“The two that couldn’t keep their noses out of your mother’s business went easily.” He continued to prod me with a sadistically triumphant smile scratched across his misshapen mouth. “The other two, not so much. You’re my daughter. I might find the sight of you to be disgusting but you’re still my kid. So do you want to guess which option I’m going to favor when I get rid of him?”
I was through with James. I was ready to pretend that nothing had occurred between us. But the thought of losing him permanently, though I knew I would never be with him again, almost brought tears to my eyes. Tears streaming down my cheeks were as rare a sight as a unicorn tumbling out of a rainbow above Antarctica, so I hope one realizes how extreme the pain I felt was when I pictured James being irreversibly gone.
I hated him for lying to me. But I could not hate him. It made no sense and to me, everything made sense. I did not find the confusion regarding my feelings for him to be a place in which I wished to spend my time. I shook my head slightly to clear the rambling, conflicting thoughts from my mind.
“Tell me that you’re not going to see him again.”
I did not reply. I was proud to the point of recklessness and always had been. Even now, as I faced the possibility of physical pain, I could not cast my pride aside. It was too resilient, like the cockroaches I assumed were still scavenging amongst the ashes of our earth.
“Brynna Claire,” He growled as his fingers locked painfully around my upper arms. “Do not test me. I don’t like raising my hand to you but I will if you don’t answer me.”
I raised my eyes to him, fantasizing about reaching out abruptly and shoving my palm up into his nose with all the force my newly acquired strength would allow. The bones would shatter and a jagged piece would be shoved up to pierce his brain. I wanted to lean forward and take an unforgiving bite right out of his throat. I wanted to jump on his back, grasp his head and rip it from his neck, destroying him the same way I destroyed that creature in my apartment.
Instead, I taunted him:
“Raise your hand, little boy.”
His hand came up and he moved it behind him so that he could muster enough force to send me to the ground. I’ll admit, the pain evoked a small cry from me. I crashed sideways into the side of the ship before sliding down into the dirt. Looking up in time to see James suddenly appear in front of me did not improve my now very disagreeable mood.
“Go. Go away.” I gasped out as I widened my eyes in an attempt to clear my blurred vision. He was sitting me up. “You lied to me and I want you to go.”
“Brynna, I lied to you because I knew you wouldn’t trust me. If you knew that I had worked with him to build this, you wouldn’t have come with me. We did vote on whether or not to allow them to come. We voted against them both, just like I said. I don’t know what he’s doing here. I thought you’d be safe from both of them here.” He was speaking quickly, trying to explain away committing the ultimate betrayal in my little world before I managed to hoist myself up and leave him forever.
“So you thought you’d save me, James?” I narrowed my eyes as a new outrage gripped me that had nothing to do with my father. How dare he suggest that I needed to be rescued? I was a strong, independent woman who just so happened to be abused, sometimes severely, by her father. That didn’t mean that I was weak and in need of a knight in shining armor. How incredibly pathetic that would be…
His own defenses rose abruptly; a cold glazed over his warm, brown eyes and his jaw tightened. The armies inside of us were raising their weapons, ready to fire on the enemy that had invaded their strongholds. We were pulling away just as we had begun to grow closer.
Deep down, past the anger, the betrayal, and the self-loathing I felt at allowing myself to move too close to him, my heart was splitting. I dreaded the moment he walked away from me. I prayed that somehow, I would find whatever was needed to change my mind; I searched desperately for some inner strength that would persuade me to let him stay. No revelation of the sort came nor did my swelling pride dissolve.
“I told you that you would pull away,” He told me furiously, “You thought it would be me. But I knew it would be you.”
“Congratulations. Would you like some sort of award for your vast knowledge on the inner workings of Brynna Olivier?” I hissed back just as viciously.
“It is quite an accomplishment considering that you’re so fundamentally f…”
“This conversation has reached its end. I do not tolerate liars.”
“But you tolerate that son of a bitch, who just punched you in the face?”
“He’s my father. You’re… You’re…” I was stammering, a new phenomenon that I was not familiar nor comfortable with. The sudden change in my speaking pattern was evidence that I did not mean what I said next, “You’re nothing, James.”
He studied me as he shook his head slightly. I wanted to see anger on his face and the desire to fight me on my resolve to push him away. Doesn’t every woman want that? But all I saw in James’s face was a new determination to get as far away from me as he could and to stay away this time.
My heart split even more fatally. I was surely bleeding to death internally. The part of me that cared for him so deeply and needed him blindly begged me through her rapidly falling, acidic tears to reach out, wrap my arms around his neck, and beg him to stay. Unfortunately, the side of me that did not allow such fragility to be shown to anyone, but especially men, crossed her arms, shook her head and dug her heels in. She would not beg James Maxwell for anything. She would not beg anyone for anything.
“Good luck to you, Brynna.”
His words were so cold. They were so final. There was not the smallest hint of that beautiful affection I knew he had for me. Over the past several days, a devotion to one another had bloomed in each of us. Mine was wilting away as though its water-source had been evaporated with one harsh ray from the sun. His was effectively eradicated; I wondered if even the smallest traces of it would survive for even an hour more.
My father ushered me back to the crowd and I turned to watch James walking in the opposite direction, getting further and further away by the second. There were so many people. If I ever needed to find him, I would more than likely be unable to do so. That was the last time I would see him, ever.
I walked back to where Maura, Elijah, Penny and Violet were standing together and chattering nervously. Only Penny comforted me with a warm hug around my leg and a kiss on my throbbing cheek when I knelt down in front of her. The rest just diverted their gazes and pretended not to notice the bruise that was already forming there.
“Your eyes are really dark blue.” Penny told me with her brows furrowed in curiosity. “Normally, they’re the color of the sky. Now they’re like the ocean.”
I was barely listening to her, God bless the sweet little girl. In my ears was the rhythmic tapping of the blood droplets as they rained down from my split heart and filled up my insides until they would eventually rise to my eyes where they would fall.
I forced it away. I forced that immense, unimaginable pain away. I allowed myself just that one moment of agony as I replayed the exact second when he had disappeared from my sight over and over again.
I cannot explain it. I cannot think about it for long. The memory pains me still.
Quinn
Our housing compartment had been the very last, so by the time we got to the ship to retrieve our bags, people had already made their camps. The lucky people who had resided in the first compartment were able to set up right in front of the ship. We were forced to set up far in the back, closer to the tree line at the end of the field.
I had very little experience with camping, though my father had insisted that we try it when I was a little kid. Though my tent-constructing skills left a lot to be desired, I managed to build ours in under two hours. Of course, I had required the assistance of a woman from the camp next to ours.
“Too bad we got the last compartment, right? We’re all the way back here in t
he nosebleeds.” She had told me as she expertly hammered a peg into the ground.
“I know, right?” I replied, “I guess we’re second-class citizens.”
“I guess so.” She looked up at Alice, who was standing away from us and staring off into the darkened forest. The leaves on the trees were a dark evergreen; the sight of them made me tired for some reason. The forest was odd; every type of tree I could think of was cluttered together in my view. A weeping willow swayed in the wind, its long, flowing leaves grazing the rough trunk of a tall palm tree. A pine tree cowered in the shadow of a towering oak. I couldn’t help but muse how weird this place was.
“Your girlfriend looks like she has had a bit of a rough time.” The woman informed me.
My thoughts snapped back to Alice, who remained motionless as she stared straight ahead. I wondered what exactly she was looking for or if she was really looking for anything at all.
“We all have, right?” I replied with a noncommittal shrug, “Yeah, it’s crazy to say out loud, but there was this thing back home. I can’t describe to you exactly what it was. I just know that it was evil. It sounds crazy…”
“It doesn’t,” The woman shook her head, “I’m the chatty one out of me and my sisters and I talked to a lot of people on the ship. We all had something after us. You and your girlfriend aren’t alone in that. What was your otherworldly stalker like?”
I chuckled softly at the term. “Otherworldly stalker” was an accurate description.
Though the recollection was painful given the way it all turned out, I found myself spilling all of the details to this stranger. I talked for a long time and she never interrupted me. She never gave any indication that she was disturbed, even when I finished our story with the very real, very grim end.
“That’s horrible,” She told me, but her voice betrayed no true sympathy, “I guess her zoning off instead of helping you make camp is acceptable then. Poor thing…”
I didn’t know whether to be offended by her suggestion that Alice was essentially a useless companion or to ask myself if I had taken her statement the wrong way. I certainly didn’t believe that Alice not helping me make camp made her useless, though I had been slightly irritated at her as I was sweating and stressing over how to build a stupid tent.
“Baby!” I called to her. “It’s done!”
Alice jumped almost completely off the ground.
“Sorry!” I shouted again.
She gave no acknowledgment of my apology. She just meandered back slowly, glancing over her shoulder every couple of seconds to view the trees again. When her face became clearer to me as she got closer, I could see that her brows were wrinkled and her mouth was crooked in an expression of curiosity and bemusement.
“Thank you. It was nice talking to you.” I told the woman, who nodded and studied Alice with narrow eyes. After she walked away, I reached out to grasp Alice’s hand.
“What is it, baby?” I put my finger under her chin to gently lift her head.
She glanced back over her shoulder, her eyes slowly scanning the trees.
“There’s something out there,” She told me, “I can feel it.”
She didn’t elaborate. She just unzipped the tent and went inside.
“It’s really big in here!” She called out to me but I was looking into the darkness behind the tree-line now, looking for whatever it was that she claimed she felt. After a minute, I was able to convince myself that she was still stressed from the events of the past weeks and as a result, was imagining things. There was nothing out there.
I followed her into the tent to see her sitting on the ground, opening her suitcase.
“I want to keep at least one shirt in my bag. I don’t want to wear it.” She told me as she cradled a pink and black striped flannel to her chest. “I just want to keep it in my bag so that it will always smell like home.”
“That’s a good idea.” I replied as I opened the box of rations that we had gotten at the same time we retrieved our bags. “Well, at least the food on the ship was good because this is all kinds of crap. Look at this!”
Though the proportions were quite large, the food itself was basic. It was only meant to supply the necessary nutrients. It was just enough to survive.
“Just add water. Where are we supposed to get water?” I asked as I held up a can of what I supposed was powdered soup.
“Look a little harder, darling.” Alice told me as she rooted around in the box to pull out three bottles of water. “Look, they gave us the bare minimum! One gallon a day each!”
“That was generous of them.” I replied bitterly. I was a typical guy; I underwent a Jekyll and Hyde transformation when I became hungry or thirsty. If I was in desperate need of a drink or meal, I was also in desperate need of a straitjacket. A smart person would promptly avoid me at all costs.
“The extra bottle is for the stuff that needs water, I guess.” Alice told me. “So do you want some powdered soup? I’ll cook it for you. It’ll be like I’m a housewife, right?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Do you even need to ask?” She asked sarcastically. “I’m only kidding. But seriously, I will make it. Let me test my survival skills right here and right now.”
“You’re testing your survival skills by following a simple direction?” I laughed slightly.
“I am. Don’t rain on my parade.”
“Sorry.” I watched her pour the packets of soup into two plastic bowls. She poured in a small amount of water and stirred the contents with a plastic spoon. “I guess the days of nice silverware and plates and bowls are over.”
“Do we really need them, though? I think fine china and silverware are the least of our worries.”
“I know. I was just making a statement.”
“Here you go. That was like magic. I turned powder into soup. Think about it this way…” She took a bite of the chunky green liquid in the bowl and frowned. “When we went away to college, we would have been eating Ramen every night. We probably would have been using Styrofoam bowls and plastic cups and washing them every night because we couldn’t even afford paper plates. We’re basically living the exact way we would have been living at the end of the summer.”
“You’re trying really hard to stay positive, aren’t you?”
“Do I have any other choice?”
“No. I guess not.” I knew that I needed to get on that faux-optimism bandwagon quickly or she would break down into tears. She needed my assurance the same way I needed hers. “We’ll chill here for awhile until we get to explore. Then we’ll figure out a way to get some wood and I’ll build you our house.”
Her face had fallen slightly after she had tried to remain upbeat. Her true feelings were beginning to leak through that mask of happiness. But at the mention of our house, I saw joy on her face that was genuine and familiar to me.
“Maybe we’ll learn to make pots out of clay and stuff.” She replied enthusiastically, “Then you can have your nice plates and bowls.”
“I don’t need plates and bowls!” I laughed again, “I was being dumb.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
I shook my head at her in jocular offense and then leaned forward to kiss her.
“This could all shape up to be really, really cool,” She told me and I knew that her proclamation was an optimistic thought in which she truly believed. “I mean, we’ll just get to chill out for the rest of our lives. No one is going to expect us to work if we’re living on our own. We don't need money for anything. We’ll get up in the morning, decide that we don’t want to do anything, so we won’t do anything.”
“Is this proof that all people are lazy?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” She said through a fit of gleeful laughter, “I believe that, Quinn. I believe it’s everyone’s dream to do nothing. Isn’t that why people started retiring early and moving to Florida and stuff? Why would you work when you can just run around on the beach all day? Look at us. We hadn’t even started wo
rking for real and we were already fantasizing about the day we didn’t have to work at all anymore. It just so happens that our time to do nothing has come a lot earlier than we planned.”
“That’s true. It’s weird to hear it put like that but you’re right. Do you remember how my dad used to talk about how lazy our generation was?”
“Oh, yeah,” Alice smiled as she rolled her eyes. “I remember those lectures. I just wanted to be like, 'Fool, it’s your generation that got us into a crisis!’”
“And it’s their generation that didn't want to work, either. People were losing their jobs left and right and there were still people who didn’t appreciate having good ones. Do you remember how your mom used to threaten to quit every week? And she was making a ridiculous amount of money!”
“I know. She annoyed me so much with that. Then I’d try to tell her about how she should consider herself lucky. And she was like, 'Allie, If you knew what I had to do at my job…’ ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about…’”
Her impression of her mother was spot on.
“Laziness, dude,” She continued, “She was the prime example of it. That was one of her bad qualities, I will say.” Alice’s smile faded as she looked off. “I would want her here even if she had only her bad qualities.”
“I know. I want my parents here, too. They should be here.”
“I know they should. But you know, I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to see them again. One day, when I die…”
“Which will be in a really long time…” I added.
“Which will be in a really long time,” She agreed, “I’ll see them again. It helps more than I thought it would.”
“I know it does. You know that I have no religious beliefs. But I’ve been thinking that a lot lately, too. And it is comforting.”
“It is. So we just need to live out our lives being as happy as we can be. Even though they didn’t approve of us and they probably never would have, they know that we need each other now. So we just need to try to live normally even though God knows this situation isn’t normal.”
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 25