by Char Cam
Marcus couldn’t help himself. He tensed. So did Leisha.
He opened the security box and added the envelope to the contents. Then he brought out a whole stack of envelopes. And another. One after another, he withdrew piles of envelopes. Each one he put into the now not so empty cloth bag. Finally, he’d apparently withdrew the last one. He set the very full bag on the table. Set the box key beside it. Bowed to the manager. Left the room.
“Thank you, Mr. Allenby, for your cooperation. I understand this is a legal matter that is now resolved. One again, our bank offers you our most sincere condolences upon your loss.”
After he left, Marcus stood looking at the bag. On the table. Accusing him of its neglect.
“Leisha? I just don’t want to look in that bag right now.”
“Yeah. Let’s go get the kids. My sister has probably been murdered by now.” She reached over and grabbed the incriminating bag. “Well, if my sister has been murdered, we know which side of the family to blame now,” Leisha said archly.
Marcus looked at her quizzically. She punched his arm.
“You’re a twin…they are twins…is it clicking yet?”
He looked at her in horror. “Oh. My. Gosh.”
Later that night after their little monsters, a. k. a. their four year old boys, had been put down like the wild hogs they were; jumping on beds, drinks, stories, drinks, bathroom, not tireds; Marcus and Leisha went into their room and stared at the ‘elephant’ on their dresser. Finally, Leisha grabbed the bag and dumped it on the bed and started sorting.
“My gosh, there’s years worth of letters here!”
Marcus reluctantly joined her. Reached down and picked up a pile. A rubber band held it together. He studied the writing on the outside of an envelope. “They seem to have been written by a child.”
“Not this pile. Huh. Maybe the child is growing up?”
“Yeah. That’s logical. Let’s see if we can find the beginning.”
After fifteen minutes, Leisha found the earliest dated letter pile.
“Okay this is the first stack here. Let’s start going though them. I’ll get some stickers and write the order we should read ‘em in while you start wiiiiiiiith this one.”
Cautiously, Marcus picked up the childishly written letter and unfolded it.
Dear Marcus,
My name is Jasmine. I am 5 years old. I am your sister. Grandma said if I write in a journal I could feel better. That’s silly. So she said write to someone. I’m writing to you. Today a very bad man came and told us our sister was Dead. Ophelia was my half sister, but she was your twin.”
Marcus paused and breathed through his teeth.
She was a good sister. She played with me and read stories. I don’t feel better yet. I will keep trying and write later. I have to go to class. Grandma says I’m precocious and need to work hard. I looked it up. Of course I am precocious. I am a Kim.
Your sister
Jasmine
Marcus picked up the next letter.
Dear Marcus
Grandma made us work very hard today. I pretended the punching bag was the bad man. Emerald says he probably pulled the plug on Ophelia and let her die. I punched very hard.
Your sister
Jasmine
They read into the night as a little girl worked through her grief for her sister. Some of it was heart rending, but there were spots of joy. Those spots became more numerous as the months wore on in the little girl’s life.
Dear Marcus,
Today Mommy found out she is preggies. I didn’t know if she was happy because she said if Daddy wasn’t dead, she would kill him herself. Then she cried. I know she didn’t mean it because they always joked I’ll kill you myself if you don’t take the garbage out. Mommy said the baby was Daddy’s last gift to us. We’re all excited.
Your sister
Jasmine
Dear Marcus,
Today we have a new brother and two new sisters! I’m gonna be the best big sister. I already help with our baby brother Aaron. Ophelia would be very proud of me.
Your sister
Jasmine
“Well, that’s the whole first year. Geesh. Do you have enough uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters?” Leisha asked incredulously. “You’ve gone from only child to one of eight!” She exclaimed packing the letters back in the bag.
Marcus nodded sadly. “I wish there was one more.”
“Well I’ll tell you one thing right now, Mister. You get me with triplets and I’ll kill you myself!”
He tackled her on the bed. “Like to see you try.” He seduced her. Reduced her to mush. Produced a triumphant grin as she lay limply like an overcooked noodle. She had only enough energy to mumble, “Oh shoot. We forgot a condom.”
“We didn’t forget anything.”
“Bastard.”
Week One Day One
ONE
She’d won! She’d won! She’d won and she, Ophelia Ransom, was really, really here! Really standing across the street from the entrance to the Azdromadarim Role-Playing Theme Park! She left her luggage and purse locked in her car and took only her ID, cell phone, and one other very important item as she stood gazing at the building across the parking lot.
Ophelia held within her hand, a Golden Ticket, Master level. She laughed. She was more excited than Charlie when he’d held his own golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. To get this ticket, she’d had to complete a mad quest in the online game she enjoyed. Before she’d even accepted that quest, she’d had to prepare. The quest had to be completed within three days of acceptance. She’d taken advice from several players, some of whom were actual winners of master tickets, and had packed ready-to-eat food near her computer. She played three to four hours then took fifteen minute breaks. She had a cot by her computer and took thirty minute catnaps when she realized she was starting to sleep at the keyboard. She took energy sustaining vitamins, even used a couple of fifteen minute breaks to shower, which helped refresh her. She couldn’t ask for people to come help her in group, but she could still chat with them and she’d asked for advice and ideas. During play she’d had to outthink, outsneak, and outfight some of the toughest questing villains she’d ever come across; but she’d succeeded! She’d earned the Golden Ticket and was among the elite of the elites! Because one could not just walk up to the counter of the theme park and buy a ticket. Every single person inside the role-play area had had to earn their way in by completing a specialized quest: unless of course, someone had bought their ticket from ebay. For several thousand dollars. Ophelia smirked. It could happen. Not very likely. Nah. Who’d want to miss this?! Nope! The only way in was to finish a quest from The Shard, a palace once housing the great family of Igen, rulers of Azdromadarim until its Queen, the heart of her husband and people, was foully murdered and the quest to restore her consumed the land.
Rumors about the inside of the role-playing area abounded and those who’d been in just smirked and said yes to every insane idea someone came up with about the park. There was one iron-clad rumor they did not laugh off however--references to the 'outside' world was strictly forbidden inside the game area.
The special effects were said to be so wondrous and the costumes so authentic, people swore it was all real. One of the rumors was that some people had gone in and never came out. They’d earned the grand prize of a perpetual guest pass and chose never to leave the park! If she won the guest pass....
Ophelia’s eyes shown with expectation. She knew she looked calm and perhaps sophisticated. Her clothes were well made, yet not tailored, so she also looked expensive, but not excessively so. She knew people looking at her would see a statuesque beauty in her late twenties with long, straight, and richly thick black hair shining with health. Her slightly slanted eyes added an exotic touch that their bright, grass-green shade made mysterious. Pale, pale skin was saved from a deathly appearance by the glow of health and vibrant energy that danced about her and enervated her quick d
ecisive gestures. However, that was all on the outside. Inside, she was a quivering mass of excited microbial bacterium. Only one thing was missing to make her joy absolute; Andrew. Andrew who had made her world whole for oh too short a time.
They’d met when she was twelve and he fourteen. She had come from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ as her in-laws liked to claim. A child of the foster care system with abusive foster parents she was left with because of chronic health problems from a traffic accident that had killed her parents. Andrew Ransom, as it happened, had been born with several sets of platinum flatware, forget the single silver spoon. Which, upon his untimely and violent death, Ophelia did not inherit. With gratitude. She hated anything having to do with her in-laws.
By sixteen, with her budding beauty, Andrews parents had worried about his attachment to her and influenced the foster system, to whom they had at last correctly reported the abuse from the foster parents, to move her. Though young, Andrew and Ophelia were fiercely loyal and devoted to each other. They pledged that nothing would separate them; not his parents trying to pay her to leave him and not his parents’ threat to disown him. They quietly worked through the courts to make Ophelia an emancipated adult, but ran out of time.
Andrew turned eighteen the day before the foster system was to move her. He ‘borrowed’ the family jet and they flew from New York to Nevada. Once there, they were met by a Reverend Parsons, contacted the day before, and money changed hands. A lot of money. Ophelia and Andrew were married and the paperwork filed and recorded before his parents could intervene.
Andrews parents cut him off. They didn’t disown him, but they blocked access to funds, hoping to force him to abandon Ophelia. Drew, however, had anticipated his parents reaction and had opened and closed several accounts in the previous weeks, so Ophelia and Drew weren’t penniless. To further strengthen their marriage bond in the eyes of the world, Ophelia and Andrew made the decision to deliberately become pregnant, turning the proverbial screws on his parents. For themselves, it was an extension of love and a gift of joy to be shared between them.
Then Drew joined the military. The quiet investments he’d made were long term, and for the short, they would need an income. The military could open job training and placement opportunities. He went through basic, then his job training--he chose cartography--and was home on leave when little Sean Andrew was born. They spent a wonderful three weeks being a family, the happiest days Ophelia remembered up to that time. Then he was posted to Afghanistan. A month later he was dead.
He should have been safe. His job as part of G2 intelligence in cartography kept him away from the front lines. However, he’d caught a ride in a mail truck going from one post to another and the truck had been targeted and blown up.
Andrews parents blamed her. It was all her fault their son was dead. Right in front of all the world at his funeral, they denounced her as a gold-digging harlot and she and her bastard son, who couldn’t be Andrew’s because mumps had made him sterile, would never see a penny of the Ransom inheritance. Drew knew they would have contested any will that even hinted at leaving her Ransom money. Instead, he’d put most of his pay check into a huge military service insurance policy and, except for the little he needed to buy necessities, sent her the remaining funds. Ophelia didn’t want their money, let alone need it.
Andrew’s parents didn’t know that, or perhaps they thought everyone should want all their wealth. Ophelia didn’t. She’d just lost her husband, the glue that held her heart together. An endless swirling bleakness constantly swamped her and on the horizon a void of the black maw of endless despair crept its way ever closer. What care did she have of their petty concern for money?
In any case, Andrews parents behavior at the funeral did not look good to the public. One newspaper caught it all in one picture: a young girl, the widow, standing quietly dignified with a baby held protectively in one arm and the flag of a fallen hero in the other, tears tracking down her lovely, sad face while two adults, one, the apparent mother of the fallen soldier, with mouth open, obviously screamed at her, and the other, the matrons obvious husband, scowled with naked hate blazing from his eyes. The mother was yanking the flag from the widow’s arms.
The picture went viral and America condemned them; the world followed suit.
The Ransoms bought the newspaper that printed that picture and fired the whole staff and dismantled the paper. The other media businesses printed the couples revenge, which again made them a spectacle to the public, who now watched them like a mutating disease under a microscope to see what else they would do.
Meanwhile, someone quietly hired every person fired from the dismantled paper and used them to open another. Ophelia laughed. Darned if that paper didn’t reprint that funeral picture and start the whole public debacle all over again--this time citing the couples pettiness toward the paper for catching their true characters and printing it.
Then the Ransoms tried to take Sean. They reported her as an unfit teenaged mother and brought Social Services to her door. Unknown to the Ransoms, Ophelia had become emancipated and at seventeen was a legal adult. Rather than risk being separated from Sean, Ophelia decided to go into hiding and disappear from the Ransoms grasping claws. Somehow they’d gotten Sean’s medical records proving that he was indeed Andrew’s son.
She escaped simply because she was willing to leave everything behind, grabbing only the diaper bag, fortuitously lined with cash. She and Andrew had always been prepared to run. They had never known what his parents might do. All the important paperwork of their lives was kept buried safely in a place only she and Andrew knew. Ophelia went out to the patio of her apartment, through its gate, and down the alley outside it like a ghost, and no one who knew her ever saw her again. It was supposed the Ransoms had murdered her. More condemnation was heaped upon them for what they had tried to do and for what they might have done. She saved every article in a scrapbook; a record and reminder of who and what they were--The Empty. The Living Dead.
Bitterness was a terrible weight, but she carried it faithfully, gladly. She was a seventeen year old grieving widow and those...people!...had sought to take the most important thing she had left of her beloved husband. She vowed they’d never see their grandson.
For two years she had run, staying hidden. She took under the table jobs that let her keep Sean close. She had lived frugally, only using the investment fund for emergencies. She’d never stayed long in one place, and had always planned escape routes out of her lodgings and work places. At nineteen, she had stepped over the border into Canada. She happened upon an older couple needing a flat replaced. She had helped them, then ended up staying with them for five years. The couple had had no children and she had had no one except Sean. They adopted each other and Ophelia considered them her grandparents. With their encouragement, she completed an education, becoming an Information Technologist. Five years ago, she’d helped start a troubleshooting technology business and it was doing very well indeed.
During those five years, she’d also started playing an online game: Azdromadarim. And here she was! Winner of a Golden Ticket for reaching level one hundred fifty and solving one of the elite quest line puzzles therein. The one thing that could have made this better was Drew being with her. Twelve years had passed, but she still missed that man. She always would.
Her phone signaled a text. “He’s off. :D” Ophelia smiled happily.
A great part, a terrific part about this vacation, was that Sean was spending the same period of time at a music camp for the gifted. For two weeks, he would be overloaded with music theory, memorization of select pieces for solo performances, composition, and advice from some of the best in the professional world of music. From classical to new age, he would be buried in music. He was thrilled. She smiled with a tinge of regret and sighed. Andrew would have been so proud of him.
Quietly, she let the past subside again. Now was her time! She let her excitement build.
The front of the game complex
jutted out in a sparkly, dazzling arch of glass doors and windows looking in on a lobby filled with gamers, players of the online game Azdromadarim. Every age of player seemed to be accounted for as they talked animatedly with hands brandishing imaginary weapons and the fits and starts of people waiting for a queue to bring their name to the top of lists. The rest of the building flowed back in a large rectangle that ended with such a huge wall, it would take a helicopter to fly over it. The length of the wall on either side stretched for miles and appeared endless--she would get to see behind what it hid. She hoped she wouldn’t have a long wait. She felt as bouncy as the people jostling about inside the lobby. She took a deep breath, walked to the door, opened it and was immediately stopped--by surprise.
"Greetings and Well Come! I am Magdar! I see you hold in your hand our Exclusive Invitation from our Mega Maximum Bonus Days! Come Right This Way and lets Get You Started on your Wondrous Journey to Azdromadarim!" Her greeter looked her up and down. “My, you’re a Tall One!”
“And you’re short,“ Ophelia quipped the come-back line from the game. She quirked an eyebrow at the boulder built, very well dressed exec type that just barely managed to reach her diaphragm. Which meant that at six feet, she really towered over him. She did not, however, feel inclined to mistake him for a minor. Although he spoke in capital letters and oozed congeniality, power barely contained vibrated in a nimbus around him. He wasn’t a joker come to life from a deck of cards: This man meant Serious Business. She smiled at herself as she noticed the capital letters she herself used.
The man actually guffawed. “We have an understanding of each other. Come, Come! Much to do and so little Time.”
He escorted her through the lobby with its pleasant seating area where guests gathered loosely in groups of subdued excitement waiting to be allowed into the public area. Several sets of nondescript metal double doors separated the lobby from the rest of the complex and these were her escort’s goal. When they reached a pair, her guide opened one side with a flourish and a twinkling smile. “After you, Oh Glorious Winner.”