Chapter 25
Quill
Papa
First Day in Court
Atli ?rvarsson
“You're sick, Joseph!” Lorette's angry voice rang through the house, and I opened my eyes, listened, and held my breath as something shattered. A bottle.
“You're sick!”
She didn't sound like herself when she was angry. Something they both had in common.
“I should have divorced you when you...”
Glass shattered again and I flinched. It was louder now, and I knew they were at the bottom of the stairs in the foyer.
“I should have known who you were when Anthony brought that twisted little brat home!”
Helplessness overwhelmed me. Even though two floors separated me from them, the restless nervousness in my stomach was creeping proof that I would never be safe from their unpredictability.
Early on, I had learned that with people who could quickly become loud and start throwing things around in their fits of rage, you never knew their next move. You were never safe in their presence, even if you desperately wanted to be.
“I should have left!”
And yet she was still here.
It was his money, as well as her reputation, not to mention her golden facade, that this woman clung to. She was already mourning something she hadn't lost yet and something she had never had.
“Lorette,” I heard my father's apologetic voice from the distance of the ground floor. “Darling…”
He had never talked to Mama like that…
“Don't touch me!” Lorette yelled at him, and I flinched.
From the hallway, I heard a soft creak that only one person in this house made whenever she eavesdropped on her arguing parents on the stairs before disappearing into her room in tears.
Sometimes I wanted to hug Brittany, but she would push me away, blame me for everything, just like everyone else in my family had done.
It was only a matter of time before Anthony also realized that I was a hopeless case. The breathing outgrowth of his dysfunctional family.
“Lorette. Let's go to bed...”
“Look at yourself!” Lorette shouted again. “Look in the mirror! How you look... How you walk...” Her voice broke as if she were close to tears, but at the same time there was something insane about it. “God, how all the alcohol is eating away at your brain!”
A door slammed. Followed by hasty, loud footsteps, left by high heels.
“Lorette...”
Another door slammed.
“Lorette!”
Outside, I heard a car engine start. Probably our driver, whom Lorette sometimes had drive her to God knows where in the middle of the night.
With growing inner tension, I listened to the engine of the car as it drove away down the long gravel driveway.
Then, as the unfamiliar silence settled back over this dead place, I turned on my side, pulled my legs up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them, closed my eyes, and tried to block out every little noise in the house.
But it was like back then. Like always.
I focused on every sound, held my breath, and continued to listen to every creak, every door that squeaked before it was... slammed.
Once again, I opened my eyes, overwhelmed by the sudden pounding in my chest.
Bang.
That was the door to a salon.
More footsteps followed. Unsteady footsteps. Then a creak... on the stairs.
Inevitably, my body tensed and I listened as the creaking moved irregularly upstairs, step by step.
As so often, the footsteps fell silent on the second floor. The moment I froze completely, left helplessly at the mercy of my fate.
Go to sleep. Please. Go to sleep.
A creak.
Footsteps.
They were getting closer.
On the stairs.
No, no, no...
I sat up, staring tensely at the slightly damaged door, which I was sure I had locked again before going to bed, waiting with trembling fingers for his footsteps to fade away in the hallway.
Thud.
I flinched.
It was his fist. On my door.
Please go.
“Onera...” my father said, his voice breaking.
Unable to break free from my paralysis, I fought against the razor-sharp nervousness that twisted a knot in my stomach.
“Onera... open the door.”
It sounded like a plea. Desperate. It reached that part of me that I thought I had buried long ago.
He’s been drinking. He’s not himself.
He doesn’t need your help. He needs help.
“Onera...”
The exhaustion in his voice was unmistakable.
I was inches away from slipping out from under the covers, putting something on, and opening that door for him, even though the mere thought of it sent goosebumps down my neck.
“Onera!”
The sound of his fist suddenly pounding on the door made me flinch, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
That's exactly why we don't open the door.
Out there was someone I didn't know. A stranger.
My door groaned as if something heavy was pressing against it, followed by the sound of fabric sliding down the wood.
Silence.
Like a frightened animal in the forest that had heard the crack of a branch under a hunter's foot, I stared at the door.
He was lying against it. He wouldn't go away. I was trapped in here.
“Onera...”
He laughed quietly and a dull sound came from the door. His head.
“Don't you want to show a little gratitude for the roof over your head that I give you?”
Feelings of guilt and disgust with myself rushed over me.
I made myself dependent on this man. And he let me feel it. Every. Single. Second.
Knowing it wasn't wise to stay naked in this bed, I slid out from under the covers as quietly as possible and slipped into my black sweatpants and midnight blue sweater.
That wasn't the first door he would break through.
“Come here, my little girl.”
On my way back to the bed, I froze in my tracks.
My little girl.
The water gathering in my eyes was a nasty traitor.
This isn't real, Quill. He's not Papa.
“Come to Papa. Open the door.”
Overwhelmed, I swallowed the lump in my throat and turned my head toward the door.
That's not Papa, Quill...
“I know you can hear me.”
The tears took on a life of their own. Unpaid actors in a war between reason and lost hope.
Like every war, I would lose this one too if I let the weapons of his tongue get too close to me.
What if this was the closest I would ever get to him? What if this was my only chance to save Papa?
As if on their own, my feet carried me to the door.
My trembling hand touched the dark wood.
“Open the door...” came the unsteady sound from the other side as my father’s voice broke, and with it, another part of me.
“Open the door.”
Betraying impatience crept into his voice, followed by the sound of his head banging against the door. Desperate.
A warning that should have made me pull my hand away from the door, but I was too focused on holding together the heavy lump in my chest that threatened to tear open all the cracks in its facade at that moment.
Despair made me sink down against the door with my back to the wood, while more tears made their way across the battlefield of my face.
It was the realization that Papa was dead. That he would never come back.
Whoever this man was out there in front of my door, he wouldn't be able to help either of us. Because his burden was too heavy for me to carry for him. I couldn't even carry my own package.
All the pain that was cramping my chest, the man outside my door was blocking my chance to disappear into the bathroom and catalyze all these shadows inside me with the help of a razor blade.
“I know you hate me.”
Processing the way he spoke to me was one thing. Analyzing his words was another.
I didn't hate him. When would he understand that the only thing I had learned to hate under his hand was this life?
“Why do you hate me?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Why did God punish me like this?”
And there it finally was. The confirmation that everything was as it always had been.
Gravia Onera Richter.
The grave burden she would forever be to others. Nothing more.
“Why...”
More tears.
“Why, Onera...”
My ability to think clearly slowly slipped away from me.
It was too much. Too many emotions, too much information. Everything. Too much.
“Why...”
His tired voice broke completely.
He would fall asleep out there any minute, wake up sometime in the morning, not knowing where he was, before kicking my door and disappearing downstairs.
Why he was here? With me?
He was lonely. Brittany was hiding from him because she couldn't look him in the eye, because she didn't want to face it any more than Anthony, who had already left an hour ago to go hunting and block out who his father really was. And even his own wife had left him.
I was the only person who had never run away from him. Because he had always been faster.
I had lost both my parents to addiction. One of them had been addicted to the love of a man who was already taken. The other to a perfect life. Both to something that my mere existence had denied them the chance to have. And so they had both lost themselves to the same drug. Alcohol.
My vision blurred completely, so I laid my head on my knees, sobbed quietly, hugged my legs, and imagined that I wasn't alone.
Please, come to me. I need you.
I tried hard, and it didn't take long before I felt him slide down next to me at the door, felt his arm wrap around me, pull me close, hold me tight as I shattered into countless pieces.
Like every time.
He was everything I had ever had. And he would soon take me away from here. To safety. To where I would finally find peace.
My invisible friend.
For years, I have been trying to
close my eyes tightly enough.
But the tighter you close them,
the more painful the process of reopening becomes.
– Blue