9781616382025

Sample Chapter of Bella Maura

Chapter One

Brown clapboard houses stagnantly lined the shore like giant tree trunks without levity. Well past the beautiful and genteel portion of winter, the actual trees appeared as lifeless sticks, black and twisted and strung up oddly in a sea of ghostly white sand and dead saw grasses. The scenery had been blank and colorless for miles, the only thing it inspired was a general malaise behind eyes passively partaking of it—that, and a vague sense of fear, of trepidation regarding the ocean of things yet unknown, the icy depths of which could make a body grow numb—the remote chambers of a mind go still.

As the gray fog of the day turned black into evening, the dreary shore road seemed an endless test of jagged rock and sleety drizzle. Sienna was exhausted, her neck stiff. She had planned to be there by now. She had a familiar CD playing low for comfort and she took a deep breath as she moved her head from side to side easing the tension. Not the best night driver in the world, she began straining (and partially praying) for Jeffers Street immediately upon entering the edge of the small town. Shortly thereafter, she made a right on it under a soothing lamp glow of yellow haze. She released a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding as she mentally reviewed Cheney’s hasty directions blurted to her over the phone more than a week prior. It was safe to say they fell a bit sketchy at this point. She rounded a bend as the vacant village receded in her rearview mirror and more expansive vacation homes emerged. The blacktop took yet another turn along the inlet coast. The darkness and water beneath threatened to swallow her Audi whole should she deviate from the glossy pavement edge one inch. She never thought she’d miss the strait gravel roads and endless cornfields of her past, but she’d rather be spanning them out into the unknown instead of this mystic lapping water.

She didn’t know the sea yet. They were certainly not friends.

After another dangerous curve and more deserted, veiled and looming houses, somehow—she believed by the grace of God—the gold-plated numbers jumped up as her headlights swept over them.Thank you, God!she muttered under her breath, then,Finally!She was amazed she’d found it since every house appeared identical—especially in the blackened, misty night. As she pulled up the drive, she noticed the house itself was completely devoid of warmth. It was extremely uninviting for such an exquisitely built structure. The question arose regarding the possibility of its being haunted and hovered amidst its historical bones and century secrets, before she quickly dismissed the ludicrous thought with a smile. She chalked it up to her writer’s imagination, she still couldn’t quite put her finger on why she suddenly felt so uneasy. She swallowed back some anxiety as she scanned the strange neighborhood, finding it eerily silent in its off-season existence and fully assuming the slanted characteristics of neglect like an abandoned ghost town, albeit a very wealthy one. The spirit within its space and border seemed to openly resent her human intrusion and so her attempt to stifle her uneasiness failed. Rather, it multiplied, climbing up out of the pit of her stomach and lodged solidly in her dry throat. Her mind sharpened against the salty midnight air, her senses heightened toward something too close to fright, her tongue tasted the sour words within;This could prove to be a very big mistake. . .

She hadn’t seen Cheney for fifteen years. Even back then, they weren’t what one would consider close. This journey had been more of a mercy call than anything, and now she wondered if she had followed God’s voice or her own. She recalled the desperation in Cheney’s voice as it trembled on the other end of the line. It was something near terror and Sienna would never forget the sound. When Cheney had made the call the week before, it had been in the middle of the night and completely unexpected—the first contact between the two since college. And it was, simply, very odd.

Sienna knocked timidly at the front door. No one answered.

“Cheney? Cheney, it’s Sienna,” she called, waiting, watching hopefully for a light to come on. It never did.

She knocked again to no avail, not knowing what else to do. She glanced back at her car suddenly feeling every ounce of exhaustion from the trip. She got a blanket out of her trunk, then turned up the heat and locked the doors. After one last scan of the surreal neighborhood surrounding, she fell asleep almost instantly upon saying a short prayer.

While tossing through a terrible sleep full of strange disjointed dreams, the length of which Sienna couldn’t determine, she awoke with a start to the sound of slurred voices. As she was forcing herself to become more alert, she slowly recognized Cheney’s laugh as it filtered in through distant memory and connected. She saw two figures approaching the front door of the house, both of them stumbling as if severely inebriated. She wiped a circle of vapor off the car window with the cuff of her sleeve, and confirmed to herself it was indeed Cheney out there, leaning heavily into the man next to her and trying to give him a kiss. She fell against him instead, limp as a rag doll and obviously passed out. Sienna watched as the man, not much better off himself, let her body slide to the cold, wet stoop, apparently contented to leave her there for the remainder of the wickedly frigid night.

Jumping from her car Sienna shouted, “Hey, you! Hey! Wait a minute!”

The man’s delayed reaction was one of gradual surprise and he clumsily stumbled off, escaping into elongated shadows and overgrown shrubbery. A thick and creeping sea fog seemed to emerge instantly, rolling in off unkind currents, circling and overlapping itself in rotational undertones like displaced waves. It completely snuffed out the light from a nearby street lamp and Sienna’s body was suddenly overcome with chills. She strained through the black liquid air, quickly making her way to her friend’s side.

“Cheney, what have you done to yourself?” she murmured through a heavily-laden sigh.

As she knelt down, she bumped Cheney’s handbag with her knee. She pulled it open, and felt around inside for a house key, and fingered smokes, a matchbook, a lighter, drug paraphernalia, condoms and a tube of lipstick—but absolutely no keys.

“Good Lord,” Sienna whispered as she quickly deduced Cheney’s lifestyle.

She ran back to her car, switched on the headlights and returned, intently looking down into Cheney’s lurid face. Thin skin stretched over sharp and jutting bone. Dark blue veins protruded oddly through pale, ghostly white and sunken temples. Mascara had streaked—dripped into a coagulated black. Purple shadow of grave sickness and cover-paint dispersed. Foundation was swept into premature crevices and haggard, splintered lines that seemed to come out from, and lead to, nowhere. It was the face of someone half-dead and barely breathing. And no matter how hard or how long she’d been trying to hide it, her demon’s face was coming unmasked. Its parasitic nature was unleashed, unearthed; its hellish corpse, nearly, completely, exhumed. It was latterly exonerated by a soul lost to its own vast freewill and earthly dependency—whatever form therein, unremarkable. Sienna couldn’t help herself—she rolled up the jacket sleeve of Cheney’s left arm. The flesh was dotted with fresh pinholes overtop layers, and layers, of stacked purple scars that told of irreconcilable years hard-lived like the weeping rings of a severed tree.

“Sweet Jesus,” Sienna gasped, bringing both hands to cover her mouth in shock while her eyes remained wide open and fixed, locked in on the all telling arm lying limply on the cold hard ground. She didn’t say it, she barely let herself think it, but moving in segregated words shifting in and out of her tolerantly stifled yet inherently judgmental mind, was the kind-heart, sick-heart notion that this particular resurrection of life was an outright impossibility, a blatant improbability at its mildest—these thoughts lingered in the secret spaces between heartbeats and breaths taken, they mixed in through the air in her blood along with the phrase,too far gone. . . and they stayed, just as deep as her veins.

Just then a hooded man in a dark sweatshirt rounded the corner. He was moving so fast, Sienna sprang to her feet and jumped back a step in reaction, suspecting him to be the barer of harm.

“You gonna leave her here again?” he accused her piercingly.

His Irish accent was thick, his tone most unpleasant. She stared into his back as he turned it on her and momentarily walked away. He unlocked the door with his own set of keys, pushed it hard and letting it slam against the wall inside as he flipped on a light.

When he returned, she tried her best to explain, “I’m not—what I mean is—I’m trying to help her. I’m her friend.”

He stopped for a moment as if resting upon her very words, letting the drizzle surround his rounded shoulders, the crystalline droplets collecting oneby- one then fading into his hood, uncountable. Along with the dampness, he absorbed into his being the notion of a decent person standing before him, with the possibility that behind her voice might actually lie something called the truth. He stood there motionless in the silence between them as if completely unaccustomed to hearing someone sober—or sane—for that matter. When he put his body back in motion, his demeanor had softened, if only just a little.

“Let’s get her inside,” he instructed.

He picked Cheney’s languid body up effortlessly as if used to the drill. He laid her out on the living room couch then checked her pulse and temperature mechanically as if this bizarre interaction between them were rote.

“She’s nearly frozen,” he finally said, no emotion evident in his voice.

And without looking at Sienna—he hadn’t made any eye contact with her at all—he requested dryly, “Would you mind starting a bath? It’s upstairs, first left.”

“Sure,” Sienna replied softly, politely exiting the scene with a bowing humility and an awkward reverence normally reserved for someone’s funeral.

As she climbed the stairs, her body seemed unnaturally heavy, the spirit within her overwhelmed by the sense of sadness, the utter helplessness, she imagined that she felt emanating from that man. She took a deep breath and shuddered to find there wasn’t any air. The house seemed like a vacuum, or an underground tomb, vacant and simply waiting on a death to fill it.

The stranger below started a fire in the fireplace, got a pot of strong coffee brewing, then he carried the limp woman up stairs he seemed all too familiar with. His countenance was similar to that of a man walking the gallows with the weight of the world in his hands. He entered the bathroom without a word, stepping sideways through the door. Sienna stepped into a corner of the small room, trying, as much as humanly possible, to not be in the way. After he perched Cheney on the toilet lid, he slapped her on the cheek as gently as possible, yet firmly enough to wake her up a little. She groaned and her head rotated ungracefully then fell forward into her chest. A curse word dribbled out of her mouth as he began to disrobe her. Sienna felt nervous and awkward, not knowing if she should leave or stay, trust this man or call the paramedics.

Without turning toward Sienna, the man sensed her discomfort, primarily because it was his own. He shook his head shamefully and said quietly in her direction, “I’m sorry . . . ”

He lifted Cheney and placed her body gently in the steaming water while giving Sienna directions, “All you have to do is keep her head up so she doesn’t drown herself. She usually wakes up about a half an hour in. Make her drink a cup or two of coffee before you fall asleep. If anytime she stops breathin’, call 911. I’m right next door, to the north.”

He stopped talking for a moment, wiping wet strands of hair away from Cheney’s face with his thumb.

“Give me your hand,” he said, holding his out in the air for Sienna.

She took it without hesitation and he steadied her as she knelt down beside him.

“Just hold her chin up like this.” He showed her kindly, with his hand over hers. His touch was warm, his hand strong. He looked into Sienna’s eyes for the first time that night. He looked into them for a long, unapologetic moment; at first, to gauge whether or not she seemed trustworthy—and he quickly surmised that she did; and secondly, to look more deeply into her as a person, to thank her. He was clearly relieved that someone else was there with him, that someone else could see what had become of his life. Something inside him exposed the fact that he was glad that someone was her. His eyes seemed to communicate that he wanted to talk to her for hours, his heart, coming straight through them, seemed to say that he wanted her to know more of his story. But he broke the gaze, looked down, looked within, and instead he simply asked her without inflection, as if it weren’t really a question at all, “You gonna be okay here?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Sienna said weakly, not really equipped to save a life.

And with that he disappeared just as quickly as he came.

Sienna was suddenly overwhelmed with immense responsibility. She literally held Cheney’s life in her hands. The stranger’s assertion proved right. Almost thirty minutes later, on the dot, Cheney began to come around. And as she slowly came back through varying degrees of coherency, she arrived with a full-blown vengeance. She hurled curses, accusations and slanderous abuses in between her indecipherable sentences and shrill screams with fervent slapping and clawing. In the midst of this emphatic mess, she finally caught a glimpse of the person in her bathroom. And she had no earthly idea who it was. She stared through blurred vision, blinking at Sienna, focusing for a long quiet time, not really placing her. Her mind just wasn’t working yet—it wasn’t moving, cooperating, or connecting with anything at all.

“Cheney, it’s me—Sienna. Remember me . . . from college . . . Sienna?” she repeated, and getting nowhere, offered, “You’re okay, Cheney. You’re gonna be just fine.”

Sienna was out of breath, wet and sprawled out on the slippery tile floor. She stood up carefully then started looking in the cabinets for disinfectant and a bandage. Her arm had gotten scraped in the struggle and was beginning to drip blood.

“Oh, Sienna . . . Si, I used to call you, right?” Cheney stammered, slowly adjusting to the name.

She watched nonchalantly as Sienna did her best to tape up her own arm.

“So what are you doing here?” Cheney finally asked, clearly having forgotten inviting her.

“Never mind, let’s just get you into something warm, some pajamas or something? And then we’ll go downstairs and get some hot coffee. How does that sound?”

Cheney followed Sienna around like a spiritless shadow, going through all the motions without conjuring the energy or wit to supply another outburst. Once downstairs, she drank some of the intensely black coffee—vomited it right back up and curled up on the couch in front of the fire—all without so much as a single word of thanks. Sienna grabbed a garbage can to place beside Cheney and covered her with a frayed patchwork quilt. As she sat down in the old recliner next, sheer exhaustion settled into her bones and stayed. An antique clock somewhere in the house laboriously chimed three times.

“Three a.m.,” she said aloud.

She looked over at Cheney who was softly moaning in pain.

“God, why do people do this to themselves?” she thought, “and what am I supposed to do about it?”

She asked her questions sincerely but didn’t get an answer to either one— nothing more than the soft crack and hiss of the hungry fire consuming itself beside her. Her eyes flowed out the window into the cold liquid night, into so much blackness, blankness and depth moving forth that her soul couldn’t hold its answer. So she let it all go. Just then she noticed the light on the nearby porch coming on. Its sweet glow dispelled the darkness surrounding and let loose every ounce and trace of her secret fears beholden. It gave enough warmth to be her blanket, enough security with which to start her on toward rest. It stayed steadily on all through the night season as night seasons do steadily creep. It promised a clearer and lighter tomorrow and in that promise she found comfort to sleep.

And it belonged to the house to the north.

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Bella Maura

1616382023

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