Halle:
"You ruined me, Mother." Hands gripped tight to the wheel, Halle risked a sidelong glance. Eric was slumped in the passenger's seat. Emaciated this time, skin as pale as death. His hair hadn't seen a comb in who knew how long. His arms bore bruising and scabs from too many failed injections. His face, almost zombie-like, bore all the signs of long-term methamphetamine addiction. She turned her eyes back to the road and forced herself to keep her focus there.
"YOU FUCKING RUINED ME!" he shouted, leaning into her ear. She could smell foul breath mixed with alcohol, smell the meth, a whiff of rotting food. Memories came unbidden, of performing CPR not on Eric, but on someone else's son. Her EMT crew found him sprawled on an old, broken-down couch in a trash-strewn shoebox apartment, a couple hollow-eyed roommates looking on. Resorting to the defibrillator, but failing to save his life despite her best efforts. She hadn't seen the Addict in quite awhile now. This time he wore the guise of her Eric, and it took all her will to ignore the phantasm.
"I'm coming for you Eric. Just as fast as I possibly can."
...
Halle growled with frustration as she struggled with the last catch for the awning of her motor home. Why did
everything have to put up a fight? Finally, she got it loose and folded the awning out so Ziggy and Crow would have shade. She opened the side door, and two fluffy border collies bounded out. One was mostly black, the other multi-tone grey and white. She took deep meditative breaths as they gamboled and played. There was nothing in the universe as happy as a happy dog, and these two changed her mood immediately. Quickly, she set out their dishes, filling them to the brim with water and food. The pair trotted up to her and looked up at her with eyes full of love and adoration.
Halle crouched down and ruffled their fur. "I'll be back soon. You'll be meeting Eric today...if it's OK to bring you over." Not knowing if there would be space for her motor home at Eric's house and not wanting to impose, she'd reserved a slot in a local motor home park. "Please God, let him just be gay," she whispered. Of all the ways her mind conjured for Eric to be "ruined" in a way that would cause such wrath in Derick, homosexuality was the best case scenario. She visualized him living in a nice home with a nice husband or partner, loved and happy with his life. Maybe they'd be latte-sipping hipsters with Bernie bumper stickers on their Priuses. Halle smiled at that image. How it would make Derick seethe! She clipped the dogs' chains to their collars and snuggled them a little more before heading to the back of her motor home.
As she lowered the frame that held her red Vespa scooter to the ground and detached it, her heart started racing. Inwardly, she clung to the happy gay hipsters, preparing to greet Eric's partner warmly if he answered the door, and not blink in surprise--or worse, throw her arms around him saying '
Oh thank GOD!'
Elandren and Signy:
As they left their room, the girls noticed that the piano music had stopped; live playing, then.
Signy looked up from they keys. Elandren stood on the balcony that overlooked the studio. She could have been Rapunzel in her tower, but there was a melancholy in her expression that knew no prince or knight would ever want to rescue her. She saw Signy looking and put on an encouraging smile, twirling her hand in a 'go on!' gesture. Signy hit the wrong key.
"Karen! You must concentrate! Now, start again. You! What are you doing up there?" Mrs. Chadbury picked up a hand-bell and rang it.
A young dark-haired maid entered the room. "Yes, ma'am?"
"Diane, why don't you find something useful for her to do?" Mrs. Chadbury said, gesturing at the balcony. The maid gave an uncomfortable look, but Mrs. Chadbury had already turned back to her lesson with Signy.
"Yes, ma'am." Silently, Diane mounted the sweeping staircase and gently put a hand on Elandren's shoulder. "Come on then," she said softly.
Elandren's fingers dragged lightly across the balustrade. The darker paneling of the room below and its colorful decor made for a much more cozy feel than the spotless white Romanesque lines of Mrs. Chadbury's mansion. The piano, black instead of white, was now unattended. Her other hand held Signy's.
None of them has said anything about my face or treated me different, she thought, trying to reassure herself. Still, if Mrs. Chadbury had been a study in faded glory, the Ladies were at the height of their powers. They exuded glamor and presence, and
their version of 'singing at the Bolshoi' was coming up this Saturday.
With Jupiter in the lead, they descended to the first floor and made their way through the house. There were rooms and hallways and nooks and crannies; this was a house that invited exploration, and had many rewards to offer. They reached the top of a darkened stairway. Jupiter flicked a switch, but no light came. Pale light came from around the corner of a doorway at the bottom. Shadows flicked ominously across it. If this had been a movie, there would have been a scree of discordant music just then.
Lofty and elegant as always, Jupiter descended the stairs without a hint of fear. "Confident in their fey power, Elethondriel led the brave adventurers Elandren and Signy down into the dungeon," Signy said softly. Ordinarily she would have said it in Djem'nii, but she decided it was best to use the secret language as little as possible in the hearing of their new family, lest they become irritated. Besides, this Story moment inherently included 'Elethondriel.' If Jupiter overheard, there was a chance they might
like being part of the narrative, if they even cared. The Twins shared playful looks. In their minds' eyes, the girls became dressed in their adventuring gear. Elandren in green and brown hooded Druid's robes, leggings and moccasins decorated with Druid symbols, beads, and feathers, Signy in a riveted brass pith helmet festooned with gadgets, matching brass goggles around her neck, canvas vest with many pockets worn over a billowy fencer's shirt, roomy canvas pants to match the vest, and black calf-boots. Veteran explorers that they were, they followed Elethondriel (now wearing a silk gown embroidered with knotwork trim and arcane sigils in fine gold thread and a circlet of gold ribbon woven in intricate traceries--crackling with magic, naturally) down the stairs and into the room beyond. Each girl's mental image of Elethondriel differed of course, but both had seen Galadriel from
Lord of the Rings and similar characters, and Jupiter fit the type perfectly in their eyes.
The room that lay beyond was a treasury indeed, but but not quite the sort to be found by delvers in a dungeon. There were beautiful dresses and outfits everywhere, feather headdresses and feather fans, shoes, boots, accessories, props and sundries of various sorts. The girls looked around themselves in wonder, careful not to touch anything. The chamber was inhabited, not by a Lich or some sort of monster, but by a beautiful Lady. The two boys had already joined her, standing near a
gorgeous red dress on a dress form.
"You know what it's for," Eva said. "That number I do with Kennedy."
Ronan beamed excitedly. "You mean that argument number that constantly makes people think you're getting a divorce?!" he asked, with a ridiculous amount of enthusiasm considering the question. "That's my favorite one!"
At the sound of the words 'you're getting a divorce' the girls froze, their fantasy of exploration immediately dissolved. The looks on Eva and Ronin's faces and the happiness in their voices said it was just a performance, some kind of joke. Whatever it was, both girls were sure they would not find it the
least bit funny. A shared look: they would both watch carefully for the first sign of the real thing, and do whatever it took to stop it from happening.
"This is what Ronan was working on," Hugo said brightly.
"I wouldn't touch it, though," Ronan advised from near the staircase. "I tried to dull down the edges of the shards before I glued them down but I'm not sure how successful I was. I might be performing in it and bend wrong and remove my own appendix by mistake. I'll probably wear it this weekend. I'll have to see if it takes any body parts off." His words were hyperbole of course, but Djem'nii shuddered at the image of Ronan on stage in the dress, face twisted in pain, wine-dark spots of blood spreading from each shard as the dress held him trapped in a sparkling, glassy embrace of wounding.
Signy leaned toward it to scrutinize the shards carefully with her hands clasped behind her back, nose almost touching. She could see the work that had been done to grind down the edges of the glass, but she would not be happy until she could examine each one closely, preferably with a magnifying glass. Her engineer's mind found another potential failure-mode: shards prized off the fabric as it flexed under them with Ronan's movements, or knocked free by swishes of the skirt, so that he or someone else might step on them. Perhaps they could also be flung into the audience by his movements.
"Elandren and I know how to sew with needle and thread," she said, still examining the dress shard by shard. "A few loops of white thread or thin fishing line around each shard should be able to secure them firmly, and not be visible from a distance. We could use black thread to sew a bit of quilted backing or felt on the inside of the dress behind each one. A medieval gambeson could stop
sword cuts. We wouldn't need to use anything that thick. Do you know what kind of maneuvers you intend to perform? If you're going to twirl around we'll take extra care with the ones on the skirt, especially closer to the edge, since they'll be subjected to the most centrifugal force. You said bends?" Never looking away from the dress, she moved to redirect her attention to the waist, trying to visualize a bend and determine if the shards there were small enough to tolerate it without poking him, peeling off, or breaking.
Then her eyes flicked to the area below the armpits. Biting her lip, she considered the shape of the dress form, then turned her head to look at Ronan. "You..."
I hope he's not insulted! "...don't quite have the inward curvature this form does. There's a non-trivial probability the shards on the sides could cut your arms, especially if you swish your arms over them." She turned back to the dress, her face a mask of concentration.
"You could wear really long opera gloves, but they'd probably snag and might not protect well enough. You're trying to be a broken mirror? I could try to make...something like a..." Signy couldn't come up with a word for what she was seeing in her mind. "...thick wires, like from coat hangers, painted black. Attacked to the front and back, they could go around your sides like magnetic field lines. We could attach larger pieces of plastic to them, painted silver, on the front and back away from the sides and the movement of your arms, so they'd look like more pieces of mirror coming out from you. But on the sides, the wires would keep your arms from touching your sides, and they wouldn't have anything on them. Like guard rails."
"Maybe we could put more plastic pieces on the ends of black wires or clear plastic rods sticking straight out from you like porcupine quills, like glass shattering in all directions?" Elandren said, making an explosion gesture with her hands. If Signy was the engineer, she was the fashion designer. "Christmas snowflake and icicle decorations, broken up to look different and painted silver could work. Or pieces of shiny metal. What about something like a collar or fan coming up from behind your shoulders?" she asked Ronan. "Like...like one of those big oval mirrors breaking from the bottom up...big flat plastic pieces painted silver. At the top they'd be rounded, like the original edges of the mirror, except it's broken in big long shards, pointed down to your shoulders. We could paint black cracks on them, more the closer to you. So people could kinda see what the mirror looked like before it broke and started turning into you or whatever. Maybe we could take some Christmas tinsel and paint it all black except in little spots where we'd leave it silver. We could stick it to your arms or whatever's going to be moving so it could look like
little tiny pieces of mirror glass coming off."
"We could secure the shard fan to the same thing that's holding the wires that protect your sides," Signy said, stepping in like a tag-team partner as she continued her study of the dress. "We could take the glass off your hips so the framework could be there and support the weight, then glue the glass to the framework. Computer fans! If I could get them to work from batteries, they'd be perfect! They're already black, and they're enclosed for safety." As the words came out of her mouth, she realized no one else was seeing what she was seeing. "For the tinsel, to blow it around, and maybe some long thin sheets of cellophane that would be invisible except when spotlights hit them and reflected, so the whole thing would be dynamic and moving and shattering!" she said, gesticulating animatedly.
Then, all of a sudden, she turned, saw everyone looking at her and came down from her inventor's trance. "If you...even wanted an exploding mirror effect." The girls blushed and looked at each other, then back at Ronan and Eva.
Halle:
Heart pounding in her chest, Halle pulled her scooter up to park, set the kick stand, and dismounted.
Please be here Eric! she thought. She took off her helmet and secured it to the back of the bike, got her purse out and hurriedly used a hairbrush to try and get rid of the worst of her helmet-hair.
I don't care if you have a husband or ten. Polyamory could be another way to blow Derick's head-gasket. Living with an interpretive dance troupe who performed in black morph suits while somebody read
The Vagina Monologues? Or a coven of Wiccans? Maybe. Either way, this home seemed to prune away most of the nightmare scenarios, or at least make them seem a lot less likely.
Only two yet loomed large: he could hate her forever, or the people here never heard of him and had no other leads to offer.
Even if you hate me forever...please just be safe and happy. With an effort of will and meditative breathing she managed not to freeze in place or run up the porch stairs and start pounding on the door. Instead, she put one foot in front of the other until she could reach the doorbell and press it with the finger of a trembling hand.
