Journey's Child

Prologue

It was a simple painting of a seascape with dark blue waves rolling in under a slate sky. A young girl, she's twelve but small for her age, is walking along the shoreline. Her khaki shorts and light blue shirt flail around her scrawny limbs in the steady breeze. Her short red hair is cut in a jaw length bob that blows around her freckled face. She's dragging a stick behind her. It leaves a wavy trail marking where she's been as she heads towards a darkening sky, laden with heavy, thick clouds. She is frozen in mid-stride and I want to tell her to turn back. I want to warn her of the nightmare that lies ahead.

*

A high-pitched scream brings me back to the present. The kettle blows clouds of steam from its spout as I rush to grab it off the stove. I make myself a cup of mint tea, and settle on the couch in front of the painting my boyfriend hung over the fireplace the night before. The picture came via UPS a day earlier with a note saying that the artist had bequeathed it to me. Now, looking up at the acrylic on canvas painting, I am filled with many emotions sparked by persistent memories that are mostly traumatic. They were born that summer when I was twelve.

Sighing heavily I shake my head and try to untangle too many confusing thoughts. The child in the painting is me and the artist, Thaddeus Squire, was my friend back in Drakes Harbor when I was twelve.

It was painted just before that terrible August night when everything changed for my mother Alisha, Thaddeus, and me. "Sometimes it takes a nightmare to wake us up," my mother would say in retrospect... and wake us up it did.

*

Hot days were rare on the Oregon coast. Even in mid-August, the sun would work up a sweat trying to move the thermometer out of the 70's. The seaside towns loosely strung along the northern coastline were far from tropical. The beaches weren't spread with white sand. There were no turquoise tides rolling in under azure skies or light breezes skipping across the shoreline.

The coastal town of Drakes Harbor was monochrome, from its seamless dove-gray sky dappled with charcoal clouds to the deep pewter sea crashing onto the beach with violent intent. The drab weathered buildings that lined the main street might have added a bohemian touch in the seventies, but thirty years later in 2003, they stood as stark reminders of a slipping economy in the past-its-prime art colony.

*

I can still feel the persistent cool wind tugging at my clothes and hair all those thirteen years ago when I was twelve. That summer back in 2003, I was to embark on the most lonely, painful and terrifying journey of my life.

An envelope that came enclosed with the painting has my first name written on it, well my nickname Gilly. I haven't opened it. I'd been told almost seven months ago that Thaddeus was terminally ill but the knowing and the feeling are two very different things. I can't bring myself to open his letter. I can't bear to have our last communication in the past tense; not yet anyway.

There's another package I haven't opened. I received it by mail over a month ago. It arrived on the thirteenth anniversary of the terrible awful thing, unnamed for all these years. This one is from Alisha, my mother. It's been sitting in the extra bedroom collecting dust until this morning when I brought it out and set it next to the letter from Thad. My mother and I have had a rocky relationship for years. I haven't spoken with her in almost six months and then it was a short conversation, forced and uncomfortable. The truth is, she's tried to have a relationship with me and I haven't reciprocated.

Well, there's no time like the present. I need to put some ghosts to rest.

I'll start with Alisha's package...

nnP}ae