Between the Perennial Blooms || Paul Lahote

Six | Anemone

"There's a monster at the end of this story. It's the blank page where the story ends and leaves you alone with yourself and your thoughts."
—r.m. | Murderer's Maze

• • •

It was the tears blurring her vision that caused her to stumble. On the verge of a full-blown panic attack, Bailey had taken off through the forest, barely paying attention to the direction she was going as she ran desperately past the trees and the bushes and the flowers. A part of her remained convinced that the faster and farther she ran from the spot Bella had broken her heart, the easier it would fair to escape the pain. Her chest felt both heavy and empty, her lungs both burdened and breathless, and as she recalled her sister's harsh words from just minutes before, she cried even harder. Bailey could only remember one other time when she had heard such cruel words directed her way, and much like the case with she and Bella, it had been none other than her own flesh-and-blood that had chipped away at a piece of her heart.

"The girl needs her mother," Edith Higginbotham stated urgently as she sat at the kitchen table. The landline had been put on speaker as she sat there with her red-horned reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose while she repeatedly slapped forever stamps onto the top right-hand corners of envelopes that held bills tucked away inside them. "She needs normalcy."

"Are we really going to have this conversation again, mother?" Renée Dwyer sighed exasperatedly over the phone.

Bailey perked up at the sound of her mother's voice, fully aware that her Gran would be furious if she saw the thirteen year old girl pressed against the wall on the other side of the kitchen doorway, but unable to curb her burning curiosity. Her mother didn't call often, but when she did, it always ended in the same loud argument between her and her Gran.

"Yes we are, daughter." Her Gran rolled her eyes. "I'm an old woman living in the middle of the desert who still eats out of homemade clay pots. Bailey doesn't need that; Bailey doesn't deserve that."

"Well what do you expect me to do?" Renée exclaimed sharply. "Put her on a plane and fly her to Phoenix? Shove another bed beside Bella's and tell them to share? I don't have room for her, Mom. That was the whole reason you wanted to take her in the first place."

With an indignant grunt and narrowed eyes, Edith slapped her palm over the last stamped envelope in the pile. "I offered to help you raise both of them, not take on a new daughter of my own! I'm eighty-three years old for Christ's sake! How much longer do you expect me to be around?"

"You act like you're about to keel over any second now, you dramatic old woman." Renée scoffed.

"Well I'm most certainly not immortal, my dear," Bailey's Gran spat. "The point is, Bailey's beyond beautiful, smart, and talented. But while she's all those things and more, she's lonely Renée. And I'm simply not enough for her. Not anymore."

"Do you not want to take care of her anymore? Is that what this is about? Are you trying to get rid of her?"

"That's not what I'm saying and you know it, Renée Marie! I love Bailey! She's like the second daughter I always wanted!"

"Well that's good then, because she's the second daughter I never did."

Then after a poignant click the line went silent.

Bailey had always felt the saying 'sticks and stones' proved something akin to a bold-face lie. She had been hurt before. From getting her ankle tangled in a coil of loose barbed wire when she was seven to breaking her arm in three places falling off the roof when she was twelve, she knew what it was like to experience pain. However, nothing had ever come close to the hurt she felt at the hands of her own mother, and now at the hands of her own sister.