Daughter of the Demon (I)

Daughter of the Demon-20-Runaway

He must have known something.

*****

As soon as I walked through the door the phone rang again. Belinda didn’t appear anywhere near me, so she must have given up. I was so freaking tired of hearing the phone ring that I walked into the kitchen and answered it.

“Hello?” I said agitatedly.

“Jacob?” Clara sounded relieved.

“Yes,” I replied tightly.

“Have you seen Jemma?” Her voice was hurried and strangled. She sounded like she’d been crying.

I froze in my place. “What do you mean?”

“I went up to her room to check on her after you left and she wasn’t there. I thought maybe you’d know---Jacob?”

I had dropped the phone on the floor, and before I knew what I was doing I ran out my front door at top-speed headed for Jemma’s house. When I got there Clara was already at the door. Without a word to her or Michael who had her in his arms I barreled up the steps and into Jemma’s room. I searched it. I looked through her whole room. She hadn’t taken anything. Nothing had moved since I was in there.

She was just . . . gone.

I ran back down her stairs, my heart beating fast and my worry-meter tipping off the charts. Clara stared helplessly at me. I swallowed hard. “Where is she?” I asked softly.

Clara shrugged and turned around to bury her face in Michael’s shirt. He pressed her face into his sweatshirt and rubbed her back gently. Michael caught my eye. I said nothing, but I guessed my eyes revealed everything I felt and more that I didn’t know.. He told me sorry through his eyes, but I turned and walked away.

At least I finally knew what this empty feeling was.

*****

Clara was so worried she wanted to be sick. She had been worried something like this would happen the moment Jemma came to her. Clara wanted to be able to be like a mother to her, but she was too young and inexperienced. There was no way, and she was just too far off. Jemma's mind still wandered with her mother, and now her father, dead and gone. Clara  was so consumed in Michael she didn’t realize the effect coming over her niece. She thought she had learned from the first time she cut herself and was sent to the hospital, but she didn’t.

It was all her fault.

Clara was seated on the living room couch with Michael. She clutched a pillow in her arms which shook involuntarily. She wanted Jemma back. She wanted to know where she went and to bring her back.

But everything seemed so helpless.

“Where could she be?” She asked Michael. She felt him tighten his old around her shoulders.

“Nobody knows,” he whispered. “Nobody knows what goes on in her head but her.”

“I just wish she wasn’t so . . .”

“Difficult?”

She sighed and nestled deeper into Michael. “Yeah.”

“If she finds what she’s looking for, then she’ll come back. If she doesn’t, she might stay wandering.”

“Well, what the hell is she looking for?”

“I don’t know. She may not even know.”

“Then why is she out in the freaking cold and not here with me? Where is the logic in that, Michael?”

Michael brushed the hair out of Clara's face and traced her features with his fingers. “There is no logic,” he informed her quietly. “But I can tell you that her mother’s funeral is in less than a month and I know for a fact Jemma is not the kind of person to miss out on that kind of occasion. Especially when it means so much to her.”

She stared hollowly into the empty fireplace. “Do you think she’s cold?”

“Clara, it’s the beginning of December, night time, and forty degrees outside. Yes, unfortunately, I do think she’s cold.”

“Not what I wanted to here.”

“It’s only the truth.”

She laid her head on his shoulder. “It was so hard for her.”

“What was?”

“The truth. To admit it. When I had to take her to psychologists and specialists over the summer I always had to explain what happened because Jemma refused to reveal the details. I think it was because she still didn’t believe it was true, or maybe because she didn’t want it to be true. I don’t know and I might not ever know. She always had quite a tangled, complicated head on her shoulders.”

“Maybe that’s why he likes her.”

The statement was sudden, out of the blue. She looked up at him. “Excuse me?”

Michael smiled, amused. “You mean you didn’t notice?”

“Uh, kind of consumed in grief right now.”

“That young boy that was just here. I’d say he’s taken quite the fancy to your niece.”

“Jemma?”

“Do you have another niece I don’t know about?”

She swatted his shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous. Jemma said they were just partners.”

“Oh, really? Maybe my assumptions are just off, then. But I could have sworn I saw something there in his eyes . . .”

“Stop straying off topic. We’re supposed to be discussing reasons for my grief, making me feel worse in doing so, but in the end making me feel better. Play your part right.”

Michael cleared his throat. “So sorry. What’s my part again? Troubled and worried boyfriend stuck in the middle of his girlfriend’s screwy business? That sounds about right.”

“You should just shut up now. I don’t even know why I said yes.”

Michael lifted Clara's face up to his and pressed his lips lightly against hers . “And yet you did,” he whispered.

She looked at the diamond ring on her finger. It sparkled in the dying light shining through the window. “I didn’t even get a chance to tell her.”

“She’ll come back, honey, I know she will.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

Michael rubbed her shoulders. “I bet you are.”

She was silent for a moment, and then asked, “do you think she’d be happy for us?’

“She may have a dark soul,” he replied, “but her heart is nothing short of whole.”

 *************************************************************