Destination 1974

Chapter 13

| The white horse is motionless, cursed to never move with a carousel. |

~***~

It's a nice home. Not too big, not too small. We walk out of the truck and head up the front porch. Clyde keeps scratching his beard and bending over to the side as he walks.

I wonder what's so bad about his sister?

He holds his fist up to the door and knocks the frame of the screen door pretty hard. Instantly, there's fumbling noises from inside, and the door opens to greet us to a woman. Her golden cross necklace sparkles from the porch light, and her emerald eyes search us for a second. "Clyde!" she opens the screen door and half-hugs Clyde with one arm before looking at me, "and you must be Mona."

"In the flesh," I mumble with a toothy grin. They both stare blankly at me for a moment, and I cough out awkwardly. "It's nice to meet you - uhh - er - ehh --" I quickly look at Clyde, silently screaming at him for not telling me her name before I got here.

"Donna," she holds her hand out, and I sigh with relief as I shake her hand with a hearty smile.

"Donna," I repeat slowly, making sure the name sticks in my memory.

"Come in, we don't want the neighbours freaking out on us for breaking curfew," Donna says with a light chuckle; Clyde and I enter her home after her. She looks young; too young. She doesn't look much older than me, actually. Maybe she just looks good for her age, or their parents had her a decade after Clyde.

The first thing I notice is a horse figurine sitting beside a floor lamp. I follow Clyde, and he offers me a seat on the couch, "make yourself comfortable..." he mumbles before swaggering into the kitchen with Donna following behind. The white horse, directly across from me now, is motionless; cursed to never move with a carousel. Its eyes are from hell; completely bloodshot, and its mouth is open like it's screaming in agony. I unintentionally shiver at the wooden horse before averting my eyes to anything else. A man walks in from the kitchen, and he smiles at me. He looks like Clark Kent; very clean-shaven, big glasses, and his hair is neatly combed. To say he's handsome would be an understatement.

"Hello, I'm Frank. Donna's husband," he reaches a hand out to me, and I stand up to shake it.

"I'm Mona. It's nice to meet you," I reply with a smile as I firmly shake his hand. His grip is powerful; he must be a lawyer or something with authority. I hesitantly sit back down and search around the room for something else to look at. I take notice of an old photo containing a bunch of children on the side table beside me. I smile and pick it up, pointing it at Frank.

"Who's in this?"

He sits down beside me, and leans over to point at a pre-teen girl, "that's Donna," I look at her picture, and tilt my head while squinting to make out her features. She's too tiny in the photograph to see exactly how she looks. Frank's finger slides across the paper, and stops at a teenage boy with a deadpan expression, "and that's Clyde." I snort out accidentally and look up to see Clyde and Donna standing by the entrance of the living room. I hold the picture out to him and smirk at him. My eyes catch the writing on the bottom of the photo, barely cut off by the frame: St. James Orphanage, 1963.

I pull the photo closer to make sure I read that right. I look up at Clyde, and he weakly smiles at me as he takes the photo from my nimble fingers.

"You were..."

"Adopted. Both of us," Clyde looks over to Donna, and they share an awkward smile. Clyde puts the photo down and looks back at me, "we were adopted together a few months after this photo was taken."