Making it Right


Startled, Chris sat up in her bed. Something woke her but she didn’t know what. Straining her eyes and ears she searched the darkness of her attic room. Nothing.

“Eddie let go of my arm; you’re hurting me!”

Chris frowned. Her parents were fighting again. She pulled the blankets up around her neck, and leaning back against the headboard she closed her eyes. If she closed them tight enough she found that her hearing improved, but her father was speaking now, and her parents’ bedroom was downstairs and at the opposite end of the house. Chris couldn’t make out what her father was saying unless he bellowed, which he often did, and at Chris herself more times than not, but when he argued at night with her mother, he spoke mostly in low deep tones.

Huddled there in the dark, Chris could just imagine how her father looked sitting there on his side of the bed, or standing, it didn’t matter which, it was the look on his face that you’d never forget. He’d have this self-satisfied grin that looked as if he thought he had something over on you, and he did, and you could tell by the calm, almost laughing tone of his voice, that he liked the power he had to make you cry.

“I’m leaving you Eddie…”

“Ha ha ha. Go ahead, leave, good riddance to bad rubbish then!”

Chris could hear her father’s voice now. Whenever he laughed in that slow mocking tone of his, it was so loud that you could feel it reverberating all the way through to your spine.

“Where do you think you are going to go, Charlene? Ha! You don’t have anywhere to go, do you?”

Chris knew what was coming next. This scene had played out so many times before, she almost knew it by heart.

“Then I’ll kill myself; anything to get away from you!” Her mother screamed.

“Good! Go ahead. See if I care.” Her father laughed; this time his laughter was real. “Make sure you get it right, and don’t come crawling back if you don’t!”

Chris could hear her mother crying in the kitchen below her bedroom. She heard the cupboard door opening, the tinkling of glasses, and then the squeak of the fridge door. Her mother was probably pouring herself a glass of rum and coke to steady her nerves. Shortly after, Chris heard the porch door open and close, and then everything was quiet.

She lay there for a few minutes, listening to see if her father would go after her mother. He never had, but Chris always held onto the small hope that he would.

Without turning on the light, she got up and got dressed. In her sock feet she slowly crept down the stairs and stood for a few moments in the kitchen, listening. She could hear her father’s heavy breathing coming from the open bedroom door. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping when he sounded that way, or if he was just pretending to, but it didn’t matter; Chris knew that it meant that he wasn’t planning to go after her mom, and that if anyone was going to bring her mom back home, it had to be her.

She didn’t want to waste time tying her sneakers, so she pulled on a pair of cold rubber boots from the pile in the porch, grabbed a coat, and slipped quietly out the door.

It was cold outside as well, but she hardly noticed. She had an idea where her mom would be, and finding her was all that mattered. With her coat open wide, and her one size too big rubber boots scuffing loudly against the gravel, she hurried down the road. Once she passed the grouping of houses where her family's house stood, the street lights were further apart, but there was just enough light between each post to see where she was going.

It wasn’t until she got to the west side of the harbour and started to climb Drummond’s Hill that it became too dark to see, and she had to drag the side of her boot along the edge of the pavement to guide her way.

She could feel her heart thumping wildly inside her chest. She hated the pitch black. Usually there was enough light that if you waited long enough your eyes would adjust, but not that night. Drummond’s Hill didn’t have any houses along it, so the county didn’t have any reason to put up street lights, and it was overcast and there wasn’t a speck of moonlight poking thought the clouds.

On Halloween the boys would hide in the ditches along either side of the hill and toss eggs at the unsuspecting trick or treaters, knowing that the darkness would provide plenty of cover to hide their identity, or to get lost in, if anyone came chasing after them. Chris knew to avoid the hill on Halloween, but tonight was different, and she was being childish being so afraid of the dark. Besides, she was nearly thirteen years old and she could take care of herself.

As she slowly climbed the hill, she remembered just how well she could take care of herself, and that gave her the courage to continue. Kenny, the next-door neighbour’s boy, used to tease her all the time. He said her hair looked just like a tumbleweed, and he would taunt her again and again by calling her that name.

“Tumbleweed, hey Tumbleweed, you’ve been doing a lot of rolling lately, I can tell” and then he’d laugh at her, with the same self-satisfied grin on his face that her father often had. So this one time, Chris had had enough, and she pinned him down and held his mitten-less hands in the snow until he started to cry. That evening, his mother phoned her mother and complained.

Chris listened in on the conversation and watched the expressions on her mother’s face from her seat at the kitchen table.

“Yes, yes, umm hum. So you’re complaining that my little girl beat up your son who’s nearly twice her size?”

Chris thought her mother had been smiling when she said that, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Well, maybe your son shouldn’t be such a bully, then my daughter won’t have a reason to beat him up. ... Yes, uh huh, you do that. Good night.”

Chris’s mother hung up the phone. Chris had at least expected a talking to, but her mother never once spoke to her about that conversation, and later, when she thought about how her mom had smiled, Chris had got the feeling that she just might have been proud of what her ‘little girl’ had done.

If she could handle a bully, she could climb Drummond’s hill in the dark by herself. “It was just the same as it was in the daytime,” Chris thought, trying hard to calm her thumping heart, “just darker, is all.”

When she reached the top of the hill, the street light in front of her mother’s friend’s house made her going much easier, but the fact that there wasn’t a single light on in the two story building left Chris with an empty feeling, and no place else to look. The house was the last one in the village, and beyond it there was nothing but unlit road and ditches, until you came to the next town, three miles away.

“Mom?” Chris chanced into the darkness, and then again a little louder; “Mom, are you there?”

“Christine, is that you? What are you doing out here so late?”

Chris let out the breath that she didn’t realise she’d been holding, as she saw her mother’s shadow pull away from the boulder beneath the town’s sign post. “I couldn’t sleep”, she answered, her voice cracking in the cold night air. “ I came to get you.”

“You came to get me? Christine I’m fine. I just wanted to go for a walk, that’s all. You know your father.”

Chris nodded, looking up at her mother, who still carrying the drink glass from the kitchen, now stood next to her on the side of the road.

“Come on, let’s go home and get you to bed.”

Drummond’s hill didn’t seem quite as frightening on the way down as it did coming up. They didn’t speak much during the twenty minutes or so that it took for them to get back home. As they neared the house Chris’s mother asked Chris if her father had been asleep when she had left, and when they got to the back porch she gestured to her daughter to be quiet, as she slowly pressed down the latch and pulled open the door.

“Now you go to bed” Charlene whispered, trying to sound as normal and reassuring as she could, but when she saw her daughter just standing there watching her, she answered her unasked question. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry. I just want to sit here on the couch for a while. I don’t want to wake your father.”

Chris nodded; she knew why that was. “Goodnight Mom”, she said, as she mounted the steps to the attic.

“Goodnight” came her mother’s whispered reply from the kitchen as she headed off to refill her glass.

When Chris reached the head of the stairs, she stopped and listened to see if her brother was asleep. “Michael, are you awake?” she asked into the darkness. There was no reply.

Back in her own bed, Chris tried to stay awake for as long as she could. Everything was right with her world once more, but she needed to listen to the sounds coming from down stairs long enough to make sure. The comfortable warmth of her bed, however, soon pulled her down into a deep and dreamless sleep, and even the restless stirrings of her mother in the living room below, didn’t wake her once.

The next day was Saturday so Chris could sleep in, but she hadn’t yet reached the age when she consistently stayed in bed until eleven or twelve, so she was up before nine like she did every Saturday morning. She was greeted by her mother, who sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and an untouched piece of toast, and her father complaining that the sugar bowl was empty. Sighing, her mother stood and filled the bowl from the canister on the cupboard next to her fathers chair.

Chris poured herself a bowl of Rice Krispies and sat down in her usual seat to her mother’s left. Michael came into the kitchen next, and without a word he went to the cupboard looking for his breakfast.

“Michael, the Rice Krispies are open and on the table”, Charlene told her son, to which he mumbled something about how he never got to choose what cereal they were going to have next.

Scowling, Michael sat across the table from Chris. The four of them then sat there eating their breakfast in silence, just as they usually did. The only thing out of the ordinary was that her mother hadn’t even touched her toast yet; she just sat there sipping her tea.

After breakfast, Chris’s father turned on the television and sat back in his easy chair with a Bloody Mary sitting on the end table next to him. Chris and Michael did the dishes as they always did, and her mother went into the bedroom and closed the door. It was a normal Saturday morning.

When the dishes were done, Chris went outside and built a fire on the beach. The quiet there seemed more natural to her somehow. For a long time she just sat and watched the flames leap and dance, wiping away the tears that refused to stop running down her cheeks, and not understanding why she was crying. Everything was back to normal; everything was right with her world again, and even if it wasn’t, she was almost thirteen, and she could take care of herself.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I don't know what happened to this post, but it was missing, so I just reposted the story.