“Do you find this sexist drivel interesting?” I asked him and he sighed heavily.
“Just when I was starting to enjoy the quiet...” He muttered and I took my time rolling up the magazine before I whacked him hard in the arm with it.
“Ow!” He exclaimed, “And I'm the one that's twelve?!”
“I'll make you a deal. I'm normally quite unskilled at socializing with people from any of the various intellect levels. However, I find your inferior intelligence to be quite engaging and the bottom line is, I just can't stand the silence right now. So, I propose that we talk like the rational adults I know that we both are.”
“I'm sorry...” He shook his head slightly in disbelief, “Did you just say that I am of inferior intelligence to you?”
I put the magazine on the dashboard delicately, “That question and your random apology prove it.” I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window slightly.
“Are you being humorous?”
“Proven again.” I told him, shaking my head slightly.
“I'm being serious. Are you joking right now?”
“I don't know.” I asked, exhaling smoke at him, “Am I?” But a grin was tugging at the corners of my mouth that he saw when he glanced over at me. I raised my eyebrows and gazed back at him impassively.
He laughed quietly to himself and shook his head, muttering, “You are something else, I'm telling you.”
We were quiet once again and I could see clearly that he was enjoying the lull in conversation. I turned my head to look outside, blowing smoke rings and watching them quickly evaporate upon meeting the air that whizzed past my open window.
“What I find interesting...” I said and he exclaimed in only slight irritation, “...is that you've been like a bull for the past hour and I, the red cape. Our arguments have ranged from the sensible to the absolutely ludicrous. It was only when I insulted your intelligence that you were calm. Why?”
“It doesn't carry any of the significance you think it does. I was just humoring you. Now, why do you think Men's Health is sexist drivel?”
“Look at all of these advertisements they run. I mean, it's better than Cosmopolitan, surely.”
“Is that the woman's magazine that's all about how to please men?”
“Indeed, it is. I am surprised you know what it is.”
“I go to the grocery store like every other human being on the planet.”
“I am just surprised you made a note of it.”
“I am also surprised I made a note of it.”
“Our world is strange. Our culture is strange. There is such an emphasis on how we look. These magazines are an example of it. We pride ourselves on our pride, if you will.”
“I will.”
I smiled and chuckled softly.
“Shut up.”
He grinned, too.
“Do you think that's why the world is ending?” I asked him, serious now.
“Why? Because magazines make us feel bad about ourselves and force us into believing we have to change our appearance to fit their standards? I think it's a little bigger than that, Brynna.”
“Don't be condescending.”
“Why not? You're condescending.”
“I'm trying to make sense of this right now. Catch a bubble.” I replied hurriedly, holding my hand out in his direction but not looking at him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
I took a deep breath and puffed my cheeks out as I held the air to demonstrate. For a moment, I thought he might slap me. Then, his face broke into a smile.
“That's clever.”
“I cannot take credit for it. Please know that what I just showed you was born from a moment of whimsy we cannot afford.”
“You're so weird.”
“Perhaps. Now, be quiet and let me stew over the topic. I should have an answer to my question momentarily.”
“I don't think there's any way to know for sure why this is happening.” He replied instantly and I rolled my eyes. “I do understand what you're getting at, though. Is it our vanity, our lust, our depravity as a whole that made some higher power want to snuff us all out? Do we deserve it?”
“Do we, James?” I asked, looking at him now.
He was quiet for a long moment, pondering the question. I thought about it more in depth throughout that silence than I had previously. I was not religious in any sense of the word, but I had studied most religions extensively. I was fascinated by the blind devotion of those who followed a specific creed. I wondered where their resignation came from. I wondered how they could glory in the grace of a Creator whose sole endgame was to smite the earth. In Christianity, there was the notion of the Rapture, as I had been told. The good people would be taken to heaven before the fireworks started. In Hinduism, there was the Kali Age, where the world would cease to exist because it was meant to and to hell with whoever remained. Some religions, like those followed by the Native Americans and Mayans, had symbols whose meaning told of the impending end for us all.
All religions knew that this was imminent and all had their different take on why it was so. I prided myself on having all the answers when a logical question was posed. But this was beyond logic. This was what those spiritual people would call “faith.” I marveled at it and was beguiled into a silence that was uncommon for me.
“I just don't know, Brynna.”
James's voice struck me down from the philosophical speculation I was engaging in and I was quite grateful, though his answer to my earlier question brought no relief.
“We'll never know.”
I nodded but said nothing, reaching for my cigarettes again. I was momentarily confused by the way my body was suddenly trembling when I looked up to see a figure lying in the road.
“Watch out!” I exclaimed and he slammed the brakes. The force from the sudden stop sent me flying forward and since I was bent down trying to retrieve my purse, I was going to smash my face against the dashboard. But James's arm jerked out in front of me, stopping the movement before one blink. The car slid forward on the snow but stopped just in front of the person lying. Whoever it was didn't move.
“Oh my God or Gods...” I muttered, seeing a car that had slammed into a light-post. I jumped out, unsure of how to proceed. Anyone inside of the wreck was surely dead but the girl on the ground could have been alive.
“Brynna!” I heard James yell as he got out of the car. On the cold, abandoned street, with the snow falling around us, I ran to the girl lying down in the road, with only the sound of the windshield wipers moving every few seconds in my ears.
“Oh my...” I muttered as the recognition gripped me. My feet slipped and slid in the snow but I ran faster until I was right above her. The girl turned over and squinted up at me through the tears that were pouring from her eyes.
“Brynna?” She asked and I fell to my knees beside my sister. My arms furiously scooped her up into a sitting position.
“What happened to you? Are you okay?” I asked her hurriedly, putting both of my hands on her face, “Violet! Were you in the car?”
She shook her head and pointed at the wreck. I am not the person to turn to when one needs comfort, as my own emotions do not function in a way that could ever be described as normal. I can feel concern for someone down to my core, as I did with Violet then, but that should not suggest that when there is an emotional outpouring, I can remedy it. I did not know why she was pointing to the car or why she was crying. If she hadn't been in the vehicle then she more than likely didn't know the person who was.
“I'm going to call 911.” James said from the car, “She's dead, but they still have to come get her and clean up the wreck.”
“No! Don't!” Violet jumped up and ran towards him, taking his cellphone right out of his hand, “I did this!”
“You did what, Violet?” I asked her with one hand rested on her arm.
“I caused it! It's my fault!”
“You said you weren't in the car!” I told her, throwing
my hands up in frustration, as I always did when a situation was just not making any sense to me. I did not enjoy when my enhanced mental abilities were trumped by mysterious circumstances.
“I wasn't!” She sobbed, “But I was... I had this dream... and...”
James and I looked at each other as she threw her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder, wailing now. We both knew that there was only one dream that she could be speaking of.
“Well, you were worried about having to convince them.” James told me as he turned us both around and started walking us back to the car. “See? The hard part's over.”
Her grip on me was so tight that I couldn't break free to get back into the front seat. So I maneuvered us both into the backseat and wrapped my other arm around her to pat her head awkwardly. James watched us in the rear-view mirror and I could tell by the way his eyes were squinted that he was smiling slightly at my discomfort.
“Shut up, James.” I muttered and he didn't hide it anymore; he laughed softly, despite the situation.
“Who is he?”
“I'm James. I know you're Brynna's sister, but that's about all I know.”
“He's making it sound like I haven't talked about you extensively. I have. She's Violet.” I told him.
“I could make a really ridiculous joke right now to lighten the mood.”
“Please don't.” I replied with another eye roll.
“Okay.”
“Vi, who was in the car?” I asked her bluntly, the tenderness that would be most comforting to her completely absent from my voice and demeanor. I didn't try to be so cold. It just happened.
“It was...” She started crying harder again and I heaved a great sigh of frustration, resigning myself to the fact that I would probably never know. “Can you please put your weird emotional tendencies aside for two seconds and just be my sister!?”
“What are you even talking about? I'm hugging you, aren't I?” I snapped at her in offense. I was unsure how she could suggest that I never comforted her. Or perhaps I was just flustered and irritated that she had called me on my strangeness and complete lack of knowledge on empathy.
“You've gotten so weird since you moved out! You used to be able to make me feel better no matter what was wrong! Now you're weird!”
“Alright, you are very upset right now.” I told her, “And you're saying things that would be hurtful if it weren't for the fact that I...”
“...that you're a cyborg!” She exclaimed, pulling away from me, “I just killed Miranda!”
“Miranda who?” I asked.
“Miranda! My best friend Miranda who you've only met like, a hundred times!”
I had seen the girl around the house every day of every summer since Violet had been in seventh grade. The two young friends were inseparable from the moment they had met. Why Violet would resort to murder to dispatch her best friend, I was not sure. A simple “I think it's time we go our separate ways” would have sufficed.
“Stop having weird thoughts! God, they're so loud!” She shrieked as she covered her ears. My heart plummeted several feet and my stomach churned dangerously. My threshold for tolerating strangeness was beginning to lessen. Violet was telling me now that she could hear the mental dialogue occurring inside of my head. Her ability to do such a thing and the fact that she could read into my innermost thoughts were upsetting to both my mind, heart and stomach. I ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to keep my breaths steady.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded and when she didn't answer, I grabbed her arm and shouted, “Violet, what are you talking about?!”
“I am well aware that this keeps getting stranger and stranger.” Violet told me, “That's what you just thought. 'This keeps getting stranger and stranger.' I don't know what's happened to you today...” She stopped, looking off at something I couldn't see, “Brynn, what...”
“What are you doing right now? Violet, stop it!'
I didn't know what I wanted her to stop. Something about the sudden change in her, though, was giving me a feeling of unease that turned my stomach and made my head spin. James had parked in front of our house and turned around to look at us, his eyes wide with curiosity and concern.
“When you said that...” Violet was looking at me now with her luminous brown eyes, “They cut off. When you told me to stop, the stream stopped.” She shook her head slightly and whacked herself in the face with both hands. “What is happening to me?!” She threw her arms around me again and this time, I squeezed her back as my love for her and my fear for her life exploded inside of me; that blast swallowed everything in its path.
The explosion. It was coming.
“Listen to me.” I took her head and lifted it somewhat abruptly, “I want you to go inside and pack a bag. We know what's coming. We know what you saw in your dream.”
“An explosion and everyone...” She stopped to breathe heavily with one hand grasping her chest. I put my hands on her face.
“Violet, I need you to focus. I need you to pull it together just for right now. Later, we'll talk about everything. James and I will explain everything we know and anything that you need to say, you can say it. But right now, we have to get the hell out of here. Understood?”
I hadn't barked like a drill sergeant rousing his lazy troops but I had certainly come close. A new urgency was consuming me now. It was reminding me that with each passing second, the imminent end moved closer and closer. We were running out of time.
Violet nodded and in a voice trembling with the same pure, child-like terror that I was beginning to feel but refused to show, whispered: “Brynna... what were those things?”
I shook my head and replied brusquely, “Later.”
XXX
“Was Maura watching Penny today?” I asked Violet hurriedly as the three of us went storming into the house.
“I think so. Why?”
“Because she's coming with us.”
“What about Mom and Dad?” Violet asked and another look passed between James and I. He had told me that my parents had basically been voted off the island, or in this case, the ship. I figured that the time to tell my sister that little detail would be much later, once we landed on Pangea. But the question I faced right then was whether I should lie and say that they would be meeting us there or if I should just dodge the query entirely.
James solved that dilemma for me when he said, “Right now, we just need to get your stuff together. Everything else can wait, Violet.”
She nodded and scampered off to her room.
“Only necessities, Vi!” I called after her.
“Is there anything that you want here?” James asked me as he observed the foyer of my parents' lavish home. I found myself scanning the familiar surroundings, feeling nothing but an icy resolve to feel nothing. Even as I took in the sight of the two-sided staircase I had come hurtling down as a child on my rush out the door every morning before school, I was expressionless. Even as I glimpsed the kitchen with its warm yellow walls where Maura had made me breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, my heart was not stung with even the slightest twinge of pain. As I looked at each formal picture of my mother, father, and siblings placed apart in perfect distance from the last that adorned the walls, I only frowned slightly and closed my eyes until every terrible feeling that could possibly roar to life and every acidic tear that could emerge into my eyes fizzled away into nonexistence.
As I said, I had always been good at feeling nothing.
“There's nothing here for me, James. There never has been.” I walked past him, beckoning for him to follow me, “Maura!”
“Who is that?”
I heard the voice that had been ever-present in my life for as long as I could remember and instantly, the harried anxiety I felt lifted. It was for a moment as brief as death but it was a moment I have never been able to shake. I found myself running to meet her as she came into the kitchen, followed closely by my youngest sister, Penelope.
“Bry
nn!” Penny exclaimed, her excitement upon seeing me as refreshingly childish as it always had been. Despite the circumstances growing ever dire as the time progressed, I couldn't help but smile as she threw her arms around my middle and squeezed me as though she hadn't seen me in years.
“Hey, turnip.” I greeted her softly as I leaned down to kiss her forehead.
“Maura, Brynn came home to see us!”
“I see that.” Maura said through a joyful chuckle as she wrapped her arms around my neck. She broke away from me abruptly and held her hands up in mock apology, “I'm sorry. I know you no longer like hugs.”
Maura had come to America from England about ten years before I was born. She had been an exchange student set to attend Yale the following fall. However, her scholarship fell through when she met my father there. He enticed her with his charisma and good looks, only to drop her abruptly when she became pregnant with their child. She found herself so despondent as a result of the sudden breakup that she stopped attending classes. For years, she took every job she could in order to stay in the country before my father contacted her out of the blue many years after their last meeting to tell her that my mother was pregnant and they would be needing a nanny. He offered her good money and a place to stay that he would help her pay for.
I try to think that my father did all of that to assuage the damage done by how badly he had hurt her. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt. I try that only to be snapped back to reality by the fact that the only reason he hired her was so he could have a woman on the side who would take care of his needs when my mother shunned him. I feel no sense of regret for Mom but I do feel slightly sorry for Maura.
“Young and naïve...” She had told me once after imbibing a little too readily one night, “Don't ever fall victim to their wiles, my dear. The only person who will pay for it in the end is you.”
After many more of those drunken conversations, I finally got up the nerve to ask her why she didn't tell him, in colorful British terms, to go screw himself. England surely would have been a welcome sight after so many years. Even though my own home was as painful to view as a particularly nasty roadkill pile on the side of the freeway, she had no reason to hate her home country. Why didn't she return to it?
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 9