The Emotional Children

XXX

She throws open the door, unable to continue bearing his disgusting, intermittent, hoarse pleas. Heels clicking violently against the old, hard wood, she sucks in her breath as she walks down the narrow hall. This place feels like an asylum.

She stands in the doorway of his bedroom; she's not seen him in nineteen years...she's not seen him since that fateful day when she had stumbled upon his crime as an eight-year-old child.

He ought to be a relatively young man still, but not so. It looks as though he's aged a hundred years. He's a skeleton with a canvas stretched over the bones that surge with cancer.

As she stares at him, it seems as though the devil has only just come to light a little fire beneath her soul. She wants to scream, to cry, to run, and to hide in a place where nothing matters and nothing ever will.

The man beholds his daughter; when he had last had his hands on her as an eight-year-old girl, she was feeble, breakable, and fragile. Now, a young woman in her late twenties meets his gaze, and if he were to touch her now, he would find a hard, weather-beaten, immovable grindstone. Her jaw is set, her eyes vicious, her lips thin and red like a crimson wound.

It reminds him of her too much and he can't help it when he cries out.

"Victoria!" he shakily gasps, his eyes bulging with terror and fear. "Victoria, oh my God! Victoria! Oh, Victoria!" he begins yelling, covering his face and sopping eyes with shaking, bony hands.

"Don't you speak her name. Don't you DARE speak her name!" Irene humidly seethes, her nostrils flare and her fists ball up. Her eyes are sacks of water ready to burst. "Not in front of me! I'll not hear you speak the name of my mother in front of me! Don't you dare!"

Her voice deepens as the water in her eyes grows heavier.

"Irene! Irene—!" he says, opening his hands beseechingly to his only child.

"What is it?" she demands, throwing her hands in the air. "What do you want to say to me? What do you want to say before you die? What is it you want to tell me that you couldn't have done five days ago? Five months ago? Five years ago? I waited for you!" she yells, her throat catching on fire and her eyes officially spilling over with tears. The droplets fall like shooting stars from the heavens.

"I waited—waited every day for ten long, insufferable years at that miserable school for the only man who ever really mattered to me!" She puts her hand to her mouth to keep a sob shut up in her throat. "But no—not one letter. Not one request to see me. I was—no, I AM—convinced that you hate me."

"Irene—" he says, through a veil of tears.

"No," she said, shaking her head miserably at him. "I'm not your daughter. I've changed my name; I am Irene Adler. I am my mother's child. I will never be yours! Never! Because you—you—"

The words are lodged in the back of her mouth, and she can't continue. She inhales, sounding like a broken engine, and manages to get the last out.

"Because you didn't want me."

She spits it out, holding her hand to her forehead and weeping bitterly with her arm on the wall to support herself.

"Irene—" he tries again, his voice shakes.

"All I wanted was to love you! I only ever wanted you to love me! You—"

She can no longer speak. The convulsive nature of the sobs is making communication impossible, and the words remain unspoken, seeming to clog her airways. Her hand is over her face; she wants to stop crying, but she can't. Her mouth is open, and long, loud sobs fall out.