Kate dried her hands on her jeans and put her arms around her daughter’s shoulders. “I love you too, sweetheart. You and I, we’ll be okay, you know that, right?”
Grace squeezed harder, a frown creasing her forehead. She didn’t know that. She didn’t know anything, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t pretend to, so as not to worry her mother. She would do anything if it would help stop her mother from leaving her, too.
There was a rap on the door. Kate kissed Grace on the top of her head and headed toward the front door. Through the screen door, she saw Officer Wade standing on the doorstep with a box in his hands and a solemn look on his face. She pushed back the screen door and ushered him in. She offered him a coffee and a seat at the kitchen table opposite Grace. He pulled out a chair and sat down, declining the coffee with a shake of his head.
He placed a brown box on the table hesitantly, stalling. Scrawled on top of it in bold handwriting ‘Brian Connors—deceased’.
Kate sat down rigidly at the end of the table and eyed the box. Wade slowly pushed the box across the table toward her. For a moment Kate just looked at it, re-read the words. A tightness gripped her throat, her stomach lurched. She took a deep breath and held it. Slowly, she removed the lid to reveal the precious contents neatly packed inside. She reached in slowly and ran her fingers over the items. She let out her breath, let out her tears, silent tears that ran down her face shamelessly.
She took out folded t-shirts and jeans and placed them on the table beside the box. She found Brian’s gold wristwatch and turned it over in her trembling hand. She silently read the elegantly engraved words, ‘My eternal love always, Kate.’ She placed the watch carefully on top of the clothes folded on the table. Underneath another t-shirt was a mobile phone, toothbrush, hairbrush, Bvlgari aftershave, and a black notebook. Her eyes darted around the emptying box. Her frenzied fingers probed eagerly between the folds of fabric, the corners of the box. She began to search more urgently, searching pockets, seams. Nothing.
Kate’s search was proving fruitless. Her husband’s wedding ring was nowhere to be found. A sudden sob escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hand to stifle those that would follow.
Wade raked his fingers through his hair, feeling guilty for making her cry again. He so badly wanted to reach over and console her, but he refrained, fearful of what might happen if he did.
Grace walked over to her mother and put her arms around her in an effort to protect her against the fresh, consuming grief.
Kate nodded. “Its okay, really…I just need to…I’m sorry…” she said, standing. She quickly refolded and placed Brian’s belongings back in the box and replaced the lid. She stood there a moment, willing herself to be strong.
Wade stood and took a step toward her. “Kate-“
“Don’t,” she snapped, then felt instantly guilty for the bitterness in her tone. “I’m sorry, I can’t…” she dragged the back of her hand across her wet cheeks, picked up the box, walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway to her bedroom.
They stood there and watched her go, watched her disappear into the darkness of the room as she closed the door quietly behind her.
Kate sat down on her bed and placed the box beside her. After a moment, she pulled a folded shirt from the box and buried her face in it. She pulled in a long breath, filling her lungs with Brian’s familiar scent. She could hear him teasing her for being silly. Like when she would cuddle up next to him on the sofa, burying her head in his chest, because she had been crying at a sad movie. “I can’t do this without you,” she sobbed into his shirt.
Wade wrestled with the urge to follow Kate, put his arms around her, hold her close to his heart, and tell her he would be there for her. Instead, he walked over to the kitchen bench, picked up the plate of food that Kate had prepared for Grace and put it on the table. “Here Grace,” he said gently. “Sit down and have something to eat.” Grace sat down submissively, picked up a fork and watched as her tears dripped, then ran down the lip of her plate.
Grace never thought to question Wade being there. And why would she? She needed someone – anyone - that would care for her while her mother could not.
Wade busied himself with making coffee, then sat down opposite her and watched as Grace pushed the food around on her plate with the fork. It looked enormous and cumbersome in her tiny hand. Her little face with the big watery grey eyes broke his heart. He knew he deserved to suffer the pain that tore through him. He alone had broken the hearts of this mother and her child.
That was when Wade, against his better judgment, decided to stay, for just a while. He would try, as best he could, to put some of the broken pieces back together again. He owed them that much. The truth though, could only do more harm than good, so that, he would keep to himself.
He wasn’t sure how long they sat there like that. Listening to the heartbreaking sounds of Kate’s sobbing drifting softly down the hall.
Chapter 8—Kali and Bongo
It was a cold wretched Sunday morning in June when Grace woke to yet another wet colorless day. It had been raining consistently for weeks without any hint that a change was drawing any nearer. Grace felt agitated by the smothering grey sadness that had shadowed her constantly since her father’s death.
She decided that she had had enough of her miserable existence behind the cold steel bars of grief. And that it was up to her alone to make the necessary changes to rectify this problem.
She pushed the blankets away and swung her legs enthusiastically over the edge of her bed. Her pathetic life, coupled with the gloomy weather, had become too depressing and predictable.
But something was already a little different about this morning, Grace sensed, with a hint of trepidation. She frowned when her stomach growled. She felt, something she hadn’t felt for a while. Really, really hungry, with an unyielding urge to find food and eat.
Grace felt instantaneously sick with hunger as she stood; her legs trembled uncontrollably. She crouched down onto her haunches to steady herself and grasped her stomach. She looked up toward the ceiling that started to vibrate and blur. Snowy white dots, like a television that had just gone off the air, filled her vision.
“Oh no, not again,” she whispered in a frightened voice just before her legs gave way and she collapsed on her bedroom floor.
As Grace’s eyelids flutter close and her mind drifts into a fitful dream, my own eyes open and I realize that I am not the Juliette that I remember, but a younger girl from an earlier time and place.
My mouth and tongue are parched, devoid of saliva, and it hurts when I try to swallow. My lips are dehydrated, cracked and resemble an old worn-out brown leather belt. A kitten meows on the ground beside my filthy bare feet.
“Bonga?” I say in a small raspy voice as I reach down to stroke the skeletal animal. I study my hand; it is bony, like it doesn't belong to me. I try to rub mud off my hand with equally dirty fingers. I gasp when I realize that it isn’t dirt that coats my body.
I search my memory for answers and realize that I have returned to Bengal, and it is 1769. I am re-experiencing the wretched suffering of myself as an eleven-year-old brown-skinned girl. An obnoxious stink assaults my nostrils, making me gag. I don’t smell good. Nothing, in fact, smells good. The soiled walls surrounding me emit a foul-smelling stench of excrement, urine and rotting flesh. I cover my nose and mouth with my grubby hand, but it doesn't help.
“Kali, stay here with your mother, I will return with food by nightfall,” a man says to me in a foreign language that somehow I understand.
I nod obediently. Maybe tonight he would bring home a rat and we would eat like kings. He is tall, softly spoken, and rakish thin, dressed in rags. Starvation has robbed him of his looks and his strength, leaving him haggard and defeated. Only the love and devotion he feels for our family keeps him alive, day after day. I know this truth about him, and it makes me love him even more. My heart is bursting at the seams with love, my stomach bloated but empty.
I remember a time, not that long ago, that he was handsome, strong, well-dressed and wealthy for a man of his station in life. A prosperous and respected merchant trader, trading in textiles, tea and exotic spices throughout India and foreign lands. We had wanted for nothing.
I watch him now as he prepares to leave; intuitively, I know that I will never see this man again and it saddens me. A dirty tear runs slowly down and over my protruding cheekbone.
“Goodbye, Father,” I say weakly to his retreating back. “I love you.” He doesn’t hear me, the bustling noise outside has already swallowed him up whole.
My kitten Bonga shrieks loudly in protest behind me. I spin around in time to see a girl snatch the kitten up from the floor by its oversized head. The girl snarls and threatens me with her wild yellow eyes, her teeth bared. In one swift movement, she twists the kitten’s scrawny neck, breaking it. It dangles silently in her hands as the girl turns and flees quickly out into the dirty alleyway. My kitten, Bonga, will be an appetizing meal for four this evening.
A woman’s voice behind me says, “Kali, come.”
This woman who summons me, I know instinctively, is my mother. My heart swells with unbounded love for her. She is lying on dirty rags on the floor and looks like a beautiful skeleton draped in satiny brown skin. By nightfall I know my mother will be dead, and I will be alone in this place.
So would ten million other men, women, and children. They will starve to death during one of the worst famines in history during the 17th century. It will happen again.
I lay down beside my mother and close my eyes. I pray for a quick walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The Gods smile down upon my mother and me this night. We do not have to wait long before the child-like Angel with her crystal clear blue eyes and long flowing red hair that shines as though it is on fire, holds our hands and walks us home to a beautiful place far from here.
Grace slowly blinked and opened her eyes; she was lying on the carpeted floor in her familiar bedroom. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and thought about the thin brown-skinned girl, Kali, with her bloated tummy and her parents. They were all dead now; their brown bodies had decayed into the parched cracked earth over three hundred years ago. She thought about Bonga, the Bengali kitten, dangling from the hands of the yellow-eyed girl, its neck limp and broken.
Grace rubbed her eyes to erase the brutal images and memories floating in her mind. The dreams and visions that Grace had experienced from an early age were occurring more frequently now. The visions and dreams that had once dissolved as quickly as they had manifested now started to linger a little longer in her memory.
I need to eat, Grace thought to herself standing slowly, her legs still trembling.
She inspected herself carefully in the mirror from head to toe. She pushed the long flannel sleeve up to her elbow, examining the color of her skin. She was clean, white, she was back — she was Grace.
Chapter 9—Angela Oaks
Before food, Grace decided she had to deal with the incessant rain that had become her jailor. The constant rain had trapped her, and then aided her in a watery prison of self-pity.
She realized that this was not how her father would have wanted her to exist. Not at all. She had served her time with the demons in purgatory. She had to do something, had to chase the demons away, be free. There was a path out there somewhere that she was supposed to be on... she knew that. She also knew without any doubt that this was not it.
“You can do this, Grace, I know you can,” her father would have told her. “Come on, get up, try again.”
“Okay”, she said to the voice in her head with vigor. “I can do this!”
She ran barefoot outside into the pelting rain in her pink polka-dot flannelette pajamas. She would make a change. Her father would indeed be proud of her. She sprinted through the front door and out into the yard. Then she went down, hard, tripping and falling on her hands and knees, splattering mud up over her face.
She looked up into a grey sky that loitered persistently overhead.
“Enough, stop raining!” she demanded. Then passively, “please.”
A contemptuous flash of lightening, followed by the heavy rumblings of thunder, pulsated through the angry sky in response to her plea.
The rain continued falling, flowing over her. Plastering her long fair hair to her muddy face. Rain streaked down her face and dripped endlessly off her dirty chin.
She dragged herself to her feet, hung her head down and plodded through murky puddles back into the house, defeated.
She closed the front door behind her with an angry shove, and trudged down the hallway, leaving muddy footprints in her wake. Her grand plan to create ‘change’ in her life, an undeniable failure.
By the time Grace reached her bedroom, pinpricks of sunlight flickered, then punched their way through the ominous grey clouds, scattering them in all directions like bowling pins. Then, slowly, the rain began to subside until just heavy droplets of rain fell haphazardly to the ground from the tree branches outside.
Grace peeked out of her bedroom window and marveled at the brightest rainbow she had ever seen. The luminous colors were dazzling as they arched high across the blue skyline.
“Skies from heaven Dad,” Grace said out loud as she place her hand against the window.
That is how her father would have described the phenomena to her when he observed the skies looking like this.
Grace’s lips rolled up slowly into an ever so slight smile. Maybe dad sent the rainbow, to let me know he’s in heaven, she thought wistfully to herself.
A sudden movement closer to earth caught Grace’s attention. She noticed Angela, her new neighbor, walking expertly along the high timber fence that separated the two yards. The girl glided effortlessly along the top of the fence, like a model on a catwalk. Then she paused, pivoted, and jumped down to land elegantly on the ground like a gymnast exiting parallel bars. She landed perfectly on the ground beside a small white dog and began walking toward Grace’s backdoor. The dog followed obediently at his master’s feet.
Grace rummaged through her drawers until she found a pair of faded denim shorts with rhinestone studs along the pockets and a bright yellow t-shirt. She dressed quickly then scraped her wet hair off her face and secured it with a large sunflower clip. She snatched up her saturated pajamas from the end of the bed, wiped the mud off her face and hands, and then tossed the pajamas onto the floor.
Her stomach growled again, reminding her that she desperately wanted something to eat. She darted to the back door and propelled it opened. Angela and the white ball of fluff stood rigidly on the doorstep—waiting to be invited in.
Grace grabbed Angela’s arm and pulled her urgently inside.
“Are you hungry? Good, let’s eat,” she said to the bewildered Angela in a hurried voice, not waiting for an answer. She kept a tight grip on Angela’s pale arm and dragged her along the hallway into the kitchen behind her. She deposited Angela down in a seat at the kitchen table as one would a rag-doll. Hurrying over to the fridge door, she hauled it open and marveled at the delectable bounty filling the shelves. “Bonanza!” Grace shrilled, throwing her arms up into the air with jubilation.
Grace had never seen so much food in the refrigerator. The shelves were crammed with food from the neighbors. She gathered up an assortment of food and shoved loaded plates on the table in front of Angela.
“Dig in,” she said. “Are you starving too? Here, have something to eat,” she said pushing bowls of food toward Angela. The dog yapped, so Grace gave him some chicken, there was plenty to go around.
“No, I am not starving,” Angela replied promptly with wide eyes. “I eat food regularly that contains nutrients, vitamins, and minerals to prevent starvation and malnutrition.” She eyed the streaky mud on Grace’s face. “You have…” she said pointing a finger at Grace’s face. “Mud.”
Grace looked over at Angela; she was almost hidden from view by a large slice of watermelon sittin
g on the platter in front of her. “Yeah, it’s nothing, have something to eat.”
Angela picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and nibbled at it. Like Bambi, Grace thought to herself and smiled.
“What kind of dog is that?” Grace asked as she eyed the small dog sitting at Angela’s feet with his pink tongue dangling out.
“Champ is a West Highland Terrier, a native of Scotland and commonly known as a Westie,” Angela answered, and then continued. “The breed was used to seek and dig out foxes, badgers, rats and…”
“Okay,” Grace said interrupting her, “I got it; Champ is a West Highland Terrier, Westie for short.” Then, “I’m so hungry I reckon I could eat a rat...”
Angela raised her eyebrows. “That is hungry, but you shouldn’t. Rats carry numerous parasites and germs.”
Angela had big round innocent fawn-like eyes with long dark lashes. But instead of having brown eyes, her eyes were the most amazing shade of violet. She had thick silky hair that fell like a veil of black satin to her slender shoulders. Her oval face was ivory smooth with a suggestion of color on her cheeks. Rosy Cherub lips formed her spoken words perfectly, too perfectly. Words that you could imagine hearing from someone much older. Not from an eleven year old child.
“It’s just an expression,” Grace said. “I’m not really going to eat a rat.” But she couldn’t say the words with any kind of conviction. Had she eaten a rat before, she wondered? She shuddered with the ghastly thoughts that suddenly flashed through her mind.
Grace stood a good head height taller than Angela. One could easily be mistaken for thinking that Angela’s elf-like build indicated a vulnerable child. However, one would be very sadly mistaken about that.
They sat eating quietly for a few moments until Grace said, “do you want to watch a movie? I’ll put one on. I’ve got lots of DVDs.”
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