by J. J. McAvoy
Looking up, I saw that she wasn’t pointing to the painting, but the silver board beside it.
“Huh?”
She brought me in front of her, to stand directly in front of the board. She hunched down beside me and pointed to it.
“You didn’t count Julia Rendell,” she said.
“The painter?” I frowned again. “She’s not in the painting, though.”
“Wrong again.”
I sighed, I was tired of this. I wanted to go play with Wyatt and Ethan. “Mommy, I want to go play.”
“Tell me why she’s in the painting and you can. If not, you’ll stay here until we go.”
“I don’t know! Ugh this is so not fair!” I snapped, pulling out of her arms and pushing her away.
“Are you yelling at me, Donatella?” she asked, crossing her arms. I looked away, frowning at the wooden floorboards. When I didn’t say anything, she spoke again, “Fine, just stand there silently.”
Her heels clicked against the wood as she left.
“Don’t let her out,” she said softly to the guard.
“MOM!” I yelled, but the doors closed behind her. I ran after her, but before I could reach her, both the doors shut in my face.
I pulled on the doors as hard as I could but they wouldn’t open. “LET ME OUT!”
I banged.
I pulled.
I kicked.
But it didn’t open. I could hear the music playing on the other side… Could they even hear me?
“Mommy, let me out please! Please!” Scared, I hit the door harder. I didn’t want to, but I started to cry, angry, and dropped to the floor, my dress puffing up all around me. The tears came down so hard.
Wiping my face, I was just about to get up and try again when the doors burst open and…
“Daddy!” I cried, running to him and throwing my arms around his waist. He was hard, like hugging a rock, but I felt better. “Mommy wouldn’t me come out.”
Picking me up, he kissed the side of my head. “It’s okay.” He smelled like spices, it tickled my nose but I didn’t let go; I held on to his neck tightly. “Do you want ice cream?”
I nodded against him.
“I’ll deal with you all later,” he hissed at the men at the door. When he turned to walk, I stuck my tongue out at them. I would have made a face but I saw her…
“Mommy,” I called out softly.
She stood on the other side of the museum, next to the big white statues, Wyatt and Ethan stood next to her. Ethan was pulling at his bowtie and Wyatt was talking really quickly…until he noticed Mommy wasn’t listening. His brown eyes looked over at me. He made a face, and in my mind it was like he was asking, “What the heck happened? And why is your face so red?”
I would have made a face back, but the way Mommy was looking at me made me stop. She looked at me the same way she looked at the papers on her desk at work. Her smile was gone.
Mommy?
She looked away and back down at Wyatt, flicking his forehead, making him look away, too.
Her mouth moved and Ethan laughed…soon they were all laughing.
What was she saying?
I wanted to know…but we kept walking further and further away until we got outside and I couldn’t see them anymore.
“Come on, princess,” Daddy said, putting me in the back of the car.
“Are we going, Daddy?” I reached up for my seatbelt.
“Ice cream, remember?” He tapped my nose, smiling at me. “Two scoops or three?”
I grinned, lifting my fingers for him to see.
“Four? You sure you can handle it?”
I nodded, swinging my feet. “Of course, I can! I’m not a kid anymore, Dad!”
“Then four scoops it is.” He laughed, sliding inside with me and nodding to the man in the front. “Drive.”
He rested into the back of his brown seat, pulling out his phone from his jacket pocket. He dialed once then he waited as it rang and rang but there was no answer. Cracking his jaw to the side, he squeezed the phone tightly.
“Daddy?”
He blinked a few times and then looked down at me, putting his big hand on my head. “Don’t be mad at Mommy, okay? Sometimes…sometimes she goes a little overboard. She loves you very much.”
I looked down to my shoes again, nodding.
“Good, now wipe your face. You have a booger hanging from your nose, like Spiderman.”
“Daddy!” I gasped, taking his handkerchief and covering my face, making him laugh.
“Tell me about school? You want to join the volleyball team?”
Somehow, I knew he was just trying to keep me talking because he couldn’t reach Mommy…no because Mommy wouldn’t answer. I knew that he was upset and didn’t really want to get ice cream, but I talked anyway. I told him everything about everything. When I couldn’t think of stuff to talk about, I talked about Ethan and Wyatt…until I ended falling asleep.
I hoped Mommy wasn’t going to be mad.
DONATELLA- NOW
“Ma’am.”
Looking up from the blood and at Greyson; “He’s told us everything.”
I nodded and got up, walking out of the room. But before the door closed, I gave only one order; “Kill him.”
Walking on, I headed to the elevator. Of all the memories I had of my mother, why did that one come to mind? I hadn’t even remembered it until this moment, nor could I remember what happened after.
After my dad took me out of the art gallery what happened? It felt like I blocked it out, but why? I couldn’t remember why.
When the doors finally opened at the ground floor, O’Phelan was standing with a phone to his ear.
“Is everything ready?” I asked, fixing the watch on my wrist.
He muted the call and said, “Wyatt is being a little difficult.”
“Of course, he is,” I said, taking the phone from him and listening to Wyatt as he snapped over the line saying;
“Don’t you know it’s usually the messengers that die first? That’s where the saying ‘don’t shoot the messenger,’ comes from…the fact that they were often shot!”
SIX
“Just like our eyes, our hearts have
a way of adjusting to the dark.”
~ Adam Stanley
WYATT
Metathesiophobia.
The fear of change.
There are many different names for the phobia of new things but Metathesiophobia was specifically about the ability to control one’s environment and unwillingness to move, to progress or to change anything from routine. Children who moved a lot or parents who had lost their children often are diagnosed with this phobia, making them unable to change their kids’ rooms after they died.
I was now beyond certain… No-one in my fucking family feared changing shit!
“I’m going to kill them,” I muttered to myself, ripping the last goddamn cat poster from my wall and shoving it into the empty box before opening the door and throwing it out into the motherfucking bloody hall! “FUCK ALL OF YOU!” I yelled before slamming the door. I didn’t give a shit if they were sleeping! If I couldn’t fuckin’ sleep, they shouldn’t fuckin’ sleep!
“Bunch of cunts…” I muttered, looking around my room, finally able to relax…when I saw it….one last item of cat paraphernalia - a pair of slippers by the dresser.
I balled my fist, trying to stay calm.
But I was at my limit.
Let us replay the last twelve hours, I thought. I had been in Boston, saving my shitty, stick-up-the-ass, know-it-all elder brother from bleeding out on the floor of what looked like a 1980s-porno set before going out and getting revenge on the man who had left him to bleed out on said porno set… Only to find out my fucking asshole of brother allowed himself and his wife to nearly die just to bring me back to Chicago… Where I had a gun pointed in my face by a rat-faced bastard who had the nerve to get his blood on my favorite pair of pure alligator-skin House of Testoni shoes after my twin sister shot
him through the skull.
All of that I could take.
In fact, for my family…that was pretty much a normal Thursday.
Which is why I decided to rest. Simply go to my room, close my eyes, and mentally prepare myself for the long years of normal Callahan days that were to come now that I was back… I should have known. Why I let my guard down for even a second was beyond me… Everyone thought Ethan was nothing but a serious, cold, glaring, murdering, manipulating genius…he was…but above all that, he was my older brother. And like all older brother’s, he missed no opportunity to fuck me with me.
Which is why when I walked into my room… Instead of seeing my room exactly as I’d left it, I walked into a fucking cat-lady’s paradise.
Cat bedsheets.
Cat pillows.
Cat rug.
Cat bathmats.
And fucking…cat slippers!
Why?
Why?
Because first… I fucking hated cats.
Second… He wanted to call me pussy.
And third… He just wanted to torture me before I could sleep. This was the side of my shite-faced brother that no-one else saw.
“Oh…fuck you,” I said once more, just in case I had the power to curse him, grabbing the damn slippers, marching to the windows and yanking them open before throwing the slippers towards the trees.
Taking a deep breath, I moved back to my empty bed, not at all caring about the sheets… I wasn’t going to sleep in that damn cat nirvana, but I wasn’t going to lose any more sleep trying to set up my room. There were people in this house for that, and they were going to do it once I woke up. How very Callahan, I thought, tossing my arms behind my back. But I was a Callahan… I didn’t wake up to that fact only because of Ethan or what had happened in Boston. Ethan didn’t force me to come back, he manipulated me into remembering who I was under the well-mannered mask I put on, the real reason I’d become a doctor… I enjoyed the feeling of having someone’s life in my hands. They lived because of me…some died because of me…the rapists, child molesters, abusers, even one serial killer and the son of a dictator. Doctors weren’t supposed to judge; they weren’t supposed to care who their patients were… I didn’t subscribe to that kind of bullshit. If a monster crossed my path, I’d hunt it down and kill it. I didn’t think I was a hero. I didn’t have some code. They disgusted me.
When I left Chicago, I couldn’t see the difference between my family and them. In all honesty, the line was slim. No one had ever raped or molested anyone…but had children died because of us? Yes. Did we harm others? Yes. But the difference was we didn’t seek to. The blood on our hands came from those who sought to cut us first.
Seeing Ethan bleeding and Ivy weeping reminded me that I didn’t need to be a doctor to have control over someone’s life… As a Callahan, everyone else’s life was already at our discretion. We had that type of power in our blood.
Rolling on to my side I closed my eyes for all of one moment when all of sudden—
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
Are you bloody shitting me?
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
“Sir—”
“If you knock on or open that door, I will throw you from my window, order someone to pick you up and throw out one more time, and you will then be buried with cat slippers on your feet… NOTHING ELSE, JUST CAT SLIPPERS!”
I was going insane. I was back here not even a full day, and I was losing my mind.
I waited a moment, but luckily someone was still sane and left me the fuck alone—
RING!
My eyes snapped open and I rolled over, looking at my cellphone as it flashed on the bedside table. Doing my best to stay calm, I reached over and picked up, answering as un-murderous as possible.
“Dr. Callahan speaking,” I said out of habit.
“Your sister requested that a maid deliver your clothes for the day—”
“As I have not yet slept, my day has not yet started. So tell my sister, O’Phelan, I am not in need of—”
“With all due respect, Sir,” he cut me off, not sounding like he had any motherfucking respect, “your sister made it clear that this was non-negotiable. She said to tell you that if you refused to cooperate, she’d set your room on fire…again. She also said I should remind you that if you think of leaving, she will find you and set that place on fire, but only if Ethan does not find you first.”
“Funny how you managed to say that so eloquently, without hesitation, and with all due respect to me,” I sneered, gripping on to the phone tighter.
Unnerved, he replied, “I am simply the messenger, Sir.”
“Don’t you know it’s usually the messengers that die first? That’s where the saying ‘don’t shoot the messenger,’ comes from…the fact they were often shot.”
“So the warning is not for the messenger, but the person doing the shooting… After all, how well did it turn out for those that didn’t have anyone to bring them important information?” He didn’t say that…Dona did, suddenly appearing on the line.
“Sister dearest,” I said sweetly.
“Yes, brother dear,” she said, even more sweetly, her voice rising to an annoyingly high pitch.
“Do you know what I’ve been doing since I returned home?” I asked her, already getting up out of bed.
“De-catting your room while you cursed our brother?”
I bit my lip, nodding to myself before speaking, “Are you the perpetrator or the accomplice?”
“I’m the innocent bystander. After all, it’s not my room…and I’m not a snitch.”
Thou shall not murder thy siblings.
Thou shall not murder thy siblings.
Thou shall NOT murder thy siblings! But harm and maim should be allowed, right?
I had to repeat it three times as I reached the door, opening it to see a dark green, House of Kiton suit, a new pair of brown Calfskin Wingtip House of Testoni shoes to match the Rockefeller brown tie and dress shirt, along with a Jean Dunand Shabaka watch.
She’s got to be kidding me? “Please explain to me what is so damn important that not only must I forsake sleep but I must also drape myself in over two-million-dollars’ worth of clothing to attend?”
“Your welcome home party, of course,” she replied without missing a beat.
“Oh, of course,” I mocked, this time much more serious than I had been before… I paused for a moment, staring at the suit hanging outside my doorway. “Just whatever you’re planning on using my return to cover up, sister dearest… Don’t put me between you and Ethan.”
I knew she was grinning on the other end of the phone as she said, “Is that physically or metaphorically?”
“Both.”
“Brunch is at ten,” she told me, changing the subject and adding, “and stop threatening the help. The last thing this family needs is rumors of you throwing maids out your window.”
“You’re sounding more and more like Nana by the minute.”
“Fuck you and goodbye.”
I smiled when she hung up and looked up, finally noticing the red haired, blue eyed maid standing and waiting patiently behind the trolley my clothes hung on.
“Can I bring them in, Sir?” she asked, and I moved aside allowing her to enter. I tilted my head to see her ass as she came in… She was slender, but the uniform made it hard to see her figure, her red hair stopping only a little bit past her shoulders.
“Do you need anything else, Sir?” she asked, turning around to face me.
Again, I looked her over, making sure she knew I was looking, before meeting her gaze; “Yes, I need a pretty maid; not too pretty, but pretty enough that she can hold my interest for short time; who simply wants have to fun and forget she’s a maid for an hour…or two…but not lose her mind thinking it’s more than what it is afterwards.” I smirked at that, she swallowed. “If you know someone like that, please send her my way.”
I opened the door for her to step out then waited
for a moment before asking, “Aren’t you leaving?”
“I…I know someone like that,” she said quickly.
Closing the door, I turned back to her, walking up close and lifting her chin up so she could look me in the eyes.
“Are you sure you know someone like that? I hate women who lie, but I hate women who overestimate themselves even more,” I whispered, placing my thumb on her bottom lip. “The last thing I want to do to an obsessive maid clinging on to me.”
“You…won’t have to… I’ll…I’ll be good.”
The grin that passed my lips made her shiver, I saw it. Placing my hand on her shoulder, I leaned in, whispering directly into her ear, “Be good later, sweetheart, take me into your mouth and show me how bad you can be right now.”
Gently, I pushed down on her shoulder and she got down onto her knees. As she grabbed hold of me, all I could think was…
It’s good to be home.
ETHAN
Placing my hand on her cheek, I brushed back her blond hair, and she smiled, rolling to her side as she muttered, “Five more minutes.”
“Five minutes for you is another five hours,” I replied, lifting my hand from her.
She pouted, sticking her pink lip out and still not opening her eyes, “Five more hours then… It's not like I have job to get to; I married rich for a reason.”
I couldn't help but smirk at that. “And here I thought it was my charm, good looks, and your desperate desire to get out prison.”
She grinned, opening her blue eyes to look up at me. “The last one. And money helped, too.”
“You’re shameless.” That was why I loved her… The moment I thought it, I realized I still hadn’t said it. I opened my mouth to speak, however she interrupted me before I could.
“I love you,” she said, looking me in the eye…
Hearing those words from her made my heart ache and throat feel as if it were set on fire. Of course, she had to be the one to say it first. Shaking my head, I reached over to the bedside table and picked up her breakfast tray.
“This is very romantic,” she grinned, sitting up. She was completely awake at the sight of food, forgetting her earlier words.
