Clandestiny [on hold]

Chapter 3

“Mom!” I yell down the hall.

I run through my house, carefully dodging the rubble on my way to the back room where my mother is crying. I call out to her; Calix is close behind me calling as well, he sometimes calls her ‘mom’ with his Australian accent that makes it sound like ‘mum’.

I burst through her bedroom door, she’s sitting at the foot of her bed clutching a box of tissues, and my little sister Zula is comforting her. Zula is 12 years old, but she is wise beyond her years. Throughout the years of her life my parents have tried to protect her from the world by not telling her the important things that make it bad; poverty, hunger, global warming, kidnapping, war, domestic violence…and when they thought they had her fooled, she would smile to herself keeping inside the fact that she knew better, that she would never let them pull the wool over her eyes. Now here she is, hugging her distressed mother, comforting her, she is strong and wise because she made herself that way.

“Mom?” I say softly.

She looks up at me, her face is bruised and battered and cut like she’d been hit. I don’t want to believe that my dad, her own husband, had done that to her. I expected her to bury her head in her hands after me seeing her like that, but her expression grew worried.

“Casey!” she exclaims. “What happened to you?” I had forgotten about my own beaten face, but I do not want to talk about me.

“Forget about me, what happened to you? What happened to the house? What did Oliver do?”

“Your father didn’t do anything, not to me…he just…he got really angry with you after you left and he…” she gestures to the rest of the house with a wave of her hand but can’t form any words, now she hides her face.

I look at Zula, she knows what I’m thinking “I was in my room, I locked the door. I only came out when I couldn’t hear anything, and I…” she squeezes her mother tighter. Calix pushes past me and kneels down beside them, speaking soft, reassuring words. I don’t go to them.

I look back out to the house, down the hall. I walk by the fallen pictures and broken pots, each room is demolished in some way, all except a small room, door slightly ajar, a fist sized hole that dints it but nothing on the inside damaged. Zula must’ve been terrified but at least she was safe. I keep walking to the front of the house where the kitchen, dining and living rooms join, it’s the worst here. Photo frames smashed, paintings ripped, holes in the walls, tables and chairs hturned up, things thrown all around the room. He sure did a thorough job. Astrid is in the living room, she’s crouched down over something.

Grandma Sophie sits quietly outside on the porch swing; it must be bliss inside her head. I walk over to where the DVD player sits in shreds on the stove top, a snapped ROM-COM disc amongst it all. A toppled book case lies on the floors with the books scattered absolutely everywhere. By the kettle is a book with its pages ripped and cover torn. ‘Lonely Girl,’ it’s mom’s favourite book, she has a great care for books so this will hurt her. Scattered in pieces are the remains of what looks like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ I always hated it when mom would read it in the living room, Oliver I think hated it the most judging by the way it’s so violently shredded.

I take Lonely Girl off the kettle and turn it on; I get the tea ready for Grandma Sophie. Astrid comes over from where she was crouching, she’s holding a broken picture frame carefully in both her hands, and she seems captivated by it.

“Is this you? Your family?” she asks. She shows me the picture of me when I was 6 years old, my mum and Oliver are both holding baby Zula, I’m sitting on Grandma Sophie’s lap to the left of Oliver, and my older sister Keely is beside mom clasping her arm tight. The photo was taken when we were all on a picnic at the Summerville Park by a friendly stranger. It’s the only picture of us all as a family, where we are all truly happy.