The Lovely Shadow

by Cory Hiles

  I could hear June calling after me, but only faintly, as if she were a mile away on a stormy night and the sound of her voice was only barely being carried to me on the wings of the wind.

  Her voice had no source and seemed to come from everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. I did not bother to search for her. I needed to wash my hands; and maybe look for a word in my dictionary that could accurately describe how I was feeling.

  I stopped by my bedroom only shortly; long enough to deposit my socks on my bed, and headed for the bath.

  I closed the door to the washroom and turned on the water at the sink and began mechanically washing my hands. I was aware of my surroundings and what I was doing, but I felt detached, as if I was not really inside myself.

  I felt almost the way I had felt just the day before, down in the basement; as if I did not really exist. The only difference being that I was well aware of my existence this time. I knew I existed but I felt removed from my existence, like I was on the outside of myself, watching me, rather than inside, controlling me.

  I finished washing and headed back downstairs for supper. I did not stop to read my dictionary on the way because I knew I did not want to be late for Miss Lilly’s super Cajun chicken gumbo. That would be a mortal sin on par with beheading babies and making lampshades from the skin of dead puppies.

  When I reached the middle of the stairs I saw that the table had already been set and the big pot of gumbo was the steaming centerpiece to the artful arrangement of bowls and spoons. ‘Miss Lilly is a model of efficiency, fo’ sho’!’ I thought to myself when I saw the table.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs and had a broader view of the room, I could see June and Miss Lilly standing together looking at me with concern etched deeply into their faces.

  “Are you ok, Hun?” June asked tentatively.

  “Sure, just hungry. I can’t wait to try your gumbo, Miss Lilly. Is it very spicy? I like spicy foods, but not when they’re so hot that they blister my eyeballs.” I replied.

  My emotionless voice did nothing to ease the concern of the ladies, nor had I intended it to. I didn’t intend anything. I was lost inside myself and did not think that anybody would be able to toss me the lifeline I needed to pull myself back from the void.

  Miss Lilly opened her mouth several times and then closed it without uttering a sound. She seemed to be at a genuine loss for words, which I almost found amusing, as it was a circumstance I would never have believed possible if I had not been there to witness it myself.

  I walked past my governesses to the table and sat down. I looked at them and said, “Come on ladies…June, Miss Lilly, the food is going to get cold, and that would be a travesty.”

  In the back of my mind I realized that I was reverting to using large words again and wondered for a second if it was some sort of defense mechanism, or if my brain, in its addled state simply could not find other words to use in place of the big ones.

  The women shared a quick concerned glance, unaware that I was well aware of their mutual concern. They walked stiffly and uncomfortably towards the table; towards me. I realized that I was the source of their discomfort, and I felt bad for it, but I still had no idea how to snap out of my numbness to make them feel better.

  They both sat opposite of me, where they could watch me. They had given up trying to speak to me, and I thought with some measure of discomfort ‘I am making them miserable because I don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling… I don’t even know how I am feeling. I bet they think I’m going crazy…CRAZY! I will NOT be crazy!’

  The mere idea of insanity was enough to snap me from my daze and images flooded into my mind of all the wrongs my mother had been guilty of; the senseless beatings, the verbal lashings, the insults, the fear, and of course the abandonment in the basement.

  I suddenly knew exactly how I felt. I was pissed! I understood that even though I had forgiven my mother for every horrible thing she had ever done to me, and though I attributed it all to the Sickness that had taken her, I had not allowed her Sickness to justify her actions and I still demanded an accounting from her.

  I wanted her to tell me, face to face, why she had allowed the Sickness to take her, why she had allowed the Sickness to beat me, why she had allowed the Sickness to humiliate, torture, and abandon me.

  And at that moment I understood with alarming clarity that I would never get that accounting. I would never get an apology, and I would never be completely free from the fears that my mother had planted in my heart; fear of abandonment, fear of the dark, and fear of impending insanity.

  I banged my fists against the table so hard that the bowl in front of me jumped up off from the saucer it had been sitting on and landed back on it with a loud clink. June and Miss Lilly both let out a yelp and jumped at least twice as high as my bowl had.

  “It’s not fair!” I screamed. “She should not have died yet! She needs to tell me WHY! I need to know WHY she did it all! It’s not FAIR!”

  By the time I had finished screaming, Miss Lilly and June were both out of their chairs and around the table holding me tightly. Pulling me deeply into themselves, as if they were trying to absorb my pain into their bodies and alleviate my suffering. In fact, I think that is exactly what they were trying to do.

  Suddenly understanding that my greatest desire in life was to have my mother give a full account for her actions, and knowing that I would never have that satisfaction was devastating to me and I could do nothing but scream out in frustration.

  I screamed out in anger until my throat was hoarse. I had never before in my life been so angry. My blood was pounding in my ears, my throat was lined with broken glass from my screams, my feet hurt from stomping them against the floor beneath the table, and I’m fairly certain that if my beautiful matrons had not been there to hold me through the fit of anger, I would have broken both my hands punching them against the table.

  Eventually, seconds, minutes, or hours later—I’m not sure how long—my anger was finally spent and I was out of screams. My ears quit pounding, my vision was no longer tinted with red, and my feet and hands lost their desire to lash out. All I had left in me were tears.

  I cried deeper and harder than I had ever cried before. I cried for my mother. I hated my mother, I loved my mother, I realized that I missed my mother and would never see her again, but my tears were not for my loss, they were for hers.

  I cried for her pain. I cried for the life she lost long before she died. I cried for the husband and son that were taken from her before they should have been. I cried for the burden of guilt that she bore in me—her unwanted son and an unwanted reminder that she had given herself to someone she did not love.

  I cried until the food was cold, and through the entire time, June and Miss Lilly never let me go. They held me as if my life depended on it, and in retrospect, it very well may have.

  As my tears finally began to dry up, and my mind began to return to me the thought crossed my mind, ‘I’m getting snot on them.’

  For some reason, that struck me as immensely funny and my sobs turned into giggles. I could not help it. I giggled helplessly until I began to hiccup, which struck me even funnier and I giggled even more profusely.

  Miss Lilly and June finally relinquished their straightjacket embrace on me and tentatively backed up, looking at me quizzically, most likely waiting for me to explain the discordant cycle of emotions I’d just gone through.

  Finally regaining enough composure to speak, I looked up at them and said, “I snotted your clothes, sorry. And I think the food is cold.”

  They were not to be satisfied with such a simple explanation of my feelings, so I was forced to try and put into words the entire dance routine of emotion that I’d just gone through.

  When I was done explaining, and they were done trying to console me, we finally settled in to eat our cold supper.

  Miss Lilly requested that I say grace, and though I had a shorter list of thanks than I’d had that morning, I
found it immensely comforting to realize that I had things to be thankful for. That knowledge took some of the sting out of my pain.

  After supper, we were all pretty exhausted and mutually agreed that it was a good time for bed. June asked if I wanted to be tucked in, and I politely declined. I just felt too weird to want any company at the moment.

  I hugged and kissed June and Miss Lilly both goodnight, told them I loved them and thanked them for everything, and then stumbled off to bed. I was utterly exhausted—emotionally and physically—and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.

  When I got to my room I saw my socks lying on the bed and briefly wondered how they got there, but then had a vague recollection of having tossed them there before supper. I picked them up and tossed them into the corner where they clunked against the wall.

  ‘What the… Socks don’t clunk,’ I thought. Tired as I was, my rampant curiosity kept me from going to bed and instead sent me off to the corner to investigate why my socks had clunked against the wall.

  I picked up one sock and found nothing at all unusual about it, but when I grabbed the other one I could feel that it had something in it, giving it an unnatural weight.

  I opened the top of the sock and stuck my hand in it, grasping the object concealed within. When I pulled my hand back out I found a spoon clutched in it. Wrapped around the handle of the spoon was a piece of paper.

  I unwrapped the piece of paper and looked at it.

  La tristesse se lave l'âme, mais il peut se laver l'âme de suite.

  I was confused. It was the same piece of paper that I had encountered earlier in the day, but I was fairly certain that I had stuck it in my back pocket when Miss Lilly gave it back to me in the kitchen.

  I thrust my hand into my pockets one by one, searching for the paper that I was holding in my hands. As I had expected, all my pockets were empty.

  I looked at the paper once more and spoke the translated version out loud, “Sadness washes the soul, but sadness can wash away the soul.”

  I had very much appreciated June and Miss Lilly’s attempts to comfort me before, but I had not found comfort in their words beyond the knowing that they loved me, I loved them and that I was in a safe place.

  But the note in its simple elegance and infinite wisdom comforted me on a deeper level. I understood from it that it was right and proper for me to be sad, but if I chose to wallow in self pity for long enough, I ran the very real risk of sharing my mother’s fate.

  I put the note on top of my dictionary, stripped down to my underwear, and crawled into bed. I reached over and shut the lamp off and felt a breeze brush past me just as I clicked the switch. The breeze brought with it the familiar scent of roses.

  I smiled in the dark, and whispered, “Thank you,” and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 20

  Although it took a long time to get June to grant me specific details about my mother’s death, I did eventually get the story—or at least as much as she was able to piece together—out of her.

  After my mother locked me in the basement on June12th, she apparently left the house and went in search of John. Having taken full leave of her mental faculties, she was likely convinced that she could find him down at the factory.

  Behind the factory, at the far end of the lot the factory occupies, is a storage pond that the factory uses to maintain a cold water supply for cooling the machines inside. The water is pumped from the pond, into the building through a large network of pipes, where it enters various water chillers, and once chilled, is then pumped through water lines in the machines.

  After flowing through the machines and cooling them off, the water is then pumped back out of the building via more pipes, and eventually ends up back in the storage pond in back of the building.

  On June 19th, about a week before June told me of my mother’s demise, the water pump at the factory abruptly stopped working. Maintenance personnel were sent to the pump-house to see what the problem was and discovered that the drive control box for the pump had overloaded, and shut down.

  The workers reset the drive, and started the pump again. The pump started up, and the motor appeared to be functioning correctly but the drive box overloaded again after only a few seconds.

  The workers moved from the pump-house down to the pond to see if there was an obstruction at the water inlet. There was. My mother’s bloated corpse was stuck in the water intake lines, keeping water from entering the pump, thus overloading the drive.

  The police were called, and my mother’s body was collected. The workers were all interviewed, but nobody had seen the woman enter the property.

  My mother was autopsied and the medical examiner was fairly certain that she had perished from drowning on or around June12th or June13th.

  Her heavy water logged wedding dress had pulled her to the bottom of the pond and left her submerged there for almost a week until the gasses released during her decomposition bloated her body enough to make it buoyant, and she was eventually pulled into the water intake.

  For about a week the police worked diligently to try to identify her body with no success. She had never been fingerprinted, she carried no I.D., there had been no missing persons cases reported that matched her description, and they were still waiting on the return of dental records.

  Then June entered the police station to talk to them about my mother, and me, and our situation. The police asked her for a description of my mother, which she gave them, and then asked if she would mind terribly coming down to the morgue to identify a body.

  June went, though she desperately did not want to, and found that although my mother had decomposed a bit, and bloated a lot, she had more than enough of her recognizable features left intact for her to be able to make a positive identification.

  We would never know if my mother entered the pond on purpose or on accident, and we would never know whether she committed suicide or suffered a mishap. We would never know why she died, but at least we knew how she died.

  The day after June told me of my mother’s demise we had to start making my mother’s final arrangements. June was an angel and tried to spare me as much grief as possible during the ordeal.

  June paid for a burial plot for my mother that was right beside John’s. Joe’s plot was a little further away, but in the same line as John and my Mother’s plots. We decided that we would not have a funeral, as we did not have anybody to invite besides ourselves, and possibly Katelyn, and we had already said our good-byes in prayers.

  June was made the executor of my mother’s estate, and she set up a stock portfolio for me and placed all my mother’s assets into it, dispersing the funds through dozens of start-up technology companies that were just beginning to gain popularity in those days, as well as into several mutual funds.

  After asking me if I wanted to keep the house, and me deciding that I never wanted to see it again, it was sold, and the proceeds were added to my portfolio.

  With the money my mother had in the bank, the sale of her car, and house, as well as the sale of the majority of the furnishings from her house, all placed into a rapidly growing stock portfolio that could not be touched until I turned eighteen, it was not likely that I was going to starve any time in early adulthood.

  Two months after my mother’s interment, we had our court hearing to determine custody. The court had tried unsuccessfully to determine who my father was, but since my mother had not added a name to my birth certificate nor ever mentioned his name to anybody that was a nearly impossible task.

  With no father or other family member to object to the ruling, and Mrs. Fischer’s weighty declarations that I was safe in June’s house, the court had no objection to June taking full and permanent custody of me, and we went home to celebrate.

  About two weeks after our custody hearing, I had my first real day of school. By the end of that day, I was ready to be done with school and just spend my life as a bum, panhandling money on a street corner.

  CHAPTER 21

&nb
sp; School was pure unadulterated Hell for me. I had never been around other kids, and had no idea how to relate to them. All the kids at school seemed so terribly childish. Their interests were juvenile, their vocabulary was appallingly mediocre, and they were, for the most part, mean spirited, over privileged little whelps that were in for a really big surprise when life finally decided to show them just how tough it could be.

  I did not make any friends that first year of school, and I did not really blame the other kids for their indifference towards me. I could not blame them for the fact that life had not yet kicked them in the teeth and showed them what pain and suffering was.

  I also could not blame them for the fact that I already had an education that was far superior to theirs, through my lust for reading, and likewise, it was not their fault that I was more intellectually mature than they were.

  The one thing I could, and did hold them accountable for was their cruelty. It was not as if I had not already suffered enough abuse in my life at the hands of my mother, I really did not have the patience to put up with their abuse as well.

  Within the first six months of the school year I had been in seven fights. I’d love to be able to say that I won every one of them and taught those mischievous little devils a lesson they would not soon forget, however, they did not call me Scrawny Johnny for nothing, and I generally got the worse end of the beatings.

  The one thing I did have going for me at school was that the staff were compassionate towards me. I got along quite well with the adults; the teachers, principal, custodians, even the lunch ladies were all my buddies.

  I tried to be around the adults whenever possible to help alleviate the taunting that I would endure if caught alone.

  For the first two months of the school year I had begged June to let me quit school and just teach myself. I promised her that I would study all day, every day while she was at work.