Blue Glass

Home Sweet Home

Even before they entered the house, Lea felt a sickening feeling suddenly fall on her shoulders like a thick, black cloak. It was a mixture of fear and foreboding, of fear and shame and...guilt that groped at her limbs like dark hands, pulling at every bone in her body, trying to drag her down. The trip to the airfield, and all the new sights and sounds and people that she had seen there, had been like a comforting balm to the otherwise damaged interior of her mind. And now, as the large, two-story brown house came into view, the salve had been torn off, laying open all of the scars that dotted the surface of her mind.  

There was a sudden bad energy to the house, or so it seemed to her, that only intensified the closer she and Svetlana came to it, their suitcases scraping on the pavement as they lugged them up the stairs to the front door. Lea hung back while Svetlana fiddled with the lock: as far as she was concerned, she may as well be trying to open the door to hell. 

Lea resisted the urge to gag as Svetlana shut the door behind her. The house still smelled of red wine and cigarettes--her mother's signature scent, which overpowered any and all of the perfumes she had ever used. The longer Lea stood there, the more convinced she became that this was the smell of death, the smell of rage, of insanity. 

She remembered the shaky yet firm resolve that had taken root deep within her the moment she realized that her mother was never going to stop demanding money from her. She remembered the realization that had shot through her: Lea, you're going to kill someone! Kill someone! Do you realize what that means? But that had swiftly been followed up by the idea of Manfred's letters to her being leaked to the general public, and the name of the man she loved being rubbed into the dirt all because of her own stupidity. And it had been then that she had known, This is what I have to do. 

Lea had felt perfectly sane in the days leading up to the incident--no, the murder. But now, as she stood in the parlor, inhaling the olfactory remnants of the presence of the woman who had given her life and whose life she had ultimately taken, she couldn't help but wonder: is that what it feels like to have a psychotic break? Can someone who the rest of the world may view as insane consider themselves to be perfectly normal people? Could I be insane, too, even in this very moment, and not know it? 

Too many emotions. 

Svetlana's hand on her shoulder nearly made her jump a foot in the air. Lea's shoes clacked loudly on the wooden floor as she turned around, staring wild-eyed into her housekeeper's startled face. 

"Jesus Christ, don't do that again." She had to clear her throat a few times to rid her voice of the raspy edge it had somehow developed. Her hand, groping blindly behind her back, found the railing of the stairs, and she clutched at the wooden banister like a lifeline. "I'm going to bed."

"Alright. No problem." There was a hint of caution in Svetlana's voice that made Lea's blood boil. It sounded like she was talking to a caged animal, not a person. 

I'm not insane!! she wanted to shout after Svetlana as she watched her make her slowly climb the stairs to her attic bedroom. I'm not insane!!

But the longer she contemplated that, the more convinced she became that perhaps she actually was losing screws. 

*****

Why Lea thought it was such a good idea to pay her mother's room a visit in the middle of the night was beyond her. She hadn't been inside the room since the incident--she had been far too busy trying to straighten out her own emotional well-being for any sort of nostalgia-inducing activities such as going to her mother's room. 

As she made her way down the hallway on tiptoe, she wondered why it seemed like a good idea all of a sudden. Was this herself unconsciously tormenting herself, by going to the site of where it happened and forcing herself to look upon what her own hands had wrought?