by Max Lockwood
"We do it for as long as it takes to be free," Felicia said insistently. "Why start this at all if we intend to give up on it half way through? We don’t know how long it could take before they stop coming after us, but I do know that they won't stop if we continue to do nothing, as Clara says because we would be labeled easy targets. If we don’t fight back, we'll end up with nothing to live for anyway."
Clara let out a sigh of relief. The looks being aimed at Felicia were different than the ones that had been aimed at her. The plan was a shaky one at best, but it was still a plan and said by someone who looked like they had a good head on their shoulders. People would at least listen to Felicia.
Either way, no one had anything to say against what she said, since it was too true. Not to mention, if they lost all their food, they would all be subjected to slow starvation, for those who weren’t outright killed in the next attacks. It would be nothing but torture for them going forward if they didn’t decide to take the risks right there.
They were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Doing something was dangerous, but doing nothing would lead to them dying anyway.
So, they just had to come up with something to defeat the intruders.
Chapter Fifteen
The meeting dragged on for what Clara felt was longer than it really needed to.
Even with how much the world had changed, bureaucracy never died. Instead of picking out the finer points of the plan, people ended up arguing about a bunch of useless points, and it had made Clara so mad she'd almost shouted at them again.
But, she had held back. The last thing she wanted was to offend anyone and let the process get dragged along any further. It took a few voices of reason every time someone broke off on a different tangent, or else the effort would have taken even longer than it did in the end.
They did get to a resolution, though, at least. Not everyone was happy, but no one else had a better idea. At least, at the end, she managed to convince everyone that by not doing anything at all would simply kill them faster. They might have a chance by resisting. Slim, but they couldn’t just ignore it when the opportunity was there.
Clara arrived home and gathered her family again in the living room. Cooper sat beside her instead of picking a different seat, and she had to admit it made something in her chest ease up a bit. Whatever he'd thought of her before, he didn’t hate her now because she was changing. He would just have to get used to it, because she didn’t plan on going back to how she was before, not with what was at stake.
A lot was going to change again, drastically, she could feel it. Clara wondered how she could prepare her family for this, but she didn’t think there was a way. There wasn’t even much of a choice in this; change would come to them if they didn’t move first, and that was the one thing she wasn’t willing to let happen.
"What happened?" Viola asked once they were all settled and no one else was saying anything.
Tessa for once sat silently and was paying attention. Cooper moved a little closer, and Clara gave into temptation, leaning back into the touch.
"We had a meeting, a lot of people showed up. Well, there were a lot of arguments, but I think everyone is on board with the plan."
"And that is?" Tessa snapped impatiently.
Clara sighed. She had already worried her family enough, but she was going to have to continue doing it.
"I want to take a stand to protect the community," she told them seriously. "The whole town is going to chip in, and this will hopefully give us an edge. We're still waiting to hear back from the police about what they think of all of this, but it is their job to help us."
It was their duty to help, but considering the weight of the problem, they would be stretched thin. They hadn't hesitated before, even if they'd only sent a handful of police officers and some guns so that it was mostly members of the neighborhood fighting for their homes.
They would have to step up their game. With this new threat, people would be looking to the police, and if they didn’t do their jobs like they were supposed to do, everything was going to fall apart. There would be more rebellion in the town, and that was the last thing they needed when they were already getting attacks from outside.
"But is this okay, Clara?" Viola fretted, hands twisting and untwisting in her lap. "This isn’t going to be easy. You said these people had guns, didn’t you? So…"
Clara felt her heart break, and that was another thing that was happening too much already. She wanted to get up and go to their grandmother, give her some reassurances, but she didn’t really have any. Before she could make the decision, either way, Tessa moved to sit beside her, taking her hands and holding them tightly between hers.
It surprised her that Tessa would move to help Viola. Well, she didn’t hate their grandmother, but Tessa had been the one to tell her to give up on Viola, that she couldn’t survive in the new world. Clara had gotten angry, thinking her sister didn’t care for Viola anymore. Clearly, that wasn’t the case. Or maybe the medication was doing just what she'd hoped and clearing Tessa's head, finally.
"We don’t have much of a choice but to go along with this, Grandma. I'm sorry, I know it's going to be hard on you. But there's nothing more important to me than my family’s safety and I want you to be able to live a normal life."
She said “you” and not “us” because Clara didn’t think she could ever go back to living a normal life, not after everything that had happened. Besides, could she really call the life she'd been living normal when it was all for her family? This was just more dangerous and life-threatening, but she'd been making sacrifices for her family from the beginning.
Viola ducked her head down, and a fine tremble ran through her body. Clara was about to jump out of her seat and over to theirs when Viola suddenly looked up. Her eyes were glossy with tears, though none of them fell, and her hands practically strangled Tessa's.
"I'm so proud of you, Clara," she whispered, her voice hoarse like she was trying not to cry. "I've watched you grow so much these past few weeks, into an amazing young woman, and I couldn’t be prouder. You always try to do the right thing by everyone involved, don’t you?"
The words were almost scolding, and Clara could imagine what she wasn’t saying. That she did all that without giving a second thought to herself. Except she had. She'd dreamed of escaping plenty of times, the position life had left her in as caretaker of her family. But she could never do that. Losing her parents had been bad enough, losing the little family she had left would break her faster than anything else.
That wasn’t the kind of thinking that merited this kind of praise. She'd always thought, that if they knew her darkest thoughts that came out of nowhere from time to time, things would have been different. Viola wouldn’t be this nice to her, Tessa would be even worse than usual. Just thinking what they would have thought of her used to scare her so badly that she pushed her family away sometimes and chose to always be out in order to escape from them, and that had, in turn, made her feel guilty.
Still, it didn’t lessen her grandmother's praise, and she felt a smile grow on her face, mirroring Viola's. If Viola was proud, she imagined their own parents would have been, too, had they been there with them. She just loved knowing she was doing her job of looking after her family.
Everything she had gone through, all the dreams she'd given up and the shitty days when she couldn’t deal with her students, made this moment worth it. To have her family with her, safe and sound, or as much as they could be, and happy even. It took away all the doubts she used to have about why she didn’t just give up when things got too tough. Besides having Cooper there to help her, knowing what she did was all for her family, had made it all worth it.
Some things hadn't changed much, though. Her sister, for example, had only started opening up. She was acting a little different, but somehow, Clara had missed a lot in her sister. Well, it was easy to do. She didn’t take that much time to hang around with the family, and neither did Tessa, preferrin
g to be locked up in her room most of the time. She hadn't noticed before, but Tessa just got more open and honest with how she felt.
Clara didn’t see the jealousy in Tessa's face before she snapped. One second, she was just seated next to Viola, holding her hand, then in the next, she was standing, fists clenched at her sides, her body shaking. But when she did look at her sister, her emotions were easy enough to read on her face. Clara felt something uncomfortable tighten her chest before she even opened her mouth.
"What the hell is all this!?" she breathed, her whole body starting to tremble as she leveled a glare on Clara. "No, seriously, what the hell!? You're putting all of us in danger, going out to fight mad people with weapons for the second time and Grandmother just… why am I always second best?"
Her voice had been growing steadily, but as she asked her question, her voice was back to being quiet again. Viola was looking up at her in shock, her hands still held in midair. Clara wanted to curse Tessa for not just taking this up with her, for including Viola in this.
"Tessa, don’t say that."
"No!" her shout startled everyone, even herself, as she jumped back a step, fists unclenching and her body stopped trembling. "It's always like this. Just…why…?”
Tessa looked lost, like she wanted to cry. Clara had her hand held out like she was going to reach for her over the coffee table that separated them, and she hadn't realized she'd brought her hand up at all. She dropped it in her lap, wondering how she could help her sister this time. She felt as if she spoke up, she would only make things worse in that moment because the one Tessa was angry at was her. But she shouldn't have been taking it out on Viola, anyway.
Clara glanced at the two of them, knowing how quickly this could escalate. It already had, but it could get so much worse. Her mind was working fast, trying to think up the safest way to diffuse the situation as quickly and painlessly as possible.
"That's not the case," Viola insisted before Clara could come up with something to say. Tessa scoffed, and Viola became a little more frantic. "Honey, please listen to me! I can see that you're trying as hard as your sister is. I don’t get to tell you as I do your sister, but I don’t always see the opportunity, and you're already so private as it is. If I've ever made you feel unappreciated, forgive me, Tessa, but I just wanted to congratulate my granddaughter. I really do care for you both, equally."
Tessa didn’t take Viola defending Clara very well. Clara could have told her grandmother that it was a bad idea with Tessa the way she was, but Viola only had the best of intentions.
Her sister should have been a little more understanding. They had been thrust on their grandmother because they didn’t have anyone else that could take them in. Viola had only had their mom, and she'd lost her husband along the way while growing distant with her own daughter to the point where all they did was fight. Then that daughter had died, and there was the two of them.
Tessa was unstable before they got her out of the hospital, and Clara had more or less closed in on herself. Yet their aging grandmother had moved in with them to look after them. Because of Viola, Tessa was saved the humiliation of being sent off to a facility for the mentally challenged. Clara had been saved from ending up in the foster system, since she had been underage at the time, and she would have been removed from her home. It wouldn’t have helped her with her grief at all if she'd even had to move away from home and her remaining family.
They both appreciated what Viola had done for them. Even though she wouldn’t come out and say it, she was confident that Tessa felt the same gratitude that she did, because it was owed to Viola. And yet, here she was, acting completely unreasonable over something Clara thought so ridiculous. If Tessa was worried about being second best, then all she had to do was work harder. But she never did. Yet somehow, this was Clara's fault, when she and Viola didn’t even care all that much about it.
But it was too late to get Tessa to stop. The lost look was suddenly gone from her face as her eyes narrowed on their grandmother. Viola flinched, and Clara felt angry on her grandmother's behalf.
"Don’t lie to me, Viola. Don’t lie!"
Their grandmother gasped, as did Clara. They never called her that, at least not to her face. It didn’t all have to do with respect for the older woman, more like affection, that they always called her grandmother, even though they had taken to referring to her by name at some point Clara couldn’t remember. But for Tessa to just come out and say her name like that…
It wasn’t like she was disrespecting their grandmother, more like she was admitting she no longer felt any affection for the older woman. Tessa must have been really mad because Clara didn’t think she would have gone that far otherwise.
Clara could see the stricken look on Viola's face, and she knew this was taking a heavy toll on her. She wanted to open her mouth and tell Tessa off, but no words came. Instead, she just sat and watched it all happen, feeling helpless to do anything about the situation unfolding. She could guess where it would all end. While Clara didn’t go starting fights with Viola, she and Tessa had been in enough spats that she knew how to recognize that Tessa was distancing herself from them because of her envy and misplaced jealousy.
"You… you always say that, but it's a lie! Exactly how do you care about us equally, huh? It's obvious how you always favor Clara, even back when Mom and Dad were still alive!"
Viola made a distressed sound, muffled by the hand she pressed to her mouth. Clara clenched her hands at her sides and glared at Tessa for even bringing that up. Clara couldn’t remember it, and she couldn’t help thinking this was just another one of her sister's delusions running rampant.
Bringing up their parents' deaths affected Viola in a different way than it did the two of them, and Tessa shouldn’t have spoken about it. Clara knew Viola was still guilty about a lot of things regarding the incident, and the fact that she'd had a major argument with their mother prior to the planning of the trip. No one could have predicted what happened, but Viola blamed herself for letting her daughter die. Taking care of her granddaughters was her way of trying to atone for not being a good enough mother. Tessa doing this would just make her think she'd failed in even that, and it would only make her feel worse.
She couldn’t just sit quietly anymore, seeing tears glistening in Viola's eyes. She shot up and leveled a glare on her sister.
"Tessa, that's enough. How can you talk to—"
"I don’t need you interfering here, Clara! This is between me and Viola."
Grandmother made a wounded sound as Tessa used her name again, and Clara growled.
"Don’t you dare tell me that as if I'm not a part of this family! The problem you have is with me, isn’t it? There's no reason for you to take it out on Grandmother. She hadn't done anything wrong."
Tessa looked at her blankly for a second, and then she was laughing. It was enough to startle Clara into stillness, but it wasn’t exactly a nice laugh. It sounded more than just a little broken and just hearing it hurt.
"Of course, you would say that, Clara," she muttered, sarcastic. "Perfect Clara, who can never do wrong. So, pure, so selfless, and too good for this world. The better sister, the sane one. The hard worker. I bet you're proud of yourself."
Tessa laughed some more, only it sounded like mad cackling to Clara. She could feel her face was flushed in her anger. Her body trembled a little, and she had her fists clenched at her sides.
That wasn’t fair. She and Tessa had already had this talk, and it wasn’t like her sister saw at all. Clara was self-centered, but then so was her sister, because Tessa had failed to notice her misery for all these years. If anything, she had added to it, sometimes deliberately when she just wanted to be difficult.
Clara would have rather had her sister back, but Tessa had done her best to push both her and their grandmother away. Her sister had problems, but the two of them had had problems of their own, as well, and Tessa never bothered with it then, so it was unfair of her to bring all this up now.
She wasn’t done speaking yet, though, turning back to Viola. "You can say that all you want, but your actions tell a different story, and I finally see it now. I know you're just too soft-hearted to ever say it to my face, but you don’t have to. I'll never be good enough, but whatever. I'm not good enough."
With her parting shot, she gave them all a last glare and stormed upstairs.
Viola was distraught, following Tessa, probably to continue with the argument, but Clara did stand up that time. She reached her grandmother before she could make her way to the stairs. Clara could handle arguing with Tessa, but she didn’t think it would be okay if they let Viola do it. Her mental health was nowhere near stable enough to take something like that well. But then her heartbroken face was turned to Clara's, and she winced.
"It's okay, Grandma, but it will be impossible to speak to her right now. She isn’t going to take anyone invading her privacy very well, either. Maybe you should just let her cool down for now?"
There was no need to let Viola and Tessa meet again so soon when Tessa was still so quick to be on the defensive. It would only make things worse than they already were if Clara let them talk when what her sister was more interested in was a confrontation. It would be better for everyone if she was left alone to get her head on straight first.
"But I really need to talk to her and clear this up," Viola fretted. "I don’t want to take too long. I can't have her thinking I don’t appreciate her as my granddaughter. You are both my daughter's children, and I do love you both equally."
"It's all right," she murmured, soothing the older woman, getting her to sit back down and rubbing her shoulders in comfort. "Right now, wouldn’t be the best time to try to talk to her, anyway. She's too mad to think rationally. And it's not like you didn’t show us that you care, I think Tessa just needs more attention to believe it."
Viola nodded distractedly, glancing toward the stairs, before sighing and leaning back into the couch, looking like she'd aged a decade in that short moment.
