Emma Kemp (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} and_in_between) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} nevermore_logs,@ 2017-04-19 11:52:00 |
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WHAT: Rediscoveries
WHEN: Tuesday, late afternoon and evening/night
WHERE: Her house
WARNINGS: NA
It was strange, just how much a person accumulated over the course of their life. Emma's husband William didn't even knew who he was any more, and yet in their home was the evidence of over forty years of marriage. Of over sixty years of life. William was all but gone, and yet his things remained, like a constant neon sign reminding Emma her husband was dying and there was nothing she could do about it.
Despite still having rather low energy levels thanks to the chemo, Emma went to work on clearing his stuff out, just to have it gone. Some of it could be used, and by people who needed it more than Emma needed the reminder. Some of it was just old garbage that could be cleared out.
When Emma was shoulders deep in a box of William's school reports, decades old, she heard the voice of her youngest child behind her. "What are you doing?" she asked, her voice sounding both scared and annoyed.
Emma extracted herself from the box and offered Little a weary smile. "Hello, darling. I'm just clearing out some of Dad's old things."
It was possible Emma couldn't have said anything to offend Little more. "What, why?!" Little hissed at her, backing up a step. She looked positively mutinous.
"Oh, sweetheart. We don't need most of it. I don't know what on earth possessed him to keep these high school reports anyway, it's just junk-"
"Oh, so all Dad's stuff is junk is it?!" Little shrieked at Emma.
"No-"
"I saw the piles of his clothes on your bed! Are you just throwing those out?"
"Darling, someone could use them. I was going to donate them to charity."
"Now that he's gone, just out with the old, right?" Little continued. "Get rid of his clothes to some stinky homeless person, and throw out all the rest of this stuff. Is that what you're going to do with Char's stuff? With Thomas'? With mine?!" Little was crying then, and Emma couldn't stand it.
"Oh- Oh, love-" She stood to comfort Little, but the girl was already backing towards the door.
"Leave me alone!" she shrieked, turning on her heel to run out the door.
Emma sighed and winced when the door slammed behind Little. There was a good chance Little would end up spending the night with her friends and Emma wouldn't see her until tomorrow afternoon when she would slink in and pretend nothing had happened. "Great job, Emma. Perfect parenting," she grumbled, turning back to the box of things. "Dammit, William."
Despite Little's rather fantastic display of upset, Emma continued her quest to clear out the boxes of things no one would ever have any use for. In fact she had been doing it so long that orange had tinged the evening sky by the time Emma pulled over a new box to start on. She ripped it open and found a huge pile of family photos inside. That surprised her, she hadn't realised William had stockpiled old photos. Most of them were in albums, resting on shelves groaning from the strain of their weight.
Emma pulled a few out, smiling idly at the pictures of William's family posing in various ways. There were photos of his parents, holding hands and making gooey eyes at each other, even after decades of marriage. Emma felt a little choked up and put them aside, rifling through another pile of them. What she pulled out was a photo of her oldest children, Anna and Thomas, with their arms around William's young cousin, Peter who was holding a baby Charlotte in his arms. Peter was grinning madly at whomever took the photo, his eyes sparkling with glee at being around his second cousins.
Emma's stomach twinged as she started at that grinning face. Peter had been the same age as Anna, the son of William's uncle Carl, who happened to be the wealthy branch of the family. Carl had had Peter quite late in life, and he never really seemed to know what to do with the boy. Peter's mother had died shortly after he was born, and Carl wasn't known for his affection, certainly. He usually dropped Peter off at William and Emma's with whatever thin excuse he could think of. Emma never minded. The more the merrier. Peter had been a delightful kid, kind and polite almost to a fault. He was awkward as all hell, but who could blame him. His father spent more time drowning his sorrows in whiskey than making eye contact with his son, let alone speaking to him.
It was with a rather large amount of guilt that Emma realised she hadn't thought about Peter in years. He had wanted to become a priest, for some unknowable reason. Perhaps because the priests at Peter's incredibly expensive private school had been the ones to comfort him after the suicide of his father, in the wake of Carl's drunk driving episode which had killed three people and seriously injured him.
After Peter went off to seminary, Emma and William had mostly lost contact with him. They had been dealing with Thomas' various issues, as well as having several other children by then. When Peter was involved with an exorcism gone wrong, which saw the death of his fellow seminarian, and Peter's subsequent admission to a mental hospital after he raved on and on about demons, Emma and William had faded from his life completely.
It was a tragedy, really. That grinning, sweet little boy, still locked up just because his life had been one calamity after another and it had been too much for him. Emma often felt like she was struggling to keep it together these days, and she hadn't seen her friend killed right in front of her. She supposed if she had, she might rave about demons too-
Demons.
Demons.
With a feeling of horror dawning in her belly, Emma jumped up from the floor and rushed to her computer to speak to her children.
There was a very real chance Peter had been incarcerated for nearly a decade for no reason at all. And if anything could make someone lose their mind, that was it.