Sweet Adaline

Part II: Ch 8

The page was pencil smudged by her sweaty palm, delicately scribbled with mechanical lead and a gentle hand. Smooth, feminine cursive, enflamed with careless youth. It was the rich curvature of artful 'T's and 'R's that held her voice. The way it all hovered just barely above the lines.
Her first memoirs began when she was twelve, a few weeks from her thirteenth birthday. There was no date to mark the moment. It was all so informal, natural. Not carried away with form and structure, but rather coarse exposition. All heart without filtration. No thoughts withdrawn for politeness or embarrassment of fear of discovery. Each raw word drew me deeper. Like recollection. She was trivial and scattered, unscathed.
It struck her one afternoon, this locomotive that damned her. I can say that, yes? She was damned by this afternoon, and who could dare blame her ever after. Not I.
She after school at the end of her stroll home from the bus with her friends. Two of which she shared her secrets with, and several more to pad the party. The walk was short, a block and a half, and it went swiftly on this bright afternoon. It was a half-day and days like that made anything seem possible, with those free hours of afternoon.
Cam had been nagging her for all the details of her talk with Nick at the back of the bus. What did he say? Did he say he liked her? Did his breath smell bad, because she heard he smoked, and somebody said he had gross teeth from it. Adaline refused to admit it did smell like smoke, but not putrid, not like her mom's breathe. It was dusty, and his teeth were fine, from what she could tell, though she tried not to stare. They had sat in the back, two seats away from Cam, and intimately close. It did sme
Adaline had noticed Nick two days before, creeping in late to class. He was always late, just the way she always just barely made the bell. Generally Eric, the gay kid from Minnesota that moved into big house down the street, would sit next to her, but due to some freak alignment of planets, he was missing and some mangy kid had filled his seat. There was no telling where he was from, as this certainly wasn't Lurch's class. She didn't know many names, but she had the faces down, and this geek wasn't one of them.
It was easier to grab one of the three back row seats that were still empty., so she took one furthest to the corner of the room and settled in. World Geography. It was the driest sixty-five minutes of the day. It gave her enough time to draft a fantasy and polish off some pre-algebra.
On this uncommon afternoon, Nick's very usual late arrival brought this dusty rebel to the forefront of her mind and for an hour she divisively stared, just beyond the geek. She stared at his second-hand black biker boots and crisp black jeans. His wispy blond hair hung carelessly past his eyes. She ran her fingers through it in her mind, imagining him holding her close at the waist, testing boundaries while he cast his spell.
She shot through the hour like lightening, and was intrigued to find how near to her he was throughout the day. She noticed him lingering outside the cafeteria for nearly the whole lunch, and then vanished. He was in her sixth hour pre-algebra class, which she also abhorred and he seemed to excel in. This boy took her concentration by siege. So in her fixation, she set out determined to make him notice her. This she confessed to her book in divulging descriptivism. What she told her friends however was far more simple.
"I told Jen he asked me out. Jennifer was like, "For real?! Just like that? Well what did you say, cause your not gonna, right? He's all weird, you know, doesn't talk much." Then Eric says, "yeah, not to mention he's just plain a mammoth dick." Then Jen's all, " Yeah, you never know. Maybe you should go. Tell me if you find out." She's such a perv. She's always talking like she's this sex fiend, but I know for a fact she's never seen a dick in her life. As for Eric, I think he ignores comments like that cause he's embarrassed, like he's got nothing down there. That's what Jen thinks, anyway. I think he's just sweet, and doesn't know what to say. That's cool. It's better than trying so hard like everybody else.
"So he wants to go to a movie with me Saturday. That shouldn't be too hard. I wonder if I should say anything to mom though. I've never actually been out with a boy, at least not like this before. Not like on a date, if that is what we're doing. It's so crazy in my head. What to say, what not to say. What do I do, what will he want to do? I want him to kiss me, he has such sexy lips. And I know I shouldn't say this about a boy, but his eyes are the prettiest I think I've ever seen. Guy or girl. I want him to kiss me, but I don't want to seem like a total slut if I let him. Jen would. Then again, maybe she wouldn't. AHHHG! I need advice."
As I read on, her world and her words became defined by an edge of darkness. The shadow of burgeoning adolescence that turned to sudden violent midnight.
She scribbled down her last sentence at the patio table in the back yard, and closed the book. The warm spring sun lit up its glossy white leather cover, bringing a prideful grin to her face. Adaline had just bought the book a couple weeks earlier at Walden Books during one of her countless trips to the mall. Her first diary was minuscule and something about the pages made the ink in her pens skip. So, aggravated and inspired more now to write than ever before, she made the greatest investment of her young life.
With a quick shuffle of her bag to make room for it, she shoved the pristine white book in and headed inside through the back door, which was always left open, whereas the front never was. She tossed her bag onto the dining room table as she often would after school, where she'd return to it for homework. "Mom?" She called up the stairs cheerfully. Her mother had been upstairs in bed for nearly a week now. She'd been sleeping in the spare room on the second floor, so that Jack didn't wake her when he came home. She'd grown detached from the hours spent burdened with the weight of the drugs. It was the painkillers, mostly, that wore her down. Adaline had never known the delightful entrapment that was her mother's vice, Vicodin.
She called again, fruitlessly until she reached the threshold of the door, where her mother sat in the bed, pale as ivory in ice. Eyes so sunken in their sockets, she seemed to already speak from death as she turned just slightly and said, "There you are. But I know you're at school. You can't make me stay this time."
She stared at Adaline disbelieving, certain she was nothing more than another delirious apparition, conjured by her waning fear of death. She said blankly, "Don't end up like me Adaline. Don't be me."  She turned back and lifted the dual barrels of her husband's duck hunting Remington, and pulled hard against both the triggers concluding her life in a bloody display.
Adaline stood broken, ripped from her body in the terror of time. She drifted silently out of her shell, and was no one thing entirely, body, spirit or mind. She was stripped and charred by the image of the blast and the barren gaze before and within the explosion of light. That image replayed over and over, until the light and that glassy stare all that filled her eyes, and the sound of the blast muted everything around her with a noise so ferocious she shutdown entirely.
When the neighbor rushed to the scene to investigate, he discovered her wide-eyed and fetal at the foot of the stairs, clutching her ears in torment. Time passed without her, encased in disbelief. Her stone dead eyes locked on infinity, on trails of light, of reds and blacks. Gentle voices sAngiezled around the inconstant room.
He was a soothing one, the short-haired blond in blue that spoke softly as he drew Adaline down the stairs. Alive was the house with uniformed men, some more and some less. The officer sat with her as Adaline remained in absence, uninterrupted in negative space. Then he spoke some words to her, Jack in hard creased brown polyester slacks. The only thing that came clear for days after that afternoon it was the weave of those polyester pants. He pulled her into embrace, but she was stoned in her dimension. Adaline wavered for a moment, Then her shell began to melt into his moment with her. It was brief. He pet her messed hair and told her "I know, I know. It's all over now." But it wasn't. It wasn't ever going to be over. It would forever be this moment. Perhaps it had only just happened. She later learned it had been over an hour before he arrived. It was all still the vacant division of time that she skipped in like a perfect stone across a sea of molten morbidity. Her mind working anxiously to defy the explosion that painted her mother across the wall as if it were her vile tapestry. Black hair and bone, blood and a body that shivered beneath its covers, mostly headless and clutching the rifle with convulsing muscle tissue.
Somehow she was stained by the blood ricocheted by a pocket of brain matter or scull at just the right trajectory. It was her favorite shirt, bought overpriced at the Hard Rock Café in D.C. that summer. She'd worn it twice that week because, just right in the mirror, she could see a woman staring back at her, rather than a twelve year-old girl.
She remained in that framework of a new reality, devoid of interruption by light or night or hunger or company. In the nightmare she lived again and again long after the shot, she'd been visited by the pastor, her grandmother and once by her doctor. She'd never cared much for any one of them. Her mother, Elisa... who was she? Already she'd become blurred. In this trance she began to lose grasp of those memories. In frame after frame of recollection, her realAngieation came clearer. Elisa was more some foreign woman and less and less her Mother, absent and mythical. As real as any exotic character she'd often read about or perhaps something imagined all together.
How easy it became to accept this, for immediately she was stricken from conversation, In fact, conversation with her father lost almost completely. She spoke again at last after five endless days and sleepless nights adrift in silence, but was not heard. They ate together at the same dining room table, which made her even more alone, but in a real way which help her climb out of her head. Their dinners were modest and their table was long, and seemed to grow longer as time went on. Jack would rarely look up at her. He was cold. The clearest description of him is cold. He became an icy man. I was taken by how she defined him at this hardened hour.
"Dad acts like I'm not even there. Not even in the house with him. Most of the time I feel like I died in that room with her. And at night when I try to talk about school or things like that, he eats slow and carefully. He eats like he's afraid of waking someone up. In a way, I'm afraid he too will so I don't say anything about it. I'd say he scares me, in a lot of ways it terrifies me, the whole life I'm living, but I know, nothing else that means anything can ever happen to me again. That's how I sleep. I used to imagine butterflies flying everywhere I look to make the "whatever" disappear. It used to work. I'd close my eyes and say it, "butterflies, butterflies, butterflies" and I couldn't see anything else. Now I get the feeling I'm not alone. I say it, but no matter how many times I still get the flash. Then they all melt into reds and grey for a second. I don't sleep much. It's starting to show. No doubt, I look fourteen, going on fifty."
What was important was all in this diary she'd been dreaming of incessantly. Not her own diary, but another one. It was her mother's. It was a pale vile thing Elisa had stained with volatile words. Adaline would sleep unevenly through the night when images transformed from the common to something she'd not yet become familiar with.
There were men in her dreams, lucid dreams. There were moments that she was the forbidden. There were moments when Adaline would no longer be willing or patient or soft or expressive. In her sleep, in those dreams she became something different... something predatory. Her sex became savage teeth. Her tenderness became lustful intent. She bled, she needed. She felt deep inside her, desire. Adaline was swept in the night by the emotionless fury of erotic physical impact. She was thrust against and softened for it. Tasted men and hungered for it. Beaten by them softly for a kiss, and she'd kiss them hard and be a blissful harlot. She'd say 'cunt' and feel them writhe in her and whisper angry things and lick them. She was visceral. She became a whisper and a hot cry of sweaty intensity surpassing the locomotive named adolescence in these dreams she had.
These were Elisa's dreams, or rather, dreams of Elisa... dreams as her mother. It was between these dreams that came the one that reoccurred night after night, many enough to lose count.  It was her vision of the book, her mother's diary.
She'd been sleeping in the spare room on the second floor, so that Jack didn't wake her when he came home late. Up the stairs to the right at the end of the short hall was her own room. It was large. Large enough and older than her than when the air was wet and the wind blew hard enough, the cedar walls popped and the hard wood floors would creak.
Adaline's grandmother once stayed there for two months after her husband passed away. That was only until they shipped her off to a home, as Elisa used to say. That always used to be the most disunited room of the entire house. Even the great room with its motionless grandfather clock that was once Jack's father's and the organ he'd played on holidays when everyone was blitzed, felt more a part of the home.
Now, it was the room at the top of the stairwell. The door would always remain closed. Jack slept, when he slept, in his room at the far end of his grand home, far from them both. Adaline slept knowing that he couldn't enter that room for the very same reason that she had to swear away demons with butterflies. In that room no longer was her mother, but they both were certain, something still remained.
Across that headboard, where her skull with buckshot had been shattered, impaling the wood, there was still something that wasn't easily understood. Perhaps it was reason or life in some form. Something unforeseen and unimaginable. Whatever it was, it breathed in the rank darkness. The superstitious might call it the darkness itself. Beyond all her natural fears, Adaline knew that she was the darkness, and that which was the worst, was now inside her. It became her, or she became it in that moment the shells had been spent. All that wild abandon that brought her out, out of that body, out of that drunken, pill sodden carcass, was the life that elicited these things in Adaline. She knew it. A woman knows what's inside her. It's their undeniable trait, and so often the clearest certainty of all: intuition. Upon her turn into thirteen, she felt it. Gone yet residual still, was Elisa, alive inside of her.
She bore this new reality as she descended into every night, experiencing more wildly exotic sensations than ever in her life. In some indescribable way she knew it was Elisa. But the sex? She'd known nothing like it. None of it made any sense.
For three consecutive nights Adaline dreamt of nothing but Elisa's diary. In those dreams she was her mother again divulging her secrets, her skeletons and demons. When finished she'd close it gently and slip it beneath her mattress, at the head of her bed. Writing in it was a rare ritual and she abhorred its necessity. She kept it because she did need it thought, because she had no one to listen. No one but the table she set and the floors she swept. These things wouldn't take her thoughts or give her release. Only after she saw them, scribbled in ink, the villains of her spirit and her past, was she free. Even then she was only free enough for a while. These villains within, they only slept. Time passed, and they'd always wake to torment again and again. This diary, this unwanted device, was her pressure release valve. Because of that, every word was pulp. Each hidden thought was potent.
She was everything a homemaker could be. Her dinner was always prepared by seven o'clock, and the dishes were done by eight thirty. Her laundry, accomplished, and her floors were immaculate. The bushes were tailored and Adaline always was kept productively occupied. On all perfunctory facets, Elisa was as perfectly domestic a beast as could be. But, this was not what she was. Elisa was a stag, down to her very core. Adaline became a disembodied automaton at school. She was abandoned by her friends.
"I still can't come home from school without getting sick. I think I'll be ok, like today. Then I come around the corner onto my street and it just hits. That brick house at the end of the cull-de-sac has a front yard full of rosemary bushes. I've been puking in those bushes for over a week now, and nobody's come out and said anything. I think the place is abandoned or something. Maybe they're dead too. I don't walk with Jennifer and Eric anymore. I don't know what to say to them. I think they feel the same way."
Adaline had a clarinet. She mentioned it once in her diary, but only once. It sounded like the type of thing that never was a part of her. The type of accessory that is simply entailed in the type of life she'd lived up to that point.
"I was getting really good my clarinet. Mr. Eckert said he wanted to put me in first chair. Remember how you went to both our band concerts even though you were super sick. Dad didn't go though. So what and who cares. I gave my clarinet to Mr. Eckert today. I know you bought it brand new. Dad reminded me of that enough times. I couldn't take it out of the case. I just started crying every time I tried. I don't have any reason to bother with it anymore. It's stupid. I don't want it around me anymore. I don't want anything from you."
She was crystallAngieing and complicating, a gentle spirit mutilated. She became the sweet remains of youth that broke the verge of revelation; catastrophic to the innocents she passed. Everyone she'd known had become subtext to her evolution. From here on she was engulfed by the wake, the echoing whispers of thunderous buckshot that lingered like vultures, stalking her fractured reason. Friends now scavenged for the gossip about her, trading it like commodities in the market of adolescent treachery. The novelty of camaraderie became less and less affordable as her fellow student's stares grew heavy on poor pitiful, hollowed Adaline. 
She was alone in her thoughts. The weekdays had school. She heard information and discarded it. She watched as friends passed and never glanced her way, and so she'd say nothing to them. The boys that she had coveted had grown no more enticing than any other dodging stare that sped past on the concrete paths between classes. Her thoughts were of mortality and burrowed deeper in her mind than any previously. They dug so deep that when looking out to see the world around her, she found herself at the end of a long and narrow corridor. In the distance were the muffled voices speaking words of which she understood less and less. It was becoming madness and it swallowed her whole, save the body, the ever-burdensome meat. There in the belly of this lonesome inferno, the whispers of her piers and sodden glares were lost. She was alone, with only the flash from a barrel to light of the darkness.
The mystical nights dulled the stresses of her adolescent life. They opened her mind to her womanly majesty conjured by the silence of her cavernous empty home, in a mind more crowded than she'd ever known before. Nightly she transcended into that firm busted, tight and vacant chest. She became hungry for the drink, ached for the sweet release of pain relief. Phantom pains that forced her teeth to grind and legs to shake. There was something profane in this dream of hers, in the way she hated. It was a wild abject hatred. And, oh god! how the sounds of the world could infuriate. As they did, she cursed them into the pages of the book with a frail, shaky hand. The book so nearly filled. 
Again and again she'd scribble into the small black-jacketed journal and shove it beneath her mattress at the head. The occasions grew more frequent, until daily she would retrieve the book from beneath the mattress she grew bound to, and spit her hate in black ink. It stained her mind as madness might, the image of that phantom book beneath what had become the grisliest of tombs.
Then on the third day, she the strength to climb the flight to her mothers' chamber. This would be the haunt, she was sure, that would destroy her. Not the dreams or the violence that danced behind her eyes incessantly. It would be that silent home. That empty home every afternoon, that hissed at her from water heaters and growled from phantom laundry loads. All the tricks the silence plays on scarred minds. As it is with all of us who fear what cannot be, but fear it anyway because we've seen the things we should not see, the silence more fearsome than the rest. It would be like this every day of her regretful damned existence, she believed with certainty, if she did not destroy it. Her irrational fear would only mount until the weight would break her. Where there was no strength for the sake of strength, it came from fear. It was elusive, though, and lied to her with violent beats of her delicate heart.
Always the breeze was cold and lifeless as it swam through the house without open windows or air vents. She would sit at the dining room table, prisoner to her abandonment in this cavernous home she was known so well by. It was like this on the afternoon Elisa closed her book finally. "Don't end up like me" her mother said vainly, and then was done. And if ever a face bore eyes devoured by cowardice, they looked the way Elisa Day had, there twisted in sheets of her bed, waiting for the buckshot's promise to take away the pain.
"No", Adaline decided, "no I will not be like you. I'll be strong", she thought and fought away the chills with narrowed soldiered eyes. At the moment she decided it, she was powerful and warm. This was true until the chill of that unnatural breeze, lifted from the hardwood floor and slipped out from the bedroom door to exodus as if woken from contented rest to these threats of unwavering confidence. It lifted up the scent of death musk that mingled with the stink of cigarettes that drifted out of the room, where she had been abandoned by her husband for her last few weeks. The smell was something dank, sulfuric and somber. That afternoon the scent was barbarous and wailed on her olfaction with fury. But Adaline recaptured her strength.
Her stride was sure, direct, the way she stared ahead. It was no more a room in her home, but something living, opponent of her. The sun was faded by her fright, and shadows crept from where she'd never seen them spill. The noises of the moans and hisses grew to warbled groans and whispers; some of her mother's own. She heard her name perchance, Adaline. They were unhealthy, unearthly incarnations.
Even as she strode her confidence befuddled, though she continued to pace step after eerily summoning step. Her self, her being, shook wiry and tensile. One solid noise could rupture her strained calm, one motion end her confidence. Still she moved on with every hair on end and viscera like cold stone. One step led to the next and to the next. She did not hear the voice she'd swear she'd heard, and stopped to throw her glance back down the stairs. She was closer to the top than she'd expected, closer than she'd hoped. Re focus. One deep shaky breath wouldn't satisfy. She took another. Nothing. Five steps until the purpose. She inhaled again and pushed on, finishing the climb with double strides. She'd taken the flight, never before so earned. Still her lungs were weak and wouldn't fill to satisfaction. And there she stood, against the lurid breeze, and an all too familiar fear. She realAngieed, it was time to blind her childish perception. A death she was a part of was waiting for her visit, her return to it. 
Adaline stood flush against the door, before this portal to some limitless abyss, "no doubt", as she'd say. "No doubt they left her there. Or maybe she came back for me. Well here I am." She thought, though she did not confide it to her book. Instead, it was only the strictest description, knowingly forced to push through it. Forcing herself to recount it, just one last thing. A few distinct sentences.
She reached the door and it was as she remembered it. It seemed larger than the others in the house. Forbidden, as though at any time she might be scolded for her opening it. Her fingers wrapped the brass knob and it turned. "Damn! It isn't locked." she thought, and pushed. It squealed the slightest bit just as it began to open no matter how often her dad oiled it, then died away.
Her stomach took flight with a shudder so tremulous it pushed her back and wrought a cry she choked to swallow. The door was open, though she had not seen the macabre portrait of her mother, her splash of violence that cursed the quarters. Adaline stood shaking, wholly ruptured from her self, frantic. It would be the first of her true anxiety attacks. The hall expanded and the entrance drifted, out as if masked by heat waves. And then compressed. Thrust forward, the floor was jerked from under her. A pop of blood burst from her nose as she crunched against her parent's door, on her way onto the floor. The pain was what woke her, casting off the fear like loathsome baggage. Pounding agony that raged across her delicate face, surging, blinding her. 
A second to discover what the anguish was, and then another to remember where she was. It hurt too bad to close her eyes to the blinding light that beamed in through the window directly across from where she knelt. The afternoon was waning, so she faced the fiery star. Colors faded into soft focus, and quickly sharpened. The flavor of zinc, my old familiar, crept in on her lips, and ran off her chin. Adaline panicked briefly, and then found a streak of humor in the irony of worrying what Jack might say about bleeding on the carpet in her mother's room.
As fast as it approached, her humor scrammed as she looked over to the bed, stripped of its sheets. Naked to reveal the full monstrosity of her mother's self-destruction. The stains of an explosion of human tar painted the high standing head board and eggshell white wall like a canvas that bore some graphically subjective piece of art of deeper meaning, driven by its context rather than its paint.
He had the walls cleaned of the remainders of his wife, the reminders of her death. No one removed the mattress though, as they had the sheets and sullied comforter. Such minimal reparation, I thought. What kind of man is that?
She stood, fists clenched and forced herself to stare at it. To face this thing that was a part of her history, but nothing more than that. She traced the stains across the wall and noticed how it spread up to the ceiling just above. Shreds of her remained glued to the popcorn textured ceiling.
In flashes she could see it happen. The look she gave to her daughter, then turned and opened her mouth, wrapping her lips around the barrels. It ran through her head again and again, concluding with its horrific end. Adaline stared wide-eyed. In her diary, she had written simply:
"Those words came up, they way you'd say it like I was still five. "Look at the mess you made. Just look." You, just look mom!"
She turned her head away and ducked into master bathroom across from the foot of the bed, flaccid and weak from her heart's furious beat. She lifted her head as she supported herself at the sink. In the mirror she saw her flushed complexion on a face older than she remembered. She saw a woman so much like the one that left this world through the bloody gate she made in this very room. Elisa stared back at her, through eyes of hard contrast, appearing black and white devoid of their vibrancy.
In the sink and across the counter lay scattered amber prescript canisters. Most opened and emptied with thick, white oval pills that sat in the sink. They were the ones that killed the pain. She'd gotten them for her mother on rare occasion, when the pain was too much to move from the bed. "I'm so lucky," her mother would say with tired words, "to have such a good girl." Those bottles were massive, bottomless. She continued to write a few days later, once she felt distant enough from the visit to recount it to her diary.

"How many pills did you have, anyway? Jeez! You could have just O.D.'d and saved me from the show. Or how about, the nightmares. The big bottle was always almost empty, usually by your bed. Sometimes they were in the kitchen too. Big white pills. You were always into those. I looked at the label on that one, the one in the kitchen: Hydrocodone. Dad's name was on it too. Dr. Day.
"I almost forgot why I was even there. And then it hit me. Your stupid little diary. It wouldn't have been worth it if you could just leave me alone. If you could just stay out of my head, I would have never gone in there. But now I need to know what you were thinking, and what you wrote about when no one else was looking. That's all I have from you, so it's mine. You won't leave me alone because I had to find it, right? That's the only thing that makes sense. You're telling me something."