A Most Rapid Fall (BWWM)

Haunting Eyes

"Honey?" There was a knock at the door, "Mona, wake up."

And so she did, luggage packed to the brim. Her clothes had been laid out for the week and she was all ready with her homework finished a week ahead of its due date. Mona wasn't the sort to be caught off guard. And so she descended the stares cradling her luggage carefully, pretending not to remember the argument she overheard as her mom washed the dishes:

"She just expects me to drop what I'm doing out of nowhere and just let her take things from me, make requests." She paused and shut off the water, "It's like she hasn't even noticed how long she's been out of our life."

"Give it a chance. She's an old woman now, probably on the outs."

"I haven't even seen her in thirty-six years and suddenly she wants to meet Mona. There was no 'hello' in the letter or even a 'how've you been?'. I expected a small and quiet 'I miss you'-"

"What? You wanted her to open herself up to rejection? You've gotta walk before you run, honey." He paused, seeing the wall rise in his wife's facade, "It's a bit of a rocky start, but at least she's trying. You don't have to go with us tomorrow, if it's too much."

"I'm not planning on it."

Mona's breath fogged the glass of the car's window and her feet were crammed between Carl's textbooks on psychology, wanting for sleep. It seemed that with every switch of the Volkswagen's path, the old man had a question:

"Do you remember the exit we just took?"

Without opening her lids, Mona murmured, "124-D."

"Name the store we passed just now." He fought the stubborn steering wheel to take the left.

"Lincoln's Auto off of Weiderteëd."

"Good." He turned out of the congested dock area and suddenly the houses were few and far between the brush of wilderness. "Mona, if I ask you something, will you answer it honestly?"

The gravel under the tires crunched, crickets chirped, and the conditioning was cranked on high to combat the muggy air. The wheels were drifting, drifting so that she felt her eyes reel away from the question. She felt a tingle of dread for the first time in a long time at the tone of things. "When have I not been honest?"

Carl was stumped. He scratched at his thin brow and cleared his throat before glancing at her in the rearview, "You don't ever question our love for you, your mother and mine, do ya, kiddo?"

"No." She answered immediately with a tone of quiet contrition. The sooner she bit the bullet of last-second sentimentality, the sooner she could retreat back to the stiff silence.

"Good." He cleared his throat and took a brief swig from his burnished silver cask before slipping it back into his computer bag, "Don't tell your mother. You're a good kid, Mona, there's never been a moment in your lifetime where I've felt any regret at having you around. Well, I would never regret having you- you're a real blessing- but here's the situation: you're mother and I, we're taking a break. Who am I kidding? We're separating. It'll be a brief split, not even a split, a small tear in the familial fabric between me and her. And don't you so much as think that you're the one to blame, you're not. You were actually our final bet, but this," he gestured his hand in the air, "-this little trip you're taking may be the straw that breaks the camel's carcass of a marriage I'm in and believe me when I say the camel is beginning to rot."

She shook her head and said the thing he wanted to hear, thinking about how blind the ears and deaf the eyes can be. "I get it." She said this although there was a bit of her that did not. There was a small and smothered voice shouting into the void that, if this marriage that had such a strong foundation has a crack in the cemented vows, what good was there in ever trying.

"And really I mean it when I say you're not the blame for this. I know how you kids can get with the woe-is-me routine and I'm not going to give you the space to get that way once you're home. You mean a whole lot to us, Mona."

"I understand."

"Oh, you do?" He tightened his grip on the wheel and beamed, "Well, that just took a colossal weight off my chest. If I could hug you right now I w-"

There was a clank and grind of metal on receding wood and suddenly the two were tipping into a ditch and the contents of her coffee mug were toppling over the works of Milton, Woolf, and Nabokov. Her forehead banged against the window and finally they were suspended in an awful position against gravity.

Her father groaned, "You alright, Mona?"

Despite the fact that her ears were ringing and her equilibrium was bent, she appeased him and said she was fine.

"Wait till you hear what your mother has to say about this." He laughed a bitter laugh and wriggled his bitty frame out of the seat to grab hold of Mona's arm, "I guess we've arrived at Nan's."

As they trudged through the suckling soil, Mona noticed that the land was boisterous with the noise of nature. Creatures guffaw and clucked in the trees and, as birds pounced along them, the branches writhed, clawing down, shaking moss and leaves down.

Ahead, an old woman watched them from her porch with her cane in hand like the lamp of a crone. From her vantage point, Mona noticed that the light of the fireflies swarmed her like a frantic thunderbolt, constantly ready to strike.

"Teresa, it's Carl. Remember me? You're son-in-law? The guy that's been married to your oldest daughter for over sixteen years."

"Is that what you call yourself? I'm old and bitter, not blind and dim. My memory's still with me." She gnashed her gums between squared jaws.

"Well, you haven't bothered to get in touch so it's easy to assume that you wouldn't recognize us, ma'am."

"Is it? No one's stopping you from paying a visit."

"The owner of the estate would certainly-"

"Not have a thing to say. We don't get visitors often, Carl. And who's this one with the haunting eyes?"

"This one?" He threw an arm over his daughter's tiny shoulders, "Well, this is Mo-"

"Desdemona Russel." She flicked her glazed eyes at him, they seemed to drip out of her sockets with ire. "You think I'm stupid? I was going to be the midwife during her birth, boy. You did something right for once in making her and you want to dote on it like a plaything. Good for you now come inside."

"What about my truck?" He planted his feet firm into the tangle of ferns. Mona squirmed at that. There was a sickness in the air.

Nan continued as if she hadn't heard him, "I'll get some food in your stomachs soon..."

"I don't know how it happened, but we were all caught up in some roots..."

"...pork chops, boiled cabbage, and brown rice sound okay? We haven't really been harvesting a lot lately. It's been slow-moving around here."

"Teresa." His tone was clipped and a vein throbbed under the sweaty skin of his forehead to the beat.

"He will be back in tomorrow from his little escapades. He should have it all fixed up by next week."