Enigma

by Leslie Drennan

  Since Lorenzo knew it was our last dinner together alone for a while, he made my favorite chocolate gelatin desert topped with whipped cream and a cherry. He also made an Italian pasta dish for our main course. I loved it when he cooked Italian foods, because I knew it reminded him of his home when he was younger.

  After dinner, I went up to my room with the intention of going back to my car to get my new prize after I got comfortable. I ran a hot bath and soaked so long with the jets massaging my back that my fingers and toes turned into prunes.

  I decided to call it a night, texting Avan that I was going to bed. I did not even bother waiting for a response before I tucked myself into bed and turned out the lights, awaiting my rude awakening from my recurring nightmare so I could return to a deep sleep and get some real rest once it was over.

  CHAPTER 6

  As tired and lifeless as I felt, I could not make myself go to sleep. I tossed and turned, and added more pillows only to throw them back in the floor. I fluffed the pillow I was resting my head on, pulled up the covers to kick them off again, and all of this left me feeling no more comfortable as I stared at the ceiling, wishing nothing more than to fall asleep. The only thing I could think of right now was the angel that was still in the floorboard of my car.

  Giving up on the idea that I could convince myself to leave the bag in the car until morning and go to sleep, I swung my legs off of the bed and slipped my feet into my fuzzy, leopard-print house shoes. I flipped on my bedroom light, opened my door, and started down the staircase, flipping on light switches as I came to them. Being all alone in a massive house at night is scary to begin with, but walking through a massive house when you’re all alone in the dark makes it terrifying.

  If I let my imagination run a little wild, I would imagine shadows moving outside the windows or feel like someone was watching me, even though I knew it was probably just the trees being blown by the wind, obstructing the light from the lampposts and causing the shadows to dance along the windows.

  Reaching the side door, I turned on the floodlight, which bathed the area where I parked with light. Unlocking the door, I slid into the night air that sent shivers right down to my bones. I couldn’t help but wrap my arms around myself as my teeth chattered so hard I feared they might start chipping. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of grabbing my robe on the way out of my bedroom. My flannel pajamas were no match for nighttime weather during the winter months.

  As I breathed in and out of my mouth through my chattering teeth I could see my breath like a trail of smoke through the air. I hurried across the pavement to reach out for the door handle of my car when I noticed I had been in such a rush to come get the angel I had forgotten my keys on the dresser in my bedroom.

  Knowing myself well enough to know I always locked my car, I am not sure why I went ahead and reached for the door handle anyway. To my surprise, it came right open! I was shocked! I never left my car unlocked. When I carried the sacks of spices in to Lorenzo before dinner, I must not have pressed the button on my keychain that automatically locks the doors and turns on the car alarm. I guess I had been more distracted by today’s events than I admitted to myself.

  To leave my car unlocked even when I was at home was completely out of character for me. Growing up as the daughter of a criminal defense lawyer I had heard about my fair share of car thefts, so this made me very wary of locking my car and using the alarm at all times.

  Sitting down on the driver’s seat, I leaned over and picked up the bag. I set the sack in my lap as I pushed the button below my window on the door handle. Locking the doors before shutting the car door and heading back across the pavement a movement caught my peripheral vision. I turned, looking out into the bushes, but the floodlight was so bright it obstructed my vision. Then someone darted out of the bushes, but there was no way I could tell which direction they had run. I was petrified and suddenly felt stiff, unable to move if I tried to. Gathering every sliver of courage I had in me, I ran as fast as I possibly could the rest of the way across the pavement into the warmth of the house, locking the door behind me.

  Checking all of the doors multiple times, I decided to turn on all the outside lights in hopes of deterring whoever had been in the bushes from attempting to enter the house. Going back the way I had come a few minutes earlier, this time I turned the rest of light switches on the ground level as I came across them before heading up the stairs and opening my bedroom door then kicking it shut behind me with my foot. After the scare, I had barely even noticed the weight from the angel inside the bag I had been tightly grasping.

  Sitting in the middle of my bed staring at my door, I was afraid it would fly open at any second and my phantom stalker would be standing in the doorway. I was sweating bullets out of fear and exhaustion. I grabbed my cell phone to see Avan had sent a text asking me what was going on. How could he possibly know anything was wrong? I hadn’t even texted anyone to let them know what just happened; especially not him. I debated texting him back to ask him to come over immediately because I was scared to be alone but refrained. Deciding it would sound too forward, I placed the phone back down onto the bed. Then without being able to stop the thought from creeping into my mind I sat rigid as I considered the frightening possibility that he couldn’t have known anything was wrong unless he was the one lurking in the darkness. No! I would not even consider it! I was letting my emotion take over. I knew Avan and he was one of the good guys. All he had done since I formally met him was prove he had no intention of being like every other slime ball guy out there. My heart knew he would never stoop so low but my fear still had a hold on my wandering imagination.

  My angel still remained in her sack, swimming in bubble wrap on the bed in front of me. I knew all the doors to the house were locked, but I still had a very uneasy feeling. Standing up beside the bed, I leaned forward, peeking through the slats on my wooden blinds to see a man in the street staring up at me then turning and running away from the house in the opposite direction. Chills raced down my spine and my breaths became shallow. I was so scared I was physically unable to cry.

  It was the kind of scared you see in horror movies when the lead character is about to be killed in some hideous act of pure repulsion and knowing they can do nothing more to prevent it, they just close their eyes and hope it gets over with quickly, with no begging, screaming, or crying.

  Crawling back onto the bed and feeling my feet slide across the satin sheets, I considered calling the police to file a report. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell them much. I knew it was a man from the way he was standing and how his figure had no curves, the way a female would have. The man was wearing all black from the hat to the shoes, but being so far up from the street with shoddy visibility, there was no way to make out a facial description or even an accurate estimated height.

  I would sound pretty stupid having them come to the house to tell them I feared being attacked by someone I could not even describe. Technically, this phantom stalker had not broken any laws since he never entered the house, so what did I really have to report? That I felt threatened? That wouldn’t do much good. I doubted they would agree to put a squad car outside your house for extra security if they thought you might have imagined it, so I decided I would forget about making that call.

  No sooner had I made the decision than I received a call from Avan asking if everything was okay. I told him everything was fine and that I was going to go to sleep. He wished me sweet dreams and asked me to come by Spirits tomorrow because he wanted to talk about some things. He assured me that he was fine but that he was concerned for me. Before hanging up, he instructed me to call if I needed to for any reason, regardless of how late it was. I told him I would and to have a great time at the concert. As I hung up the phone I still felt a small pinch of uneasy curiosity at how he was so inquisitive and how he seemed to know unexplainably how something had occurred with me. I couldn’t explain it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Could one of his friends have been
the darkly clad figure spying on me for him? Maybe I had just seen way too many of the movies Damien had done the special effects for!

  Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and concentrated on finding the tranquil and serene feelings I experienced earlier in the store. I opened them back up, deciding it was time to rescue my angel from her bubble-wrapped sarcophagus. I pulled the bag across the comforter on to the sheet and into my lap. Opening the handles wide and looking down into the bag, I noticed something out of place.

  Lying inside the bag tucked down beside the angel wrapped in plastic bubble wrap was a little white piece of paper. I had personally watched Natasha package up the angel, yet I never saw her put anything in the bag with her. Then again, with the entire day not making much sense, I supposed anything could be a possibility at this point.

  Reaching inside the bag and touching the note gave me a dark feeling, just like the one I got when I had found the pieces of paper in my locker and on my car. Pulling the paper out of the bag, I dreaded what message would be enclosed. As always, the paper was thick and white, with no indication of who it was from. Holding it with a firm grip in my hands, I felt my heart rate increase again with nervousness. Five minutes must have passed before I decided on opening it.

  I carefully started unfolding the piece of paper one fold at a time, holding my breath with anticipation. With each second that passed, I could hear the clock echo through my ears, making it sound as if it were bouncing off the walls—like I was a bat using echo location. The paper was still folded in half as I played with the edges with my fingers, trying to buy some extra time before I had to read what was inside.

  By running my fingers over the top portion of the piece of paper folded in half, I could already tell the words on the inside had been typed there by a typewriter from the way the letters were raised up on the back, indented as well as inked onto the paper. I finally took the plunge, unfolding the last crease and looking down to read the message that stood there beaming up at me.

  They know what you are.

  Unlike the others, this note did not seem threatening. It almost made it sound like I was the threat. I had no clue what this note could possibly be referring to. It almost seemed like whoever wrote it was insinuating that I was some kind of alien or something. The weird thing was that it still seemed like a warning.

  It was written in the third person, leading me to believe the person leaving the notes was not the person I needed to guard myself from. One thing was very clear tonight after getting this note: these notes were definitely intended for me and not Lena.

  I was two weeks away from being a seventeen-year-old senior in high school who had lived through a very tragic event, leaving me as a very fortunate orphan; I dealt with it the best I knew how. Aside from that, there was nothing different about me than there was about any other girl my age, so what did this person mean when they warned me that someone or some people knew what I was? I had gone repeatedly over the notes in my head before I realized they hardly seemed like threats when they were together. Instead, it was like someone was leaving me a jigsaw puzzle piece by piece and I was supposed to put it all together.

  It was clear that this person felt I was in significant danger, but why? Who was watching me, and what was I? Was I actually a descendant of someone important, like a royal family somewhere? What did they mean when they stated I was something other than human in not so many words? Did they think I was an illegal alien? Maybe they mistakenly thought my parents and I had moved here from another country and they were trying to warn me that someone was checking up on me to try and have me deported.

  My mind came up with every bogus thought under the sun as to what they thought I could be, including the spawn of an actual alien left behind by the mother ship after visiting our planet years ago only to be taken in and raised by humans. By the time I’d finished my outlandish thought processes, I had made my life out to be a sci-fi movie in my head before bringing myself back to reality.

  The reality of the situation was that a stranger who I had caught tonight, all because I wanted to get something out of my car, had been leaving me another puzzle piece that I had to figure out. This stranger also believed I was in immediate danger and being watched. That being said, I needed to find out what all this meant in order to understand what would give anyone the idea that I was in danger. Not knowing the answers would not only annoy me, but if something was actually going on, I could be putting myself in more danger by not knowing the details of this situation.

  I needed to talk to someone about all this, but how would I explain it? My gut was telling me with every fiber of my being that Lena was the last person that needed to find out about any of this. Since I lived in her house and she was supposed to be my best friend, it was an abnormal feeling for me to want to hide things from her. Lena had known all my secrets up until the last two weeks. Even more strange was that since she had been gone, I felt like my eyes had been opened to the type of person she really was.

  Not that I had not been aware, but I had always thought she had the ability to change. It was as if we had grown apart, but that would take both parties pulling away from the friendship. It was I over the past two weeks who had made the conscious decision to pull back from the friendship with Lena. I had no desire of having the reputation of being the bad girl’s sidekick anymore. I could not accept the rest of the world presuming I was just like her, labeling me as her little protégé.

  More important than the rest of the world was what I needed to stop settling on. I needed to stop believing I needed Lena to be important. I needed to find myself and make my own life. Lena’s life was great, and aside from her immoral decisions, I had been trying to live her life of fortune and fame for the last three years, and I had never been truly happy.

  I needed to be Mattie, and Mattie was a good person who did what was right and stayed away from trouble. Who could care less if she lived in a mansion, had five cars, a platinum credit card, and was the most popular girl in school? I might have to live here in this house, but I was not required to assume her role.

  I was not required to feel pressured into going out with guys who pressured me to make wrong decisions, and I did not have to feel like I had to keep up with her. In short, I was going to start making myself happy rather than worrying about what Lena liked or disliked, what made her mad or satisfied, and I was not going to let her pressure me to put myself in situations that made me feel uncomfortable or that contributed to me making bad decisions anymore.

  Upon my new epiphany, I took the note I was still holding in my hands and put it into my bag, where I would keep it until I could place it with the others I was keeping secretively locked away in my glove compartment. Turning my attention back toward the sack that still held my angel, I hurried over to unwrap my beautiful token of love from my mom.

  I lifted the bundle of bubble wrap out of the sack, placed it softly down onto the comforter, and began to unwind the bubble wrap that protected the angel. As she finally came into view, emerging from all the protective wrapping, she looked even more beautiful now than she had been when Natasha first gave her to me at the store. She stood about a foot tall and had delicate features cut out of the crystal to form a tender looking little face, arms, hair, and even folds of her dress.

  I had never seen anything like it, even in the home décor stores that had everything you could imagine carved into crystal trinkets to show off in your curio cabinets. The way my angel was so intricately cut reflecting even the tiniest of details it didn’t seem possible to make a creation that was so flawless, but here she was and now she was mine.

  I placed her on top of the chest of drawers in the corner. to where it appeared as though she was watching over the room, making sure she was protected from any harm. Though it was not as prevalent as it had been inside the store, a feeling of peace seemed to settle over the room. Even though I knew I had many things to think about and decide how to handle them, I did not feel the slightest bit of stress or wo
rry.

  I couldn’t help but think it was because of the beautiful angel watching over me with my mother’s love. For the first time in three years, I did not feel scared to be in the house alone. Even though I now knew the man I had caught in the bushes earlier had been there for the sole purpose of delivering another clue for me to use in piecing together the jigsaw puzzle that had become my life, I had no anxiety about the things that were out of my control. In fact, everything felt so peaceful that after cleaning up the mess I made unwrapping the angel, I turned off the light, settled myself comfortably into bed, and immediately fell into the most restful sleep I had had in years.

  As I woke up to a sunny Sunday morning, it almost escaped my attention that I had slept through the night for the first time since my parents’ death. Without torment in my sleep from the nightmare that haunted me every night, I was rested and more energetic than I had been in years. Making my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I noticed my reflection in the mirror even looked different.

  The girl who stared back at me in the mirror looked as though she was older. As I touched my face to make sure it was really my reflection that looked back at me from the mirror and not just a dream, for the first time in my life I saw that I had transformed from a pretty little girl into a beautiful young woman.

  I chose black pants and a blue shirt that complemented my hair and eyes for my attire for the day and opted not to use makeup with the exception of a light coat of lipgloss. Looking up at my angel, I felt that once again she was responsible for all the wonderful things that were happening. It felt so good not having to hide myself under layers of cosmetics, even though I always kept it looking as natural as possible.