Mayhem by Estelle Laure

Author:Estelle Laure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

TWENTY-ONE

BILLIE BRAYBURN DAUGHTER OF JULIANNA

1928

Mother told me yesterday that Father has been run over by an automobile. I can’t picture it. Did his face come to pieces? What does a body look like after that? I don’t know and I can’t get my head around it properly, so I’ve given up. It’s because of the way I work, the way that I figure through things slow as syrup. But I get there. I get to an understanding. I just have to be patient with myself.

And meanwhile, Father is the person I would have asked for help in this sort of situation, for advice. He would have been the one to tell me how to go step by step until I understood how he could be here one day and gone the next as though he had never been at all. He would have tried to explain to me about the body being a temporary home for the soul, and I would have been able to understand it. But without him, I can only imagine him putting his things away in his drawers, turning off the lights, going out the front door, and disintegrating into nothing, ceasing to be.

When I close my eyes, I hear him saying to chin up, to put my best foot forward. Still, I don’t quite know what to make of death. One time I saw Tommy Havershaw shoot a deer, saw the hole from the gunshot, all the blood coming out and leaking everywhere. Why, I feel like I’ve got one of those holes in me right now, that bits of me are leaking out all over the place.

But Mother.

Oh, Mother.

She recited lines from Romeo & Juliet for hours last night. That’s the play Mother and Father were in when they met. She lay down with her scarred cheek against the sofa in the drawing room, and she sobbed. And I ask you, where do I belong in this? I do not.

I first saw the hideaway last week. Maybe finding it meant something. Maybe it was a foreshadowing of Father’s explosion, of his corporeal departure from this fair world and of something new for me.

And I don’t know.

I don’t know what made me get my swimming costume on and put my hair up in my cap and go all the way there, to the place where the cliffs come apart.

Well, I do know why, and I shall endeavor to be honest here, in this place, writing just for me. Perhaps that way, life won’t be such a puzzle.

The hideaway opened to me, showed me its existence, and I remembered Mother talking about a dangerous place filled with magic, built into the cliffs. The curtains made of mountain drew back, drew apart. Can you imagine? I think most would run, but I did not. Or I did, but I ran toward.

I saw something that shouldn’t even exist, and I believe in magic, and I believe when magic comes a-knockin’ at your door, you have no business doing anything but answering the call.

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