Written In The Stars

Chapter Forty Five

ARDELLA

My mother rarely ever rang. Her presence in my life was a mere flash. She would appear for a second and then she would be gone, with a few phone calls here and there to remind me she would never change into the mother I had hoped for all these years. A call was rare, but a visit was an impossibility.

When her knock sounded out,  opening the door to her rose lips scowling and blue eyes piercing down at me, I thought maybe I could fly today.

She hadn't been in touch ever since the disastrous evening dinner in which I'd ran away with smoke burning at my heels. That part of my life had been buried along time ago, but Evelyn Bloom could dig her way up cement if she was determined enough. She would always disturb the dust that had settled, rocked the waves that had finally calmed. She was my own personal earthquake. Nothing could ever be still while she was around.

"What are you doing here?" A voice with rigid tones sounded out, almost like it was on autopilot. I had been brought back to the present. My mother still stood tall and calculating. 

If only I had never answered the door.

"Are you not going to invite me in, Ardella?"

If only.

With great regret, I stood back two steps to open the door wider, welcoming Mrs Bloom in to my apartment and back into my life. With one swift stride in and her shoulders held high, I couldn't help but glance around at the unkept apartment. Had I known she would be visiting I maybe would have binned the Chinese takeaway containers from the night before, left spewed across the kitchen counters along with two empty bottles of wine. A small tint of rose coloured embarrassment began to creep into my cheeks.

Traipsing behind her I could sense her eyes seizing up the small space. I could feel her nausea as she focused in on the yellow accent wall I had pained in my despair. My mother had a distaste for the colour yellow. In her home the walls could only ever be monotone. Presentable. Yellow was far too bold, far too...happy.

"This is...nice. Your grandparents are taking care of you, I see?" Her lies were blatant but for once she hadn't openly insulted me.

With a hesitant tongue I mumbled out a timid response. "They are."

I hoped Evelyn knew just how much her parents had loved and cared for me all these years. How many years of trauma they had made up for something my mother could never do.

She sighed at my lack of enthusiasm, continuing to walk around the place taking every little detail in. She paused in her tracks, the sound of her heels coming to a stop right in front of the glass cabinet I had decorated with fresh flowers and a pine candle that had yet to be burned. Amongst these was a photo I had framed some time back when I first moved in.

Gina's smile lifted the whole room up that day, someone that day had snapped the photo at the perfect time. Gina's arms were engulfing me as she grinned with all her pearly whites at the camera and I was laughing, my eyes were a lot brighter back then. Emerson could be seen in the very back with his face tilted as he, too, grinned wildly, almost looking identical to his sister. It was Gina's sixteenth birthday that day.

Every time I looked at that photo I was reminded about how much I had left behind, but I could still never find it in me to replace it. It belonged there.

I had almost forgotten the woman in my apartment, but she didn't stay quiet for long. "How's Emerson?"

There it was. I should have expected his name to pop up at least once whilst she was here. For someone who had tried and succeeded in keeping me away from that boy, she sure was invested in his life a hell of a lot.