Linda slept soundly all morning. When she finally awoke, she found Sharon's note, not Sharon, lying in her bed. Still snarfulled under the covers, the note spread a warm morning smile across her face. It welcomed Linda back to the world and assured her how much Sharon loved her. It felt good to be back. She woke up with a clear mind and heart for the first time in weeks. Questions still fluttered about; questions about her family and her own life. They always would. The difference now, she accepted those questions and the deaths of her brother and mother at face value; the way she had unquestioningly accepted so many other parts of her life.
By the late afternoon, wanting to relive her father's reaction from the night before, she searched the kitchen for something to make for dinner. She knew Saturdays in Sears Home Furnishings Department were busy. He usually arrived home tired, and having dinner almost ready for him would be a treat. By the time he walked in the door, she'd baked two potatoes and heated up her favorite vegetable, Stouffer's corn scuffle. She'd also defrosted and prepared a small steak, slathering it in butter, Accent, Lawry's salt, and pepper, leaving it on the counter waiting to go into the broiler. When Gloria cooked, her father always claimed to enjoy broiling steak. A claim derived from fear that Gloria might forget what she was doing and burn down the house.
They ate together at the kitchen table, happy to be in each other's company. Linda asked her father what he did at work that day, hoping to hear one of his funny stories about his customers. However, Ed only wanted to talk about her and her future. His daughter's maturity often amazed him; at the same time, he took it for granted. At 13, she spoke more intelligently than most adults he knew. Clearly, Metuchin couldn't hold her much longer, and he knew he couldn't either. Asking whether she'd been thinking about college, he said that he'd heard students like her sometimes went early.
Then, he said something that defined the change in their world. "If you see Mr. Dwight at the library sometime, you should ask him about colleges. He knows a lot more about where you should go than I do. Maybe you could even go to Harvard, where he works. Isn't that the best college in the country?" It came out as if talking about Titus were an everyday occurrence around the Stapelton dinner table. Linda gladly accepted the change.
After dinner, Linda insisted on cleaning up, telling her father he'd worked hard all day and should relax. She supposed that the kitchen, once her grandmother's, then her mother's, was hers. Eliza had all but said she and James were leaving to follow some rock band back to San Francisco. She suspected she might not see her sister again for a long time.
No, Linda thought, it would be just her and her father. She'd have to be the woman of the house - taking care of everything his wife should've done - keep the house clean and looking just so, cook his meals and clean his clothes. As she saw it, everything a man should want from his wife.
Linda brought a cup of Sanka and a couple of cookies into the living room, where Ed sat watching TV. She stayed with him for a little bit, then, when he'd finished his coffee, took his cup and went to finish tidying up. Taking the dishes from the drying rack and putting them away, she pondered on the irony of Fate placing her, not Sharon, in this role.
With everything done in the kitchen, Linda kissed her father goodnight and went upstairs. She wanted to call Sharon but didn't. She knew they wouldn't be allowed to talk with Sharon's father having just come home, and she didn't want to get Sharon in trouble.
For close to two months, Linda had used meditation to punish herself. Now feeling like herself again, she craved the bliss it could provide. She didn't exactly understand that what she wanted to do was travel to the Sea of Souls. Linda's Earthly self merely identified she could have any experience she chose during her meditation. And having sorted through her life, she felt deserving of the euphoria she knew she'd return with.
With a sense of peace settled deep in her heart, Linda rolled out the yoga mat Robin had given her and sat spine-straight on the floor of her room. As was her meditation ritual, she began with her breaths. By consciously focusing her breathes into the chakras Robin had taught her about, she'd found something akin to an on-ramp into the energy streams. Her seven chakras were also where she anchored her tether. Without an anchor, Linda knew she might never find her way back. Even during her punishment travels, she'd carefully secured herself to the seven points of her breaths. It meant swimming with something akin to drag. However, it also acted as a line to pull herself out of the Sea when she needed to return. It felt similar to what the Water did when she stayed under too long, and pressure pulled her to the surface.
Entering the Sea of Souls, the beam of light Linda became darted amongst the Soul Strands. Swimming this way and that, she played like a baby dolphin in a psychedelic kelp forest. During her travels, she'd learned how to penetrate people's souls to varying depths. Usually, she would pick a specific strand and sweep along the outskirts of its glow, taking in the emotional reverberations as she moved from point to point through the person's history - scanning what amounted to a low-resolution chronicle of their life. Then, when she found a particularly intriguing event, she'd swim closer, embracing the singular point to live the moment's richness. After such a nice dinner with her father, Linda chose to search out the unbridled love people felt within families, particularly the reciprocating feelings derived from parental pride. Once saturated in the joy those feelings brought her, Linda went to find Sharon.
In nearly all her travels through the Sea, Linda mingled in the lives of strangers, often people who had died years and generations earlier. She'd observed the souls of Titus and Robin and, of course, her family, but other than her mother's, she rarely embraced their strands. Delving too deeply into the lives of people she knew felt intrusive.
Sharon was different. Linda knew Sharon would never mind her mingling with her soul. And the experience of being with Sharon was unique. When reliving the experiences encoded onto Sharon's soul, Linda felt the times they had shared far differently than she did when attaching herself to anyone else. It struck her as odd, but it came as close to touching her own strand as she had found.
Wiggling alongside Sharon's Soul Strand, Linda relived the moment they met, sitting making sand castles on the beach. She discovered a unique tautness at the point of their first connection, a glitch that felt like an oddly reminiscent marker. Descending further, Linda endured Sharon's panic from the wave sweeping her off the rock in front of Titus's house and Sharon's bursts of relief turning into silliness as they sat together in his bathroom. She avoided the times when Sharon had been abused at home, assuming they'd solved that problem by wishing the lm's away. Then, wondering if she could communicate with Sharon, she slid down toward the present.
Linda enjoyed watching the Soul Strands as they emerged from the predicted future. She thought of the barrier that held her from exploring the future as the floor sea's floor, knowing that what went on within the barrier itself was happening in the present. That within the thin plane of the present, the Sea wove its recording of humanity into place. Swimming along the sea's floor, Linda could watch the connections between souls freezing into place, and the multi-faceted blocks that recorded each person's actions, solidifying. There, she could watch as every action's associated feelings, and emotions hung like loosely draped fabric, then shrunk tightly over the polyhedron's uniquely shaped facets, becoming a permanent recording on each person's Soul Strand.
Sliding along Sharon's strand, closing in on the present, Linda became concerned. First, she felt Sharon's apprehension as she picked at her dinner in a fancy restaurant. And her sense of foreboding bordering on nausea as her father periodically touched her leg on their drive home. Watching Sharon's strand emerge from the predicted future, Linda identified intricate patterns forming - elaborately shaped blocks of 55, 89 and 144 sides. She knew configurations of this complexity only arose from people's most sensual connections.
The soul's carnal connections, and more so, the feelings they generated, baffled Linda. Sometimes, they held a person's (particularly a woman's), most beautiful moments of joy and intimacy. Other times, though, the same formations were overlaid with hatred, pain, and anguish imprints. In Sharon's case, she was suffering the latter. Watching Sharon's soul emerging from the barrier, Linda saw wave after wave of horrifying emotions blanketing her friend's soul.
Powerless to stop what was happening, Linda lived Sharon's violation, frame by hideous frame. In a panic, she followed the connection to Sharon's abuser. The soul she encountered held no significant difference between life's bleakest and happiest moments; Linda immediately recognized it as Sharon's father. Terrified, she raced back to Sharon. She knew of no way to sever the connection. Instead, she wove herself tightly into Sharon's soul, living the shame, humiliation, and disgust, along with the stabbing, burning physical pain Sharon felt filling her body over and over.
But another, far more confusing set of feelings overwhelmed Linda. The pain filling Sharon's body was shrouded with a sense of duty. As mortifying as her father's actions were, Sharon was willingly subjecting herself to them for some perceived greater good. Although in all the times Linda searched for Sharon's motivation, she never found anything beyond a blurred calculus of love, duty, and sacrifice.
Suddenly, Linda felt a pulsing, physical repulsion throbbing from Sharon's core, along with shivers of fear as the consequences of what was happening raced through her mind. Then, after only a moment, Linda could feel Sharon's relief as her abuser withdrew. And while Sharon's relief coursed through Linda, she watched as sheets of self-loathing, revulsion, and shame sealed themselves to the intricate lattice of shapes on Sharon's strand. The event would forever soil Sharon's soul. Why Sharon would allow herself to be hurt so deeply, Linda couldn't imagine.
Coming back from her meditation, sliding back into the conscious awareness of her worldly mind, Linda's comprehension of what had happened to Sharon abstracted. Like staring too closely at a Seurat, Linda understood individual points of emotion, but the portrait they made up became indecipherable. Then, as she came back completely, even those points scattered. Once returned to her body, Linda found herself with nothing more than the abstract idea of pain, possibly having to do with Sharon, but she couldn't be sure. The connection to the Sea of Souls had washed away any actualities she encountered.
Waking up the following day when the first rays of sun came into her room, Linda sensed only a resonance of her feelings from the night before. She recalled nothing more than meditating in search of joy and delight and stumbling onto pain that recesses of her mind vaguely connected to Sharon.
Knowing Sharon's penchant for sleeping late, Linda waited until after ten to call. Unfortunately, Sharon's father answered, not her. Hearing Bob's deep voice leaked tinges of the previous night's repulsion into her gut. Bob sniped that she would have to figure out a way to live without Sharon for the day. That his daughter was in the shower, and when she got out, they were going shopping. Linda listened politely and asked to please have Sharon call when they got home.
When Sharon finally called that evening, Linda lay on the verge of hysteria. Assuring her that nothing had happened the night before, Sharon told her not to always believe her dreams. Linda pushed, saying her fear came from something she picked up during meditation, not a dream. But the more Linda pushed the issue, the more insistent Sharon became. And the more Sharon insisted nothing happened, the more discomfort Linda heard in her voice.
Sharon remained silent about what her father did to her until it was too late. Still, Linda knew each and every time it happened. She saw changes in Sharon, a more pronounced version of her behavior from a year ago. Sharon began grasping for any lifeline that gave her a sense of control. Desperately trying to regain some sense of her lost self, her voice and things she said became more childlike; and while naturally a little daffy, she played up that part of her persona. At the same time, she began wearing make-up and dressing in the provocative new clothes Bob bought for her. And when at school, she flirted with the older boys.
Linda tried talking to Sharon about the way she acted. She'd admit that maybe she shouldn't be teasing the boys or wearing her skirt so high, but it was just for fun. But, the one person Linda felt she could go to, Robin, had been gone for weeks. And when they finally spoke on the phone, Linda didn't know exactly how to explain what worried her about Sharon.
"What do you mean, 'she's acting weird,' Pinky," Robin asked?
"Well, like she's just not acting like Shar. She's saying dumb things, like on purpose, and flirting in this weird way with juniors and seniors at school. And I just have this feeling that someone's hurting her, and I don't know why." Linda tried to explain herself, realizing she didn't have facts to back up her feelings.
Robin assumed the issue boiled down to the girl's two-year age difference rearing its head and tried giving Linda whatever advice she could. "I don't think you need to worry too much about Sharon. Is she doing anything with the boys she shouldn't? Is it the older kids at school you think are hurting her?"
"I don't think so; she just likes to tease them, to get their hopes up. But I keep getting this feeling someone's doing terrible things to her and that she's letting him, and I don't know why or when, because other than when she's home, we're together all the time."
"And you said her brothers are still away at school, so it's not them," Robin confirmed, not imagining Sharon's parents would mistreat her. They were 'straights' in Robin's eyes but didn't sound like bad people. "I wish I knew what to tell you, Linny. But, if it's just a feeling, and Sharon tells you everything's fine, you kinda got to believe her."
"I know. I'm just worried. Are you coming home soon?"
"I'm afraid not, sweetie. Titus and I are going to be traveling. He's speaking at anti-war rallies for the next several months. Someone has to stop this war. LBJ was bad enough but what Nixon's doing is even worse. We'd love to be there with you, but people listen to Titus because of who he is. So we're going to be traveling most of the summer too."
The call would haunt Robin for the rest of her life. A cry for help she never heeded. At the time, she had no way to comprehend the extent of what her little buddies faced. And when she told Titus about the call, he too wrote it off as the girls growing up. In a week, he assured Robin, it would probably be something completely different.
In one way, Robin was right; things did change. Sharon learned to tamp down her reaction. As time progressed and her father's behavior became the norm, she spent less time mourning her own destruction. Believing his actions paid a debt she owed, she wanted two things in return, Linda's well-being and her father to act like a member of the family again. She received one; the other, she was less certain about.
On the surface, the loosely communicated familial agreement had worked. Just not in a way anyone other than Bob MacCalaster saw as family unity. Bob returned to coming home three or four nights a week. However, nothing resembled normal familial relationships.
When home, Bob strictly enforced his decree that there be no visits: not Linda; not the neighborhood housewives; and certainly no entertaining (a staple of Bob and Perrin's weekend life in the past). As he sealed off life with his daughter and wife, Sharon's status elevated to that of a lover, and Perrin's sank to that of a servant. And at that, one he openly mocked. The depths of Bob's depravity seemed to have no limits. When just the three of them were at home, Bob would endlessly comment on Perrin's aging body, how her breasts sagged, the crow's feet forming around her eyes, and the stretch marks that disfigured her abdomen. Then, sighing in relief, he would say at least one woman in the house had the kind of body a man wanted.
The one place Sharon still acted as if she felt comfortable was Linda's house, and the house had very much become Linda's. While both girls assumed quasi-spousal roles in their families, Linda's weren't destroying her. In fact, taking care of her father did the opposite. She thrived, as did Ed and their home. Linda did everything possible to brighten up the house and took tremendous pride in cooking dinner for her father every night. It all amazed Sharon, who teased Linda, calling her miniPerrin. Sharon's playful taunts didn't bother Linda. At least Sharon let her guard down and showed glimpses of her old self.