Three
Our house was a constant, raucous scrum, filled with rattles and squeaks and scrapes and booms and chimes amongst other assorted onomatopoeias, that was the soundtrack that followed my Mother's frequent changes of mind.
The year passed with these noises keeping everyone from finding the solace of slumber late into the night and early into the morning, and filling the space habitually occupied by Dee Dee's conversations and debates with me, a painful reminder of how I had let her down.
Despite Aunt Dee Dee's disapproval, and the way she snubbed Octavia whenever in her presence, I continued our friendship. I loved the way she always complimented me and told me how clever I was, how lucky to be an only child, as she hated her three younger sisters, and how pretty I was. This a grand compliment that she paid me often, and I relished it because no one have ever thought me beautiful.
My grandmother said I was much too thin, my mother told me that my apricot skin was too dark, and that my blush pink lips weren't dark enough. My father said my olive green eyes were too flecked with gold, and that my nose was a tad slanted. Even Cordelia said my light blonde curls were too complicated and easily mussed up, and always seemed to resent that at my current five feet and eight inches I was now the tallest family member.
I had looked in the mirror for years then wished for beauty upon countless stars. I had always awoken discouraged to find that I had not metamorphosed into the stunning fair maiden my family wished me to be, and that my face still could not launch thousands of ships as my family desired. But when Octavia, the sole definition of beauty, told me that I was pretty, for once I actually believed it.
Because having the two together in the same room was equivalent to tying two angry felines into a sack, Dee Dee always left for her weekly, though sometimes daily, "drive" in the coach when Octavia came to visit from then on. Granted my aunt was very secretive with her plans and destination for this "drive", dressed in durable (somewhat expedition-like) clothing, and was gone all day, but this did not bother us as it gave us the whole day to ourselves, and we were free to do as we wished. We relished the freedom to insult Cordelia behind her back, to gripe all our daily annoyances without her chiding, and the ability to order anything our hearts desired from the mail order catalogue sent out by the Island's leading department store. We continued in this fashion for a year, and then a grave and horrible occurrence took place when I was thirteen.
Octavia had just left after an outing to ice skate on the frozen rive that ran behind the homes of every resident in our neighborhood, and I had entered the gates of my parents grandiose estate, my cheeks flushed from the exertion and the afternoon chill. Cordelia, who had not been allowed use of the coach until it returned me home, was impatiently waiting for me to step inside our spacious and highly gilded rococo entryway. She huffed her way past me and ventured outside in the light snow, slamming the door behind her as she stalked down the frozen path to the already awaiting coach, ready to begin her "drive" yet again. As I traced elaborate frost designs on the window pane I was watching her out of, my breath fogging over the glass, I was saddened by the fact that she had not even bid me goodbye or bestowed me with a parting glance. When she failed to return at her usual time, my parents grew worried, but I simply disappeared to my room, shut off like a recluse, to mull over my anger at her for being so rude to me. I also noticed her sporting not only her scarf, but MINE as well, which I had searched relentless for all morning. So while my neck had turned a frigid blue, Aunt Cordelia was toasty in our scarves. How unthoughtful!
The next morning, blinking sleep from my eyes and shivering in my nightgown as my bare feet graced the cold marble checkerboard tile floors of my house, I sat down at the table where my mother was sobbing uncontrollably into the shoulder of my grim looking father, who did not even flinch as his velvet house coat became my Mother's personal mucus-filled handkerchief.
"Isobel," he began gruffly, rows of wrinkles appearing upon his broad forehead as he furrowed his wide, bushy black eyebrows and closed his small brown eyes. "I fear I have some regrettably news." He paused to let me comprehend this, stroking the impressive and curly mustache swallowing his thin, white lips and most of his suntanned face, save his thick jaw line.
I waited patiently for what was coming, after all I had seen the butterfly this morning, and feigned gathering my bearings.
"BELLA! Oh Bella!" my mother sobbed, rather unattractively might I add. Her stringy brown hair was greasy and hung in limp, unbrushed strands about her bloated and blotchy tear streaked face. Her lips appeared quite chapped, and her teal-green eyes were red and swollen at the rims. Her nose was a cherry that was oozing mucus onto my father. "B-Bella!" shrieked my mother shrilly. "My b-b-baby sister Cordelia has b-b-been p-p-pronounced DEAD!"
I tolerated my Mother's blubbering a moment longer before I calmly asked my aunt's cause of death. Apparently her coach had been crossing over the frozen Lake Wilson when they had hit a patch of thin ice and fell into the icy waters. Both my aunt and her driver, a jolly hired man named Ben, had perished, "almost instantly" we were most assured by the constable. My mind and body were too numbed by the realization that Dee Dee was gone to consider just why she had been crossing the lake to reach the other side of the island. It didn't matter then, why she'd left, only that she would never return.
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