Left

by Tamar Ossowski

  Even though it was hard leaving Franny behind, things had all gone according to plan. She and Matilda settled into the townhouse and slipped into the routine of their lives. She was sure that no one watching from the outside would ever be able to tell that what she was really doing was waiting, for the knock or the phone call. She planned and plotted, watching the scene play out like a movie in her head.

  Days and then weeks passed, and when he didn’t come, the idea of him quieted inside of her, until it was almost like a whisper. Suddenly, there were real things in her life to contend with, and she turned her entire focus upon Matilda. She understood how much her daughter hated her, but what concerned her more was the boy she had fallen for. Even though she did not understand why, he made her more uncomfortable than she could bear. Even worse was that Matilda refused to listen, sneaking around as if Therese did not know what she was doing.

  It all infuriated her, but right at that moment, it was mostly about the socks. Since they had moved into the townhouse, Matilda had developed an annoying habit of randomly tossing them into the first room she could find. They taunted her from the hallway floor, misshapen and stiff from dried sweat. She yelled for Matilda, but her voice cracked, making the sound disappear inside her throat. Anger coursed through her, and she whipped the ones she could find into the trashcan.

  Outside, the wind roared, slapping twigs into the side of the house. So rarely did the weather match her mood that she closed her eyes to fully appreciate the moment. There was a tap at the door, but it took a second knock, soft yet determined, to catch her attention. She tossed the mail onto the table and went to answer it.

  His hands were poked into his pant pockets, elbows awkwardly jutting out. He shifted from one foot to the other before looking up. Her heart raced into her throat, filling her insides with indefinable emotion.

  “What do you want?” It came out slightly high-pitched.

  Tim tilted his head and shrugged as if the answer was obvious.

  “You shouldn’t have come.” She tried to close the door, but he easily pushed past her.

  They faced each other, waiting for the other to move, and finally she walked over to the couch. Colors and sounds and lights flashed at her and she covered her eyes with her hands. The cushion shifted beneath her weight, and then he was sitting beside her, staring straight ahead, like they were taking a Sunday drive.

  “Why are you here?”

  He answered without looking. “I want to see her.”

  The sound of his voice caught her offguard, and she hesitated for a moment. “You can’t.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

  He spread his hands on his knees, the calluses on his knuckles white and cracked, his fingernails chewed to the skin, the sight of which reignited her anger.

  “You are the one that doesn’t understand.”

  She flew off the couch, knocking over a bowl of chocolates she put out for the guests who never visited. They dotted the carpet like little diamonds, and she watched as he kneeled over to collect them, cleaning up her mess. She wondered if now he might leave, but instead he spoke in a tone so low, it combined with the groan of the wind outside.

  “I am going to see her.”

  More of the indistinguishable emotion swirled inside her, so intensely that she fell a few steps back.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I went to see your mother. She made me a cup of tea. I can’t remember the last time someone has done that.”

  Therese crossed her arms across her chest. “She told you where we were.”

  “Don’t be angry with her.” He said it so softly that the words almost lost themselves in his breath. “She said you never told her what happened between us.”

  “That’s because there was nothing to tell.” She stumbled across another one of Matilda’s socks and kicked it under a chair.

  As he stood, she suddenly realized that she had forgotten how tall he was. He walked toward her. “There is a lot to tell.”

  “It’s too late, Tim. You made your choice.”

  His eyes . . . she remembered them. So gray, they were almost translucent. Now, they were rimmed in red. His breath quickened, and she could feel the change in the air.

  “I need you to understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve met my obligations. I don’t owe anyone anything anymore. I want to see her. Please, let me see my daughter.”

  The plea was too familiar, and she tried to force thoughts of Leah out of her head. She had expected his rage but hadn’t anticipated despair. She refocused, making herself remember her plan. She would not allow the months she had spent planning to go to waste. She was going to destroy him. To make him regret every decision that had led to this moment, to his choice.

  She was about to tell him about his mother. About the lie she had perpetrated and the one he had spent his life paying for. She opened her mouth to speak, knowing exactly what was supposed to happen next.

  And it would have if not for the blood-curdling scream that came from the unit next door.

  Tim ran outside, and even though she could have slammed the door closed behind him, she didn’t. They were standing outside her neighbor’s, the sound of a woman’s wail so piercing, it made her heart skip. Tim pushed the door open and walked inside. Therese guessed the woman kneeling on the floor covering her face was Daryl’s mother, although they had never met.

  The man standing in the center of the room had his back turned and red hair poked out like straw from his glistening scalp. He turned to look at them. For the second time that day, her chest filled with unspeakable emotion. She closed her eyes to force the memories to move quicker, but her heart was racing so fast that it all just made her dizzy.

  He smiled and licked his lips. “Hello, Therese.”

  The woman on the floor took advantage of his distraction to rise and wipe the blood from her mouth. The two children were standing together, Daryl in front of the girl as though he was trying to protect her.

  “Have you met my lovely wife and children?” He said it as if they had just run into each other at the grocery store. He extended his hand, which she had the overwhelming urge to bite.

  The woman’s eye was ringed in blue.

  Lionel’s signature work.

  Her black dress was ripped at the waist. She hoisted up the edge of her skirt and used it to dab at her face, exposing a red bruise on her knee. But that was not what caused Therese to stop and stare. It was the look of desperation that she recognized.

  Patiently, she waited. And then, like the seconds it takes to breathe in a deep gulp of air, it came to her. A layer of sweat started at her temples and worked itself down the side of her neck as images and sounds crashed inside her head and then suddenly none of it mattered anymore because there was only one thought left.

  “Where is Matilda?”

  It was Daryl who spoke. But when he did, it was so quiet she could barely hear.

  “Gone.”

  The sweat slid cold and thin, farther down her chest. Lionel dug a flask out his pants pocket. He took a long, leisurely sip, and when he was finished, threw it down and grabbed the woman by the arm. She cried out softly, pushing him away, but he pulled harder until again she fell to the floor.

  “It’s time for you to get going now,” Tim mumbled.

  Therese had forgotten he was there.

  Lionel turned to him. “You’re the one who’s going.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And take that bitch with you.”

  There was a moment of silence where no one moved or spoke. All she could hear was music in the background, maybe from the little radio on the table or maybe it was just inside her head. Then everything happened slowly, like they were all moving under water.

  Lionel cocked his head back and leapt forward as if he was diving into a pool. The two men grabbed one another and began to roll on the floor. The music played and the woman screamed and Daryl and his sister huddl
ed in a corner.

  A crash a few frightened seconds later shook Therese out of the moment. She saw the girl, Matilda’s friend, Lavi, standing over her father with a broken lamp in her hand. Lionel laid sprawled out on the floor, eyes closed and peaceful, with a streak of red running down the side of his face. No one spoke, and the only sound Therese heard was the woman whimpering. Lavi stood up, still holding the cracked lamp in her hand.

  “We should call someone,” Tim said, pushing himself off the ground and feeling his face, which already looked tender. He reached for the telephone and started to dial the police.

  Therese looked around and realized they were standing in a circle, like they were playing some silly childhood game and were waiting for the one in the middle to stand up. The woman continued to whimper in a pitch that was quickly escalating. Therese tried to think about what to do, but truly all she wanted was to run. An overwhelming heaviness settled upon her, and she knew that she needed to find Matilda.

  “She went to go find her dad,” Daryl said.

  The sound of his voice startled her, and she wondered if she was thinking aloud. Why had Matilda gone to find Tim? She had worked so hard to erase him from their lives. She had worked so hard to pretend the things that happened . . . didn’t. Why couldn’t Matilda just let it go? Why couldn’t she simply understand that Tim had made his choice?

  The image of her own father snaked its way into her mind. She needed to clear her head, but it was so hard to hear her own thoughts over Sara’s cries. She closed her eyes as sheets of rain slapped against the side of the house. Then, suddenly, the whole room lit up in a bluish white light, and she wasn’t sure if it was thunder that shook the house or the tree that came crashing through the roof.

  Like a missile hitting its target, debris from the ceiling landed squarely on the man lying in the middle of the carpet. His hand twitched once and then stopped. She turned to Tim, just as the woman began to wail, but this time she didn’t notice because at that exact moment, a second bolt of lightning hit the house.

  Everyone screamed and the girl, Lavi, fell to the ground. Tim was kneeling over her, his hands cradling her head as though it were the most fragile thing he had ever held. She thought about Friendly’s and apples and eggshells. When he looked up at her, she could tell he wanted to speak. She turned her head away, but it didn’t matter because she could still hear his words over the moan of the storm.

  “When I came home that day, I found her that way. She was locked in the basement. Just like my mother had done to me. She tried to explain, but all I wanted to do was push her down those basement stairs and run. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave her.”

  He pulled Lavi closer to him, whispered into her ear, and kissed the top of her head.

  Therese covered her ears.

  “Listen to me!” he yelled. “Do you know what it feels like to send someone you love away? I love her, Therese. Please, let me see her.”

  She watched as he held the girl in his lap, rocking her back and forth, his tears spilling down and disappearing inside the curves of her curls, which she realized were familiar because they reminded her of Franny’s. The girl coughed and shifted in Tim’s arms, and Therese let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Smoke was starting to clear, and, as it did, the deep sense of his loss began to move through her like frost, making her fingers and toes go numb. She took her hands off her ears and looked at him.

  He was quiet, lost somewhere in his thoughts. “Do you think she will ever forgive me?”

  The familiarity of the question startled her. How could it be so different, yet the same? She closed her eyes, mostly because she wasn’t ready to experience the revelations that were beginning to come. Leah and Tim and her own father’s face swam through her as if she was liquid, grabbing at her insides so hard that she toppled back. She wanted to hurt him. To punish him. She took a deep breath, fully intending to tell him that he had wasted his life on a lie, but when she spoke, a different truth emerged.

  “She will love you too much to care.” She whispered her words—the same words she had said to Leah—and watched as they disappeared into the silky air. He looked back at her with his translucent gray eyes, except this time she could see through and into him. It made her heart skip, but before she could speak again, he had risen to his feet and run off.

  Sirens blared in the distance, getting louder as the ambulance approached the development of townhomes. Therese fell to the floor next to Lavi’s mother, who had crawled over to her daughter, who was now beginning to stir.

  Therese knew exactly where Tim was going, and she didn’t care because right now all she could think about was the question. The one that tormented her when she was alone, when it was dark and quiet and the world was asleep. The one that came to her sometimes when she dropped Matilda off at school and more often when she heard her quiet snores coming from the bedroom. The question for which she could never find a true answer and the one that she repeated almost every night before she fell asleep.

  Will she ever forgive me?

  Franny

  Ididn’t notice it at first.

  It was slipped underneath the door and had a shoe print stamped across the middle like a convoluted road map. I picked it up and rubbed off the dirt and then I threw it back down as if holding it too long would burn my fingers. She had been writing to me for weeks, long-winded letters with no punctuation, so that when I finished reading her words, I was breathless. But this letter was different.

  This letter was hand delivered.

  I sat in front of the television, eating goldfish crackers out of the bag. Silently, I counted each one before chewing. Leah would be home soon. If I could just make it until then everything would be okay.

  Four.

  Crunch.

  Matilda’s note called me from the hallway.

  Two.

  Crunch.

  I should have thrown it in the trash or, better yet, put it in Leah’s magic drawer where all things I didn’t know what to do with went. Everything would be fine once Leah came home. All I needed to do was look at her and then I would know what to do.

  Three.

  Crunch.

  But that letter kept calling. I put the goldfish crackers back in the cabinet and started talking out loud. Letters jumbled with thoughts and then I started thinking about my mother and my sister and before I could think anything else, I was in the hallway, ripping open the envelope.

  “MEET ME AT THE MAILBOX AT 4—M.”

  Had she finally made good on her promise to come back for me? I didn’t know what I would say when I saw her. I don’t know why, but I put on the brass-colored key that Leah had given me. The one I wore around my neck to remind me of where I belonged. I folded the letter and slipped it into my pocket. Then I went outside.

  The sky was so gray, it made the air feel dirty. The mailbox was a few feet from the edge of the sidewalk and people walked by stuffing mail into its mouth. It made an angry creaking noise that reminded me of a dungeon door every time it opened. I was thinking about all those letters buried deep at the bottom of the box so I wasn’t focusing on the hand that suddenly reached out to grab me.

  She pulled me hard.

  Like she was trying to pull me out of the life I was living and into hers—only I didn’t really think about it that way at the time. Mostly I thought about how walking beside her felt right, even though something about her was wrong. Maybe her hair, which looked longer and like it hadn’t been combed for days. Little balls of fire burst inside of me and there was so much to say, but when I opened my mouth to speak, a thick ball of spit stuck in my throat. I tried to remember to be brave.

  I reached out to hold her hand, which felt sticky, like a used candy wrapper. There was a quiet between us that I liked because I didn’t want to have to think about words and because it gave me an opportunity to count tires. Specifically, those on parked cars that were painted blue. She led me onto a bus and I sat by the window, this time countin
g parking meters, but things outside were moving too quickly and the thickness in my throat got bigger. She squeezed my hand once when we reached our stop. I still didn’t know where we were going, but it didn’t seem to matter because she was with me and I couldn’t imagine not following wherever she led.

  “I will never leave you again.” She said it without looking at me, her words skimming the top of my head, and then we were back walking again. It had been raining on and off all day and each time her shoe plunked into a puddle, it sprayed a web of mud that clung to her socks. She pulled me along a little faster, maybe because I was falling behind or maybe for another reason.

  And then suddenly we were there.

  I knew because of the way she stopped. So abruptly that I accidentally crashed into her, sending the paper she was holding in her hand fluttering to the ground. I watched as raindrops landed on it, beading into pearls that then washed the letters away. She didn’t seem to care.

  We stood in front of a very red house. A crimson shutter dangled from the side of one of the windows and when we walked up the front steps, I waited for her to ring the doorbell. Instead she fished around in her pocket, took out a screwdriver and what looked like a paper clip, and huddled over the doorknob. Within seconds I heard a click, and then the big red door creaked open.

  “Where are we?” I whispered. It was dark. I wondered if anyone was home.

  “Shhh.” She put her finger over her lips. “This way.”

  She led me through the house as if she knew where she was going. As if she had been in this place before. We walked farther down the hallway until she found a door and opened it. I looked down into the depth of the staircase, but it was so black that I couldn’t see to the bottom.

  I shook my head, but her grip grew tighter and she dragged me down the steps behind her. The air was wet and heavy and smelled of dirty laundry. The windowpanes were painted red and covered in cloth, which made me feel like I was stuck inside a rotting tomato. She let me go and sat down on the ground, then wrapped her arms around her knees and began to mumble. Her voice was hoarse, as though she had been crying, and she stumbled over the first few words.