Chapter 23: Trip down memory lane
“What do I do now?
I didn't think my heart could break any more than it already has.
The pieces still inside of me feel like broken glass.
Every time I take a breath, they stab into me.
It never ends....”
― H.M. Ward
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The ride back from the darkness was much calmer. I was not falling anymore, it was more of a gentle float through a black abyss which thankfully did not have my heart pounding in my chest. I however, was preoccupied in thought.
The site of Irene’s supposed father walking in after her while removing his belt was etched in my mind. The cracking sound of his belt striking her was stuck in my head like a player jammed on repeat. The thought of Irene having to bear all that not so long ago, considering she looked not that much younger in her memory, broke my heart. She had had a troubled childhood and instead of having solace from her sister, Rosalyn only seemed to aggravate things.
I had always thought having a sibling would have made my life more fun, I would have enjoyed things. I had always secretly felt sad that my mom never could have another baby but I never said anything to her, it was bad enough she took it so harshly herself. However, seeing Irene’s memory dramatically changed my mind. If this is what having sibling's did to you, I didn’t want any. The entire situation also explained why Irene looked so freaked all the time. I had no idea what to think of her mother but what I had seen of the remaining members of her family, I held no good thoughts about her either.
My floating in this empty abyss slowed down a lot more as my lost thoughts were answered. I was getting a bonus memory from Irene this time, I wasn’t back to reality yet. A distant part of my brain worried about the centaurs finding us in the forest, not sure of what my body was doing back in the woods, but I pushed the thought further back in my mind. I was more interested in looking at what Irene had to show me, perhaps it would clarify why her family treated her the way that they did.
The darkness around me gradually changed color and momentum. The darkness what taking on a much lighter intensity, leading up to an orange light, and just like that I was standing in the middle of a room illuminated a light orange color by candle light. Turns out, I was seeing this memory through Irene’s eyes because I was nowhere in sight, but there stood Irene, in front of a floor length mirror, her dress pulled down slightly from her shoulders. Her thin, cream colored shoulders were streaked with red and blue rectangular bruises, now fading away slightly. My vision got blurry as I realized Irene was crying. Arms came up all of a sudden as she quickly pulled up her dress onto her shoulders and buttoned it in place. She wiped her tears away from her face furiously, as I felt a resolve run through her body; she didn’t want to be caught crying.
My vision faded into blackness again for a millisecond and then back to morning light. I was lying on a bed, staring up at a stark white ceiling. I could hear birds chirping on my right hand side, causing me to look up. There was a red Robin, absolutely beautiful, sitting on my window sill but instead of feeling happy or delighted at its presence, all I felt was unhappiness. I looked away from the window and back at the ceiling, raising my hands up, drawing shapes in the air. Scrawny hands drew flowers into nothingness as I realized, I was still in Irene’s body and memory. She was showing me things from her perspective, again.
The door to the left of my room opened then, and a stout woman, the same size as Irene’s father, dressed in a dark blue dress with small, pink bows on it walked in with her hands on her hips.
“It’s 7 o clock! When are you going to wake up, Irene? I am not your servant to have to come wake you up and the servants themselves have a lot to do! No one is going to wait around for her highness, Irene to wake up and then give her breakfast! Get out of bed now and you better be downstairs in 10 minutes or you get no breakfast!” the woman yelled with a shrill voice. I could feel Irene get irritated just at the woman opening her mouth and by the time the lady had finished her little speech, Irene had gone from irritation to not caring at all. I felt a sense of nonchalance run through her body as she didn’t even bother to respond to her and instead watched the woman turn around, walk out of the room and slam her door shut.
The room faded into darkness again and this time when the view changed, I was back in my body but still in Irene’s memory. She was sitting in a room illuminated with candle light, on a bench overlooking a medium sized wooden table. At the table stood a tall woman with a darker skin tone, cutting what looked like carrots. I walked closer to the woman and realized I was in the kitchen because behind her was a large pot that sat atop an open fire. Water bubbled inside with ferocity but neither Irene nor the woman paid any attention to it.
“Miss’us, you must eat, please. I ‘ave seen you for the past few weeks. You ‘ardly eat. Please miss, you must. You’ve grown so thin,” her accent was foreign but she spoke with genuine concern for Irene, I could hear it in her voice.
“As much as I appreciate your concern, Louise, I know you care but please don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I don’t want you getting caught talking to me. Mama will get so mad and you know what happened the last time she got mad,” Irene’s voice had faded towards the very end of her sentence which caused a shiver to run down Louie’s spine.
“I know miss, I’ll be very quiet,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “did you put that balm I gave you fo’ your bruise?”
Irene bobbed her head up and down in acknowledgment, “Thank you for that, Louise, it worked wonders, you can barely see the belt marks on my back anymore. I tried it on the burn marks I had from last week, you can barely tell mama put hot, kitchen prongs to my arms. Although my skin still feels quite charred from there,” her voice was barely a whisper as she tried her best to conceal the emotions in it but even from where I stood across the room, I could see glints of tears in her eyes. The girl was putting on a brave face but I was quite sure Louise saw right through her.
“I curse the day that woman was born!” whisper yelled Louise, slamming down her knife onto the carrots as furiously as she could, “beating ‘p a li’le child that way. Bu’ning her with fire! The woman will pay fo’ her crimes, I tell you, miss, she will!” the carrots were finely chopped pieces now as she slapped her knife down on the last piece but before she had a chance to look up, Irene was walking to her. She gently put her arms around Louise’s waist, the woman was quite tall, and buried her face in her stomach, a muffled sound came from Irene, “I love you, Louise. If you weren’t here to take care of me, I might have died a long time ago,” her voice shook with the emotions that she was trying her best to keep at bay.
“Hush now, miss. Don’t say that. God has a plan for ‘veryone. You just be strong,” I saw Irene nod her head yes and just like that the room twisted within itself and was I hurtling in the empty abyss again. I was falling quite possibly at the speed of light, my heart pounding in my chest. Instinctively, I clutched at it from exploding out my rib cage and squeezed my eyes shut, unable to take the free fall anymore.
Within a few seconds my feet touched the ground with a soft crunch, making me realize I had landed on grass and fallen leaves, back in the woods.
Irene stood a breath away where I had stepped forward to touch her shoulder before being hurtled off in her memories. She was still in her trance, looking deep into the woods and whispering, “Just be strong, just be strong,” over and over again. All I could do was look at her. Look at her beautiful face and now understand how tortured she was behind it. All I could think then was something I had read from Shepherd’s book, Lifeboat, what kind of miracle ripped out your heart, and left you breathing? It fit Irene perfectly but the irony of life was again in front of me, beauty and pain walking this Earth together, unable to leave one another. I wanted to pull her to me then and hug her as tightly as I could, tell her that I would take her pain away and make her feel better, at least that’s what I wanted to do but I knew it sounded like something out of the movies. I actually could not touch her, let alone take away her pain. I couldn’t make her feel better, I could hardly even save her.
As much as I was trying to be this girls’ “knight in shining armor” since yesterday, I could hardly step up to the plate. She had obviously suffered a lot more than I had imagined and needed something more than “being taken home” and just like that a thought popped into my head. She was so absolutely tortured, why on Earth would she want to go back to this family of hers? Was it all too easy to assume that perhaps she might have actually run away from home to evade those barbaric fools and had gotten lost in these woods? My mind was reeling. My hypothesis did not match the visions she had shown me of the dying man and woman, earlier in the forest. Nor did it explain her memory loss at being questioned about her house. I was going around in circles and was leading nowhere. Irene, however, was still whispering to herself, leaving me to do only one thing. I had to break her out of her trance and have a long conversation with her even if she didn’t like it. She had all these memories that she kept flashing onto me and yet when talking to me, she remembered nothing.
I was beginning to feel dizzy with all these realizations and had to do something fast. Time to snap Irene out of it.
© Hafsa T.M (aka HTMwrites)