Still Watters

STILL WATTERS

PROLOGUE



Two years.

Some people like to mark anniversaries, even the morbid ones. He wasn’t one of them. Was the fact it was also his birthday today ironic or tragic? He could never get those two straight.

Kelly opened his eyes very slowly. Judging by the amount of light leaking through the blinds, it was fairly early. Out in the kitchen, the noises that had waked him began to get clearer. Jillian was making herself breakfast - at least to the extent that a six year old can. Corn pops probably.

Closing his eyes he could see her standing on the tiny wooden stepladder he made for her. She’d be bellied up to the counter across from the fridge – whose door was probably still propped open. She'd be using one of the large white bowls he'd moved down to the bottom shelf for her. "Daddy's bowls” she called them. She liked them because they were the ones that he used for his own cereal. They were grown up bowls, different from the tiny child-themed plastic ones she now so disliked.

She was a big girl now.

Picturing the trail of spilled milk from the fridge to the counter where she had just finished preparing her morning meal, he smiled to himself and grunted a little laugh. He listened as she popped her favourite DVD into the player and settled in at the counter for her morning ritual of breakfast and a movie. Her curly blonde hair would still be a pushed up on her right side like a permanent gust of wind was blowing in and her big green eyes would be focused with laser like intensity on the latest goings on of Barbie and her friends all while her little mouth struggled to keep up with the cereal being shoved in it.

Two years already? He asked himself. The fog of sleep deprivation that was all too familiar to him these days began to dissipate. Two years can be an eternity or roar by in an instant. For him they had done both.



  “I’m leaving", she said. “I can’t do this anymore. I don't want to wake up one morning and I'm fifty and we've got three kids and I'm still working at the pub with a giant ass and a bad back just wondering if...IF! I could have made it, if I could have made something of myself!!” 

  For a long time, he could re-live the sensation at will; the white panic that spread through his chest and made his ears ring like he’d been punched in the side of the head. He could remember it as clearly as the day it happened. He could still see her standing in front of him, holding the tacky plaid suitcase her step father had bought them for Christmas, while he sat on the end of the bed with his pants around his ankles. He was in the middle of getting dressed for his “surprise” birthday party. The one she had helped his mother plan and promised she would help keep secret but told him about anyway. She was standing at the bedroom door and she had on that stupid brown leather coat. The one she told him she bought with the money from her first modeling gig in high school. How thrilled she had been that finally someone appreciated how special she was, justification after a lifetime of waiting for it. He remembered all the times he cringed at how materialistic she was, but he didn't care because she was beautiful. She was shallow and mean and materialistic but he didn't care because she was beautiful and she was with him.

  Another form of justification. The duplicity of his own materialism wasn't lost on him, even then. He still wasn’t sure if he ever really loved her or if it was just the idea of her that he loved.







  He supposed that it didn’t really matter now that she was gone. Four years of marriage and one beautiful daughter later she moved to New York to be an actress. If she realized how cliché that sounded, she never let on. She wouldn't let something like that stand in her way. After all, she was going to make something of herself.                                                                   

  Most days since then had gone by more or less as they had all his life. Get up. Start moving. Keep moving. Stop. Sleep. Repeat. Most days there was also the cloudiness, a strange hum in the back of his mind that never really left. It was sort of like the feeling that you've forgotten something; did I leave the stove on? Did I pay the phone bill? Did I lock the door this morning? And then it would hit him.

Oh yeah....she's gone. And she's not coming back.



  Arching his back, he lifted his torso high off the bed to stretch his muscles back to life and then sat up as he rubbed his hands over his cheeks and up to his puffy swollen eyes. With a groan he swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  'You did make something of yourself Jill ', he thought. 'We both did'

  "Happy Birthday Daddy!” his bedroom door creaked open. "Are you up yet?"