Tipping the Scales

Tipping the Scales, Chapter 35

The odor of the room almost knocked her over. 

 Her room. 

 Her odor. 

 Of all the filthy things in this filthy house, she must have been the filthiest, reeking of sweat and desperation, and the ammoniated stench of urine.

Urine...? What? That couldn't be right.

Casting around for the source, she saw that the plastic catheter tubing she'd pulled out of herself and carelessly tossed onto the bed was no longer attached to a nearly full bag, but an almost empty one. She must have kicked it, or possibly even lain on it at some point in her struggle to escape the room, because the anti-reflux valve on the bag had failed, allowing most of the contents to leak out, seeping into the mattress.

Oh no... Her iPhone!

She tip-toed across the sticky floorboards, bent over and curled the corner of the mattress up. There, still safe and dry, was her iPhone, as was her recharging kit and the video glasses. And nestled beside them, something else...

The Barbie doll Courtney had given her.

Bald and battered from being loved literally to pieces, it was dearer to her than anything other than the little girl who had parted with it, and here she had almost forgotten it existed.

As she gathered her few possessions, she noticed the pen and the few sheets of paper left over from making Courtney's packing list lying beside the trash can, so she picked them up, too, and as she did, an idea came to her.

Once again she crossed the living room, wishing with each gritty step that she was wearing shoes, or at least socks. When she hit the hallway, she hesitated, then stepped back into the master bedroom, walked to the closet and squinted at the row of shoes on Melanie's side.

All were impractical, and even without trying them on she knew every last pair would prove much too narrow for her own feet. But there had to be something...

She crossed to the dresser, pulled open Melanie's sock drawer and felt around toward the back. They were in there someplace, she knew they were... After only a moment of fumbling, she located a pair of stretch, microfiber ballerina slippers, black with little multi-colored flowers perched on the toe caps.

She stuck each of her feet in turn through the shower door to rinse the residue of her walk off their soles before pulling her finds on. Real shoes would have been preferable, but these were comfortable, they coordinated reasonably well with her sheet/dress, and they were immeasurably better than nothing at all.

Odelia smiled down at her toes, happy to see them protected at least a little from the crusty carpet, but even happier just to be able to look down and see them at all. Could it be she was still shrinking? That would be nice...

Returning to her original purpose, she stepped back into the well-lit living room and leaned the paper against the wall. Given Courtney's current reading level, the note should be no more than one short sentence of simple, familiar, easily sounded out words, but it also needed to be something that would mean something to her, not just now, but for however many years passed until they saw one another again, if indeed, they ever did. She thought for a very long time before finally writing, in large block letters:

ALWAYS KNOW THAT SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE IS WISHING YOU WELL.

Carrying the paper to Courtney's room, she laid it on top of the bed and anchored it in place with the battered Barbie, as a form of signature. In the unlikely event that Melanie, Jackson, or Brian happened upon the note before Courtney did, they would almost certainly leave it be, because they would have no idea what it meant, and probably not even realize it had been written by Odelia.