Sliding On The Edge

by C. Lee McKenzie

  Only one ghost is allowed to enter here now.

  Chapter 3

  Mom’s friend, Maureen Fogger, invites us for Thanksgiving dinner.

  We go.

  We eat.

  We leave early.

  I fall asleep to Mom’s crying. It’s become as much a part of home as the sound of the ocean outside our windows.

  Chapter 4

  I drive Keith to the Christmas tree farm like Dad used to do. We saw down a six foot fir and tie it onto the top of the car. At home we carry it as far as the front door, look at each other and set it down in front of the bay window.

  That’s where it stays.

  Chapter 5

  Mom goes to Maureen Fogger’s New Year’s Eve fundraiser. I think Keith’s at Mitch’s house. I cancel babysitting for the Franklins and stay home. It’s just the TV and me with Quicken curled on my lap, purring.

  Chapter 6

  “Ten. Nine. Eight.” The drum of Time Square voices beat out the final seconds of the year. As the ball plunges to the count of one, paper bits flurry across the TV screen—a sudden end and a sudden beginning. I choke back tears at that thought—the one I’ve had since I watched my Dad die—the moment when the world grew one breath smaller.

  When I switch off the television the house goes silent. Tonight’s the first time since the memorial service that I’ve been here after dark without Mom or Keith someplace close by, and now loneliness crowds the room.

  I twist my Sweet Sixteen bracelet around and around, fingering the tiny links.

  Setting Quicken down I stretch up from the couch. “Come on fur person.”

  Leaving on a few downstairs lights for Mom and Keith, I pad up the steps behind my cat. She leaps to her cushion at the foot of my bed and curls into a tight circle.

  I wish I could fall into a steady purring sleep like she does. I wish Mom would come home. I even wish Keith would shuffle down the hall to his mole hole of a room.

  On my desk my journal lies open to the almost blank sheet of paper with a date across the top. I trace my finger over “October 22.” The rest of the page is blotched with old tears.

  Perhaps because I can’t stand to read about the darkness inside me, I’ve avoided writing anything since that day. I feel like I’m wrapped in a cocoon.

  “Carlie love, you’ve been shut away long enough. It’s time to rejoin your world.”

  My dad’s talking to me like he used to, only now his words come like whispers inside my heart.

  The journal was his idea. After I won Channing’s Scribe contest my freshman year, he handed me a small package. Inside was this blank book embossed with C. E. On the inside cover he’d written. “For Carlie Edmund, one girl who has the imagination to write wonderful stories. Put some of those ideas down and use them later when you need them.”

  Since October 22nd, there’s nothing this One Girl has to write that anyone would want to read, especially me.

  “You have all kinds of good ideas, Carlie love.”

  “I only have one idea and it’s so not a good one.”

  “Good or bad you have to start sometime.”

  I turn to a blank page and take up my pen. “Sometimes bad things happen... even in Channing.”

  The first bad thing that springs into my head is spelled c-a-n-c-e-r, then comes the vision of that hospital room, the hours plodding forward. More memories creep forward like tiny monsters and sit hunched, waiting for me to notice them.

  I drop my pen onto the journal page, tasting rather than hearing the low sound just behind my lips, not quite a cry, not quite a moan, just something sharp-edged, something I’d like to keep hidden.

  When I read what I just wrote, some letters aren’t clear. Even though I’ve turned to a new page, the tears have made the surface rough, so October 22nd has bled through to a new day.

  What can I write that won’t tear at me every time I read it? What can I write that won’t crush my heart and send me back to that day life changed?

  The answer—nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I say softly, then I listen to the silence. I don’t know what’s worse, when he talks to me or when he doesn’t.

  From outside comes the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, then the garage door slides open. Mom’s home.

  I change into my pajamas and robe, brush my hair and pull it into a long dark tail that hangs to my shoulders. I got the thick black mane from my mom’s side of the family. Keith inherited Dad’s sandy color and the spatter of freckles across his cheeks. We don’t look like we’re related, except for our eyes and those are all Dad, sand pebble gray.

  Mom will make cocoa before she goes to bed just like she did when Dad was here. Cocoa is still a bedtime ritual, but it’s not the happy one it used to be. Now she sits alone at the table, studying real estate books, or, as she says, “sorting out the finances.” After being by myself most of the night I need company, so cocoa and Mom to talk to sound good.

  “Hi Mom. How did the fundraiser go?” She’s already pouring milk into a saucepan when I slipper my way into the kitchen.

  “Let’s see.” She sets the saucepan on the cooktop, and stirs in cocoa. “I made a hundred plus a fifty dollar bonus from the caterer at Maureen Fogger’s annual charity event—proceeds going to Bangladesh or Milwaukee, depending on which place needs it more this year.”

  Mom’s attempt at keeping it light doesn’t fool me. She was embarrassed having to work with the catering crew at a party she should have been enjoying as a guest.

  “Oh, and I saw Eric Peterson. He was parking cars.”

  “Wonderful. Now I suppose he’ll spread the word about our money problems.”

  “I don’t think so. I gave him an excuse about volunteering and escaped to the back entrance.” She turns the flame under the pan to low and sits at the table. “It was a small uncomfortable moment.” Mom’s humor fizzles again.

  For years she helped Mrs. Fogger organize her charity party. She hired the caterers. She walked in the front door with the guests. From the way Mom looks and sounds, tonight’s been an embarrassing hell.

  “You didn’t go out? No party at Lena’s this year?”

  I shake my head. There was a party. I didn’t go.

  We jump at the sudden sound of the front door slamming. Keith’s familiar shuffling footsteps start at the entry and cross the dining room toward the kitchen. He pauses at the kitchen door.

  “How was the movie?” Mom’s voice gives her away, at least to me. She wants Keith to stick around and talk to us. She knows he won’t.

  “Didn’t go. Stayed at Mitch’s.” His jaw is tight like it’s been for months, and I’ve forgotten when he looked at either one of us as if we were really there.

  “Do you want some co—?” Keith has already started upstairs. When his bedroom door closes, not with a bang, but something close, Mom slumps in her chair and rubs her eyes.

  Thanks to my mole of a brother, she looks more exhausted than when I came in. Slowly she straightens her back as if every muscle aches, then she goes to the stove and pours cocoa for each of us.

  We sip from our mugs, staring into the steamy liquid and letting the quiet hang in the air between us. We have more to think about than we have to talk about.

  “I do have some good news for the start of the year.” Her words should sound hopeful. They would if the way she said them did. “When I finally opened last week’s mail I found I made ninety percent on my first realtor’s exam.”

  “Great, Mom.” I try to mean it, but everything that has to do with her real estate course reminds me how different our lives are now.

  “It’s only a practice test, but I feel a lot more confident after taking it.”

  We fall into more silence. I have no good news, except that Lena called to tell me the Nicolas Benz might be asking me to the Spring Fling. It’s not a sure thing, so it’s only semi-good news and not as important as it was last year.

  “Carlie… I,” Mom clears her throat and looks u
p at the ceiling. She does this when she has things to tell us that aren’t of the good news variety. When Dad was first diagnosed with cancer, she studied the ceiling for a long time, letting the tears trickle back into her hairline before she looked Keith and me in the eyes and told us about the reports.

  I can’t take too much more of her staring-at-the-ceiling news.

  “I made a decision.” Now her eyes are on me and the way the word, “decision” sounds sets off an alarm in my head.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything yet, but... Well, there’s never going to be a good time to tell you. It’s not something I decided tonight either, and it’s something—” Mom sits back in her chair. “We need to sell this house.”

  “Sell?” I sound like all the air is leaking between my ribs.

  Mom puts her hand over mine, but I snatch mine back.

  “We can’t make it otherwise. I have to free up some capital and the house is the only asset that will get us out of this mess. The health insurance company isn’t coming up with any more money to cover the last of the hospital bills unless we sue. I can’t face that right now. Not ever.” She sighs. “All I want for a while is some peace.”

  “But Mom! It’s the middle of my junior year!”

  “I know, Carlie. It’ll be very hard for you and Keith, but no matter how I add the figures, I come up way too short. Even if I finish the real estate course and start working by summer, we’ll lose everything. I can’t even promise you college right now.” Mom gazes into her mug as if she’s looking for answers. “We can’t afford to live in Channing anymore.”

  “No!”

  “I borrowed money on the house and now the payments are—” She presses her hand against her lips as if she doesn’t want the words to escape. “They’re bigger than I thought. I made a mistake when I figured out how much I’d have to pay each month,, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew I needed money, so I got it the quickest way I could.”

  I push away from the table and get to my feet. “You can’t do this. There has to be—”

  “It’s late. We’ll talk tomorrow. Let’s keep this between us until we have a family meeting, okay? Your brother’s so edgy that I need to choose one of his good moments to tell him.”

  I hurry out of the kitchen.

  “Wait.” She catches me at the stairs. “I need you to understand.” There’s pleading in her voice, something I’ve never heard when she talks to me.

  I yank my arm free and run up the stairs.

  “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have—”

  Slamming my door, I lean against it, squeezing my eyes closed and tasting the salt tears at the corner of my mouth. Quicken jumps from my bed and rubs against my legs until I pick her up and cry into her short gray fur. She nuzzles her Siamese understanding and sympathy under my chin.

  With her tucked close to me I open my bedroom window, inviting the sound of the Pacific inside. When I set her onto the window sill she wraps her tail tightly around her haunches and stares across our beachfront. Like me, she’s never lived anywhere but here. The steady rhythm of waves has always rocked me to sleep, and I’ve never thought how important that sound was until this moment. I get one of those heart shock moments. What if there’s no ocean where we end up living?

  I lift Quicken and close the window, leaning my forehead against the pane, wondering where we’ll wind up and what the next bad event will be that we have to face.

  The shelf over my desk holds a paperweight I won in the eighth grade poetry contest. Two Channing Yearbooks lie stacked next to it and on top of those sits my broken Jack-in-the-Box. When I crank the handle of the metal toy, it swings around freely, not catching the tiny gears. The puppet’s trapped inside.

  Cradling Jack’s small prison, I lie curled around it on my bed. I hate you for dying, Dad. I can’t bury my face any deeper in the pillow. I hate everybody in this stupid world.

  “Carlie love, this is tough, but you’ll be fine. I know it.”

  No! This will not be just fine.

  END of EXCERPT

  Read more of Carlie’s story.

  See all of C. Lee McKenzie’s work at

  https://www.cleemckenziebooks.com/

  Free Gift

  Thank you for reading Sliding on the Edge. If you enjoyed Shawna and Kay and if Carlie’s story intrigues enough to read it, I hope you’ll leave reviews. Authors truly appreciate their readers and reviewers.

  Please join my MAILING LIST for your Free Gift. (https://www.cleemckenziebooks.com) During the year, I often have Special Offers for all of my followers. I look forward to being in contact with you.

  Yours,

  C. Lee McKenzie