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CHAPTER TWO:
❝ Secrets And Lies ❞
Esme stared up at the purple ceiling of her bedroom with loathing. The edges of her eyes shone with tears like pools of stardust. The afternoon light from the window was unforgiving and refracted oceans in her blue orbs. I am not alone, her mind seemed to scream at a voice that was no longer there. The word 'Father' went stale in her mouth. It had happened on multiple occasions before and happened still. These small pricks of his words gradually made her unfunctional. A paralyzing fear took over ─ I am not you. I am not my father.
Aren't you? Aren't you? Rehearsed words seemed to echo and amplify her self-doubt and self-hatred. She had remembered thinking, My father can't die. They can't make a coffin big enough for my father. They hadn't. He was still out there making coffins big enough for the world. Her father had the anger all fathers did. Loud and terrible. It lingered even in his absence.
But Esme was her mother. When a child knows that young that her father doesn't care for her, bad things happen.
She sat up then stood, wiping under her nose with the long sleeve of the t-shirt she had donned to hide the nursed cut. Making her way downstairs, she found her. She was drifting ─ she was always drifting these days, teetering on the edge of being and not being. Her presence reminded Esme more of a ghost than a person ─ a translucent will and flimsy existence. Every tragedy that happened in the world had happened to her mother. Her parents had died when was young, the foster homes weren't very kind, her husband never let her off the hook, she had miscarried her first child ─ yet, after all these godawful things, she had never stopped believing in kindness and the power of love.
And Esme was an unorthodox mix of her parents ─ she believed in the power of love. In the power of love to make one bleed.
The shrill piercing sound of a ringing telephone echoed through the apartment. She waited, leaning against the banister to see the littlest movement in her mother ─ a flutter of eyelids. As if the blowing wind had disturbed her melancholy existence not the ringing phone. Her mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remained a hobby. She hopped down the steps and passed her mother as she reached for the retro-red phone on a table near the front door.
The voice on the other end of the phone was as familiar as her own. "Missed you at band practice today."
Esme felt guilt swell in her chest. These ocean waves of feelings that knocked her down some dreary afternoons made her unable to participate in mundane activities ─ things she loved, people she loved. Pain. "How was it?" she asked.
