ONE: Leah
It felt like dying, she assumed.
She hadn't ever died, so she couldn't be sure, but the way the raindrops plummeted from the sky, only to explode upon reaching the ground seemed to her like a ceremonial massacre, an unstoppable slaughter.
She felt sorry for those little quivering gems, because they had no idea that soon would splatter onto the ground, shattering and spreading into a million different places. But she knew, and she could only watch.
It was stupid, and Leah knew it, too, but for some reason, she hadn't been able to think of anything else for the past quarter hour. She had been sitting on her windowsill for a while, watching the rainfall. It was mesmerizing, and on a day like that one, there was nothing better to do.
An ear shattering clap of thunder caused Leah to jump and drop her mug of tea all over the hardwood floor of her bedroom. She rose to her feet and grabbed an old tee shirt out of her laundry bin to mop up the mess. Above her laundry bag, hung her calendar, and when she saw the date, she froze, forgetting the spilled tea and not flinching at the boom of thunder that rattled her home.
September 25th.
The anniversary of the day her picture perfect world was disturbed, bent, twisted and finally broken. In a haze, Leah bent down to pick up the soft, cotton shirt and watched while it's color transformed from a friendly grey to an intense black as it soaked up the spilled tea.
But it was too hard to pretend. She dropped the t-shirt out the window and watched it fall, just as the rain had, she watched it twist and turn in mid-air until it landed on the roof of a passing car and was driven away into the distance. In her rage, Leah approached her worn wooden desk. On it sat her homework, her laptop, some scattered drawings she had started, but failed to complete, and an old album filled to bursting with photos of her childhood.
She opened it to the first page. There lay her mother, age twenty-eight at this point, on a hospital bed beaming as she held her new baby girl in her arms, on the next page, her father kissing his newborn daughter on the head, as the little baby cried, cold, afraid, and confused. There were a few pictures of her as a tiny baby, and then, once her brother, Asher, was born, the family photos began.
1996: Leah sees her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Glass, sitting next to one another, her head on his shoulder, him holding a tiny version of Leah and her holding Asher.
1999: After skipping a few years forward, she sees the changes begin. Leah and Asher are toddling on unsure feet in front of their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Glass are holding hands, in a formal, unloving manner.
2005: This picture was taken just a year before Leah and Asher noticed anything strange about their parents at all. Leah and Asher are shown leaning on one another looking fresh faced, happy and youthful. Mr. and Mrs. Glass are sitting beside Asher, and there is an unmistakable empty space between the two of them.
2007: Looking back, Leah sees that the photo taken in 2007 sums up her family perfectly, a group of four people, who deny pain and sadness and reality. A sorry excuse for a family. Leah and Asher stand in between their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Glass are standing on either side of their teenage children, smiling at the camera with fake, forced, smiles on both of their faces, looking just as uncomfortable as Leah felt looking at the picture three years later.
2009: For this unusual year, there are two photographs, the first one shows Mr. Glass standing between two mush older looking versions of Leah and Asher, ones with fashionable clothes, makeup, expensive cell-phones sticking out of their pockets, popular sneakers, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends. Mr. Glass has a posed smile on his face, one meant to show that nothing at all was wrong, that he was fine. In the second one, we see the former Mrs. Glass, Ms. Cruz, standing, like a plastic doll between a teenage boy of 13, distant from his family but popular at his school amongst his friends, and girls, and a tall, thin, popular 15 year old young woman. Both are completely unrecognizable from their happy childhood selves. A tall man of twenty-nine years stands just behind her forty-six year old mother, his arm hanging over her shoulder, tan, young and muscular, standing half a foot taller than her.
