiona covered her mouth, but she was too late to stifle the audible gasp that escaped from it.
She began looking around the living room in a frantic search for more pictures that she may have missed. It wasn’t long before she discovered more, in an old Kodak envelope on top of a nearby bookshelf.
As she began flipping through the large stack of pictures, she saw more shots of the younger and older sister before finally finding the one she was looking for. The twin girls, no more than four or five years old, wore matching overalls and pigtails. They looked exactly alike, save for two minor differences: one of the girls wore glasses, and the other was not smiling. The subtle differences were apparent in all the other pictures that Fiona saw of the pair. As the girls progressed in age, the differences became
less subtle. She compared the latest picture of the twins to the most recent picture of the older and younger sister. The younger sister (minus her twin) had aged only a year, possibly two, between the pictures. But then Fiona noticed something else; something that she had completely missed before. The younger sister, the twin without the glasses, hadn’t smiled in any of the pictures, and in a few of the more recent ones, she could barely look at the camera. It was then that the stark contrast between this girl, her twin sister, and her older sister, became obvious.
But three sobering questions remained. Why was this little girl always so sad? What happened to her twin sister? And which one of them was Olivia?
Fiona had hoped for an immediate answer to the last question as she walked out of the living room toward the single beam of light in the back hallway that she assumed was coming from Olivia’s bedroom.
After a few steps, she stopped and looked behind her. The apartment door was still open. She could have saved herself the inevitable trespassing charge by leaving right then, but instead she closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned her attention back to the hallway.
“Olivia? It’s Fiona. Can you please come out?”
Fiona took the silent response as a cue that Olivia was upset.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the door. I had just gotten a really important phone call, and I…” Fiona stopped herself. “There’s no excuse. I’m really sorry. Can we still talk?”
Fiona took her first step toward the hallway. Before she could take her second, the beam of light went out.
Her eyes grew wide with fear as she attempted to adjust them to the suddenly dark space.
“Olivia?”
She took another few steps toward the back hallway before she heard from a place that seemed very distant, “Go away.”
Fiona continued toward the voice. “Olivia, please don’t be mad at me. I just want to talk.”
“No you don’t. You’re just like my mom. Every time I try to talk to her, she ignores me. And you did the same thing.” Olivia’s voice seemed more remote now, despite Fiona being directly outside her slightly ajar bedroom door.
She saw nothing but black as she looked through the narrow opening. “I’m not ignoring you, okay? I want to talk to you.”
Fiona jumped as something stirred in the darkness.
“Olivia, please.”
More stirring, then Olivia’s distant voice. “I’ll talk to you. But you have to promise something first.”
“What?”
“You have to promise that you won’t get scared and move away like you almost did today.”
Fiona swallowed hard as she attempted to formulate a rational justification for the blatant lie that was about to come out of her mouth. She searched the deepest recesses of her conscience, but couldn’t come up with a single thing. She lied anyway.
“I won’t leave.”
“Really? Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay, you can come in.”
Fiona slowly opened the door, revealing more of the pitch-darkness of the bedroom. Her eyes darted aimlessly from one end of black space to the other, until she finally found a tiny sliver of sunlight that edged its way in through a corner of the drawn window shade. It was only then that she was oriented enough in her surroundings to notice the dark mass in the corner.
“Olivia? Is that you?”
“Yes,” she answered, her voice more immediate.
“Can you please turn on a light? I can’t see.”
“Noah took the lightbulb out.”
Not believing her, Fiona slid her hand across the wall until she came upon the light switch. When she flipped it, nothing happened.
“He says I keep it on too much, says I waste too much electricity that I don’t pay for. But it’s the only way I can sleep.”
“What about the light that was just on? Where did that come from?”
Fiona was suddenly blinded by the bright beam of an LED flashlight.
“It was this,” Olivia said.
“Okay, could you please not shine that in my eyes?” an irritated Fiona said as she covered her face.
“Oh right. Sorry.” Olivia quickly turned off the flashlight.
As Fiona blinked away the residual strobes, she heard footsteps creaking across the wood floor. In the next instant, she was blinded again, this time by sunlight as Olivia let up the window shade.
“Is that better?”
When Fiona opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed were the glasses. The dark, oval-shaped frames were a size too big for Olivia’s face, much as they had appeared to be in the photos. Each time she moved her head even the slightest bit, she had to adjust them.
“Noah and my mom always like for the shades to be down. I only opened the window because they aren’t here.”
“Where are they?” Fiona asked as she blinked away the last floating dot of light.
“Noah is at work, and my mom… I don’t know where she is. But I’m sure she won’t be gone for long, so we shouldn’t waste too much time.”
With her vision fully restored, Fiona finally got her first good look at Olivia. She was long and lean, appearing much taller than the girl in the photos. Instead of the short pigtails present in many of the shots, her dark brown hair was long and rich, with finely trimmed bangs that nearly touched the top rim of her glasses. She wore a faded Taylor Swift t-shirt and loose black leggings. She looked like any other normal adolescent girl that one would see on the street, hanging out with her friends, gossiping about boys, laughing and joking and loving the utter simplicity of her life. But nothing about this adolescent girl’s life was simple or normal.
“Is it okay if I sit?” Fiona asked tentatively.
“Sure. Why don’t you sit there?” Olivia pointed to a twin bed that had been stripped of its sheets and blankets.
It was only after Fiona saw this that she noticed the makeshift sleeping area that Olivia had made on the corner near the wall, which consisted of a pillow, flat sheet, and a plain white comforter piled on top of a Dora the Explorer sleeping bag.
“That’s where I sleep now,” Olivia confirmed.
“What for? It looks like you have a perfectly good bed right here.”
“Because I’m more comfortable there.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m closer to you.” Olivia adjusted her falling glasses, and when she looked up at Fiona, she smiled. But it didn’t take long for her brave face to falter under the weight of sadness. She did her best to hold the smile, even as her mouth began quivering. “Since you moved in, it’s been really different around here. I don’t feel as scared as I used to, back when your apartment was empty.”
Fiona did her best to hide her own sadness. “What made you so scared?”
“Lots of things.” Her eyes suddenly drifted to the amulet hanging around Fiona’s neck. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.
Fiona held on to the warm stone with a tight grip. “It was a special gift from a friend.”
“It’s really pretty.”
When Fiona saw the look of admiration in Olivia’s gentle eyes, she only had one thought. “Would you like to wear it?”
Olivia’s face brightened with excitement, then fell just as quickly. “But you said it was a gift. Won’t your friend be mad if you let me wear it?”
“Of course not,” Fiona said, lifting the chain off her neck. “She would want to help you just as much as she helped me. Besides, it’s already served its purpose. Come on, let’s make sure it fits.”
Olivia was suddenly hesitant. “How would it help me?”
“Well, it helped me feel brave. It helped me not want to run, or move away when certain things happened.”
“Certain things?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Olivia nodded.
“After I started wearing this, those things didn’t feel quite so scary.”
“Will it do that for me?”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Fiona held out the necklace.
The tension faded from Olivia’s face as she stepped toward it. When she put her hand out, Fiona dropped the necklace in it.
Olivia smiled as she squeezed. “It feels so warm.”
“I’ve been told it’s a mood stone, meaning that whatever energy you give to it, it gives back to you. It’s giving you warmth, that means it likes your energy.”
Olivia’s smile suddenly flattened. “I wonder how it would react to Noah? Or even my mom?”
Fiona shrugged, knowing it was best if she didn’t respond.
“I bet it would be so cold for Noah that it would freeze his entire hand.” Olivia’s smile returned at the thought.
Fiona smiled too. “You might be right about that. Here, why don’t you let me put it on for you.”
Olivia handed her the amulet, turned around, and lifted her long hair. “I sure hope it fits.”
Fiona clasped it and turned her around. The stone sat just below the base of her sternum. “Fits beautifully.”
“Really?” Olivia ran to her dresser mirror, holding the stone in her hand like it was the most prized possession she’d ever owned. “I love it. Thank you.”
Fiona walked up behind Olivia, looking at her in the mirror. “You should only thank me if it helps you feel more brave.”
“It’s already helping.”
“I’m so glad.”
Olivia turned to her with inquisitive eyes. “How does it do that?”
“I honestly don’t know. All I know is that it works.”
Olivia turned back to the mirror. “I guess you can’t really question magic, can you?”
“No, I guess you can’t.”
Olivia looked at her with sudden concern. “But if you aren’t wearing this anymore, won’t you get scared again? Won’t you want to leave?”
“I promise you, I’ll be fine. I’m frankly a lot more worried about you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. I have this now,” Olivia answered with a brave smile that didn’t look at all manufactured.
“That’s all I needed to hear. Now, do you mind if we sit? I’d like to talk to you about something else.”