Betty's Cardigan

Old Cardigan (Part I)

"Betty!" called Inez from below. "Are you okay up there?"

"Yeah. It's just dusty." Rebekah 'Betty' Brooks knelt on the floor of the vast attic of her childhood home. "I'll be down in a minute."

Betty was looking for a photo album from her high school days. Her fiancé, Adam, and she had danced to her favorite song at her junior Spring Dance.  

She dug around in the boxes until she found a pink album bordered with red lace. Betty sighed with a smile on her lips. 

"You looked beautiful in that blue dress!" Betty called to Inez. "You should definitely go for the same color for your bridesmaid's dress."

Inez said something unintelligible and Betty stood up and dusted off the cobwebs from her pants. She was about to leave with the album when she spotted something. 

Betty knew that she should have left that very instant and let the object rot in the humidity. She should have dragged Inez to cake tasting and forgotten that she had glanced upon the cardigan that lay sprawled in the darkest corner of the attic.
As soon as she let herself think about it, everything came back to her. It was as if her wounds had closed but the scars were too ugly to acknowledge without grimacing. 

"Hey," Inez said. "It's getting late."

"You go ahead," Betty said as she approached the cardigan slowly as if it was a Venus Flytrap primed to strike. "I'll catch up in a few." 

She heard footsteps retreating. A kind of hushed silence filled the attic. It was a scene from a fairytale. Betty was half afraid that as soon as she touched the cardigan her life would go back to the way it used to be. She could almost smell the salt of the tears she had cried while wrapped in its warm embrace which had felt like a furnace trying to snuff the life out of her.

But she picked it up anyway. Betty was a woman who didn't believe in magic, and she knew that the sooner she got over her trauma's the better. She was getting married, and no ghosts from her past could haunt her.

"When you are young they assume you know nothing," she whispered into the fabric as she remembered his face. Dark hair and baby-blue eyes had given her nightmares for days to come. 

And then she remembered a name. "James Parker," she whispered as the tears finally broke through.