Sweet Adaline

Chapter Twenty-Nine

On the other end of the door was baleful serenity. The warm amber glow of lamplight diffused from opposite ends of the room. Paul Anka crooned "You Are My Destiny" on the radio at a moderate volume on the radio.
Adaline closed the door softly behind her, careful not to draw attention to her entry. Bold luminance poured out of the kitchen, where she most certainly expected him to be. She knew she would have to face him, but there was no need to rush into it. First, her mind was set on one goal. Anything else was purely consequential. First, she needed her guitar. She was to page Angela as soon as she had it and needed to be picked up. Happily, Angela had offered to wait down the road a ways, keeping herself occupied.
She moved swiftly to the stairs, listening carefully as she made each ascending step. Her senses were overwhelmed by the crisp atmosphere of the house and the muffled sound of the rain, pummeling the ceramic shingles of the roof. She was halfway up when thunder cracked, shattering her firm composure. For a moment she stood immobilAngieed completely, reestablishing her balance.
She began again with sure steps, up to the top of the stairs, holding tightly to the banister. More thunder rolled distantly, followed by a flicker of darkness through the house. It wasn't fear, she told herself, that tensed her stomach and squeezed the air from her lungs. It was concentration. And it was anxiousness. Though she knew she didn't want to, it was time to face her fears and her hatred. It was because of this man that she was brought back here, to meet Angela, and soon, to meet her true father. She believed in Jack, in his purpose in her life. And she believed that in some way, he must care for her. He must have and so he must still.
Still there was no sign of him, no sound came from the kitchen. No bottle against the counter top, set down after pouring another drink. No clatter of ice in the glass. There was no shuffle to come see who might have come in. Only the symphony of the storm. Only the eerie whistle of wind through the eaves and hush of rain all around, and Paul Anka crooning You Are My Destiny again as it repeated. That was our song, I recall. Penny made a CD while we were in college. So long ago, and maybe only days. She told how I was her destiny. I was why she would exist. And when it played, she'd take my hand in both of hers and hang on tightly, as though I'd slip away into the notes, should she let go. In later years, two, maybe, his declaration came with another kind of ache.
She stepped in through the open door to her room, switched on the light to find her Gibson acoustic atop her bed, not where she had left it. The pick remained, woven in and out of the strings.
Quickly she uncovered its hard black case from beneath a pile of clothing in her closet, and rushed it to her bed. With almost one fluid movement, her guitar was inside and she had closed the lid, locking it tight by the latches. It was a truly premium case Foster had given her. Water tight and solid. It was possibly the single most impressive case she seen, and never thought, for all it's value, it would ever be tested in those capacities.
She looked on, around the room. No matter what would happen next, she did not have any expectations of seeing that room again. It was her moment for a brief, informal goodbye. It wasn't the pictures on the walls or remaining clothes she'd left on the ground after ransacking her closet. It wasn't even her bed, the one thing she always could return to for safety, when everything else had failed her. In fact, even it betrayed her.
It was the "idea" that she said her goodbye to. The idea of a child's home. A room that was her own. A place that could be hers, and when she needed, could find solace in the fantasy that everything was normal there. There, she could close out the copious bitterness that would always wait for her on the other side of her door. Her room had become her sanctuary, more so for her than for most any other girl.
She bid farewell to this child's illusion and stepped out, past the threshold into the daunting  and limitless unknown. The lights flickered again from the tumultuous storm that grew outside.
"I thought about it. About smashing it against that desk your mother paid so much for. Of course I knew what it would do to you," said a murky voice that cracked from within the darkness of the room across from hers.
Adaline stood rigid, frozen by his rotten tone. Now she was frightened. She faced the lion's den. She did so with courage, but her courage quickly dissipated by the crackle of his words. She was in his world now, and the storming world outside would not be welcoming. So she stood silent, praying. Praying for anything that could end this moment. "I'm not ready!" cried out again and again in her mind.
"Don't you want to know why I didn't?" He spoke from the shadows.
"Because you're better than that." She replied boldly. The air was still for a moment, and then laughter that wasn't kind. And it wasn't jovial, but arrogant and dark as the shadows he lingered in.
"No," the word came like a frigid gust across the hall with every wave as resonant as when it left his room, as if he stood right before her. He had brought his darkness to her.
The pings of bed springs sang from the room.
"Me and that guitar have a history," he said with a voice that grew closer and colder.
"Really," she said, forcing insolence out of her fright.
His face was shallow and hardened by the booze and a night without sleep, as he stepped out of the shadows, to the threshold across from her. The hallway light painted the edges of his features, leaving the rest to stark shadow.
"Really." He replied with arrogant conviction. "It was when your boyfriend gave you that guitar, that I was broken. My dignity, and my humanity." he slurred from the drink. "That's what you took away from me...then. And he gave you a pretty guitar." Jack looked up from the shadows, from the vacancy, with detestation. "Please, tell me you don't know what I mean. Adaline."
Adaline stared into his caustic expression, hollowed by the things he'd said. It was what he could not know that tore through her veins. Did he know?!
"I don't," she took a step forward for the stairs, "and you're drunk."
He stepped forward into the hall and she froze.
"I am drunk. I was drunk when I found her little book, too. I think you can imagine what I thought then." He fashioned what might have been a grin, in poor taste. "It was...illuminating, Adaline."
Adaline shuddered, petrified. She could only think of the pages she'd left inside it. She said nothing.
"You probably thought I never knew anything. Oblivious Jack." He bobbed his head in a patronAngieing malaise. "You're just like her, Ad." He stared at her with contempt. "Well I did know something. We were having one hell of a time trying to have a kid. She just wanted one so bad." He settled against the door frame and his glare drifted. "I would have settled for a cat."
"I realAngieed I was celibate. Do you know what that means, Adaline?" He asked blandly. "Well, celibacy is when a man can't...reproduce. So when she got pregnant, I obviously knew...what I was.
"I'm not an idiot, contrary to what you obviously believe, Adaline." His empty stare burrowed under her skin and lingered.
"I never said..." She started, but he took a step closer, cutting off her concentration.
"ElAngiea was a writer, she'd write down every little thought she had. It was sweet," he smiled. "She had so many stories. She told them to me when I needed something to take me away from my career. Your mother was the thing that kept me together. Kind of ironic, really. It took someone so neurotic as her..., and trust me, she was more difficult than your little divisive head can imagine.
"But maybe, just maybe, I was worse. She used to say that, Adaline. She was an icicle when...well, when she was..." His stare was lost, passed through her into some ghostly recollection of the woman he loved. "But I loved her." He narrowed his eyes to reality. "I loved her, Adaline. It was something I'll never get back!" He shouted in a volume quieter than when he spoke. "No Angela or sleep talking rendition of her can be her." Spittle glistened on his lower lip. He snarled, maddened. "You know what I mean!"
"I loved her too." Adaline said evasively, with bitter tears too proud to fall, collected in her labyrinthine eyes. "She was my mother."
He watched her with cold expectation, waiting for some emotional display, but let go nothing but a silent sneer. 
"She would put me to sleep with her stories. They became excellent. But, you must know how great a writer she was. So it seems...
"But after long enough, anything wears on you. Ask anyone. They'll tell you what raising a child can do to a marriage. We managed, though. We did so much for you, Adaline. We gave up so much. And after enough years of setting ourselves aside, we couldn't be around each other.
"Who do you think she blamed, Adaline?" He asked. "Who do you think she blamed for all her guilt?"
Adaline was hurt, receptive and insulted by his selfish implications.
"Me." She replied compliantly and cold.
"Me, Adaline," he corrected her. "She blamed me. And when she cried when I fucked her, what did I do, Adaline?"
She shook her head with poorly concealed nervousness.
"I stopped. But that was wrong! What was the right answer, Adaline?!" he asked as his voice broke. "You know this Adaline! You know it very well!" he waited, stepped forward, and stared drunken on the verge of rage.
"Keep going! That was what Elisa wanted, Adaline! She wanted me to hurt her! Why did she want me to hurt her, Adaline?!" He said with another bold step. She shook her head, leaning back.
"She needed me to hurt her so she could be right. So the reluctant father could be her failed mistake. She made me do it to her so she could be emptied out. And it killed her heart.
"But that's just part of it, Adaline. Everything I did. Every kiss, every look. Every second I spent with her. She helped me to realAngiee, Adaline, that I never really cared about her. That I couldn't love her, because she was empty and nothing could love something that couldn't love itself.
"But I could." He smiled through strained eyes. "Your mother was persistent. She wore me down.
"I'm sorry Jack. I wish..." She started to say, trying to calm him as his shoulders pulled back predatorily.
"I wish a lot of things, Adaline. I wish I never tried to be there for you. To sit by your bedside. Tell you stories of her, the beautiful things she was. I stomached my blame for you, and hoped to give you her love. That was all she wanted for you. Love. She was too broken though. She was too empty. She taught me that.
"Her stories got colder, about loss and dying. They all became the same, and I listened to them. That was all I could do, Adaline!" Jack pursed his lips on the verge of crumbling. "I listened because I loved, but I hated those stories! And what do you know about what I endured?! HUH?!"
"I don't know anything, Jack. Please. I'm sorry for whatever I did. I'm sorry!" She cried out as her back reached the doorframe and she nearly collapsed. A crack simultaneous with a slice of lightning, struck her ears, and her heart fired sharp fright through her soul.
"And I'm sitting at your bedside, just trying to care for you. It was just you and I. It was up to me to make the best of it. But then you start to talk." Jack looked into her eyes and through her. He was watching it happen beyond her. His hands shook with anger and fear from his spirit's confusion. "You start to talk, Adaline. And you sound so foreign, and you sound so familiar. You enunciated so well." The rain struck harder against the windowpane.
"In your sleep you tell me her story. You know the one. The one about the celibate King. You remember? His queen, well, she can't have children, so he locks her far from him in the castle. In her grief she plants a tree outside his window to remind him of her love, then throws herself from the tower. Then the crops all fail in soil as infertile as he is, but the tree that bears no fruit grows tall outside his window." Without notice or flicker, the lights of the house vanished, and the ignored sounds of everything, ceased to exist. The air, no longer condition. The hum of electrical flow died, as did the hypnotAngieing repetition lent by Anka's rendition, that had played more times than Adaline could count, were she not stricken with growing terror.
"And the kingdom grows weak and they hate their King. And the tree continues to grow. In the night, the wind, it whispers through the leaves, her name. Every night, louder and louder, until finally, when his kingdom has fallen apart, he goes mad and hangs himself from the tallest branch of the tree Queen Elisa had planted for her King.
"I thought I would never hear her tell that story again. You have your mother's tongue, Adaline." Jack stepped forward, pushing her through the door. A magnificent electrical spectacle poured through the night sky, giving light to a face no longer restrained by reason, for a second, and then vanished into wicked shadow.
"And then the things you said after that. Things I've never heard come out of any woman's mouth before her." The musky cologne of vodka and sweat bore closer in the pitch black room. "No woman but ElAngiea."
"And when I found those pages in her book, I realAngieed you were the tree, and she was right, Adaline. I did hang myself. On your lies, on your body and my sick hopeless hallucinations." He had come so close she could feel his breath on top of her. That familiar smell. "But I don't have any hopes now, Adaline. And you don't have any lies. Her legs hit the foot of her bed, and fractions of light reflected from the rain, into the fire of his eyes. "And you don't have anymore lies. So Adaline, are you going to be so kind?"
She swung with all of her might, striking hard in the throat and dove past him. She tripped on his foot and her face struck the desk. He cursed, rasped. Dazed, she pulled herself to her feet, but he grabbed her. Adaline kicked hard into shadow, striking nothing, as she was pulled off balance.
He knelt down. "I'm not trying to hurt you, Elisa. It is Elisa, right?" He hissed. The halo of his head stood right before her. She swung her hand, dragging claws down the flesh of his face, and screamed with everything in her.
With a buggered whelp, Jack stumbled back against the wall, disorientated.
Adaline leapt to her feet and escaped, snatching up the case on her way. In a moment of forethought, she remembered his keys in a dish by the garage, where he left them every evening. She snatched them up too and burst out through the door, and into his Audi, locking it.
The adrenaline electrified her, transforming her sheer terror into velocity. She couldn't breathe, think, but only act. Convulsive hands thrust the key with the black rubber grip, into the ignition and cranked it. As soon as it turned over, animating the engine, she dropped in reverse and pounded the gas. The squeal of new tires on smooth wet concrete echoed and sent fierce reverberations off the walls of the garage. Once the hot rubber grasped the concrete, her body lurched forward the car shot out of the open garage, onto the shimmering black road, and she spun the wheel. She looked to her side as she threw it in drive, to see Jack staring back at her. She spun off into the night.
By sheer dumb luck, which is ethereal guidance, she plowed through the storm blindly. Wave after wave crushed any image or light that flashed into sight as the wiper blades swept past intensely. She sat rigidly clenching the wheel with a deathly aghast expression because even she was uncertain if any of this had just happened. Off to the right was a large shopping plaza. The vehicle fishtailed with the turn she cut sharply, nearly sending her into a light post. She threw it in park and sat idling in the white noise that hammered her senses. It washed over her, protectively, resolving her terror. She pulled a choppy breath and collapsed into a storm of tears and sobs, more brutal than the one that spilled outside.
Adaline gasped to draw air into her trembling chest. She searched the dAsh to orient herself with the reality of where she was. In a way, she tried to anchor her perception to understand what it was she'd become, as she knew at that moment she was changed, transformed, undone.
Her eyes darted around the car's cabin, only to notice a black cellular phone identical to the one Angela had given her, plugged into the cigarette lighter. It suddenly struck her and she pulled out the number to that cell phone, which was still with Angela.
Just the way Danny told her, she punched in the digits, sent the call and waited. It rang once. She shivered. She was alone in the frigid moment. It rang again. A cry was welling up, tensing her throat, creeping, then she heard Angela's voice. She shattered on the phone. Everything was out, released into the waves that soared through the air, passing through a world that seemed too distant to care about a girl. Just a girl. There are worse things in this world.
But right in that moment, a girl stronger than anyone I had ever met, had succumb to fear faster than the hail that began to strike the hood like fists. She was shivering too hard to respond.
Once my mother found her, she gave my sister her car, in exchange for her husband's. She told her to go somewhere safe. She told her to find me, but Adaline needed something other than a brother's love. She needed redemption and she thought she could find it in a boy.
She wanted to tell him she loved him. She was sorry that she was what she was. She would need to explain, but he needed to know. No more secrets. He could love her for the ugly thing she'd become, back when she was so young and she pushed a dream past illusion, into sweat and first blood.
They were clandestine, star-crossed in love. She could tell him. That's what she thought as she called. But when he answered, something else was formed and sung through the phone like a blood thirsty chorus.
"He hurt me, Brian! I'm scared! He hurt me!" she cried. She was no longer in control. Adaline opened a door in that moment, to irreversible fate by a chain of events that began with these words.
"Come home to me, Adaline. I'm never going to let him hurt you again. Come home to me now and let me fix everything." His voice was clear, with a tone of certainty. It was true. He knew he could fix everything.
The rain outside faded into infinity as Brian removed his mother's gun from a bedside drawer. It was loaded for him, kept that way. And though his lessons with it were brief, he did know how to turn off the safety. In Brian's hypnotAngieed, guilt driven, hate ridden fractured mind, that was all that he needed to know. He thrust it into his pants like a veteran gangster.
A surge of something beautifully dreadful shot up his spine, numbing him in a way that even I can't define.
When Adaline arrived, Verona was a very different place. Though her hands wrapped round his neck, and her cold damp body pressed against his, between Brian and Adaline was a void. They were planets in contrary orbits, aligned to collide, drifting away, and yet closer already. It was a beautiful night to die, if I don't say so myself.