Good Fortune

Good Fortune

         The trip was wonderful and painful, all at the same time.  Many days were spent lying on their backs, soaking up the sun, and walking hand in hand along the mostly unpopulated beaches or dabbing up tears.  When they tired of doing next-to-nothing, they rented a jeep and headed two hours up into the hills away from the tourist digs.  Up in the hills where few spoke English, they found themselves waving and gesticulating wildly while trying to bring down the price of what they felt was a worthless piece of linen, meant only to remind them of their trip.

         Finally, when they tired of quibbling over pennies and swatting away mosquitoes the size of small birds, they packed up their restless children, and their goodies in the equally cute bags they bought, and journeyed back to their hotel room to reapply bug-repellent, even though the bugs didn’t appear the least bit deterred by the scents they were forced to endure.

         As they traveled back downhill, much too fast for the rapid onset of the downpour they were experiencing, she barely had time to scream.  Her children, and much to her despair, her husband, were too caught up in their rapid descent to respond to her alarm.  She thought surely they were going to hit the old lady; otherwise she would never have grabbed the wheel.

         Barreling down on the old woman, even with her tug of the wheel, she imagined the woman falling, topsy-turvy, head-over-heels down the hill.  Instead, the old woman turned, stared at them as if frozen from fear, and presently, sprung with all the energy of a juvenile, headfirst into the brush along side of the road.  Twenty feet down the hill; her husband finally came to a stop, looked at his wife, and then rapidly reaccelerated to his prior unsafe speed. 

“You’d risk the lives of us all for a stranger?”

“You’d risk the lives of us all for speed?  We really should go back and make sure she’s okay.”

“Why, so she could get our license number and try to sue us.  Get a clue.  If we went back, it would be to make sure she was dead.”  He started laughing and her son soon joined in.  She was appalled as she looked past the gleeful face of her son, the terrified face of her youngest clutching her doll, and out the rear window.

He didn’t even look in the mirror to see what had happened to his near-victim, but his wife did.  What she saw was a placid, unmistakably calm, stare on the face of the old woman as she stood and wiped the muddy rainwater from her face and hair.  She lifted her cane in the air and waved it, not in the pleasant gesture of a friend, but in the gesture of one who should not have been disturbed.

The two-hour drive down the hill was comparatively calm as her husband and the children sang songs with all the exuberance of the tone-deaf.  Her daughter had relaxed her grip on her doll and with that, she palpated her own pulse as the only evidence that she still lived and mattered.  Her eyes were peeled to the road, just in case another potential victim wandered into their course.  Maybe that was her purpose.

Unperturbed, her husband did not decrease his speed until they reached the very outskirts of town.  He smirked triumphantly at her as they pulled into the parking lot.  She couldn’t even look at him, and could barely look at herself. 

As she reached for her door handle, he grabbed her arm and said, “Try not to ruin our trip, will you?  This trip cost an arm and a leg, you know.  You can be pissed off if you want, but if you ruin it for the kids, I’ll divorce you, take the kids, and leave you penniless.”  He smiled.  “We understand one another?  Do we?” He said this last part as he squeezed her arm.  She nodded she understood and stepped out of the car, cradling her arm, doubting there was any ice to diminish the bruise.

Nighttime never seemed to come.  Finally the children were asleep and her husband had passed out.  She went out to the balcony and looked up to the star-filled sky.  This trip was one of multiple presents they had given themselves over the last year to celebrate their good fortune, her husband’s promotion.  They never discussed the backstabbing of his best friend of twenty years to get it.  He screamed at her that Charlie was merely a volunteer casualty of war, and wasn’t he nice to let Charlie keep his job.  Wasn’t she happy with her new Jaguar?  She could give back the car, and the house, for that matter, and pull the kids out of their private schools.  He could fire Charlie; all she had to do was give the word.  She could do all of that, but what she couldn’t do was shrink to a smaller size.

She could tell him that she knew about the pearls and the earrings; the one’s she had never seen and never worn; charged on his credit card.  She could tell him she knew he was embezzling money from the company.  She could tell him in which banks it was buried.  She could tell him that she knew Charlie did all the work he glossed over and for which he took credit.  She could tell him all that, but instead all she did was stare at the sky and let the tears stream down her face.

When she’d had her fill of crying, and as she readjusted her smile so she could return inside without fear, she began to hear whispering.  It wasn’t really a conversation or really a voice.  She didn’t hear it with her ears; she heard it in her head.  Was she going crazy?  What was it saying?  She began to strain to drown out the tumultuous silence surrounding her.  Then she heard it again.

“The daughter born to merely suffer to gain attention of the mother; the son is born for the father.”

         What a strange thought, voice.  She found it disturbing, but it was one of those disturbances you couldn’t do anything with.  Who could she tell, her husband?  He’d probably have her committed or again, drive her to thoughts of suicide.  It was better to be silent.  With that, a strong gust of cool air and a flicker of light convinced her to go inside.  There was a storm coming.  She could feel it.  She just couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming.  As she turned to enter, she thought she caught sight of someone standing in the garden below.  If she could be sure it wasn’t a temporary illusion, she would have sworn it was the old lady they almost sideswiped.  Maybe she was just thinking too much.  She shook her head and reapplied her smile.

         Quietly she undressed and climbed into bed.  She didn’t want to risk waking her husband.  He hadn’t touched her in months and she didn’t want to disturb the tide.  He was drunk, after all.  He might try and fake it.  And likewise, she would have to do the same.

         She’d barely drifted off to sleep when the rain pelts and the wind really picked up.  She was half-asleep when it dawned on her that her daughter hadn’t snuck into their bedroom to hide from the storm monsters.  Lightening frightened her, but if the storm was close enough for her to hear the thunder, she became terrified.  Any second now, she expected to hear her light feet running outside their room, but there was nothing.  She became fully awake and felt her pulse to realize she was alarmed.  Something was wrong.

         Quickly, she walked the few steps to her daughter’s room.  The door was closed.  The door was never closed.  She tentatively opened it.  If her daughter was asleep, she wanted her to stay asleep.  As the hall light brushed across her daughter’s face, she thought she was asleep at first, but then she saw the beads of sweat across her forehead and the flushed look of her skin.  Even from there, she knew she was sick.  Some things a mother just knows.  She also knew they needed to go home at once. 


To be continued…