Ophelia

Part 1, Chapter 2

 Juliet knelt in the closet. It had once been shared between her and Ophelia, and it was still both of their things that lined the shelves, but it was her closet now. Just hers. In the days immediately following Ophelia's departure, their mother had dug through, over and over, upturning each carefully folded shirt the first time, throwing them onto the floor of the room the second. She found nothing and gave up, leaving Juliet alone, silent and stiff in the center of the room a little too large for one person, surrounded by crumpled clothes that weren't all hers.

That was what kept Juliet in her room, at the beginning, the clean-up. She couldn't think with everything spilled out on the floor, it had to be put away. And her mom had departed in tears when she didn't find whatever it was that she was looking for, so it fell to Juliet. It took her a long time to put the clothes back exactly as she'd found them, because she couldn't remember how they'd been before. She folded every shirt, every pair of jeans. A few at a time, she put them back. Halfway through she took a step back from her frantic cleaning and looked up. No, it was all wrong. All wrong. And crying, she tore it all back down, never more her mother's daughter.

So that was the first day, undoing her mother's attempt to fix her sister's mess. And then Juliet finished and didn't leave. And so she trapped herself in her own prison, just for a bit, just until it was time to leave again.

There was nothing new in the closet, she knew it. So she stood back up, took a step back, and closed the closet door. Juliet was antsy, she'd only just left her room and here she was, back again. She looked at her bed, but she hated it, she already knew too well each lump in the pillow and the smell of laundry and sweat in the mattress.

Juliet sat on the edge of Ophelia's mattress, hunched over and her knee bouncing. She needed to think, needed to retrace Ophelia's steps so she could plan her own. She idly shifted her weight, and felt a sharp edge dig into her thigh. She stood up and knelt before the bed, reaching her hand under the mattress. She felt something, buried deep. She pulled.

Downstairs, Esther gazed at her daughter's face. She'd grown into her features, only now did she bare them with the age and fortitude that they'd merited. They'd always looked a little out of place on a little girl, her sharp nose and long face looked so severe, like they belonged to a much older woman who'd born far more. With pride and sadness on Esther's part, Violet had become that woman.

She was awfully tired; she ought to lie down.

Violet watched her mother depart with gentle hobbling steps. She pulled her knees up and pressed the base of her hands into her eyes.

She was not a contractor, not an engineer or electrician. She was just the only competent person, the only one cold enough to keep her eyes open in the freezing water, and that made her the expert. The wood was rotting, that much was clear. That wasn't so bad, yet, there'd be no real trouble unless mold grew. The generator was on its last legs regardless, but electrical damage wouldn't help matters. Violet suspected, though, that the endless water had committed more egregious acts, and that it hid its damage well in its murky depths.

Finally the object came unstuck and with one last pull Juliet wrenched it free. Ophelia's perfect sheets were untucked and rumpled, a flat board lay on the floor. Juliet sat back, shaking out her arms. The object was maybe one square foot, assembled out of two slabs of plywood. One side was lined in pieces of some sort of neon foam, it looked like a pool noodle. Juliet flipped it over. One edge featured a thin wooden lining poking up at a ninety degree angle. In black marker was written on the wood in Ophelia's telltale messy scrawl, "v. 2 floats but not w/ weight".

Juliet stared at the words, cross legged on the floor. She touched the writing, then jerked her hand away. She put the board down and crawled forward, reaching back under the mattress for anything else Ophelia may have left behind. Finally her fingers touched something firm, and she grabbed. When she withdrew her arm, she found herself staring at a leathery black book. The word "Diary" was emobosed in worn gold letters. A diary? That was too juvenile, for Ophelia, too typical. Too much like a teenage girl in a chick flick with no problems in the world, not enough like Ophelia who wore bright pink eyeshadow every day, even when the flood waters rose and there was nowhere to wear it to and no people to see it. Juliet thought of her sister, in a little wooden house teetering on top of a hill, and the hill surrounded by water. She thought of her with only their little family for company, and hiding this little book from all of them still. She thought of her locked up in their room, no longer shielded by making light of everything, surrounded by hoards of people to laugh at her jokes, no longer painting vibrant colors over everything that scares her, then she thought of her making her way out without them. She left them behind, the only three people left to her. Juliet's chest hurt. She opened the book.