Burden of the Soul

4.

Cleaning my room was slow going, mostly because it was boring and I kept being drawn out of my room by the sound of Mom and Grace laughing. I heard it again and headed down the hall to find out what was going on, but Grace was in the foyer grabbing her bag.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” she said. “You’re mom has seem to forgotten punch for the adults. So I’ve put myself in charge of that.”

She gave a salute and stamped her feet together as punctuation.

“Grace, get the bigger bag of ice,” Mom said from the kitchen. “We’ll probably run out.”

Aunt Grace leaned in closely to me with her head tilted. “She thinks I’m just getting ice.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Clara?” Mom heard me in the foyer, and her voice meant business.

“I’m doing it!” My head rolled back and Grace gave and an elbow poke in my side before heading out the door.

A full and thorough cleaning of my room just wasn’t possible in the time restraint. When we got back I had set about doing the homework that absolutely needed to get done before tomorrow, saving everything that could wait another day for the weekend.

Across my freshly made bed I had laid out an outfit for the evening. Nothing fancy, but a step above what I had worn to school. I put on a pair of jeans, the nicest pair I owned, then slipped on the powder blue blouse. There was a white, satin ribbon hanging at its sides, and I struggled to get it through all of the thread loops that surrounded my waist and eventually just gave up on it.

After slipping on a pair of black ballet flats, I was good to go.

I turned the music off and closed my laptop—a sign of it being “off limits” to anyone who might hang out in my room later. The smells of dinner cooking and Mom’s voice struggling with something carried down the hall to my room, and I went off to see what she was up to.

I took to the living room at a jog, and launched off the step in the foyer. She was standing on one of the stools from the kitchen hanging purple and white streamers over the living room’s archway. She had already blown up a bunch of white balloons, some for hanging like the one in her hand and some to scatter over the floor.

“Mom, you have got to be joking.”

“What?”

“I’m too old for this kind of stuff.”

“Clara, no one is ever too old for streamers.”

“Mom, seriously…”

“I know you’re getting older, Clara, but please don’t take my fun just yet.”

She smoothed the clear tape over the streamers and then looked down at me before she burst out laughing.

“Had a little trouble with the sash, Clara?” The white balloon floated in midair for a moment until she raised her hand above it and smacked it down, sending it careening down to my forehead and rebounding back up and then slowly to the floor. “You’re too old for streamers and balloons the day you can tie a sash correctly.”

“It’s embarrassing, Mom.”

“Yes, it is.”

I had been referring to the decorations, but the path her eyes took to my waist made her point clear.

The white ribbon was clumped up and twisted in some areas, and the bow seemed flimsy and lopsided at best. It appeared I would need her help with that part.

As she stepped down from the stool there was a clear yet small rumble and her hand braced against the arch. I felt a shiver run up my legs making my knees stiffen trying to catch my balance. The shaking was slight but noticeable, as if the apartment building was hungry and its stomach growled. It lasted no more than a few seconds. She froze with her foot on the middle rung.

My eyes had locked on her, but saw the white balloons scatter through the room off to the side, jostling and swaying. I had heard of earthquakes mostly from TV when Dad went through his Discovery channel phase, but had never felt one before.

“Holy crap, what was that?”

“I have no idea, sweetheart.” She stood frozen with one foot on the stepping stool and the other on the floor, her eyes were narrow looking through the apartment. “Maybe one of the neighbors dropped something heavy?”

The apartment above us had been empty for months after Ms. Ostreka, who had always been very quiet, passed away. Mom climbed off the stool and shot straight through the living room and foyer to the front door opening it and leaning outside into the hallway. She looked left, and then right.

With a crinkled look of confusion pushing her eyebrows together, she came back in, closed and locked the door. “That was odd. Here, I better fix that sash for…” We both froze as the floor shook again, this time longer and louder.

The building wasn’t hungry… it was angry.

The balloons seemed to twitch in place for a moment and Mom’s heavy curtains swayed back and forth. I felt my eyes go wide, feeling the vibrations coming up through my feet and spreading back to my knees. I felt my body sway back and forth without a center of gravity to keep me rooted. My stomach became heavy trying to compensate as an anchor, but the sensation made me feel sick.

But then it stopped.

“Mom, what’s happening?” I was terrified now, holding one end of my white ribbon intertwined through my clenched fists. Burning at the back of my eyes gave way to a few tears.

“Get under the archway. It’s going to be fine.” The anxiety in her voice made me doubt she believed what she said.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was so frightened. I took a few steps back until my outstretched arm connected with the wall and watched her as she tried to cover her own concern with a look of ease. As if this was an everyday occurrence, completely ordinary. An occurrence I just happened to miss until now.

Now it roared. Shook in spurts. Struggle echoed. Air swelled and rushed in a stream around the room to a single point. A whirlpool gathering strength. I fell backwards, my knees buckling underneath me, my body caught by the single stair into the kitchen.

Her arms were reached out toward me as she cut through the angry space, light from the bay windows bouncing off of the key hanging from her wrist. Hanging, without moving except for a gentle pendulum sway, unaffected by the chaos. The sounds were coming from the kitchen and family room area, a cracking of wood, but unlike the soft snap of a branch, this sound ruptured through the apartment.

There was a blur to everything as the entire apartment shook violently. Mom was at my side then, her arms wrapped around me and mine wrapped around her waist. I could smell the lilac and vanilla from her perfume she dabbed under her ears each morning. I leaned into her shoulder, the tears gathering behind my eyes frozen in fear.

“Clara, I will not let anything happen to you.” Her voice was severe and her eyes were charged with the intensity of her conviction. She kept repeating the words into my ear. “Nothing will happen to you. Nothing can happen to you.”

Then silence. The room froze and became eerily still. The balloons returned to a gentle glide across the hardwood floor until finding a resting spot. The sound of wood giving way under force was gone. Even the noise of cars honking and busses braking from 18 stories below had disappeared. Total silence surrounded us like it was a presence in the room.

I could even feel the rise and fall of her chest against my cheek, her warm breath across my ear and down my neck, but could not hear the sound of her breathing or my own.

Mom pulled her arms away from me slowly as her legs lifted her up and into the kitchen; her hands still tense and claw like at her sides. I allowed my hands to find their way up the arch pulling my body with them. Mercury ran through my veins and thumped heavily against my temples and through every joint making it impossible to gather enough strength in my legs to stand up straight.

My hand grasped at the wall’s edge, grabbing and tearing a purple streamer by accident. A small tear mumbled through the kitchen, like a whisper compared to the storm of blasts, cracks and clamors that had torn through the apartment less than a moment ago. It made Mom turn over her shoulder with a jolt, startled.

Then the noise shot out. Sprang back to life. Resurrected. CRACK. Mom screamed. Echoing. Metal on metal. Snapping wood. CRACK. Split in the marble. Bigger. Stretching over the side. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

I saw it. A beam of light from the split in the counter slicing the air to the ceiling.

A tear rolled over my eyelid, but I couldn’t find my voice. Mom took a step closer to the counter, me with my hand still holding the wall to support myself.

Then another… CRACK. More light. Sliver of white. Then more. And more. It was quickly turning into a river running to my mother’s body just a foot away from the counter. CRACK. Its pace was quickening, and with each crack more of the counter was pulled away into the light. It didn’t crumble. It didn’t fall. I saw pieces of our counter snap downward in a staccato rhythm as if pulled with intention.

The light was more than a river now. With each piece of granite or wood that snapped down, another ray of light would shoot up joining the others, melting into them and forming a large wall of golden white that was closing in on my mother and I.

Once more the cracking stopped and the wall of light stood silent, swaying. Mom stared straight into it before turning to me over her shoulder slowly.

There was fear in her eyes, along with tears gathering. A single tear dropped over the edge and down her cheek in a death fall to the floor below. Her lips moved slowly pushing each syllable out with a slow and steady forcefulness that sent heat coursing through my limbs.

“Clara,” she said with intensity. “You need to run.”

My tongue reached back and found my voice cowering in the back corners of my throat. Tears burned tracks down my cheeks and across my quivering chin, now released from my terror.

The counter collapsed rapidly piece after piece creating a rhythm that pounded against the walls, aching to get out into the open.

The towering wave of light chased Mom as she turned and launched forward now screaming for me to run, but my arms wouldn’t budge except to cling tighter to the wall. With her left hand, she grabbed the shoulder of my blouse and hurled me off the step and into the living room, yelling for me to run, to hide. I slid, crashing my knees into the floor and clawing with my hands to pull myself forward and back onto my feet. They refused. I could not get my feet back under me. While my feet pumped grasping for grip, my arms lurched forward, the sweat of my palms sticking to the wood panels and giving me enough hold to pull against with the little strength my petrified muscles had.

I twisted my hip back and saw out of the corner of my eye the dark figure of my mother backlit by only light… light that was swallowing our entire home. Light that was chasing her and gaining. The chain on her wrist swung lower and deeper as she pried it from her arm. When it was free she threw it out over my head. I heard the cling of metal on metal like the single stroke of an orchestra’s triangle somehow rise above the cracking and clacking of wood snapping and steel breaking, being twisted to its limits.

Then the last screams of my mother, pleading with me to run as she was swallowed whole by the brightness.

The voice disappeared as her dark figure melted away into the light. I braced myself against the foyer landing, tears stinging my face and neck, yelling for her. Light was going to engulf me. I was going to join her. The separation was temporary. My shoulders tightened. My head turned and my eyes clenched. I prepared myself for pain, for burning…

But neither came.

Once again there was silence and the whirling air paused in mid-flight. I relaxed one eye. The wall of light had stopped. It was a frozen mass, an illuminated glacier. It was leaning toward me, inches from my face. The surface melted and throbbed with glints of pearlescent waves pouring every which way. This monster, this beast which I cowered from seemed to be moving with me for a moment, taking me in with every tilt of my chin, each cower of my shoulder. It poured around me gently on all sides until my lips parted and a tiny, single word creaked out from the back of my throat.

“Mom?”

The creature stopped and retreated with great force and agility, sucking itself back through the floor which restored itself, board by board, as it passed through to the other side. Snap…Snap…Snap. Each piece that had broken away, pulled under, popped back into place in a reverse domino effect, chasing the mass of light back into the kitchen and pushing it back down into what had started as a river, then back into a beam, then a glow, and with one last snap, the island counter was restored. It was whole.

Cracks from the kitchen island and the floor were gone as if nothing had ever happened, leaving the rooms just as they had been when I had first jogged across the floor and was greeted by the embarrassment of streamers and balloons a few minutes before. But now with one torn streamer, and one less person.

Tingling warmth bled out from my knees and up my thighs as I crawled on all fours toward the spot where my mother’s figure was consumed by the light. I had to think about each movement of my arms and legs, forcing them to move. My whole body was shaking, the tremors becoming more intense fighting back against each motion.

Had only a moment passed? Had it all happened so quickly? Time stopped in my mind, my awareness now on lockdown unable to process what I had just witnessed. Quickly and with an all-encompassing force I fell into shock.

There was a rumbling deep within my throat where animalistic sounds reverberated, unable to form words—a harsh and disheveled manifestation of my incoherent thoughts.

The sounds of busses and cars, people yelling and a neighbor walking down the hall seeped back into the room with their day-to-day normalcy, but I couldn’t get myself to call out or to move.

My mind refused to budge from the place it halted just a moment ago. It refused to take in anything else until the past minute was restored—until my mother was back on the stool hanging streamers through the archway. No. The busses or the neighbor in the hall could not exist until Mom’s figure was back in the living room decorating and tying my sash. I blinked repeatedly begging my will to become reality.

Finally words formed through a continuous and muddy exhale. “This can’t be real.”

My mind clung to that simple thought. I repeated it countless times pushing myself forward a little bit more with each exertion. Pulling myself with sweaty palms against the hardwood floors, I reached the exact spot she had disappeared, right behind the cream colored couch facing the windows where blue met green. It was cold. The floor was cold where my hands stopped.

“This can’t be real.” I lowered my cheek between my palms and pressed it against the smooth, chilled surface. The chill kissed my face gently, like she would when she would put me to sleep as a child.

I cried, not knowing what to do and still dense with shock. An unfamiliar wave of emotion poured over me, lifting and lowering my shoulders. I cried harder and harder, gasping for air but unable to slow the heaving. Loss. Grief. This can’t be real.

“Mom? Mom, please.”

My mind flipped from the images of the past few minutes to old memories—the three of us lying on the couch together watching TV, playing a board game at the kitchen table on New Year’s Eve, Mom doing a victory dance after winning while Dad and I just laughed. Then came the most recent memory—that morning when Dad had embraced Mom across the counter from me.

The memories moved at the speed of sound, flipping through each year randomly, and a pain in my stomach pulled at my heart realizing just how much I had taken for granted along the way.

The mental slide show slowed as it rested on a memory from Dad’s Discovery Channel phase—a special on tornados. I was stretched out on the couch nestled under his arm, my head resting at his chest and watched as survivors of one of Oklahoma’s worst tornados were interviewed. A woman in a bathrobe and curlers pale with shock, looked straight into the camera. I stiffened a bit at her directness. It seemed like she was looking beyond the camera, beyond location, beyond time, to look straight at me.

She described a deathly silence. Where everything stopped just long enough for relief to begin trickling in and for balance to find itself again, making the tornado’s jarring return all the more catastrophic.

The woman’s voice trailed off, unable to finish ticking off the list of things lost or destroyed. She turned back to the camera, her eyes as wide as a freshly slapped child and looked straight at me one last time, sending a shutter through my spine.

My mind exhaled, releasing me from its travels and returning my awareness to the cold, hardwood floor of our living room with a deathly absence bearing down on me from all sides.

In that moment I realized a characteristic of evil, a weapon it used to lure and seduce the unprepared—silence.

“I was down there buzzing forever, Claire.” The sound of the door closing behind Aunt Grace snapped me awake.

My eyes opened slowly, though my head never moved. I could see her heels as she closed the door. “Thank God your doorman has a crush on me or else I would have just been stuck down there…”

I could see her foot as she turned, and I could see the key and chain she nudged with the toe of her boot. There was no motion for a moment, but a sharp exhale with a slant of panic came from her. Her knees bent and a large brown bag in her arm lowered to the floor.

Her arms then free, she picked up the key between her fingers. The chain trailed, swinging back and forth.

“Clara!” Her voice was sharp, cutting through the apartment with an echo. “Clara! Where are you?”

She took off sprinting down the hallway to my bedroom. I peeled my cheek off the floor and willed my shaking arms to push me up to a sitting position, the dried tears on my cheeks leaving a salty film across my skin. Puddles of tears had collected in wet and dry spots on the floor below me.

“I’m here.” I didn’t recognize my battered and torn voice as my own. Each word ran its fingernails across my throat as it came out. My neck ached and my eyes felt like they couldn’t open all the way.

The sound of her sprinting stopped and immediately changed directions, getting louder each second. The warmth of her palms was on my cheeks suddenly. The heat on my skin and the sensation of her presence brought a relief that ached in my chest.

“Clara, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

She didn’t ask where Mom was, but her eyes seared into mine as she tilted my head to hers. Her voice was low and severe, the lighthearted and joking tone that were so intrinsic to the Aunt Grace I knew was absent.

My neck hurt. My throat hurt. My eyes burned.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see a single torn streamer ride a draft into the air and float slowly back to its position against the wall. The moment I opened my mouth to try and explain what I had seen, the tears came back with greater force, my mind now cooperating through each detail, each moment. Recalling the experience brought it all back a bit more real then when it first happened. The sound rattled in my head and the image of cracking marble and wood cut through me.

I closed my eyes tightly trying to make it go away, trying to see only blackness, but it was all on the back of my eyelids. The brightness. Her eyes. Her figure vanishing within the light.

The heaving exploded through my chest escaping out through my mouth and the tears came back, hotter than before stinging my cheeks and rolling over onto my aunt’s fingers. She pulled me into her chest and wrapped her arms around me with her fingers clenched.

How long ago was it that Mom held me like this just feet away from this spot? How much time had passed? Had it really happened? It couldn’t be real.

Aunt Grace rocked back and forth with me tightly in her arms with more and more pressure the harder I cried. Or maybe it was her arms growing tighter every moment that squeezed the agony out of me. Eventually I began to calm down and could only then hear her soft, mournful breaths.

We sat like that for five minutes, maybe fifteen or thirty. After your life—reality as you understood it—crumbles in front of your eyes, time loses its importance. Our grip on each other only loosened with the sound of the front door opening.

Fear struck both Aunt Grace and I first as our spines stood alert and heads turned. She let go of me and in one machine-like motion slid me behind her body. Her legs maneuvered into a crouch and her arms seemed charged for an attack.

Dad’s shoulder slipped through the doorway first and turned as he closed the door behind him, set his leather messenger bag on the floor and hung his jacket on the stand in the foyer.

“I know. I know. I’m late. But you wouldn’t believe how chaotic work was today,” he said with the smooth, loving humor intended for Mom.

It was the last time I heard that flavor in his voice. That sweetness and honey in his tone. I wish I could have bottled it at that moment, preserved it for later, but in that moment all I wanted was him. I jumped out of Aunt Grace’s hold and ran to the foyer, once again crying freely. His arms opened automatically as I came running toward him, but instead of taking me in, he took my shoulders and held me at arms’ length locking eyes with me, and demanding to know what had happened. I couldn’t get myself to say it. I couldn’t. Finally he looked up and over my head to where Aunt Grace stood in the living room.

“What happened? Grace, where’s Claire?” He held me close, his hand on the back of my head as my face buried deep within his side. After a second, I glanced over and saw Aunt Grace looking at him from the living room, standing with a blank gaze. She looked down at the key that was in her palm and slowly wrapped the chain around her right wrist. She looked me straight in the eye seeming to consider her next words carefully. A cold and stoic expression spread across her face. She had decided.

“She’s not here,” was all she said.

“What do you mean she’s not here?”

“I mean she’s not HERE, Chris.”

Dad let me go to follow her, his elbows straight and his steps fast. He was angry and the anger was building quickly. I stepped into the living room and watched through the archway as they paced around the island counter a bit before settling into opposing sides. Their voices raised, volumes building on one another and voices overlapping, pushing and fighting for position.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know, Chris. All I know is that she’s not HERE.” Aunt Grace wasn’t looking at him. Instead she pulled her phone from her back pocket and lifted her left arm, straightening it below the phone. She hovered her phone above her barcode tattoo for a few seconds until there was a clicking sound as if a picture had been taken. Her fingers went to work immediately, furiously texting something as quickly as possible.

Dad’s eyes bounced between her phone and her face, confusion morphing into shock and then anger.

“You did this. How could you do this? She was your sister.”

“You think I had something to do with this?”

“You’re reckless. You’ve always been reckless and you encouraged this…”

“It was her decision and I supported her…”

“Decision? None of this has ever been her choice. You think she wanted this?”

“None of us wanted this, Chris. It was a responsibility given to…”

“You talked her into it. You never thought about the consequences…”

“…us and we accepted it knowing full well there were risks…”

“…accepted it? I have never accepted this. I was never given a choice.”

“You chose this when you chose her. She warned you, so don’t you dare blame me.” She pressed one more button with emphasis and then locked her phone before putting it back in her pocket.

Their voices seethed in the background, but my mind was split between two realities. I was both here, in this moment, and there, in the moment in which reality, as I knew it vanished in a flood of violent light.

“There.” My voice ached at first when I said it.

It felt foreign to me, and even though it was barely above a whisper, it cut through their yelling. They both froze on either side of the island, startled by my voice. My hand rose robotically against my will and pointed to the middle of the counter between them.

“That’s where it came from.” My eyes clung to the spot where the first crack appeared and my finger followed downward, tracing its path splitting the counter and onto the floor, over the landing and into the living room until my finger pointed downward between my feet.

“That’s where she went.”

He was in front of me in a flash, on his knees looking up at me and holding my elbows. He locked eyes with me, this time with desperation behind his stare.

“What, Clara? What was here? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. She just… disappeared.”

“Clara, please.”

His voice quivered and shook. He was pleading with me. With my eyes locked in his, I saw the veil of anger dissolve for a moment and succumb to the weight of mourning and pain. His eyes went glossy as a swelling of tears gathered and protruded until finally slipping over the edge of his lower lid, skipping like a stone across water’s surface against his cheek. Red spread throughout his face and his lips began quivering, warbling each word as it passed over.

A simmering heat shot through my veins as his fingers dug deep into my arms and shook me with each syllable pushed through his clenched jaw.

“Where did she go?”

“Chris, you have to stop,” said Aunt Grace, taking a step into the living room, but Dad stood up immediately and walked to the front door without another word. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket pulling out his phone.

“Who are you calling?” Aunt Grace took a stance just behind me with one hand on the small of my back. It didn’t feel warm. The touch sent a chill up my spine. I turned slightly to see that her stance was solid, like that of a soldier.

Dad kept his head down and passed us both on his way to the kitchen dialing.

“The police.”

“To tell them what exactly, Chris?”

“To tell them my wife has gone missing.”

“Right, that will go over great. ‘Officer, my wife disappeared while on duty as a Guardian protecting our daughter, the oldest…”

“Not another word.” His eyes cut through the room with such violent anger that my stomach dropped. I had never seen his face contorted with such burning craze.

“She is not just an assignment, Grace. She is my daughter, and your niece. She is your family.” His voice lowered and shook at the final word. There may have been more he wanted to say, but he choked on it.

Questions whirled around my mind, unable to make sense of what they were saying, but the tone of his voice was one I had never heard before or believed him capable of. Every muscle in my body froze in awe.

Behind the frozen layer of fear trembling in my body and mind, I wondered why they seemed to accept the supernatural element of Mom’s absence so easily. Dad had shot straight to anger and mourning while Aunt Grace had solidified in resolve.

He was pointing the phone at her like a weapon. “She was my wife. She was your sister. She was your sister and my wife and you want me to do nothing?”

This time when she began to speak, the words came out softer, trying to approach him kindly and pleading.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’ve lost your mind, Grace.”

“They’ll take her away, Chris. They’ll think you’re crazy and they’ll take Clara away. We won’t be able to protect her from…”

He cut her off, his tone pleading with her. “Please, Grace.” He bit his bottom lip to stop it from quivering. “She’s too young.”

For a moment there was nothing and the statement hung between them in the archway until finally he broke under the weight of his own grief, folding into himself. Anger melted off of his body and dripped to the floor with his tears. He gasped for air as the pulsating wave of grief overtook his shoulders.

I wanted to go to him, to hold him like I probably should have, but I stayed with my feet planted watching as he disappeared in front of my eyes and became a man I didn’t recognize. A stranger I hadn’t a clue how to comfort having never realized the seeds of such pain were buried inside of him all along.

We both wanted her. She was the one to comfort. She was the one to soothe cuts, wounds or breaks. She was the one to dry tears, blowing them out like birthday candles.

All I could do was watch him, a weeping heap at the spot in the kitchen where it had started. Unable to go to him—unable to command my body to cross the distance that lay between he and I—I froze once again under the weight of my own confusion and shock, and looked down between my toes.

My father, just outside of my view, crouched in an ever expanding and contracting pile of pain at the place in which it started. Me… well, I stood cold in fear and growing numbness, where it had ended.