Post by Demi Stratford on Sept 1, 2020 15:26:40 GMT -5
It’s always the same. He’s holding me against his body and I'm struggling to get away from him before I suffocate.. but I never get away no matter how hard I fight it. I wake up in the night, gasping for air, my body thrown into fight or flight remembering something that didn’t happen. I’m sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I'm not ready to look at it yet. Honestly, if it was just that, just the attack and the feeling of helplessness, I think I could deal with that. But it’s the part before it all goes pear shaped that makes me wake up in a cold sweat, not the attack. Leave it to my psyche to take the night he proposed and twist it into something dark.
God, I remember it so clearly. My body was so sore from all the time on the road and the job that I had spent what must have been an hour soaking up the heat of the water in the old cast iron tub that we had in our apartment in the French Quarter. By the time I got out and slipped into my nightgown it must have been after midnight, I was alone and the apartment was quiet and dark at this hour. And then I saw it, a piece of paper hanging from a string in the hallway just outside the bathroom door, where I was sure not to miss it. “Find me” it read in the unmistakable scrawl of his handwriting, black ink on white paper. I knew this game by now, it was something that we did frequently when we were alone, sometimes here in this apartment, sometimes in the woods not far from here, and sometimes in the back of some faceless nameless venue on the road. Sometimes the game was just that, a game. Other times, when things had been fraught with tension and the road began to eat at us we would use it as an apology of sorts. When my moods would come on and I would find myself being cold or distant I always knew that if he came to find me that we would be okay. I have to admit now, to myself, that everytime we played I worried that this would be the time that he didn’t come. The time that he finally got tired of me and left me alone in whatever little hole I had found for myself that night. But it never happened, he always came for me, always.
I tiptoed through the apartment, checking behind furniture and drapes, not making much progress until I heard him laugh from somewhere beyond me, his voice and the words “find me” floating on the air. Gently I crept back down the hallway towards a flickering glow coming from the crack in our bedroom door, it was funny, at the time I remember thinking to myself “just like a jackolantern.” I pushed the door back carefully in case he was hiding behind it, once, I had used too much force and smacked him in the face with it - so I was much more careful now. Our bedroom was awash in the glow of candles, scattered on every bare surface that was suitable, but it was empty save for the folded card sitting at the foot of the bed. Ah, now this was a new touch to our game. The card felt much heavier than I expected it to as I lifted it from the bed and opened the flap to read the scrawl inside: “Found you”.
Suddenly, his arms encircled my waist from behind, nuzzling his face into my hair. I laid my hands lightly overtop of his own, relaxing into the warmth of his bare upper body. He murmured softly against my hair
“I stop and I stare too much, afraid that I care too much, and hardly I dare to touch for fear that the spell may be broken.”
We swayed gently together, my eyes closed, his lips on my temple.
“Turn around.”
I shifted to turn in his arms but he released me and dropped down to his knees in front of me. I bent down, hands cupping his face to pull him back up to me but he pulled them away and took my hands in his own, placing gentle kisses in the palm of each.
“Sweetest perfection to call my own.”
He released one of my hands then, reaching behind me to produce the opened ring box from its hiding spot underneath the foot of the bed. Inside lay a pear shaped garnet in a halo of diamonds, set on a gold band.
“To remind you that every last drop of blood running through my veins belongs to you, forever, if you’ll agree to have me.”
I don’t even really remember when the dream started, was it right after I left? After she was born? Have I always had it but just never realized what it was until it was too late? I don’t guess it really matters all that much. It doesn’t come to me every night, thankfully, but lately it’s been much more frequent and I can’t help but feel like that frequency is building to something. I couldn’t even begin to guess at what but I feel it like the angry march of ants down my skin that something is coming. The ring was still heavy on my ring finger as I spun it around, mindlessly staring out the front window to the garden beyond. I hadn’t ever had the heart to take it off and it did offer a certain measure of protection from anyone who would try to get too close to us - it was a very effective warning. When does marriage really end? When someone gets sick of the day to day and decides to bail? When one of you dies? And what about those of us who don’t fit into either of those neat little categories but find ourselves alone, nevertheless? Can you still be married and alone, all at once? All I knew was that I felt married, I felt like there was a part of me that belonged to someone else. No one else could ever try to take it because it just wasn’t there inside of me anymore. I gave it away that night in the flickering glow of candles and the touch of his skin on mine.
“Mama, we’re going to be late.”
Her voice startled me, I was too deep in my thoughts, too much there in that room all those years ago. I straightened up in the chair, securing the ring back on my ring finger and smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the emerald colored dress laying across my knees. I turned my head with a small smile to Charlotte, my Charlotte, struck in that moment by how much her face reminded me of his. Was she becoming more like him the older she got or was he just too close to the surface of my mind, his image laying over top of hers like a veil? She watched everything around her with his same serious eyes, a silent observer making little notes in her mind. Half the time, I wouldn’t even realize the things that she was picking up on until days later out of the blue she would approach me washing dishes and ask: Mama, you picked up a candle in the store but you only held it for a second before shaking your head and putting it back on the shelf - why did you do that? Much too perceptive, indeed.
“Sometimes i’m dreaming, Charlotte Sometimes.”
I smiled weakly at her, holding out my hand as she took it and came to stand beside the chair. Much taller now than she had been yesterday though I knew that couldn’t possibly be true. Less a child and more a woman with every blink of the eye. Would she grow up and leave me the way that I had left him?
“We told Grandma Nita we would be there by 7’clock to help her set up for Grandpa Ted’s party. If we don’t leave now we’re going to be late.”
“Whatever would I do without you, Charlotte Sometimes?”
“Probably stare out that window forever until the police came and found a skeleton sitting in the chair.”
Surprised laughter bubbled from my throat. Yes, definitely taking shaky steps into the teenage years.
“Well, then, let us be off before passerby's begin to mistake me for an early Halloween decoration.”
I stood, shaking out the skirt of my dress, stepping into the kitten heeled pumps lying forgotten next to the window. When I had first arrived here I was utterly alone in the world, I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t pick up the phone and call anyone from my old life. Things in that life had gotten dark, bleak - I found myself scared and alone, carrying a child that I hadn’t realized I ever even wanted until the news came that she was growing in my stomach. In that moment, with the sound of her heartbeat pumping away from the machines next to me, I knew I would do anything in the world to protect her. My life at that time was so drastically different than the life I had settled into here. Had it not been for the attack would I have known she was there inside of me before it was too late? Before I or someone else did something that would have cost me her life? I hated to think about what so easily could have been.
This little cottage had been picked because it was relatively secluded, nestled at the base of the mountains, the woods not far off. I picked it with secrecy and security in mind but there must have been some other higher power involved because it also gave me some of the only family I'd ever known in my life. Nita and Ted, the Turners, lived just across the street and had for the last fifty years since the construction of their home. Ted had taken Nita straight from her parents bosom at nineteen years old to this little house at the end of town, purchased with a modest inheritance some distant relative had left behind. They assure me at the time it wasn’t much but over the years they’ve poured sweat and love into the little house to transform it into a place that's safe and warm and always faintly smells like cinnamon. Ted even loved Nita so much that he agreed to paint the whole thing pink, her favorite color, with the exception of a periwinkle blue kitchen. Oh, it really was something to see. Pastel pink outside with white shutters that matched the white picket fence, inside every shade of pink you could imagine right down to the hand towels in the bathroom. Nita lovingly called it her Pink Palace, so we did too. When I arrived here at the cottage some thirteen years ago, they could tell that I was someone in need. They were gentle at first - “just coming by to welcome you to the neighborhood dear”. But as the baby grew inside me I became anxious and paranoid, voices in my head whispering the most insidious thoughts in my ear every night. Ted found me one night trying to light the house on fire, convinced that someone from my old life was hiding in the walls just waiting for the opportunity to steal my baby. He tells me that when he found me I was dirty from the woods and had told him that I went to kill the wolves, that the wolves had followed me and were creeping around just waiting for the right moment to strike. He coaxed me back to the Pink Palace where he and Nita kept watch over me for the last few weeks of the pregnancy, sitting vigilant by my bed at night and soothing me when the voices started to whisper in my ear. Some nights, Ted would place a dining room chair in front of the front door, a shotgun laying across his lap. “Sleep, girl. I’ll keep watch for the wolves.”
Of course, they knew there were no wolves in these woods, no sinister men hiding in the walls of my home. But they did know something about fear and about loss. They had a daughter once, not much older than I was then, when she got off the wrong path into drink and drugs that took her life. Their daughter’s birth had taken a toll on Nita rendering her unable to have more children and most of the family had died off or moved away. They sat together in the Pink Palace, lonely together, making the best of the years until the day that I showed up. I think that they must have needed me as much as I needed them.
Our strange beginning swirled around in my head as Charlotte ahead of me pushed open the front door of the pink palace, the scent of confectionary ghosts washing over us in the doorway. Ted emerged from the direction of the kitchen, cheeks flushed and a genuine affection showing on his face.
“Well, look at this! I didn’t know that the Miss America pageant was in town!”
Charlotte ran to him, wrapping him in that type of hug children always reserve for favorite grandparents. They weren’t family by blood, but they were the only grandparents she had ever known. And they were wonderful.
“Happy birthday, Grandpa Ted. I’m sorry we’re late, it’s her fault.”
She jerked a thumb back in my direction as Ted gave me a bemused expression above her head.
“What are we going to do with her? Maybe we should ground her. Not let her have any of the cake, what do you think?”
Charlotte studied me seriously, weighing the pros and cons in her mind before turning back to him.
“I think we should give her another chance. But ONLY if she lets me stay up late tonight.”
There’s the rub, I thought. I made a push away gesture with my hands as I approached the two.
“Alright, alright, I know when i’m beat.”
Charlotte gave a satisfied smile before running into the kitchen where Nita was hard at work on the birthday cake, painstakingly going over every detail before the rest of the guests arrived. I moved in to Ted, wrapping him in a hug before pulling away with his hand resting on my back.
“I tell you, I must be the luckiest man alive to be surrounded by such beauty at my age.”
“Happy birthday, Ted. They don’t make them like you anymore, you’re a peach.”
Charlotte was back, weaving between us as we moved apart, a spot of powdered sugar on her nose where Nita had likely tapped her when chastising her for trying to sneak a taste out of the frosting bowl.
“Why don’t you and me head into the other room and make ourselves busy so these two don’t try to rope us into any of the work?”
Ted took the girl by the hand leading her deeper into the Palace, the distant sound of a TV clicking on not long after. I made my way into the kitchen where a round jolly woman was hard at work pulling the cakes from the oven, a forgotten sifting of powdered sugar coating her apron.
“Hello dear. I’m almost done, just have the cakes left to frost before the guests arrive.”
She paused then, really stopping to look at me. Nita may have lost her daughter but she was still a mother and she had a way of looking you over that made you feel like she knew all of your secrets so you had better not try to hide anything from her, it was a skill that was just so innately ingrained in her that it frequently caught me off guard. Her brow furrowed together in worry as she took me in, setting the cake racks on the counter to cool.
“You had the dream again last night, didn’t you?”
There were no secrets between Nita, Ted and I. They knew about my husband, about the insecurity of my old life, the anger, the fear. They knew that I had run, run so far and so long that no one could ever have any hope of catching me. And they accepted those things in stride, like so many other things. But they also knew about the dream.
“I don’t know why it’s so frequent now. Nothing has changed, i’m not under any stress, I’m taking my medication.”
“Dreams have no power, dear. As long as you’re minding yourself and doing all the things you’re supposed to do it’ll go away. Fade back in the muck of your mind where it belongs.”
“I hope you’re right, Nita.”
She tsked me.
“Of course i’m right! You don’t think i’m just pretty packaging do you?”
Nita cocked her hip out a little, lifted her chin, one hand on her hip. She looked like everyone’s mental image of Mrs. Claus and nowhere near the Mae West she was trying to imitate. I smiled and shook my head, because it was what she wanted. She moved toward the counter and produced one of the “good” glass cups from the cabinet that was reserved for entertaining and special occasions, filling it to the brim with the pitcher of cold tea that sat close by. Handing it to me as she moved back to her cakes.
“Now, shoo. Go see what trouble the children have found while I finish up in here. You’ll just distract me from my work and sneak tastes of frosting when my backs turned.”
She turned me around with two hands on my shoulders, giving me a push on the butt towards the room beyond where a TV droned in the distance. I walked through the Pink Palace, feeling safe in its walls as I made my way to the den where Ted and Charlotte were huddled around a small, beyond its expiration date television set.
“Nita sent me in to see what nefarious deeds the two of you are getting up to. I get the impression she doesn’t trust me alone with her cake.”
“We’re watching wrestling.”
“Yeah, I'm teaching Little Lotte here how to handle any dates that get out of hand when i’m not around.”
Wrestling. The one thing I never disclosed to the Turner’s over the years, I didn’t think it mattered at the time and I wasn’t sure what they would have thought of my persona in those days. I didn’t want them to see me differently so I had just always left that little detail out of the story, it didn’t seem like it would make any difference. Suddenly, I realized how wrong I was. I moved around Charlotte to look at the image splayed across the screen. The man on the screen was grinding the baseball bat into the throat of Damon Riggs, eyes wild. The man reached down to grab the neck of the fallen man on the ground, digging in as he screamed from the little television set.
“Who am I, Damon? Who am I? Say...my...name!”
I heard the glass shatter on the wood floor below me before I even realized that it had left my hand. I was left standing there, my hand floating in the air and the pulse in my neck beating against my skin like some trapped thing trying desperately to escape. The words shot their way up inside me like molten lava to erupt helplessly out of my mouth while I stood there transfixed by the man on the screen.
“Stratford…. Stephen.. Stratford.”
God, I remember it so clearly. My body was so sore from all the time on the road and the job that I had spent what must have been an hour soaking up the heat of the water in the old cast iron tub that we had in our apartment in the French Quarter. By the time I got out and slipped into my nightgown it must have been after midnight, I was alone and the apartment was quiet and dark at this hour. And then I saw it, a piece of paper hanging from a string in the hallway just outside the bathroom door, where I was sure not to miss it. “Find me” it read in the unmistakable scrawl of his handwriting, black ink on white paper. I knew this game by now, it was something that we did frequently when we were alone, sometimes here in this apartment, sometimes in the woods not far from here, and sometimes in the back of some faceless nameless venue on the road. Sometimes the game was just that, a game. Other times, when things had been fraught with tension and the road began to eat at us we would use it as an apology of sorts. When my moods would come on and I would find myself being cold or distant I always knew that if he came to find me that we would be okay. I have to admit now, to myself, that everytime we played I worried that this would be the time that he didn’t come. The time that he finally got tired of me and left me alone in whatever little hole I had found for myself that night. But it never happened, he always came for me, always.
I tiptoed through the apartment, checking behind furniture and drapes, not making much progress until I heard him laugh from somewhere beyond me, his voice and the words “find me” floating on the air. Gently I crept back down the hallway towards a flickering glow coming from the crack in our bedroom door, it was funny, at the time I remember thinking to myself “just like a jackolantern.” I pushed the door back carefully in case he was hiding behind it, once, I had used too much force and smacked him in the face with it - so I was much more careful now. Our bedroom was awash in the glow of candles, scattered on every bare surface that was suitable, but it was empty save for the folded card sitting at the foot of the bed. Ah, now this was a new touch to our game. The card felt much heavier than I expected it to as I lifted it from the bed and opened the flap to read the scrawl inside: “Found you”.
Suddenly, his arms encircled my waist from behind, nuzzling his face into my hair. I laid my hands lightly overtop of his own, relaxing into the warmth of his bare upper body. He murmured softly against my hair
“I stop and I stare too much, afraid that I care too much, and hardly I dare to touch for fear that the spell may be broken.”
We swayed gently together, my eyes closed, his lips on my temple.
“Turn around.”
I shifted to turn in his arms but he released me and dropped down to his knees in front of me. I bent down, hands cupping his face to pull him back up to me but he pulled them away and took my hands in his own, placing gentle kisses in the palm of each.
“Sweetest perfection to call my own.”
He released one of my hands then, reaching behind me to produce the opened ring box from its hiding spot underneath the foot of the bed. Inside lay a pear shaped garnet in a halo of diamonds, set on a gold band.
“To remind you that every last drop of blood running through my veins belongs to you, forever, if you’ll agree to have me.”
I don’t even really remember when the dream started, was it right after I left? After she was born? Have I always had it but just never realized what it was until it was too late? I don’t guess it really matters all that much. It doesn’t come to me every night, thankfully, but lately it’s been much more frequent and I can’t help but feel like that frequency is building to something. I couldn’t even begin to guess at what but I feel it like the angry march of ants down my skin that something is coming. The ring was still heavy on my ring finger as I spun it around, mindlessly staring out the front window to the garden beyond. I hadn’t ever had the heart to take it off and it did offer a certain measure of protection from anyone who would try to get too close to us - it was a very effective warning. When does marriage really end? When someone gets sick of the day to day and decides to bail? When one of you dies? And what about those of us who don’t fit into either of those neat little categories but find ourselves alone, nevertheless? Can you still be married and alone, all at once? All I knew was that I felt married, I felt like there was a part of me that belonged to someone else. No one else could ever try to take it because it just wasn’t there inside of me anymore. I gave it away that night in the flickering glow of candles and the touch of his skin on mine.
“Mama, we’re going to be late.”
Her voice startled me, I was too deep in my thoughts, too much there in that room all those years ago. I straightened up in the chair, securing the ring back on my ring finger and smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the emerald colored dress laying across my knees. I turned my head with a small smile to Charlotte, my Charlotte, struck in that moment by how much her face reminded me of his. Was she becoming more like him the older she got or was he just too close to the surface of my mind, his image laying over top of hers like a veil? She watched everything around her with his same serious eyes, a silent observer making little notes in her mind. Half the time, I wouldn’t even realize the things that she was picking up on until days later out of the blue she would approach me washing dishes and ask: Mama, you picked up a candle in the store but you only held it for a second before shaking your head and putting it back on the shelf - why did you do that? Much too perceptive, indeed.
“Sometimes i’m dreaming, Charlotte Sometimes.”
I smiled weakly at her, holding out my hand as she took it and came to stand beside the chair. Much taller now than she had been yesterday though I knew that couldn’t possibly be true. Less a child and more a woman with every blink of the eye. Would she grow up and leave me the way that I had left him?
“We told Grandma Nita we would be there by 7’clock to help her set up for Grandpa Ted’s party. If we don’t leave now we’re going to be late.”
“Whatever would I do without you, Charlotte Sometimes?”
“Probably stare out that window forever until the police came and found a skeleton sitting in the chair.”
Surprised laughter bubbled from my throat. Yes, definitely taking shaky steps into the teenage years.
“Well, then, let us be off before passerby's begin to mistake me for an early Halloween decoration.”
I stood, shaking out the skirt of my dress, stepping into the kitten heeled pumps lying forgotten next to the window. When I had first arrived here I was utterly alone in the world, I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t pick up the phone and call anyone from my old life. Things in that life had gotten dark, bleak - I found myself scared and alone, carrying a child that I hadn’t realized I ever even wanted until the news came that she was growing in my stomach. In that moment, with the sound of her heartbeat pumping away from the machines next to me, I knew I would do anything in the world to protect her. My life at that time was so drastically different than the life I had settled into here. Had it not been for the attack would I have known she was there inside of me before it was too late? Before I or someone else did something that would have cost me her life? I hated to think about what so easily could have been.
This little cottage had been picked because it was relatively secluded, nestled at the base of the mountains, the woods not far off. I picked it with secrecy and security in mind but there must have been some other higher power involved because it also gave me some of the only family I'd ever known in my life. Nita and Ted, the Turners, lived just across the street and had for the last fifty years since the construction of their home. Ted had taken Nita straight from her parents bosom at nineteen years old to this little house at the end of town, purchased with a modest inheritance some distant relative had left behind. They assure me at the time it wasn’t much but over the years they’ve poured sweat and love into the little house to transform it into a place that's safe and warm and always faintly smells like cinnamon. Ted even loved Nita so much that he agreed to paint the whole thing pink, her favorite color, with the exception of a periwinkle blue kitchen. Oh, it really was something to see. Pastel pink outside with white shutters that matched the white picket fence, inside every shade of pink you could imagine right down to the hand towels in the bathroom. Nita lovingly called it her Pink Palace, so we did too. When I arrived here at the cottage some thirteen years ago, they could tell that I was someone in need. They were gentle at first - “just coming by to welcome you to the neighborhood dear”. But as the baby grew inside me I became anxious and paranoid, voices in my head whispering the most insidious thoughts in my ear every night. Ted found me one night trying to light the house on fire, convinced that someone from my old life was hiding in the walls just waiting for the opportunity to steal my baby. He tells me that when he found me I was dirty from the woods and had told him that I went to kill the wolves, that the wolves had followed me and were creeping around just waiting for the right moment to strike. He coaxed me back to the Pink Palace where he and Nita kept watch over me for the last few weeks of the pregnancy, sitting vigilant by my bed at night and soothing me when the voices started to whisper in my ear. Some nights, Ted would place a dining room chair in front of the front door, a shotgun laying across his lap. “Sleep, girl. I’ll keep watch for the wolves.”
Of course, they knew there were no wolves in these woods, no sinister men hiding in the walls of my home. But they did know something about fear and about loss. They had a daughter once, not much older than I was then, when she got off the wrong path into drink and drugs that took her life. Their daughter’s birth had taken a toll on Nita rendering her unable to have more children and most of the family had died off or moved away. They sat together in the Pink Palace, lonely together, making the best of the years until the day that I showed up. I think that they must have needed me as much as I needed them.
Our strange beginning swirled around in my head as Charlotte ahead of me pushed open the front door of the pink palace, the scent of confectionary ghosts washing over us in the doorway. Ted emerged from the direction of the kitchen, cheeks flushed and a genuine affection showing on his face.
“Well, look at this! I didn’t know that the Miss America pageant was in town!”
Charlotte ran to him, wrapping him in that type of hug children always reserve for favorite grandparents. They weren’t family by blood, but they were the only grandparents she had ever known. And they were wonderful.
“Happy birthday, Grandpa Ted. I’m sorry we’re late, it’s her fault.”
She jerked a thumb back in my direction as Ted gave me a bemused expression above her head.
“What are we going to do with her? Maybe we should ground her. Not let her have any of the cake, what do you think?”
Charlotte studied me seriously, weighing the pros and cons in her mind before turning back to him.
“I think we should give her another chance. But ONLY if she lets me stay up late tonight.”
There’s the rub, I thought. I made a push away gesture with my hands as I approached the two.
“Alright, alright, I know when i’m beat.”
Charlotte gave a satisfied smile before running into the kitchen where Nita was hard at work on the birthday cake, painstakingly going over every detail before the rest of the guests arrived. I moved in to Ted, wrapping him in a hug before pulling away with his hand resting on my back.
“I tell you, I must be the luckiest man alive to be surrounded by such beauty at my age.”
“Happy birthday, Ted. They don’t make them like you anymore, you’re a peach.”
Charlotte was back, weaving between us as we moved apart, a spot of powdered sugar on her nose where Nita had likely tapped her when chastising her for trying to sneak a taste out of the frosting bowl.
“Why don’t you and me head into the other room and make ourselves busy so these two don’t try to rope us into any of the work?”
Ted took the girl by the hand leading her deeper into the Palace, the distant sound of a TV clicking on not long after. I made my way into the kitchen where a round jolly woman was hard at work pulling the cakes from the oven, a forgotten sifting of powdered sugar coating her apron.
“Hello dear. I’m almost done, just have the cakes left to frost before the guests arrive.”
She paused then, really stopping to look at me. Nita may have lost her daughter but she was still a mother and she had a way of looking you over that made you feel like she knew all of your secrets so you had better not try to hide anything from her, it was a skill that was just so innately ingrained in her that it frequently caught me off guard. Her brow furrowed together in worry as she took me in, setting the cake racks on the counter to cool.
“You had the dream again last night, didn’t you?”
There were no secrets between Nita, Ted and I. They knew about my husband, about the insecurity of my old life, the anger, the fear. They knew that I had run, run so far and so long that no one could ever have any hope of catching me. And they accepted those things in stride, like so many other things. But they also knew about the dream.
“I don’t know why it’s so frequent now. Nothing has changed, i’m not under any stress, I’m taking my medication.”
“Dreams have no power, dear. As long as you’re minding yourself and doing all the things you’re supposed to do it’ll go away. Fade back in the muck of your mind where it belongs.”
“I hope you’re right, Nita.”
She tsked me.
“Of course i’m right! You don’t think i’m just pretty packaging do you?”
Nita cocked her hip out a little, lifted her chin, one hand on her hip. She looked like everyone’s mental image of Mrs. Claus and nowhere near the Mae West she was trying to imitate. I smiled and shook my head, because it was what she wanted. She moved toward the counter and produced one of the “good” glass cups from the cabinet that was reserved for entertaining and special occasions, filling it to the brim with the pitcher of cold tea that sat close by. Handing it to me as she moved back to her cakes.
“Now, shoo. Go see what trouble the children have found while I finish up in here. You’ll just distract me from my work and sneak tastes of frosting when my backs turned.”
She turned me around with two hands on my shoulders, giving me a push on the butt towards the room beyond where a TV droned in the distance. I walked through the Pink Palace, feeling safe in its walls as I made my way to the den where Ted and Charlotte were huddled around a small, beyond its expiration date television set.
“Nita sent me in to see what nefarious deeds the two of you are getting up to. I get the impression she doesn’t trust me alone with her cake.”
“We’re watching wrestling.”
“Yeah, I'm teaching Little Lotte here how to handle any dates that get out of hand when i’m not around.”
Wrestling. The one thing I never disclosed to the Turner’s over the years, I didn’t think it mattered at the time and I wasn’t sure what they would have thought of my persona in those days. I didn’t want them to see me differently so I had just always left that little detail out of the story, it didn’t seem like it would make any difference. Suddenly, I realized how wrong I was. I moved around Charlotte to look at the image splayed across the screen. The man on the screen was grinding the baseball bat into the throat of Damon Riggs, eyes wild. The man reached down to grab the neck of the fallen man on the ground, digging in as he screamed from the little television set.
“Who am I, Damon? Who am I? Say...my...name!”
I heard the glass shatter on the wood floor below me before I even realized that it had left my hand. I was left standing there, my hand floating in the air and the pulse in my neck beating against my skin like some trapped thing trying desperately to escape. The words shot their way up inside me like molten lava to erupt helplessly out of my mouth while I stood there transfixed by the man on the screen.
“Stratford…. Stephen.. Stratford.”