Staccato

Of Beginnings

Before I could gather my wits and put up some pathetic defense to that, our parents walk into the family room.

They both look a little harried, in their formal outfits; it seems like they were engaged in some serious conversation until the moment they walked into the room.

They break into grins, however, when they see us all together in the room.

"Hey, what are you guys up to?" dad asks mildly, as he and mom settle down on the sofa. Mom lets out a weary sigh, throws her clutch purse aside and leans back, sagging against the throw cushion.

"Nothing, we were just talking about Halloween," Laurie lets him know with her usual chirpiness.

"Mom looks like she had a long day." Lilly notes lightly.

"Oh it really was, honey," mom opens her eyes and gives Lilly a tired smile.

"How did the talk go?" inquires Leon, leaning forward with an elbow on a knee as he looks at our parents from where he is sat, Louie leaning with him, their huge mess of afro hair almost merging into one.

"Not good." dad says, looking quite grave and shaking his head.

The light in mom's eyes just goes off. She looks down at her lap, seeming to brood.

"What do you mean not good?" frowns Louie.

"Well, they keep stalling taking real actions with these talks," dad says sadly, his hands automatically doing their habituated gestures, "Promises to raise a hundred billion by 2020, promises to cut emissions, the usual jazz - a lot of these promises which they'll never keep. They still have to raise the funds that they said they would in the Kyoto protocol."

Mom lets out a cheerless, almost dark chuckle. She looks up from her lap, as though coming out of a troubling trance. Turning to dad, she seems to go right back into the mood she was in when they were talking before they walked into the room. "You are skirting around the real topic, Stephen." she looks at us, "It's not like they don't know what certain people are up to."

"You mean Tyler?" asks Lilly.

There, that ominous name.

It sends a rushing fire through me. As it always, always had.

It's a queasy, foreboding, yet gripping feeling that accompanies this name. This name that's been an old, familiar name to our family since before the day I was born.

"Yes, him." Mom sighs. "He has, as we've learnt from a source, successfully managed to lobby some-" she wants to curse, her voice wavers with controlled anger, but we've never heard her curse in our lifetimes.

"-Some absolute traitors in the congress. And now he gets to be the ghostwriter of laws that would push the US into more dependence on countries like Russia for fuel. Export import laws for fossil fuel trade? More relaxed. Funding that would help research and development of clean energy? All slashed."

"So basically he's trying to screw us over." says Leon.

Because we are the ones who both own and have heavy investments in clean energy producing endeavours - solar, wind, tidal, and even a laboratory that researches in antimatter energy in collaboration with Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider right here in New York.

"I swear to god," mom mutters, shaking her head to herself, seeming to forget us for a moment as she gets carried away with anger. "I swear to god, Stephen, just let me deal with this- this absolute fiend - he's going to influence Paul more than he already has! Just let me give Doug all those papers that'd put him in jail-"

"No, Fiona." Dad looks at her imploringly. He gives her a significant look, accompanied with disbelief. As if she's said something that she shouldn't.

"What?" we all almost chorus as one.

"Wait, you're trying to build a case against him?"

Our mom is a lawyer and a Harvard Law School graduate. She very well can build a case against him. That's not the question. The question is, is she really going to?

Because we're not sure if we want her to.

"Mom, let Mr. Schultz deal with it," Lilly says quietly. She looks a little ashen all of a sudden. "You know how powerful Tyler is."

"What?" Leon gives her a pissed look. "Mom, I say you go build that case against him. Guy has a lot of dirt on him! Schultz has been working his ass off since ages over it and he hasn't been progressing!"

"He's doing things that'd directly counter our undertakings." Louie says. "How do we simply fold our arms and sit back and let him do it to us?" 

"Louie! Do you even realise what position you're trying to put us in? He's, he's dangerous." Lilly's voice drops into a whisper suddenly.

There, that same feeling.

"You know what he did to poor Mr. Lawrence back in 1990-"

That chill.

"-to acquire his assets so he could merge it with his and-"

A feeling.

"-start that stupid freaking paper industry of his that's earning in billions today-"

Of premonition, of ache. Of echoes from afar.

Him in a dark robe..

One clop of hoof, then the other, on a leaf-littered ground-

"-he fucking had the guy killed!"

Perhaps it is the shock of getting caught off-guard with those razor-sharp and lightning-quick images that reeled through my head that makes me speak.

"Efrim's coming home tomorrow."

Or perhaps it's the memory of sitting next to mom in the front porch, aching for him - my child voice echoing in me - that makes me look at her as I say that.

A hush seems to fall. Everywhere's a staggered silence.

Mom is looking at me with soulfully wide, unblinking eyes, lips parted as if she drew a breath in stunned surprise.

I realise that it's the same look Mrs Tyler had when she'd stared at me that evening, before she'd left the hall suppressing tears.

~*~