Briar Rose

~2~

Amanda Harrington has lived in Hawkins since she was 3 months old, This town is all that she has ever known.

She was always intelligent, a great student and wonderful friend and family member.  Growing up with two brothers meant that she grew up knowing how to handle boys and knowing her worth.

She knew marrying George would come back to bite her. She was in love with him at one time. They were young and when in high school, everyone thinks they are in love.  George came from money and was guaranteed a good job fresh out of college in his father's science firm, maybe it was the security or maybe it was the fact that he was handsome and told her what she wanted to hear.

Amanda always knew that their relationship had cracks and lapses, they stopped being in love a long time ago.

Briar Emily Harrington was not to blame for her father's actions, she most definitely was not to blame for the strain on the Harrington marriage.

So why did Amanda feel so sick?

When Steve was 5 years old his parents slept in separate bedrooms. When he was 7 his mother would go to book clubs and crochet circles all day, avoiding his father. And when Steve was 10 family dinners became non-existent. He always knew his parents didn't love each other and for a while, like most children in his situation, he blamed himself.

At 17 years old now he knew better than that, his parents was just destined to have a dysfunctional marriage, and Amanda always felt guilty for her son's pain.

The kitchen was silent after hearing the engine of Steve's BMD 733i roar to life and the crunch of the wheels pulling out of the drive and down the road. The silence was painful and awkward, to say the least.

There was once a time when Amanda and George would have been glad for the quality time with each other, but, that was back in the time when she still asked how his day went while greeting him with a kiss at the door, and when he would still kiss her goodnight.

Out of the corner of her eye, Amanda saw George make his way over to the glass cabinet in their kitchen and pour a whiskey, with a sigh she pulled her chair away from the table and stalked up the stairs.

She had to prepare the guest bedroom.

Briar hated hospitals with a passion, call it PTSD from her frequent and unnerving visits to them when she was young.  Briar never thought she was sick when she would go, she always felt fine, if anything the hospital visits made her feel worse. She was always put to sleep when she was there by the creepy nurses who wouldn't speak to her, only to her mother.

She did remember her doctor though, he was friendly. Dr. Owens has been in charge of her treatment since she could remember. He always spoke to her like a normal person and gave her a lollypop after her treatment to make her feel better. She stopped going to the hospital 2 years ago, her mother told her she was getting strong and that he didn't need to go anymore. This was the best news Briar could hear because she hated the hospital, she hated waking up and feeling weak and confused and like there was cotton in the mouth and nose and brain.

April stood pacing the waiting room floor, and Briar didn't know what for. Her mother was dead so they weren't waiting for any news on her condition.  April had been crying a lot today and Briar felt guilty for not crying more. She was still in shock, not every day you lose your mother.

The sight of the doctors coming out of a room and walking towards April sent a dreadful shiver down her spine and so Briar took the first exit to the outside she saw, and ended up in the patient garden.  She always loved gardens, nature was the exact opposite of the hospital environment that haunted her early childhood memories.  Hospitals smelled of chemicals and steel, artificial and man-made while trees and flowers smelled of freedom and ponds and rivers screamed adventure. 

Kneeling down in a secluded corner surrounded by Foxgloves and Heathers, their deep purple and pink hues a sharp contrast to the rich green of the grass she sat on she began to sob quietly.  Nobody would find her here, she didn't want to be found.

Briar's mind was so clouded by grief that she wasn't paying any kind of close attention to her surrounding. Had she been paying attention she would have realized the sky slowly darken along with her disposition.  She would have seen the foxgloves bow their heads and slowly wilt to the ground. She would have noticed the heathers lose their colour and their buds fall from their stalks. She would have regarded the one bright purples and pinks being replaced with stark white lilies and chrysanthemums reaching towards the child, singing their respects for the deceased. She might have felt the rain start to fall with her tears, soaking her black shoes through to the soles. 

Had Briar not been so consumed by her sadness she would have felt the blood running from her nose and the burning on her wrist, where the numbers she was branded with since birth weighed down on her psyche, the reason for the visits to the hospitals of her youth.

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