Pamela is made of (hemlockandhoney) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-07-26 20:46:00 |
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The kitchen in Summerlin was wide sand-colored stone surfaces and steel-smooth appliances, appliances that showed fingermarks even if you were real careful to wash your hands. They were rubbed clean, polished the way of elbow grease and show-rooms and the smell in the air that followed through the house was lemons and the honey of beeswax, the fresh snap of clean linens and the hiss of steam from the iron and board set up in the corner. The kitchen had been Ella’s favorite place since the first day, walls the color of butter and light that pooled through long windows and puddled dappled warmth against the stripped floorboards. It was clean lines and thoughtfulness in a house full of such places but it was a place that was out of the way.
Above the stairs, she could hear now and again people moving around, the closed doors and the faint hum of talking - but with the kitchen door shut carefully, she could turn the radio up a little, she could fill the kitchen full of the clean laundry for ironing, she could comb through the fridge for pieces left over to put together into other things. Ian had asked her to make sure Iris left her room and Ella knew only one way to persuade people out. She did it the way her mother had done it once, the shy way of love that crumbled on a plate. The kitchen was out of the way, the kitchen was - the font of cleaning products and things she needed to smooth the place out to glassy perfection. It meant knowing, when people were up real close, and since she’d walked in first thing, there’d been the faint shiver down her spine of all the little hairs there on end. If she was going to manage, if she was going to be right there and know when to look, it had to be how it was, how it had been. There was something real soothing about the smell of sugar and butter in the oven, rich and home-y.
Today was the sweet-sharp smell of lemon shortbread in the oven, the soft rise-and-fall of voices on the radio and the rhythmic hiss and slap of the iron over cotton bedsheets.
Cerise didn't know what lemon shortbread was. There hadn't been a whole lot of sweet things in her childhood, but if a cookie was designated to the moldy, milksour trailer she'd grown up in, it would have been those dollar store concoctions with with a mountain peak of marshmallow sitting on top and a greasy film of wannabe chocolate gilding the saccharine lily. She remembered them being overly sweet and crumbly like dry cheese. Whatever was baking right now shouldn't have reminded her of those sugared pucks.. but Cerise didn't have a lot of experience with anything else to compare it to. She'd certainly never been a girl scout, and if it couldn't be bought at a gas station or in the frozen food aisle, she didn't know what it tasted like. The scent should have been welcoming, invigorating, and warm.. but it was mostly alarming. So alarming that there wasn't room for the rest of those feelings.
Ian didn't strike her as a baker, and the fact that there apparently was somebody who lived here who was.. well, it went against everything that she knew to associate with the man who'd raised her. Cerise crept around the corner like she was anticipating an ambush. Music from the radio muted the quiet humming of a voice.
There had been nothing in that small white house that was bought off the shelf and nothing of gas stations and sad little stores devoted to frozen foods. Ella’s momma hadn’t known much, she hadn’t gone to college, hadn’t done a lot but she knew exactly what making home for a man should be and she’d taught the daughter she could teach. She was a small figure behind the ironing board, all soft cotton skirt and flat shoes and she looked maybe like she was past twenty but not by much in a loose blouse and knotted-up blond hair. She smiled big, though - big enough to be warm and sweet as the crumbled sugar on the shortbread in the oven - but tentative.
“Hi,” Ella’s voice was soft, honey-gold, she sounded like maybe this place, of all the places in the Summerlin place was hers, but she wasn’t confident exactly of that but the woman in the doorframe didn’t look confident either. She didn’t look like the ghost of a blonde who had slipped in and out of the room right up beside the master, and she didn’t sound like the woman behind the door, the one Ian had called Iris and who was soft-voiced hesitancy behind white gloss paintwork. This was the other one, the unknown, and Ella hung back, the iron quietly steaming as she looked stricken for a moment.
“I’m sorry if y’all weren’t expecting me to be here. I can go?” she offered.
Cerise stared with no sense of the awkwardness it produced to be so silent with such wide eyed hesitancy. Her senses separated everything into bite size portions. It was something that she'd been conditioned into when she was younger, but habits came involuntarily now, tearing away all sense of normalcy and replacing it with a pie chart dedicated to danger. Everything was separate, pieces of a puzzle that she could put together later at her convenience; tart sugar, hissing iron, matte baseboards, blonde. No threat.
"No, yer fine," Cerise said as she eased off from the wall that she'd posted herself to. She had no accent to speak of, nothing to give her away or let her be tracked down. The perfect byproduct of Nowhere, USA. She didn't know this one, but it wasn't Iris, and left her to assume it was Ella, who was as much of a mystery as why Ian was here at all. The baking and the ironing cemented Cerise's immediate hesitation, although it was born out of awkwardness more than fear. She imagined that this was what people felt like when they discovered a new species.
She moved for the fridge, edging around the polished island with one eye on the unknown woman as she pulled on the stainless door. Cerise was softer than she'd ever been in her life, muscle eaten away by five years of retirement and a whole nother year nibbling the poppy. It'd only been a couple of weeks since she'd moved into Ian's house, but she already had some weight back. Not enough, but it was something. Her legs were still bruised like peonies from kicking the wall in her dreams, those fitful nightmares that came not just with withdrawal, but with sobriety. That's why she could never last on the wagon, she remembered, even sleep became torture. Her denim cut-offs were frayed and loose on the hip. The tank top was black, and when she turned her back to Ella, there was a prominent, circular branding scar on one shoulder blade. Ancient enough that it was more white than pink, shiny under the kitchen lights when she leaned to collect a jug of orange juice. Not bothering with a glass, Cerise watched Ella as she took a sip from the plastic.
There wasn’t a darn thing about Ella that was suited to secrecy. She was fragile truth painted bright and bold on white silk - a livid wash of something like surprise flooding her face, fluid-blue eyes trained on that branding scar beneath the shirt, scar tissue catching the spotlights streaming down onto the surfaces and when Cerise turned - jug of orange juice in hand and raised to lips, Ella didn’t say a word about glasses, she didn’t say anything about whether the juice meant another trip to the market. She looked, instead and her hands twisted in front of her like torture. The house in Summerlin was bright white and soft sunshine but the woman in front of her wore old bruises like flowers blooming up and down her legs, something wrong carved across her back.
“Have a glass, honey,” her voice was sand-soft, her mouth dried down to nothing; Ella reached like she knew the kitchen and the things in it, a dancer on a stage she was used to, comfort in that knowledge and she set a glass tumbler with a quiet click on the island in front of Cerise. It necessitated coming out from behind the ironing board, the smell of warm-clean cotton and sugar and lemon: Ella padded across, she folded herself back into her corner when she was done, like a doll laid down once done playing with.
“You want something to eat?” The hesitancy of offering, something shy about it, awkward in the giving.
Cerise watched the glass get lowered to the counter, mouth half poised on the rim of the jug. The normalcy of it made her heart hurt, because she couldn't remember anything that existed like this house except for in a dream. She tried not to remember the house in Texas as often as possible, and it had really been years since she'd likened back to those kinds of basement horrors.. but she remembered now with more vague than clarity that even that house had seemed appropriate and clean on the surface.
Realizing that she'd gone still, Cerise forced herself to take another swig of juice while still ignoring the glass. Thinking of Texas made her think on the rest of it, and Cerise watched the crayola blond with the wringing hands. The girl was quite young, and Cerise recognized the look on her face only because she'd seen it so often in herself.
"Don't have to be nervous," she murmured with an unlikely smile. Afraid had almost been the word of choice, and it was certainly more apropos. That was the look, wasn't it? Afraid on the inside but determinedly not on the outside. In an act of consolation, Cerise moved forward and took the glass, splashing some juice down within. Even her smiles were sad. Half-formed and then aborted things, like midway through the happiness she remembered everything else. She tucked the juice back into the fridge with scarred knuckles and no rings to disguise them.
The woman across, she went still like maybe somewhere she remembered things like manners and glasses. Had it been Ella’s mom’s house, had it been a place of white walls and clean linen that didn’t have the acrid understench of human fear, of neuroses soaked into the walls like nicotine then the glass would have been on a coaster before it clicked down onto countertop. There would have been something pretty about the glass like cut crystal or maybe just the kind of border you didn’t notice til you were done drinking. The orange juice splashed up against the sides and her mother would have said careful, she’d have said pour it like you were being gentle with it. Ella licked her lips instead, her mouth Louisiana-dry.
And then she called it nervous, said it with a smile that curled like it was knowing things about the house, the house that crawled with shadows from all that sunshine on the surface. Ella looked toward the corner, the corner Bethie usually occupied, a brief little flicker of her eyes and she looked back at Cerise without blinking. Whenever you’re feeling like crawling into bed, her mother had said, you just smile until it’s over. Ella smiled, a thing of sweet pastry and sunshine to meet that shadow-thing Cerise smiled on back at her.
“Why would I be nervous?” Ella said it without her voice shaking one bit and she looked at her hands, at her body wreathed-around with violence like it had taken to her, lover-close. “You never said what your name was, honey?”
Cerise had never learned etiquette in the tradition of matrons and nuns. Her mother had ignored the escalating stages of her unplanned pregnancy, with a youthful and troublesome naivete that almost believed the problem would go away if she just didn't acknowledge it. Of course, that hadn't worked, but it did set the tone for their mother-daughter relationship throughout life. Turning blind eyes and locking little girls away in closets when they weren't convenient. Cerise had rarely been convenient. At Ella's inquiry on hunger, Cerise just hefted the little glass higher in demonstration before taking a sip, as if to convey that she was having her breakfast, albeit several hours late.
"I don't know," Cerise murmured from over a crystal lip. Watching with eyes of a polluted garden grove; green flecked with carnivorous wormholes of a brown so dark that it might as well have been black. Why would Ella be nervous? It was a good question, and Cerise could have hypothesized a baker's dozen of different reasons for nerves to self-shred in an effigy of much-needed escape. But the blond seemed to be in one piece, shaken perhaps only by the awkward company that Cerise dragged along with her person like a child with a dirty, over-loved blanket. Besides, Ian had promised that it wouldn't be like before, or maybe that's just what she desperately wanted him to have promised when he swore to her that it would be okay. Okay had various meanings, like heads on a hydra.
"My name's Cerise."
There was normality in food and drink, in the simple tradition of making things the way they ought be. Ella fed people like other people hugged them, warm-buttery food, soaked in tradition and steeped in hours in the kitchen, stood at her mother’s elbow, as if they could swallow all that good intention along with the cornbread and the biscuits and the gravy. She watched Cerise lift up that glass like a salute and it was tension-plucked nerves gone steel-tight steady for a moment, the drunk-sway steady step of a sailor back on ship, the skirl of the sea too close for comfort but still more meaningful than land. Ella wrinkled her nose. “Orange juice isn’t food,” she said, plainly. Her path was not direct but meandered around various kitchen points that suggested prior knowledge and familiarity. She removed eggs from a refridgerator too well-stocked for a single man to do so solo, and bread that had the vague blurred edges of the handmade from a bin on the side.
“Sit down, honey,” Ella directed and she was soft blond edges but the words were quiet command, the sugared-down steel of things-as-they-ought-be. “Cerise is a pretty name.” And if Cerise was sitting, if she ate eggs and toast and she sat at the table then maybe it was normal, and how it ought be.
There was a look that crossed her face, a malt blend of lips gone tight with amusement and eyebrows scaling higher with surprise. It was an expression that said Cerise wasn't exactly accustomed to being told what to do, or maybe she just wasn't used to sitting at tables for late-in-the-day breakfasts. But she did sit down with ankles tucked in behind the legs of her chair, leaning into the table's edge as she watched the girl navigate the kitchen with the help of some internalized domestic compass.
"Yeah," she said with absentminded wonder over the girl, not entirely sure how she fit into things, wondering how soft, uncalloused hands and lemon shortbread were part of Ian. "Its, uh, French, I don't know," she explained with a shrug. All lacklustre interest in anything that had to do with herself. And although they hadn't quite made the full round of introductions, Cerise knew that this one was Ella and not Iris. "Ella is a nice name too.." Compliments tasted weird, she wasn't really sure how they were supposed to work.
Ella thought Cerise was pretty, pretty enough for hair-bows and lace dresses and songs to wind you off to sleep and French made her think of madelines and macaroons, sweet pastel confections for little girls but Cerise didn’t look like that had been how it had been for her. She looked like she weren’t used to eating properly, and she looked like maybe she didn’t mind either, and when she sat and the chair drew itself along the floor with the scrape of wooden legs on polished floorboards, Ella’s heart stopped fluttering small wing-beats in her chest like a trapped sparrow. She’d thought about something French, something that sounded like spun-sugar on the tongue for Beth - and then Beth hadn’t been anything but her own sweet self and they’d called her after Coop’s mom, Betty - Elizabeth.
She had an egg balanced on the side of a glass bowl, rounded-pink perfection cradled in her hand - it cracked, just then, split soggy-yellow yolk into the sliding sides like something entirely broken. Ella stood and she looked at it like she was surprised by it herself. “Oh. Mr Ru-Ian told you my name, honey?”
She hadn’t thought about it long, Iris (white door and golden-blond hair wisping out behind her as the door snicked closed) and Cerise, two women contained in the Summerlin house and names spoken by Ian with the fondness of melted chocolate on the tongue. (Except Iris, the girl behind the door, ill, Sam had said, a slash of type on white page, broken, and Ella looked for a second, dandelion-blond hair and washed-blue eyes at the woman at the table who was tattooed with bruises and wondered if this one was broken, too. She hadn’t thought Ian would hand over her own name, as much part of the house’s blank white surfaces as the smell of lemon hanging in the air - faint, unimportant.
She whisked instead, pushed it on out of her own head, both the bruises and the uncertainty, and the scrape of metal on metal was rhythmic, a clock to tick to.
Cerise watched on with green eyes and the rising uncertainty that came with being out of one's element. Nobody had made her breakfast before, and it wasn't until this moment -- sitting and waiting and heart beating weirdly in her body -- that she was able to reflect on that. It seemed like a relatively normal occurrence, but she couldn't recall it ever happening in her life. Cerise wondered if there was something she should be doing to help. She'd never been very comfortable with sitting still, not unless she was so railroaded by drugs that standing upright wasn't an option. There was a vulnerability that came with being stationary, and Cerise didn't know how to shake it.
Realizing that Ella had asked her a question, Cerise lit up with a filament of surprise, as if even the prospect of conversation wasn't expected. "Oh.. yes, he did." Really, that was all that Ian had told her was the simplicity that came with a name, and Cerise had taken it at face value because that was what she'd always done.. but now she wondered. Ella was about as out of place in this house and Cerise was in the outside world. She got Iris. That girl was mentally fucked up six ways to Sunday, but not this one. This one smiled like she had a reason to.
"That's all he told me, though.." The statement was leading, synchronized with a questioning lift in a dark eyebrow. "How do you know him?"
Nothing starred out from the center of Ella’s mind, a flaw to extricate, a bruise that spread itself to the surrounds, inky-black and blotting out sense and reason. Ella smiled because she had a home to go to, she had a milk-sweet hug and locks on the door and she smiled because she knew how. She was beating on eggs and she poured them into a pan ready to scramble and she didn’t think a bit on strange. Ella had sat at the table and watched her mother make breakfast all the years she could remember and the first time Coop had been married to her, in that tiny apartment kitchen, she’d sat him down and made him eggs that burned when he pulled her onto his lap with him. It was warm happiness blushing out from center that was being cared for. She didn’t think on it, but she watched the set of the woman’s shoulders, like she was half-ready to get up from the table right then and there.
“I don’t know him real well,” Ella was vague, the vague of magic books and people that clustered around them and her heartbeat threw itself into her throat once again. She didn’t know him one little bit beyond someone to talk at who’d been real considerate. Someone who liked things nice, who seemed a little like the professors she’d known at college, the kind who read well and listened to the music she’d hoped one day to sing. There were gaps, between the knowing, shadows of things other people said they knew. “But he offered me a job. Did me a favor,” she smiled above the pan, threw it over her shoulder like a lifeline. “Guess he does that. Favors.”
Favors. Cerise couldn't remember when she'd stopped looking at anything Ian did as a favor, but she knew that it had been a long time ago. Probably a full decade and a half ago, when she'd first started doing the drugs because they seemed like safety and salvation even though they were anything but. The drugs had kept her sane to a degree. Even if they were as close to dying as one could get without actually punching their ticket, it also felt like the only thing worth living for back then. Things were always backwards like that. Bad wrapped up in good, evil barb-twisted with caring, black holding hands with white.. all muddled into one confusing shade of gray.
Cerise could see through it now. Maybe that kind of sight came with age, or just crawling up from the bottom so many times that the blinders finally fell off. Even if she couldn't translate the reasoning behind Ian's machinations, she knew them for what they were. That man helped a lot of people, but never quite for free. "Yeah, he does," Cerise confirmed with a pathetic sniff that she attributed to allergies she didn't have.
There wasn’t a word for what Ian did but there was a black-thick line in Ella’s mind, between the madness of his actions, of the cruelty of them and the favor he’d doled out for her - something small enough and simple, to slide on through the cracks. She didn’t think of favors as things given with expectation and she didn’t think of shades of gray; Ella liked sunshine, she liked the slide of light through the windows in this confusing house, white-lit and soft-spoken. She listened, instead to that soft little sound and she was quiet steps across the kitchen, a rattle-gather of cutlery first and a plate set down in front of Cerise, sunshine-yellow eggs blanketed over toast. Favors came and favors went but food was constant, and the food set down on the table glistened with butter, smelled fresh-wholesome and warm. “You go on and eat that, honey,” and Ella was quiet certainty in the things she knew, gathered up into her hands.
“How do you know him?” She folded herself into a chair at the end, chin on drawn-up knees, and she looked at Cerise, clear blue eyes and thoughtfulness. Maybe Cerise wasn’t the same way as Sam, as Iris-behind-the-door. Maybe there was still some good to the man, not a monster. But the woman bruised and branded like cigarette burns and hard handling looked like a butterfly stabbed through with a pin, like maybe she didn’t flutter anymore. Ella’s mouth was still and soft, her fingers folded together like a prayer at church.
The food was simple, a homestyle replica of breakfast plates at small town diners, and Cerise had been to enough of those that it wasn't completely unfamiliar. Her momma might not have ever cooked, and living out of a suitcase wasn't a match for hearty meals, but she'd been stationary for awhile with Jack. Steady normalcy and real food. She'd missed it, Cerise realized. The smell was buttery and warm and she could have fallen into it happily. She picked up a wedge of toast and took a bite, giving Ella a small, green glance brimming with gratitude. God, she hadn't realized how hungry she was until that first, perfect bite. "He's my father," she explained from around the chew.
There were semantics involved, and all things that Cerise never quite got into explaining. Ian was her father in every way but biology. He'd taken care of her more than anyone else, and sometimes she resented him for that more than any of the painful things he did. The silver lining always made it hard to walk away. Story of her fucking life. "This is really good," she murmured while taking a forkful of eggs.
Ella smiled like sun coming out from behind clouds, Louisiana summer-bright delight at seeing all that enjoyment tied up in a person who looked like she didn’t get around to eating all that often. Eggs weren’t fancy, they weren’t, like her momma used to tell her, love on a plate, all fixings and syrup and biscuits nestled up close on the side. They were quick and they were easy, but they were filling and Cerise, bruised like spilled ink, could do with filling up. She hugged her knees, and she grinned like quiet pride because there were some things she could manage fine. And then she choked, stifled on that little he’s my father like someone had taken all the breath out of the air.
“He’s your dad?” Ella didn’t know semantics but she knew how fathers were meant to be. Her own was loud, and he didn’t much like anything that messed with how things ought to be. Far as the General was concerned, how things ought to be was out of sight, ‘lest he wanted them in the line of fire and going anywhere and studying music was a foolish idea, cold-voiced coming down through the telephone wires as she’d sat in the hall and nursed the extension to her momma’s phone call. Coop had loved his, had loved him right up until he’d died; all kinds of stories about how they’d been. Ella eyed Cerise uncertainly; Ian didn’t seem like he’d flown kites, or kissed bruised knees.
But maybe there was something. “He didn’t say you were his daughter.”
Cerise shrugged her way into the next bite, barely concerned. That was an old wound, one that still burned when it was accidentally scratched, but familiar enough to ignore. Of course Ian wouldn't have said she was his daughter. She'd been a nobody child, and now she was a nobody woman. People didn't give a whole lot of thought to nobody, not when there was always somebody real around the bend. Everybody she'd ever loved had somebody else. They didn't need her, but she'd always needed them a little too much. That was her wiring, her dysfunction, not theirs.. and that's what made it hurt the worst. She did this shit to herself. Mid-bite, Cerise closed her eyes in an attempt to savor the ooze of warm butter dancing between the toast's crumb.. but it just wasn't the same as it had been a moment ago. She wanted drugs, and that steered the hunger away from her stomach and into her head. She might have put the drugs in her arm, but the starving lunatic was in her mind.. and she remembered now that it felt better to need something and not someone. The someones were always a let down.
Cerise set aside the last edge of toast, and nudged the plate away with the pointed end of her elbow when she looked at Ella with a smile that was warmer than her thoughts. "We have a complicated relationship."
Ian had spilled honey and balm, soft-wickedness with words and a tongue like a liar, flicking around the veiled hints of wrongs done both women. She’d listened, soaked it up like biscuits with butter and it didn’t feel right, now. Like oil, scummy-clear on water, like washing dishes that wouldn’t run clean. Ella sat, pointed elbows on the table and leaning like a willow bowing over water, behind a cloud of blond hair. She looked at the plate but she didn’t stand, not right off. Cerise (pretty name, no hair ribbons, no childhood tucked up in lace and French lullabies) looked like hunger bound around with barbed wire just a minute, but she couldn’t be, all that food done with.
“Tell me?” Ella said and it was hesitant, uncertain but it was soft, like kisses after falling down. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, the woman with bruises like wingbeats on her shoulders and a burnt ridge of a scar that looked like it might not have been accident, same way there’d been locked doors and doctors, once. She smiled back, whole and warm and if Ella knew anything at all it was how to smile.
“I had one. With my father.”
Cerise had green goddess eyes. Nothing of peacock vibrancy or Aphroditical love spell sea foam. These were the sad, regretful eyes of greatness that sat on an ocean floor, marble statues of glory lost to so much ancient mold. Tell her? She squeezed those eyes shut behind the back of a hand, making a small laugh of a sound that didn't quite sound like laughing at all. It had become her trademark sound for happy amusement over the years, cheap formica laid over real marble. Ramen noodles to satisfy the memory of truffled orecchiette for a death row heart. Chicken soup for the soul that's given up. It was just easier to pretend, and it had been for a long time.
"Nothing to tell," she shrugged. Then, in a moment of crippled honesty brought on by the first warm meal she'd had since maybe Georgia, and even then she could only recall it was the morning after half-thought breakfast of some guy in some bar. It wasn't Jack and it wasn't Sid, and she didn't love him, so maybe thats what leaving felt like. Maybe thats how it was for them when they always left or stopped wanting to be around her or whatever it was. Just enough, rather go on with the cold food, so long. But she wasn't a stranger to them, how could they leave..
Or maybe she was. Maybe nobody knew her, and her head was all backwards on a self-inflicted pike. Now that she thought about it, they never even said goodbye. And with Jack, well.. there'd never been any of that morning stuff because it was all stuck in her head(them), and it wouldn't get out. She needed it out, she needed to be alone, she needed to use. Cerise twisted her hands into fists and laid her face down on her arm with a mind manic on the past and trying to catch up with the present. She was talking to Ella, she was supposed to answer something..
"I don't know," she sobbed weakly into her arm, hurt by everything but her childhood just then. Talking about that suddenly seemed less godawful than what was in her heart. When she turned her head to the side, cheek pinning her arm, the tears in her eyes were already drying and her lips were steady without any gutwrenching wibble. There had been a question, and she was suddenly determined to answer. "My mother wanted me to go. She was young and couldn't raise me. I thought she was so big then, and I still think of her like that, but.. she was just a kid. Couldn't even buy alcohol most places as I remember.." Sniff, straighten in the chair. "So Dad took me. He knew I couldn't stay there.." Attention flicked to the ceiling, half manic in search of a reason that she could conduct out of thin air. She thought she understood Ian, better than anyone. "He couldn't just leave me there, you know." She had been just a kid, practically a child.. there was no reason he would have taken her in. Knowing what she knew now, there was no way.. unless he wanted to help her.
"He helped me, he- he raised me. But my ex-- my.." Grimace, rewrite. "My friend, he.. tried to.. we ran away, kind of and things just haven't been the same since." She looked at Ella then and spoke without underlined preamble, "You need to leave."
She’d gone digging through her momma’s sewing basket once, looking for a button box, full of bright and shiny pretties, like candy, like jewels. She’d dug deep with little hands, set one spool of thread bouncing over the edge of the basket, a bobbin spinning by itself on hardwood floor; Cerise’s story was candid as brightly colored silk unspooling itself, like cracked glass and the damp sliding in underneath it. She looked like seams unstitched and jagged stitches remade, like crumpled paper smoothed out pretending it had never been tossed away at all. Ella listened; milk-white elbows on the edge of the table and chin in hands, she listened with wide eyes and parted lips, caught breath oh as Cerise twisted, turned, caught within a maze constructed of memories. She listened, and she hurt for a little girl with damp green eyes and wild hair, a little girl who wasn’t silver-marked by scars and had a Daddy like a shadow cast long across a floor.
Short stop, quick drawn up, and Ella folded in upon herself like origami, like paper swans set free to fly. “What?” Caught in the ribbon of Cerise’s fractured fairy-tale, an ex-a-friend, runaways, a father who didn’t sound like a father should (Ian, he didn’t talk the way a father talked, he didn’t hold his head high and look proud, he hadn’t kept her from breaking, wrapped her up like china), the scissors flashed, clipped it clear. Ella’s eyes were wide blue, fear bled through into soft concern.
“Why?” Her fingers had gone tight, wrapped around each other, locked together like prayers at church, head bent, I will be good.
The breakfast had weakened Cerise. Warmth was so much more dangerous than the cold, it loosened muscled grips and made knives slip. She sighed with eyes closed and held back urges by the hair, the sudden want to shatter that plate on the ground, break windows, scream. It was a recurring wave, initially tidal but consciously brought to a shallow pool after a moment. "You just have to," she said. None of the gentle pleading that had strung her previous words together like frightened yarn through a barbed grommet. These words were steady, and with a sniff, so was her stare. Green eyes bristled with red in a way that was nothing like Christmas morning.
"I'm not saying anything more," she murmured with a voice that found its way home in cold and comfort once more. Standing from the table, Cerise took her plate and dropped it, leftover egg, toast crust, and all, into the sink. And without another word or even a sympathetic glance, she rounded out of the kitchen and went for the stairs.