Bec2: Thanksgiving
Copyright© 2008 by BarBar
Chapter 10: Thanksgiving Morning
The problem with standing right behind your bedroom door is that if someone decides to come bursting into your room WITHOUT KNOCKING, then the door tends to thump into you and send you flying across the room.
“OW! THAT HURT!” I yelled.
“WE HAVEN’T FINISHED TALKING,” screamed Mum.
The problem with being thumped by a door so hard that your brains rattle in your head and then being screamed at by an insane mother is that it gets hard to think calmly and sensibly. It makes you do dumb things like, for example, screaming back at your mother even though you know that will never do any good. Calm, sensible, thoughtful Bec would have found some way to settle things down. But calm, sensible, thoughtful Bec had checked out of the hotel room.
Mum yelled some more at me but I don’t know what she said because I was screaming “GET OUT! GET OUT!” over and over. It drowned out the sound of her voice.
Suddenly, Dan was there – blocking my view of Mum with the sheer physical bulk of his body. He picked me up with one arm and turned me so that I was facing away from Mum. I was pinned against his body with a single arm that was as tense and rigid as a steel bar. I struggled. I hit his arm with my hands. I drummed my heels against his shins. I was still screaming at Mum but by that stage I don’t think I was making any sense.
I think I heard Dan telling Dad to get Mum out of the room. He must have been right there because a moment later the door slammed shut and Mum’s voice became muffled.
Dan let go of me and I launched myself at the door. I was still yelling at Mum and I banged my hands against the door to make her listen. I honestly don’t remember what I was yelling. I don’t think it made much sense whatever it was.
Dan pulled me away from the door and wrapped his hands around my upper arms. Then he lifted me up off the ground so that I was dangling in his grip and my face was up at the same level as his. I might have been thrashing around a bit, or he might have been shaking me a bit, I’m not sure which. But then he captured me with his eyes and his voice penetrated into my brain.
He was telling me to stop – so I did. I didn’t stop suddenly. I kind of wound down like a toy where the battery is going flat. Eventually, I just hung there with my feet dangling in the air and my lungs gasping for breath. Dan had his face right in front of mine. I tried not to look into his eyes. I tried to look everywhere else but at him. But I was trapped.
He was telling me to listen – so I listened. Dad had gotten Mum to quiet down at the same time, but the house wasn’t quiet. It echoed with the distant sounds of Angie screaming in her room on the other side of the house. She wasn’t screaming with anger. She wasn’t screaming at someone. She was just screaming. I could hear the distant sounds of Tara trying to hush her and calm her down but the screaming went on. A part of me wanted to ask Dan why, but I already knew the answer so I didn’t ask.
The fear that was tangled within Angie’s voice broke my heart. It reached deep into my chest and tore my broken heart right out of there – leaving nothing but a gaping hole in the middle of my chest. The shattered pieces of my heart stuck to the door and hung there like a collection of dead bugs in some museum display. Each bit dribbled a trail of blood down the door – smearing my half-finished painting of Angie with long lines of blood-red tears.
Slowly the anger, the red-hot fury that had completely flooded through me, drained out through that gaping hole in my chest. It flowed down my front and dripped off my dangling feet to make messy pools on the rug beneath me. Soon there was nothing left inside of the empty husk that was me. I’d become a rag doll, limp and boneless.
Dan lowered me until my feet were on the floor, but a rag doll can’t stand on its own so I crumpled and started to collapse. Dan caught me before I could fall. That was good because I would’ve ended up in a heap in the middle of those messy pools of rage that had dripped out of me. It would all have soaked straight back into me and then where would I be? Dan lifted me and laid me over one shoulder. I lay there, with my head resting on the top of his back and my hair dangling down in long streamers. Every time Dan moved, my hair would sway back and forth like a palm tree waving in the wind – an upside down palm tree. It was very hypnotic.
In the distance, the screaming died down to crying – a faint, far-off crying that became the sound track to the movie of my life.
I wondered if Dan was going to throw me into the closet – to lie there broken and forgotten with all the other useless clutter that lies at the bottom of the closet. But he didn’t. He flipped me off his shoulder and laid me out on the bed. He propped me up with pillows and posed me. He arranged my legs and arms nicely, with my head resting squarely in the middle of the top pillow. It was good he did that because a rag doll can’t pose itself.
The only parts of me that were moving – the only parts of me that could move – were my eyes. They were linked to Dan with invisible wires that made them follow him as he moved around the room. He cleaned all that messy stuff off the rug with some paper towel and dropped it all into the trash. Somewhere on the floor he found something that had fallen off me during the fight. He came back to the bed and stuck it back on to the side of my head. Maybe one of my ears had fallen off and I didn’t notice. He stopped to arrange my hair on the pillow and straighten up my clothes. That was nice of him.
The last thing he did was scrape the pieces of my heart off the door. He squeezed the pieces together in his hands like a handful of play-doh and molded it back into the shape of a heart. He pushed that lumpy mass back inside me, using that convenient gaping hole in my chest. Then he stuck the edges of the hole together with his finger, like he was doing up a zipper. Finally, he laid his hand on my chest and pressed. Amazingly, I felt my heart lurch and thump back to life under the pressure of his hand.
At least I think he did all that. It doesn’t seem logical, though, does it? I think my brain was playing tricks on me, but I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t – so I wrote it all down.
Dan leaned over me and kissed me on the nose. My heart was now thumping steadily under the reassuring pressure of his hand.
“There you are – all back together again.”
Dan’s voice sounded solid and real. It was something I could grab onto and use as a handle to drag myself out of the strange place where I’d been lurking. Dan was sitting beside me on the bed with the palm of his hand resting on the bone in the middle of my chest. The simple weight of his hand held me in place as effectively as any weird ideas about being a rag doll could have done.
I felt my mouth curl up in a little smile and Dan’s face relaxed a little in response.
“I don’t know where that came from.” Dan’s voice was calm and gentle. “You and Mum don’t usually fight. Everyone seemed so happy at breakfast. Then suddenly – kaboom! World War Three erupts in the kitchen. Then you and Mum bring it into here and escalate until you both go nuclear.”
I lay there and looked up at Dan. I had no answers.
“It’s a good thing that we’re going out this morning. It will give you and Mum a chance to cool off a bit. You have half an hour to sort yourself out and get ready. By then, you need to be calm and you need to be in control. I’m not taking a ticking time-bomb anywhere. I’m not taking a zombie anywhere either. Am I clear?”
It took a moment for me to process everything he was saying, but then I nodded.
“Good!”
He leaned over and kissed me on the nose again.
“You’ve got half an hour. Stay in here until then. I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”
The bed lurched as he stood up and made his way towards the door.
“Are you punishing me, too?” It was a little girl’s voice – small and pathetic. “Am I banished to my room?”
He stopped and looked at me, leaning against the door he’d been about to open.
“No – yes – maybe a little. Mostly, I’m keeping you and Mum apart.”
The door opened and closed, and he was gone.
A hand reached up and wiped the slobber off my nose. I stared at the hand curiously. I was surprised at how easily it had moved. I lowered my arm back down to my side and rested the hand on my stomach.
Without Dan to watch, my eyes were now free to roam around the familiar sights of my room. I spotted Mum’s old sketchbook sitting on the bedside table. Without having received any instructions from me, a hand reached out and picked it up. I hugged it to my chest with both arms and lay there.
My brain slowly got more and more active. I started to feel restless. It got to the point where lying on the bed and staring at my room wasn’t enough any more. My brain wanted to do something.
I opened Mum’s sketchbook and started flipping through it, stopping every so often to smile at the pictures I’d already studied. By the time I found the last picture I’d looked at, I was starting to feel pretty good. Mum’s drawings – the ones she’d made when I was six – were all kind of fun. Looking at them was putting me into a good mood. I turned the page to see what came next.
The next drawing was a character study of an elderly woman walking down a street. The woman had two leashes in her hand.
The first leash looped down to a huge St Bernard – like the ones in the Napoleon movies. It padded along beside her, calm and serene. Somehow Mum had captured the impression that its calmness was an illusion. The way she’d drawn the dog showed that it had an enormous potential for creating chaos boiling away inside of it – underneath the surface.
The second leash was attached to a smaller dog – I don’t know the breed. It was more the sort of dog you’d expect an older lady to have – small and cute. Except this one was obviously young – not a puppy, but still young. It bounced along beside the old lady – curious and excited, happy and lively.
In front of the lady, unrestrained but obviously still a part of the group, prowled a cat – slinking along with its body low to the ground. On first glance the cat seemed to be stalking along in its own little world, ignoring the others and not taking much notice of its surroundings. I got the impression that Mum was trying to say the cat was choosing to walk with the others for its own mysterious reasons, the way cats do. But first impressions were deceiving. The cat was the only figure in the picture that looked out of the frame at the viewer. Its eyes had that eerie thing going on where they seemed to look directly at you.
The cat gave me the clue about how to understand the picture. It was the same cat that Mum had drawn as me hiding under a table a few pictures back. The previous picture had a kind of half-human face on the cat’s body and this one was purely cat but it was still me. That meant that the small cute dog was probably meant to be Tara and the big St Bernard was meant to be Dan. At first I thought that Mum had drawn Nana, but now as I looked more closely, I saw that she’d drawn herself – only older. She was happy in the picture. She had drawn herself growing older and being happy about it because she was surrounded by her children.
I looked again at the picture. There was one person missing. I wondered why Mum would draw a family picture without Dad. I tilted my head to the side and looked at the picture again. Then I smiled to myself. As usual, Mum was being tricky. It was a pencil sketch. Everything was there in shades of gray. I had initially taken the cross-hatching on the ground as the pavement – I think everyone was supposed to initially take it as the pavement. The shading on the ground was actually the shadow of someone standing just outside of the picture – someone large and solid. Everyone was walking towards him – or maybe following him – that difference wasn’t clear. Everyone was happily looking towards him – except me. Mum had drawn me looking out at the world and not noticing my own father. What did she mean by that? She’d drawn us all walking in Dad’s shadow – that’s usually a bad thing. But Mum had shown us all happy to be there. I wondered what she meant by that.
I sighed in frustration. Sometimes Mum’s pictures have too many layers. And sometimes you could think too much about a picture when the first thing you see is what she meant you to see. I sighed again and put the sketchbook down.
I picked it up again and went back to the same page. I looked at it again and started to smile. If the shadow on the ground was a person, then my cat-like self was standing right in the palm of one of the shadow’s hands. That’s what made me smile. Even though I wasn’t looking, Dad’s shadow-hand was still holding me.
Was I really spending so much time looking at the rest of the world that I wasn’t seeing my own father? That’s what Mum seemed to be saying in the picture. That was something to think about.
I picked up Dad’s notebook and ran my hand over the cover. One way to understand Dad better would be to read the things that he wrote about. I flipped through the pages to find the last entry I was up to and turned to the next page.
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