Agony of Ire

She didn’t belong here. They wouldn’t want her here. Certainly they’d blame her for this. He died from a broken heart she caused. That’s what they’d say. She knew it. Why couldn’t she have realized this before taking the long drive to get here? Her hand slipped away from the door and she leaned back against the rusting rail.

Elle nibbled at her fingernails, nubs that they were. Her nerves held her in place. She hadn’t been here since she was a girl and it still felt like home somehow. A low-lying mist surrounded her as bumps lined her arm. She clutched the wrought iron railing as ancient black paint flaked and crusted free in her grasp. An elderly couple wandered up to the steps, the woman’s shaking hands reached for the rail as her unsteady feet searched the steps. Her husband patiently guided her, but he seemed even more frail. Elle climbed down to meet them and helped the woman to the landing.

“Thank you, dear,” the woman said in a weary voice. “Did you know Malcolm?”

Elle’s feeble smile faded quickly. “Yeah, I think you could say that.”

The woman studied her a moment longer, a hint of recognition passed across her face and then it was gone. Her husband opened the door and the two slipped quietly inside the white house that wore its own dark coat for the occasion, from years of neglect, though. Elle’s heart knocked in her chest as her nicotine-craved blood surged through her body.

This was a mistake. No one expected her. It didn’t matter what lured her back here. She had been gone for more than fifteen years, without a word to anyone. Not to her brother, or her sister. Definitely not to that woman she had to call a stepmother. And, of course, not to her father who, in his last act of compassion, managed to bring them all back together once more. Something he had failed to do in life.

Elle –born Myra-Ellen- turned from the steps and shuffled away from the house. Cars rolled into the overburdened driveway and spilled onto the wet brown grass, their headlights like cataracts in the fog. Elle searched the pockets of her rain slicker, grasped, and then withdrew a small box. She slipped a cigarette between her lips and lit it up in an amber glow. She drew in a long, deep breath and choked back a cough, just as she’d done for the past few months. Her nerves began to settle. She held the cigarette between her fingers and studied it like a curious creature. Her father would have hated this habit of hers if he had known. She missed out on all that nagging.

Elle tramped through the tall grasses and weeds of the fields that had once been her father’s farm. Prickers, grape vines, sumacs, and youthful yet demanding oaks now jockeyed for dominance where corn and wheat once reigned. The memories tiptoed around to the back of her mind and she closed her eyes tight against them. She knew they’d be coming, though. They always did.



***************



Her father is perched high upon his brand new green John Deere tractor, riding at a grueling pace, inching through cornrows just before harvest. Elle darts between the stalks towering over her eight-year-old body, playing a modified version of hide-and-seek. She is laughing, as is her father who cranes his head from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of her sprinting behind him. “Mind the machine, Elle,” he says in his harsh, throaty voice.

“I will, daddy,” she calls back from the cover of green and yellow.

“Wouldn’t want nuthin happ’nin to you shooga, cuz ya know wah?”

Elle steps out of the corn and the tractor stops. “Why, daddy?”

He smiles down at her, the crown of the sun swallowing his hat like a halo. “Cuz Ah love you, shooga.”



***************



The first tears tripped down her face and she swatted at them, laughing uneasily at the force of emotions bearing down on her. She sucked another long drag of her cigarette, hypnotized by the red orb twinkling in front of her nose. The fog was thickening. She peered over her shoulder at the house and it looked like little more than a sketch. Shaded outlines and shadowy features blurred among the deepening cloud. She needed to calm herself and just march inside once and for all, or slip away.

She wore the cigarette down to the filter and stomped the butt out in the overgrown brush. When she looked up again, a silhouette was strolling in her direction. Her nerves rattled again, threatening to unravel and she strained her eyes to make out the individual. It was a man, tall and broad shouldered. With each step he took, she could discern more characteristics, but not enough to recognize.

He lit up his own stick and exhaled with exaggeration. It looked as though he noticed her standing there. Elle licked her dry lips as she continued to squint at him. Finally he spoke. “Nothin’ more depressin’ than a damn funeral.”

It couldn’t be. ‘No, not like this,’ Elle thought. Her head shook as though struck by palsy. She wasn’t ready for this. Not yet. Elle struggled with words tripping over themselves in her mind. Words she had prepared to say and words formed in reaction. Words that made no sense. Even words she hadn’t used in almost fifteen years, since high school. Since she ran away. Her mouth opened and she choked on the whole lot trying to escape at once.

“Who’s that anyway?” the man said in his familiar drawl. He leaned forward. Elle could tell he was squinting into the haze too. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be botherin’ you like this.”

“Not bothering me,” Elle managed. She watched his body shift and his head tip to the side. His stare burned through the brume and her mind went into flight mode. This was a mistake. She couldn’t shake the notion. She wasn’t ready for this. Before she could move, the man stepped closer.

“I don’t believe it. That you, Elle?”

Her throat was so dry it stung to swallow. She gobbled air, then managed to spit out, “Yeah.” She swallowed again. “Yeah, Chuck, it’s me.”

“I don’t believe this. How ... you ... wah ...” His stammering helped her to relax, if only a bit. “When’d you get here?” His face emerged from cover and she looked up at him. It was her brother alright. He looked so much the same as she remembered, aside from his shoulder length hair that was left somewhere in the past. A king’s crown was all he had left on top. Still, he looked good.

“I just got here,” she said, surprised by the smile that clipped her cheeks. “Few minutes ago. Thought I’d gather myself before coming inside, you know?”

Chuck’s bewilderment trimmed a smile back a few times as he stared at her. Each moment of uncertainty and discomfort he showed made her more at ease. Perhaps she wouldn’t be alone in this after all. “I know,” he said. A drawn out pause, then, “I can ‘magine.” His head shook in a slow, droll motion. “It’s like a dream ... you here, in this weather,” his arm fanned in an arc between them, cutting the cloud in two. “How you been, Elle? How you been?” He leaned forward with his arms open wide. Elle gingerly stepped into his embrace.

“I’ve been ...” She didn’t know what to say. How was she? It’d been fifteen years. Lives had come and gone. Her life had collapsed and been rebuilt more times than she cared to count.

“I – I’ve been ... I’m still here,” she said with an awkward smile and shrug. She decided another smoke wasn’t such a bad idea. Chuck offered his dwindling stick to help light hers. “Thanks,” she said with the cigarette pinched between her lips.

“It’s been a long time.” Chuck stamped out his butt and his hands found comfort in his pockets. “Got a husband? Kids? What’s been goin’ on?”

“Been married, and divorced. Twice. Got a kid. A son who’s takin’ after his mother a little too much these days, I’m afraid.” Elle couldn’t decide what to include. Guilt snapped between her mind’s molars. An acid taste. All these years she had stolen from her brother and sister. They bore no fault in any of the animosity or acrimony. They were innocent victims of the drive-by assaults and sulking abandonment. And here she was, tiptoeing back through the minefields she had laid out behind her.

“A kid? Really?” Chuck rubbed his bald scalp like a ghost limb. “That’s great, Elle. I’m happy for ya.” He shifted his weight and wrapped his arms about him. “How old?”

“Twelve. Going on twenty.” The smile was genuine. He was her pride and joy. An ambitious and hyper kid who gave her fits –along with an occasional migraine- but never failed to amaze her with his generosity and strength of character. Perhaps that’s why she came here. He must have rubbed off on her somehow.

“Yeah, I know what that’s like. My Sherry-Sue’s about to teenage next month. They sure are a handful.”

“How many you got?”

“Two. William’s six. A little slow, but we’re waitin’ on him pretty good. Naace boy, just ... slow.”

A second figure slipped into view. Daylight had begun to drift away but even in the darkening haze, Elle knew who it was. “Who you talking to, Chuck?” The woman said.

His head craned over his shoulder to look at the new edition to the impromptu family reunion. “Karen, you’re not gonna believe this.”

Elle took that as her cue and nervously chimed in. She said hello to her only sister.

“Elle?” Karen gasped as something thunked to the ground. A bottle, a drink ... Elle couldn’t tell. “Oh, my God.”

Chuck gathered his arms around her before she keeled over. Her hands clasped over her gaping mouth, eyes wide. Shock frozen on her features. Karen carried a bit more weight than when Elle last saw her, looking too much like their mother. Their real mother.

“Yea, kind of what I said,” Chuck said. “She’s out here smokin’ and I couldn’t believe it. Recognized that voice straight away.”

“Elle, I mean, how are you?” Karen’s color had faded and she blended into the fog, like she would be the one to disappear now for fifteen years.

Elle hesitated, not sure she could remember what she’d just told Chuck. Her thoughts were drifting on rough seas, one-by-one succumbing to the angry waters.

Chuck stepped in, “Elle’s been married and divorced. Got a boy. Twelve, right?”

Elle nodded.

“She looks good, doesn’t she?”

“Great,” Karen said. “We got a nephew?”

Elle’s head continued to bob. “Yeah. Yeah, you do. He’s a great kid, too. You’d like him.”

“Where is he?”

“With a friend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Malcolm.”

Karen looked up at Chuck as they shared a silent moment. Elle didn’t need a map to know what they were thinking. And it was no accident that she had named her son after their father.

“Did dad know?” Karen asked.

“I, ... yeah, I think so.”

“You think?” Chuck said, an edge gleaning on his words.

“I mean, I never really talked to him, but, I wrote him once. About ten years ago. Told him about his grandson. I just don’t know for sure he ever got it.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Elle fidgeted on her feet. The cigarette snapped between her fingers. She tossed it away with a shaking hand. She took an uncomfortable step back. “You know, cause of ... her.” She jutted her chin toward the house.

Karen looked back over her shoulder at the house. “Rachel? What does she have to do with that?”

Elle felt herself sliding. Sliding down a path littered with bitterness and broken shards of deceit. She wanted to avoid this. She had mapped out her path, steering clear of this place and regardless of the careful planning, here she was, drawn down into it. Like quicksand. “Everything.”

“What’re you talkin’ about?” Chuck said.

Elle’s eyes danced between the two, feeling like an unwitting solo act in a tag-team wrestling match. “She ... I don’t know, I’m not sure she’d give him anything from me.”

Chuck and Karen studied each other again, shaking heads and raising eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t she?” Karen asked.

“Why wouldn’t? What do you mean why wouldn’t she? She kept him ... she tore this family apart.”

“How?”

Elle’s stomach turned. A punch in the gut of a question. “How? What do you mean how?” Anger surfaced. Her words cut across her tongue even as she struggled to remain composed. “She broke our family apart.”

“Right, I heard you. But how? Chuck and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Elle raised her hand, shook her head, and started to walk away. Chuck stepped up and grasped her elbow. “Elle, we don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. We don’t know wah you left.” He sounded so much like her father. Karen and her took after their mother. “We don’t know wah you never called. But we don’t wanna lose you again.”

“Talk to us, Elle,” Karen said. “Please.”

Elle forced out three deep breaths, felt a tear crowd along her eyelid and trip down her face. She couldn’t believe they didn’t have a clue. Wasn’t it obvious? “You mean you really don’t know?”

They shook their heads in unison.

“My God, that woman is the reason mom died.”

They stared at her, mute.

Elle’s arms worked into the routine, pantomiming through the fog, assisting in driving her words home. “Mom killed herself because that woman, Rachel, seduced dad!”

Chuck’s breath escaped him in a blast. “Is that what you been believin’? All these years?”

Elle stared at him.

“That’s not wah ma died.”

“No, it isn’t,” Karen said. “And I can’t believe you’ve been thinking that all this time.”

“I don’t understand.” Elle was swimming with her thoughts, getting slammed by giant wave after wave below the surface. She couldn’t find air.

“Elle,” Karen said, “we had no idea why you left, why you ran away. I mean, you were our little sister. Quiet Elle who barely said boo to anyone. Dad knew, but wouldn’t tell us. He always said, ‘She’s gotta figure it out herself. Let her be. She’ll come back when she’s ready.’ I mean,” Karen looked at Chuck, “if we had known ...”

“We would have found you. We would have told you,” Chuck finished.

“But he cheated on mom,” Elle said. She felt all those years being ripped away from her and her heart was taking the brunt of it.

“Technically, yes,” Karen said. “But mom was already gone. She’d been gone a long time by then. Rachel saved dad. Saved his mind, and his spirit.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“Mom was sick for a long time, Elle. It wasn’t sudden. I mean, dad couldn’t afford a doctor for her, but he did the best he could. He stuck by her. He took care of us when she wouldn’t.”

“But why don’t I remember that?”

“Prob’ly cause dad protected you,” Chuck said. “I guess you didn’t get to see what we saw.”

“Mom could be sweet one minute,” Karen said, “then bam! Cruel the next. We were, I guess,” she looked at Chuck, “scared of her. For a while.”

“What was wrong with her? Why didn’t I see it?”

“Manic depression, schizophrenia, the doctors have told us since. We don’t know for sure since she never made it to a shrink. But like Chuck said, dad guarded you more than anything.”

“Why me?”

“Cause you were the youngest. You were his baby, sweet Elle. We’d already seen the worst of mom by then. So had you, but dad thought you were too young for it to affect you. He just wanted you to be safe. To have a normal childhood. Oh, God, Elle, I wish we knew.”

“So Rachel never ...”

Chuck shook his head. “No. Ma was locked in her room by then. She didn’t wanna come out. Dad couldn’t take it.”

“I think,” Karen said, “we think, dad might have died with mom if it hadn’t been for Rachel. He was so lost.”

“So were we.”

“She was the right woman at the right time.”

Elle wandered away, deeper into the vast fields. Twenty years of anger. Twenty years of bitterness. Twenty years of silence. And for what? A teenage girl’s misplaced aggression? What had she done? How was she to know? She was only twelve when the ambulance took her mother away for the last time. Twelve! For five more years she held that anger and let it fester, testing Rachel at every turn, lashing out whenever she could. Why didn’t someone tell her? Why couldn’t she have told them about her anger? Her feelings?

The reality of having missed out on all those years with her father sank in. Pinch weights on her fishing line of life. Too much weight dragging the bait to the sea’s floor. Nothing to catch down there except a few bottom-feeders. She looked back at her older brother and sister and wondered if they shared the blame for this pain. Karen huddled in the mass of Chuck’s body. They watched her. Their eyes pierced the graying cloud as the sun dipped farther below the horizon.

The moment overcame her and she collapsed to her knees. One popped as it smacked the damp ground. She barely noticed. Instead, she cried. “Oh my God,” she wept into shaking hands. “Oh my God.” Her sobs bore into her hands and filled her ears. This was what she was afraid of, all those years.

She didn’t hear a third person walk up behind them. She didn’t hear the words they exchanged. She didn’t even hear the feather-light footsteps approach her. What she did hear was a soft voice she barely recognized. “Elle?” the woman said.

She looked up from her tear-drenched hands and through a haze in her eyes she saw what she ran from all those years ago. A woman she had blamed for so much that went wrong in her life. A woman she hardly knew. A woman she once -as a bitter and rebellious teenager- vowed to destroy. And as much as she wanted to hide in those feelings, as much as she wanted to lash out with words she had practiced for almost twenty years, just to feel secure instead of this vulnerable, self-loathing sensation squeezing her, she couldn’t.

She had been wrong. It was what she worried about for so many years. For so long she wanted to come back, to mend the wounds or the bridge or whatever damned analogy people liked to place on what had happened, but she couldn’t let go of the anger. It had kept her feeling safe, feeling justified. It had kept her sane.

Elle dropped back and landed hard on the ground. She cried hard, for how long she wouldn’t remember. Her family stayed with her. They waited patiently. They didn’t leave. They wouldn’t leave.

That was the deepest cut of all.