Unravel

by Calia Read

  The first bullet punctures her dad’s skin. I watch in horror as his body jerks once before he falls backwards onto his daughter.

  That’s when the impossible happens: my body merges with Lana’s.

  It’s so painful, like I’m being squeezed through a small opening. My skin pulling, resisting. Nerves are tingling. I scream at the top of my lungs. My body starts to twitch. I grasp the air above me frantically.

  Reach, reach, reach. I’m trying to grab onto anything to get me out of here. The pain inside of Lana is soul destroying, filled with demons waiting to smother me. It becomes too much and my hands drop limply to the floor.

  My eyes feel heavy and swollen from tears. I blink a few times trying to adjust. But reality doesn’t give me time to adjust. It slams into me.

  I’m not Lana. I’m not Lana. I’M NOT HER! My mind screams.

  I’m too numb to hold onto anything, except for the fact that I can’t breathe.

  “Get him off,” I pant. “Get him off me.”

  There’s too much going on. My brain is on overload. It’s ready to explode. I feel so much pain. Little moans escape my mouth.

  I feel a wet, sticky substance on my fingers. When I lift my hands, I see that my skin is paler and on my wrists are horizontal scars about four inches long. The skin is red and puckered.

  My lips quiver.

  “I’m not her,” I croak.

  I turn my hand around and can see the bluish veins running underneath my skin. That sticky substance? It’s dark, warm blood and it’s on my fingers, slowly traveling down my hand, onto my arms. “Naomi.”

  I look up at Max. He’s pushing Lana’s dad off me. When his weight is off me, I greedily suck up all the oxygen I can. Max drops the gun and stares down at me. His face is pale and his eyes are wild. There are flecks of Lana’s dad’s blood on his cheeks.

  Not my dad. My dad wouldn’t hurt me like this, I think.

  Max holds my face and looks into my eyes, saying my name again, this time with more concern.

  “Talk to me,” he pleads.

  And then I blink. It’s just one simple blink. But when I open my eyes back up, Max is Lachlan.

  Impossible.

  My mind is playing tricks on me. Or maybe the world is playing one big trick on me? Either way, I blink frantically, hoping that I’m wrong.

  But Lachlan is still here, dressed in the clothes that Max had been wearing seconds ago and with flecks of blood on his face. His hands hook underneath my arms. He pulls me onto his lap, cradling my head. I lay there like a rag doll, my arms hanging at my sides. My eyes close and when they do, I see a memory.

  It’s reeled in front of me slowly, giving me no choice but to absorb everything that happened. Lana is playing on the black asphalt, but it can’t be her because I remember sitting there and drawing. I remember the pieces of chalk spread out around me. I hum a song that my nanny had taught me. I was only eleven. The sun is hot on my back but it feels good. I continue to draw and trace and when my creation is just right, I curl up in a ball, right in the middle of my creation, on that hot asphalt, and fall asleep. The memory ends there. I remember it being a good summer day. But Lana gives me the rest of the memory. She shows my dad finding me later on. He was furious. He asked what the fuck I was doing. I nervously tell him that I was sleeping. His eyes narrow slightly. He looks down at my creation and asks what I created. I move off my creation and look down. On the black asphalt was the outline of a body. I didn’t give it eyes, nose, mouth or even hair. But I gave it a heart. Because in my 11-year-old mind, that’s all that it needed, and it had been holding me tightly in its arms. On this black asphalt was a parent I had always wanted. It accepted my love, and in return loved me unconditionally. On this black asphalt was something I could never have.

  My dad had screamed at the mess I made on the driveway. Told me to get a hose, clean it up and then to go clean myself up. When I was clean, he raped me.

  My body starts to shake.

  All the pain I felt was one dark soul unraveling and intertwining itself around the other soul—the clean soul. The darkness hands over its black memories, hoping that purity of the clean will obscure all its pain.

  I feel arms squeeze me tighter. Keep pressing, keep holding, I think to myself. Maybe then all this pain and agony will leave my body.

  I look down and finally accept that it’s my own dad’s blood spreading across the ground, seeping into the cracks of the wood floor.

  The body holding me pulls away. I’m looking into the eyes of Lachlan.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lachlan whispers hoarsely.

  This pain is mine and only mine. My body starts to shake until I’m practically convulsing.

  Time speeds up right after that and I see Dr. Rutledge standing in the doorway. Her face instantly pales as she takes in the room. Her eyes go from the gun to Lachlan. She’s putting the pieces together quickly.

  Then she looks at me. Not with her doctor eyes, she looks at me with so much sorrow and understanding. I realize then that she knew all along. She walks into the room, kicking pieces of splintered wood aside.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  Lachlan doesn’t turn around. His lips are in a flat line, nostrils flared, and eyes flat. “I caught him. I—” He tightens his grip on me. “I saw him. I saw him—” his voice croaks and fades.

  Dr. Rutledge approaches us slowly. She touches Lachlan’s shoulder and he tenses up. She backs away and quickly speaks. “This was self-defense, okay? He was going to come after you and you had to protect yourself.”

  Lachlan turns and looks over at Rutledge. “That’s not what—”

  “Lachlan, you had to protect yourself and Naomi.” Dr. Rutledge utters meaningfully.

  Lachlan nods.

  “It’s done,” she whispers. And I want to know who she’s talking to, me or Lachlan?

  I hear footsteps outside the door and the murmur of voices. My mom walks into the room. All kinds of emotions run through her eyes as she stares at my dad’s lifeless body. Her face crumbles. She runs over to him and drapes herself over him. She’s sobbing so loudly my ears ring.

  In the midst of her tears, Dr. Rutledge is on her phone, speaking frantically. I know that cops and EMT’s will be here soon. I know they’re going to ask me questions. Ask Lachlan questions. I know they’re going to take my dad away in a black bag, placed on a gurney.

  What I don’t know is how I’m going to survive all the pain Lana has given me.

  An hour later, I’m sitting outside on the front steps with a blanket draped around my shoulders. Cop lights are flashing. Five cops are here. Three of them are walking in and out of the house. The other two are talking to Dr. Rutledge and Lachlan. They’ve talked to me a few times and I know it won’t be the last. Two EMT’s walk down the sidewalk, flanking a stretcher. My mom’s still inside, still sobbing. I haven’t talked to her. And she hasn’t looked at me once. If she did, I don’t think much would pass between us. With Lana’s memories, my memories, slowly coming to me I see there was nothing there to begin with.

  I look ahead. Lachlan is walking this way. This whole time he’s been Max. I still can’t wrap my head around it. There’s a lot I can’t wrap my head around.

  He stops in front of me. “I’m going in for questioning.”

  My eyes widen. I go to stand up but he places his hands on my shoulders, and kneels next to me. “It’s standard procedure.”

  “I want to go,” I say, my voice is hoarse and scratchy from all the screams.

  Lachlan smiles but it never quite reaches his eyes. He’s trying to make this entire situation appear better than it looks. It’s a waste of time though because I know it’s bad. I know that what happened inside that office will have serious consequences for him.

  “Lachlan, I—”

  “Naomi, it’s okay,” he says, his voice steady.

  Dr. Rutledge walks over and sits down next to me. She places an arm around me. “I’m going with Lachlan. I promise every
thing will be fine.”

  My eyes are wide, frantic. “I’m not staying here by myself!”

  “No, you’re not staying here.” Dr. Rutledge looks at Lachlan and back to me. “You’re going to the hospital to get checked out.”

  “I’m not—I’m not ready…” My voice wavers and veers off because I can’t form the right words. I don’t know how to tell them that I’m ready for nothing. Haven’t I been through enough in one day? Questions have been answered, but there are a whole slew waiting to be answered. Those answers are in my head, waiting to be uncovered. I’m too scared to reveal them.

  My body starts to shake. Behind Lachlan two police officers are walking over. I grip his arm tightly. He leans his head against mine. One by one his fingers curl around the back of my neck. “He can’t hurt you anymore, Naomi.”

  He kisses my forehead and stands up. I stare down at the sidewalk, refusing to watch him leave. I want to feel numb right now, but I feel everything. Isn’t that what Lana was so good at: being numb? Keeping the pain at bay? I now realize just how endless her pain was. I place a hand over my heart, as if that will make the ache lessen.

  A car door slams and then another. I hear a car pull away.

  “Miss?”

  I look up. An EMT is staring down at me with a calm expression. “Are you ready to go?”

  Freedom is heady, yes, but as my life falls down around me I see the underlining truth: freedom has a price.

  I just wish someone had told me it was my life.

  “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”

  Paul Auster

  Life moves forward whether you’re okay or not.

  The ground is frozen, with a blanket of sound covering it. It’s a freezing winter night, where the stars are out, twinkling brightly. I watch all of this with a smile on my face, grateful that for once, I’m on the okay side. Once, there used to be a barrier between me and the outside world. That barrier was once the truth and it held me back from so much.

  For decades, my life had been put on pause. I stopped breathing, living. To put it simply, I stopped existing. But for the past year, I have been trying to exist; all the while knowing everything that has happened to me and not letting that define me.

  “You ready?”

  I look over at Lachlan Maximilian Halstead. “I’m ready.”

  “We need to hurry up,” he says, his breath appearing in the air like puffs of smoke. “My fingers are going to freeze.”

  He kneels down and drags a match across the coarse matchbox surface. The flame comes alive. He looks over at me and smiles before he places the flame against the tip of the rocket.

  There are times I catch him watching me and before he can recover, I see the concern and sadness in his eyes. My past still weighs on him… on us. But it’s getting better. Every day the wounds are less painful and noticeable.

  The fuse glows ember and we instantly back away. I curl my hand around Lachlan’s arm and lean into him and think about everything I’ve been through in the past year.

  I was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. It’s also called multiple personality disorder and better known as split personality. In most cases there is more than one personality.

  But Lana was my only personality.

  My only alter.

  My only part.

  And creating Max? Well, that was a whole other twist that baffled Dr. Rutledge and the rest of the doctors. I know I can’t go back and change what I thought and who I created. I just know that I did it to survive.

  I direct my attention at the array of colors in the sky. For the next twenty minutes we light off rocket after rocket. Soon, I forget about the bitter wind hitting my cheeks. I just live in the moment and enjoy the show.

  Everything that we’ve been through makes me realize that love is about finding the right person in this cold, oppressive world that loves all the wrong things about you. Everything you try to hide, they accept. And I know he accepts me.

  He puts the matches in his back pocket and looks over at me. “Did you like the show?”

  “It was beautiful.”

  Lachlan stands up and holds out his hand. “You ready to go home?”

  I nod and take his hand.

  A huge thanks to a group of amazing ladies that read through Unravel when it was in its roughest form: Tosha, Melissa, Vanessa, Jessica, Nina, Claribel, and Darla. I can’t think you enough!

  Thank you to Natasha for the beautiful graphics.

  Christine, thank you for everything. For supporting me and believing in this story.

  Thanks to Sheena for being one of the first to read those first few chapters.

  Regina Wamba, my cover designer. Thank you for creating one of the most beautiful covers I have ever seen. I still get chills when I look at it.

  Angela, my formatter. Thank you for making my book all pretty!

  Lori Sabin, my wonderful editor. Thank you for everything you do. I could never go through the publishing process without you!

  Thank you to my husband, Joshua. For your unwavering support. For every single thing you do.

  College seemed like too much stress for me. Traveling across the world, getting married, and having four kids seemed much more relaxing.

  Yeah, I’m still waiting for the relaxing part to kick in…

  I change addresses every other year. It’s not by choice but it is my reality.

  While the crazies of life kept me busy, the stories in my head decided to bubble to the surface. They were dying to be told and I was dying to tell them.

  I hope you’ll enjoy escaping to the crazy world of these characters with me!

  For more information on Calia Read visit her blog:

  www.Caliareadsandwrites.blogspot.de

  Or visit her Author Page on Facebook

  www.facebook.com/CaliaRead

  Follow Calia on Twitter

  @Caliaco22