Sweet Adaline

Chapter Eighteen

"It's over!" She declared on the phone. "I left him, Ashley! I don't know if I was right or...I'm so mixed up." Her call was abrupt. We hadn't spoken for weeks. She didn't even call to hound me for the rent two weeks prior. The throbbing pain from my wrist made focusing on her difficult, but the words themselves really didn't matter. It would be as it is every time. What might be difficult for anyone else in a relationship, had become overwhelming to her. This was how she does it and I figured, she'd decided his time was up. She'd declare that she had to escape with her remnants of sanity. It's never simple as boredom. The same face, the same back pressed against her in the morning, the same bland disagreements about this and that. Vacations, dinner, the like.
But with my mother, it's never that simple at all. Angela is the bold but inevitable victim. Our family martyr, patient but always betrayed. Let's not forget, she's done it all for me.
Either they're drunken abusers or just sodomites that refuse to take the lord into their life. That one was humorous, when she was born again for stint. Then the Baptist Preacher she married next turned out to be more vile than the last guy. It's what she'd say, at least. I didn't care enough take a stand, but one thing I am sure of. The man liked his porn, and he liked it with leather. Boys have a nose for these things and I sniffed it out in our first month there. That was over the course of my last few teen years. I left that house expeditiously, and a year later she followed. Those were her past selections.
Jack was different. Through Adaline's pen, I've known Jack far longer than my mother could have. I was invested, and didn't like. None of this quite felt right, and I realAngieed I needed to finish Adaline's
So I hung on the other line nauseous with my much deserved migraine, wishing it was just a another hangover. I waited to hear to excuse to jump-ship, anxious to know just what she'd found. Did she see him, finally, for what Adaline saw and what I was beginning to see?
"Calm down." I said in the softest tone I could manage through the gravel of my morning voice. "I'll meet you for lunch. Just give me an hour." I said. The afternoon was clouded, but the time never matters when Angela's life meets disarray.
"Just meet me for coffee. I can't eat. I'm far too upset." She whined. I sighed with relief. I wasn't so sure I could stomach much either.
"Perfect. The place on 1st in an hour." It was a coffee house I'd grown familiar with as a student at the U of A. The place was modern and gave the illusions of complexity. Although the espresso was always burnt and half the tables wobbled with rickety mismatched chairs, it was a great place for studying and complaining.
"Yes. Fine. I have a few things to pack still. I don't think I can do much more today though. I'm a wreck, dear. Just an utter wreck." She sighed on the phone. Her melodramatic panache was engaged.
"I'll call when I'm leaving." I replied
"Don't take too long."
"All right, mother. Goodbye." And I hung up the phone.
Adaline was still struggling with sleep. I came to her side, knelt by my couch and watched her sleep for a moment. She was an anomaly, more so today than the day before. What she'd done for me, I could even barely understand. And that she so assertively referred to me as her brother, was as comforting as it was curious.
She spoke from her sleep, eyes still darting back and forth beneath their lids. And so I listened close. One should never listen to somebody speak in their sleep. These whispered, unconscious muttering always reveal more than wakefully, they ever would (or could). This is rarely helpful. Still, I convinced myself that perhaps, she was waking and actually speaking to me. Sometimes it only takes a half-mast line of bullshit for me to give the reigns to my curiosity.
I know this and still I listened.
"It wasn't fair," were the words I first made out from her whispers, in a tone unlike hers, but more familiar. A subtle southern accent rounded her words. Then she muttered more, too scrambled for me to understand. I listened more closely, no longer passively. "...took him first."
Wind howled through the overhang outside and rang the chime next-door. It felt as though I was a part of what she was trying to say.
"Who?" I asked softly by her side. "Who did they take first?"
"I had to. It was my fault. Alley... I didn't mean to let go. I didn't mean to let go," she muttered, shifting uncomfortably on the sunken cushions of the couch. My thoughts scattered. As if lightening had just struck in front of me. 'What is this?!' I thought in silence, mouth agape, but stoned in disarray.
Alley. She said Alley. She could never have known.
"Penny?" I whispered "Why? Penny?" I was drawn into something impossible.
"I'm so sorry Alley." She said again, with pained expression. "I left you. I should have said so. I couldn't live without you."
I was dumbstruck. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know why. It was Penny, not a doubt in my mind. More than anything, I needed her to stay longer. Just a little longer.
"I forgive you Penny. I left. I'm sorry." I said restrained. My throat clenched and my nostrils flared, the final fleeting attempt to hold back something more.
"I am poison." She said. She was pale, just as she'd always been. The revelations of a passed spirit roll out under evolved. They fall like sediment, to the floor where you are, concentrated and heavy like stones of guilt. This is the birth of transition, that is, when we accept our life. We witness our decisions and where our paths led us, extracted from the heart that has protected us from seeing ourselves, we see honestly as this essence. Unlike me, how I witness freely now, she took her life. As it is in suicide, she fights the moments of that decision, and may eternally. Her spirit refuses to let go. Still she tries.
Only now do I understand. It's the very same as it is in life. Only the living, however, can make the choice to forgive themselves. For some, living in hell seems more peaceful than living awake, accepting our humanity. That's what the name for our nature, being prone to "mistakes" so that we can grow. Some growth is just too terrifying. But that's just humanity.
With all her power, every shred of twisted energy she can gather in death, she will eternally strive for forgiveness from me for what she's done. She'll do this in vain however, because even as we spoke there in that room and I forgave her, she couldn't take it. She's damned by her own concrete condemnation of herself, so she never can escape these thoughts, and in this afterlife, thought is existence.
"If ever that was true, it isn't anymore. It will always be you Pen. Penny Page, I'll never love anyone the way I love you." I said this, and even now, myself a mere essence, diffused and liberated, still I feel the absence of her. I feel the way a living man must feel, my phantom heart aches to be with her.
"Protect her. He'll take her life. He'll take her from you too. Now, she needs you right now." She said. Then there was nothing more.
"Who? Penny, who?" I asked. My torso crawled with chills from a frigid breeze beneath my skin. "Who?! Adaline?" I demanded anxiously, frozen by her prophecy. "Who will hurt her?!" I demanded, taking hold of her and quickly letting go.
Adaline woke up, startled. Penny had left her. The girl felt more fragile and fair than she ever appeared. She groggily rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Barely woken, she was taken by surprise.
"What?! What happened?" she asked sitting up against the back of the couch still trying to gather her wits. I just watched, entranced. Rather, I was detached from whatever she was now. She was Adaline, at risk, and I was at a loss for any way to protect her. Penny was gone and I was Ash. A coward. And she, well she looked at me much the way she looked at the man she once called her father. Her eyes focused on me like artillery. "What's up Ash?" she asked, expecting a mess of an answer. Adaline knew the answer, and she didn't want me to say it. She didn't want to hear the name, Penny. She prayed it was anything else.
"Nothing. My mother called. She's leaving Jack." I said averting my eyes.
"I know. I meant to tell you last night. But, well...I just never got to it." she said. "You seemed stressed enough."
"She wants to tell me all about it, her side of the story. The usual Angela tale." I said this but knew better.
"It'll be anything but usual. You know that." she didn't look up. We both were too detached to be dignified, hiding in our own minds.
"Yeah, well...I'm just gonna get ready. I must smell like shit." I said and smiled.
She nodded, amused. "Yeah. Ya kinda do." Promptly I returned to my room. I was teeming with thoughts like desert wildfire. Thoughts that I never worked through thoroughly. I was back at that damned impasse. Was it all in my head, some hallucination. Was it my Penny? Was it some sentry from hell, sent to test whether I'd run. Like every other chance I'd had when faced with some duty. Would I fail Adaline, too. Still, I wonder. Did I? Perhaps this moment right her, will be the one I play through repeatedly, eternally. Did I fail them both?
Who would want to harm this girl, this angel that has guarded over me. If she weren't family, I'd have no doubt she was my guardian. Who was indeed the question. What sick event would end with her end, and who could be so cold? Would it be someone close, someone trusted? I don't know Jack. However disgruntled as he may be, I couldn't see him kill her, daughter or not. Who else could it be though? My mother? Hardly. This kid she adores? She is just a girl and girls can be careless with hearts and thoughts. I've read her examples. She's  hardly delicate with boys.
I had begun to see something in this idea. This boy, Brian, was reckless. There was nothing about him I liked. Adaline, however, must have seen something I couldn't. It's never so easy. There was so much to this boy that I saw in myself at that age. The impatience and carelessness were all my traits, and I never would have harmed Penny. I belonged to her and vice-versa.
More likely than any of the rest, it must be some random event. Perhaps an accident. I could keep her in my car. She'd never let me, but I could try. I'd drive her everywhere, and I could do it sober. I could do it all sober. This girl would be my only goal, my charge, and I could protect her with my life. I would, I swore, as I already had before. Only, now I knew that promise would be tested. Perhaps it would, and perhaps it was nothing more than madness. As real as the nights I carried on phone conversations with my wife in the red rocks. I needed to eat. I needed water and sleep, and I needed not to hear another word from Penny, from the beyond.
Still, I thought, what kind of man does alienates his child after the death of her mother? What had he done for Elisa to say "I do"? What had he done to make Angela say it too? Could he be the type that just can't stand a woman to leave him the way my mother said she did? And how did she? Could he be more dangerous than any of us assume?
Would he blame Adaline once again for his personal life? That seems to be the man I've read about. The type that takes no responsibility for himself, for his choices or for his ignorance. A man need not always make the right choice. He doesn't need to think pristine thoughts. He doesn't need to choose others over himself. He needs only to be a man. Do no harm.
My mind was a shattered glass on the kitchen floor. It poured out like blood in the bath and diffused. It crackled and snapped spitting spires of flame, randomly from furious embers. But for what, I'd already forgotten. Not a fire of hope. Was it the fire of life? Who would be stripped from me now and am I strong enough? I thought this from every corner of my mind. Would I even be strong enough to stop it?
The mystery became mental anarchy. It carried through my shower, and as I got ready I lost myself in it completely. This has always been my way, total immersion. I found a note on the table, instead of Adaline. I didn't expect her to still be there, but thought she would want a ride home.
"I had to go. Call me for any reason at all. Ash, I told you last night and I meant it. I don't get why I need you around. Just be there. I'm here for you. How bout this. We'll survive only for each other. Related by life! Brother, I love you!!"
She signed it. That handwriting was so warmly familiar. It was strange how her words sunk in, like ink through my paper skin. And the broad curvature of her "R"s... She felt like a part of me, lost before this lifetime but delivered for only one night, to give me a whisper of hope. I couldn't have imagined a sister. I never had. Not even when all this began. But then she wrote the word. It meant something. It meant more than I'd thought it would. I was real, ordained by more than just her saying so.