“Ready?” he asked.
I nodded. He started to open the door. “Buck,” I said quickly.
He turned to give me one last moment of attention.
“Stay close by me.”
He opened the door wider letting me enter first.
Chapter 6
The days following my mother’s admission to the hospital whizzed by in a blur. I became full of responsibility for once with running the store, taking care of Matthew and all of the housework. The holidays were in full swing. Everyone thought I should just close the store temporarily, but I welcomed any sort of activity that would keep my mind off everything going on around me.
My mother came home after staying in the hospital for a few days. They had put her on some sort of new medication to help regulate her heart rhythm, but she was very tired when she finally got home and seemed to constantly sleep. My father would pop in every now and again to see how she was doing, but he was spending a lot of late nights out. I never asked where he was going. No one said anything further about Mrs. Anderson, and my mother gave me no more indication that she had any knowledge that something was going on other than how she had reacted by seeing Mrs. Anderson that night at the hospital. I tried not to dwell on it anymore. I could feel the tension all around me, but with mom being sick, I knew the problem wouldn’t be addressed. For all I knew, perhaps they thought their reputation was far more important than getting at the bigger issue at hand, and even when she got better, nothing more would be said. I knew that nothing would be the same between any one of us, and I was sure that they knew that as well even if they tried as hard as they could to put up a good front to everyone else.
I spent my days tending to the antique store and thinking about Emry Logan, and then I would come home and make dinner and then lay in bed and think about Emry Logan. I became restless anticipating the next time I would be able to see him, get to talk to him or even touch his beautifully tanned skin. I would get out the book that contained the brief notes he had written to me and read them over and over, memorizing every word and the way he wrote the words as well. I found myself dreaming about him almost every night. Sometimes the dreams would be cruel as he would come close to me and hold out both of his arms toward me, yet I could never reach him no matter how hard I tried. And other times, I would find myself running down a dark corridor, much like the ones they had at the jail, and I would scream his name out. I would wake up in a panic, praying that I hadn’t actually said his name out loud in my sleep.
I knew I was becoming someone completely different than I had been just a few months ago. I had once felt content with my life. And now there stood a woman in the mirror who looked like Anna James, but she was worn down and beaten. I felt like digging my fingers in the ground and pleading for some sort of justice for all the good I had done. Didn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t something good come my way in return?
Emotions flowed through me I had never experienced before. I had once boxed myself in thinking everything around me was already perfect, that nowhere else in the entire world could I find such peace than with my family, the church, the store. Now I dreamed of helping Emry Logan escape from prison and running away with him to some tropical island where I imagined him holding me in his strong arms, and just being there with him would make all of my troubles here in Seneca go away forever. I’d be able to breathe again. These mood swings were agonizing to try to take control of. I felt like those teenage hormones that I thought had skipped over me were finally catching up. I hated my life. I wanted out, but I wanted to take Emry with me. My profound obsession with him only added to the craziness of my moods.
I heard the roar of an engine outside and hurried over to the window to see who it was. A black Mustang sat parked in front of the house. I didn’t know anyone who drove a Mustang. Out of the driver’s side, a short, middle-aged woman with dark brown roots protruding from her dyed blondishcolored hair, got out. She turned and stood to stare at the house. I noticed she wore overly large black sunglasses as she turned to slam her door shut. She moved to the back of the car and opened the trunk to retrieve a pink suitcase with red stripes.
I was still racking my brain with who it could be when I opened up the front door as she walked up the porch steps. She brushed right by me and threw the suitcase down on the hardwood floor with a loud thud.
“Annie, are you really that surprised to see me?” Then I instantly knew who she was. “What are you doing here?” I asked. It was Carlin, my aunt. She was my mother’s baby sister. I hadn’t seen her in probably over ten years. I never cared for her much. She thought she was better than everyone else. She was a free spirit, drifting from here to there, never living in one place for very long and always wanting to experience new things to help restore what little youth she had left. She and my mother never saw eye-to-eye. My mother wanted a family, and Carlin didn’t believe in the concept. They rarely spoke. I curiously examined her. She still looked the same, only aged with small wrinkles stemming outwards slightly from the edges of her mouth and eyes. She had permanent indents molded into her forehead, and she had gained a little weight. She always referred to me as Annie, saying it in a spiteful manner. I could remember that even as a little girl, I detested the nickname. When I was little, I had always been relieved when her visits ended. Our personalities had always clashed.
She glanced around the room and huffed as if agitated by the way the house looked. “So I heard my sister is sick.” “Who told you that?”
She took her long black dress coat off and put one hand on her hip impatiently. “John called me.” “He did?” My voice cracked with surprise.
She nodded and tapped her stilettos on the wooden floor. “Where’s Helene? Is she upstairs in bed?”
Before I could respond, she was already moving up the staircase toward my parents’ bedroom. I didn’t bother to follow. I sat down on the couch and tried to focus on the TV show that Matthew had on. I could hear the low hum of voices upstairs but couldn’t make anything specific out. A few minutes later, my father came into the room and took a seat in the tan recliner.
“Your Aunt Carlin is here,” he said.
“I’ve already seen,” I mumbled, my eyes never leaving the screen of the television. “She’s going to be staying for a while.”
I was about to protest, but then I quickly shut my mouth and decided not to waste my breath.
“I’m not saying you’re not doing a good job,” he continued, either reading my mind or sensing my growing irritation that her very presence caused. “I just think you could use a helping hand is all. Plus, I think it would be good to get Carlin back into the family. It would be good for her and Helene to patch things up and enjoy being sisters again.”
Based upon my recent opinion of my father’s intentions, I guessed this was merely another one of his schemes to take the attention away from him and give my mother, along with me, someone else to focus on so he could go off and parade over to his lover’s house once again.
I didn’t say anything back to him. Carlin would just cause problems. She always had. Even though my mother had never dared to say anything remotely bad about her whenever her name turned up in conversation, I had always sensed that something had happened between them to tear them apart.
“Why don’t you go put fresh sheets on the spare bed?”
Why don’t you do it yourself? I wanted to scream at him, but again, my inner hostility would do me no good at a time like this. I left the room to do as I was asked to do. Another week passed. I was good at avoiding Carlin. I backed off and let her do most of the things that needed done around the house. It gave me a chance to avoid everyone else in the process. Some days I’d feel guilty as if I was abandoning my mother and Matthew when they needed me most, but then I would try to drive the feeling down and out of my mind and not think about it. My mother was gaining her strength back little by little every day.
“Anna?” her mother called. “Can you come here for a second, please?�
�� I paused just outside of my parents’ bedroom and peered in. My mother was lying on the king-sized bed with her legs propped up. The curtains were drawn shut so that the sun couldn’t shine in, and the only light glowed from a small, crystal lamp on her nightstand.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked, almost whispering because of the darkness.
“I just have a little headache. Come in and chat with me for a while.” She patted a spot on the bed beside her.
I walked in cautiously at first and then settled down Indian style on the puffy checkered comforter. I looked up, and our eyes met.
“I feel like we’re becoming strangers,” she confessed, and I instantly felt guilty knowing that I had avoided being in this house as much as I possibly could.
I lowered my head. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.” She put her hand under my chin and carefully made me look up at her again. She smiled, and it made me feel a little better. “So tell me how things have been. How is Buck?” Her eyes always did this little sparkle when she said his name. Maybe she was assuming that all of my time spent away had been with him, that we had bonded and found a connection and were forming this beautiful, passionate relationship together.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t talked to him in a while. Since the night he drove me to the hospital to see you.”
“Oh.” The sparkle instantly disappeared and she was the one to look down now. I had disappointed her. “Then what have you been up to? Carlin says you’re always running off somewhere.”
I hated being cornered like this. Carlin was nosey and needed to stay out of my business. “Well, just keeping up with the store and going to the library. Nothing much.”
“Anna, please don’t worry about that store. It isn’t going anywhere. Closing it for a while isn’t going to hurt business. It’s not the most popular place anyway.” She chuckled a little.
“How can you say that?” I asked. “You love that store. I want to keep up with it. You get tons of customers.”
“Only the older ladies from the church.” She smiled, amused I had guessed by picturing them in there shopping, chatting away as they always did amongst each other. “Carlin seems to think there’s something not quite right going on with you, dear. Is there anything going on you need to tell me about?”
Carlin had really put a bug in her ear this time. This conversation probably wouldn’t even be happening right now if it hadn’t been for her and her stupid opinions. I felt angry all of a sudden. “Carlin needs to …” I stopped. I couldn’t explode on my mother like this. It wasn’t her fault.
She raised her eyebrows. “Carlin needs to what?” She needs to shut her mouth. All she does is push her way into family matters that don’t concern her. She just shows up after ten years and decides that she can be boss and do whatever she wants and say whatever she pleases. She’s conniving, and she gets under my skin by simply looking my way, and I have no idea how the two of you even share the same blood, is what I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t.
She took a deep breath and leaned back in the bed. I guessed her headache was bothering her again. “Do you need me to get you some pills?” I offered, hoping to end the subject abruptly.
But she ignored me. “Carlin is who she is. I don’t think there’s a person in the world who can change that. But there’s something maybe you should know.” I leaned in closer to make sure that I could hear her clearly. My mother never really talked about her side of the family. Her parents had died when she was young, and her and Carlin had lived with one of their cousin’s for most of their adolescence. That was basically all I knew. I was intrigued that she was offering more information to me now.
“I know she can be irritating sometimes, well, most of the time. It probably seems to you that her and I don’t have the best relationship, especially since she has barely been a part of yours and Matthew’s lives, but there was a time when her and I were actually very close. We were best friends and sisters at the same time.”
“What happened?” I asked impatient to know. “Well,” she began slow and cautious. She looked up at me again, perhaps uncertain if she should continue. “We were in love with the same man.”
I was completely stunned. Was she saying what I thought she was? “What? Carlin was in love with father?” My eyes widened in disbelief.
“No, no,” she quickly said. “Not him.”
“Then who?”
“Another man. Someone before your father.”
My mother was in love with someone other than my father? I guess I had never thought that possible before. Until recently, I had always thought of the two of them as having their marriage completely together, that they had never been with anyone else besides each other.
“His name was Russell, and he was gorgeous.” I watched her eyes gleam in excitement as she said his name and remembered him in her head. “We were in the same grade. We were seniors, and Carlin, she was just a freshman. But he always hung around our house, and he seemed to show interest in both of us. He kind of dated both of us at the same time.”
“Wow,” I mumbled. “That’s a little creepy.” “I know.” She laughed. “We didn’t care. He was so wonderful, and we could both be around him and share his attention and still be the best of friends at the same time. Then Russell did something unexpected. He did something that Carlin could just not forgive.”
I found myself hanging on every word. I was discovering a different side to my mother, one never revealed to me before.
“He proposed to me.”
“Did you accept?” I blurted out. Then I hesitantly looked behind me at the open door. What if Carlin was eavesdropping and heard us talking about this? “Don’t worry,” she quickly told me. “I’ve sent her out on errands. She’ll be gone for a while.” I nodded, anxious to get back to her story.
“Yes, I did accept. He gave me a ring and everything. It devastated Carlin. She moped around for weeks and became so bitter toward me and everyone else around her, very much like how she is today. I never saw my happy, perky, baby sister again after that. She had really been in love with Russell, or so I assumed, that it had changed her so drastically.”
“So then what happened with you and Russell? Did you marry him?” She smiled again. “No. I gave the ring back. I couldn’t stand to see Carlin like that. I thought by breaking things off with Russell that maybe she’d come back around, but she never did. It took a very long time for her to even talk to me again, and then once that happened, it was just civil, not sister-like anymore. Everything had changed.”
“Wow,” I repeated. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”
She chuckled at my reaction. “I don’t know, honey. I didn’t want to bother you with it, to have you know that there was someone else before your father. Life is funny sometimes.”
“Why are you telling me now then?” She thought for a moment and then sighed, bringing her forearm up to cover her eyes as if she had just remembered the pain of the headache again. “I just didn’t want you to think Carlin had always been so … cranky.”
“I can’t believe she would hold a grudge for so long.” “I found your dad shortly after that and we got married, and Carlin, well, she’s never found anyone who could compare to Russell. I suppose in her own mind, he had been the only one for her, and I had stolen that right from her, the right of true happiness. I guess I’m just as surprised as you by her staying here with us, and even though I don’t feel like we’re back to where we had been before Russell had come into our lives, I’m happy she’s here. She’s trying at least, trying as much as Carlin can try.”
The time spent with Carlin was still torturous to me, even after my mother’s little chat explaining why she thought she was like that. I, on the other hand, was quite amused that this Russell guy had been smart enough to choose my mother over her. Carlin was so self-centered it made me sick. Her presence put a downer on everyone’s mood. She had this nega
tive energy about her. Every small issue she made into a large one, and she also made it out to be about her because of her conceited, twisted ways. She was so melodramatic, she belonged in a theater. I couldn’t seem to think of her as my aunt. Aunts were supposed to be caring and yet sometimes better than parents because they always took your side and let you get away with murder. Carlin, on the other hand, was like some pathetic high school wannabe cheerleader who never made the squad and based the rest of her entire life off of that one negative instance. She spent all of her energy trying to make herself look like some sort of rich model/movie star, yet she honestly looked horrible. She looked worn down and was trying too hard to be young for her age. It was like she was never going to be able to accept that she was no longer a teenager.
“I’m going to go get some air,” I announced one night after dinner was over and the dishes had been put away. Everyone had settled into the living room together, and I couldn’t take another moment breathing the same air as Carlin.
My mother frowned. “Where are you going?”
“Probably the library again,” Carlin assumed, rolling her eyes.
I stood up and walked toward the front door. “Actually, the library is closed,” I informed her with just as much attitude as she had given me. “I guess I’ll go to the store.” Carlin laughed out loud. I glared at her.
“For what?” my father asked, putting the newspaper below his chin to peer over at me.
I sighed, kind of huffing as I did so. “I don’t know. Didn’t you say we needed coffee?” I asked my mother quickly.
“What?” she said, confused as I had just made that up. “Bye.” I didn’t stick around to look at all of their reactions. I just turned as fast as I could and headed straight for my car.
I actually did go to the store. I didn’t specifically look for coffee, though I knew that I would have to go home with some just to prove that I had been there. I walked up and down the aisles. It was late enough in the evening that not a lot of people were there. I glanced at faces as I walked by, and I wondered if they thought I was strange because I wasn’t searching the shelves like everyone else. Maybe they thought I was intoxicated as I made it to the end of the store and decided to walk up and down each aisle again just one more time.
Strange in Skin Page 9
