A Vagrant Story (31 page)

“If it never happened, John would still be here. So simple.”

“I had to leave him. The silence between us was enough to drive me mad. I wanted him to say something, anything at all just to break that silence.”

“I would always blame other people for my own problems. It was easier at the time. Now there’s no one left to pin the blame back on me.”

“You were just a child. You were certainly a handful but to say you had anything to do with what happened to John is … John loved you. I know you were the anchor in this world preventing him from going to the next.”

“It didn’t hold very long. John knew what I did to him. He must have realised it, that’s why he did what he did. He must have felt so betrayed.”

“Betrayed? What could you have possibly done to him? You were just a child back then.”

“I tried to delete his stories from the computer so he’d have nothing left.”

“I remember that. You couldn’t work the computer so you just banged away at the keypad. You were upset because Jess died. That was your puppy’s name – Jess?”

Sierra nodded. “She was a golden Labrador. Very sweet dog, though I don’t really remember much about her. She was cute and I played with her, she made me happy – that’s all I remember of her really. Selfish of me, I guess.”

“That’s all most children would remember – all they should if you ask me.”

“You make it sound like I was a normal child.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I went through five foster homes before I was eight years old, you tell me.”

“Get that out of your head. They were unfit to be parents in the first place.”

“Apparently I was just a noisy kid most of the time. I wasn’t anything like the angel they were expecting.”

“Tell me of one good parent who would drop a kid for being too noisy? You’re blaming yourself for things you had no control over, with this and with what happened to John. You were a child then. You had no control over what happened.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Well weren’t you? What could you have done that was so awful?”

“I told him lies about you. I made it look like you were…”

“-Having an affair?”

“You knew what I did?”

“Of course, John told me.”

“John knew?”

“You don’t give the man much credit to think he could be outwitted by a child. John didn’t believe you. In fact after he told me we both thought it was quite cute how jealous you were.”

“But he … asked me to spy on you.”

“That’s right. You were his ‘little secret agent.’ That’s what he used to say to you, right? It was the perfect rouse to keep a hyper active child out of the way while we were trying to get my things settled in the house.”

“A rouse? But then … why did you break up in the end?”

“I don’t know - adult stuff. We grew apart … John did start drinking more too. A lot of things built up in the end. It just didn’t work out for us.”

“No.”

“Sierra?”

“This isn’t fair. It was my fault!”

“Never. You just think it was your fault. You’re exaggerating the things you did and trying to take the blame yourself, like any son or daughter would when they lose a parent. What you remember doing might have seemed big to you, but in reality they were nothing but childish games.”

“But I remember…”

Maria reached for Sierra’s hand, leaning across the table to whisper. “And I remember Sierra used to be a quiet little girl. She lived in many terrible foster homes, with many terrible people. They were monstrous people.”

“They weren’t monsters. There was something wrong with me. There had to be something wrong with me. That’s why no one wanted me. I remember always being noisy and getting into trouble all the time.”

“John told me about the first day he adopted Sierra. She was such a quiet little thing. He said, she looked ready to shriek at a pin drop. She was so quiet it didn’t look like she’d ever spoken in her whole life. You don’t remember being so quiet, do you?”

“I might have been. My other foster parents would scream at me for being so noisy, or doing bad things. I must have been trying to behave when I moved in with John first. I didn’t want him to yell at me too.”

“That’s what they told you. Right to this day you still take the blame for it all. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was. You became so used to being blamed you started to accept it as fact. Now you’re afraid to let go of it all.”

Sierra stifled into choking sadness. Her lips chattered and she lowered her head. She coughed out a whimper, sealing her mouth to hold it all back. She lowered her head to the table as if to hide away. It didn’t matter even if she tried to hide, at least she could hear herself cry for the first time in many years.

Maria didn’t release her hand the whole time. “John never liked to see people hurt on account of him. Even if they deserved it.”

“He never did, did he?” Sierra bundled down crying into her own arms. “John.”

Sierra remembered something else.   

***

She remembered bursting the front door of their house open, waving test results in hand. She had hurried home from school quickly to boast over her positive results. It was an event too rare to waste chatting to her friends outside in the dull darkness of a winter mid-day. She’d hurry home and reap the rewards.

She entered to find that same dull darkness looming over the walls of her house, as though light hadn’t reached here all day. In truth it had been this way since Maria left, but without John waiting to greet her she somehow noticed this depressive atmosphere.

“John?” Sierra called to an empty hallway and up empty stairs. “I got a C+ on my test.”

John rarely went out since Maria left. Not that he went out much before then. The thought that John got a sudden urge to go for a walk when Sierra would be due home from school, felt somehow wrong. She would have shrugged it off and proceeded to watch TV, when she realised she didn’t actually use a key to open the front door. It had been left unlocked. She rushed in so thoughtlessly it might have even been left open.

Sierra proceeded deeper into the house with cautious step. She began climbing the stairs one foot after another. Both hands clutched the banisters as if she could rip it off and use it to club any potential burglars. It was a cowardly state of vigilance yet she knew little else to do as she walked bit by bit toward the shadow at the top of the stairs. She’d never seen it like that before, it was as if those steps at the top had been swallowed to another dimension and only darkness remained like a staircase to nowhere.

When she did reach top the darkness cleared. She glanced about the landing for signs of struggle yet found everything as normal. She tried calling again.

“John? Are you hiding? I don’t like being surprised.”

John’s bedroom door had been left ajar. Sierra could see through the opening to a figure on the other side. It was dark in his room, darker than the landing. She couldn’t really see the figure only hear noises it made – something like creaking.

On one tap from her tiny hand, the bedroom door swung open slowly.

John was on the other side. He hung in the air, noose tied at the throat over a fallen stool. He swayed left to right in tune with that sickly creaking sound. His skin was stark pale, face ham-locked into a twisted scream. His eyes bulged wide with an empty glare that tore straight through the child in the doorway.

Paramedics didn’t arrive until close to her bedtime, roughly nine o clock. Sierra couldn’t remember if she had called them herself or merely slumped crying to the curb for any passer-by to respond. There was a missing space of memory between the time she stood at John’s bedroom door to the time she sat at the end of the driveway watching that sealed bag being wheeled out.

By that time Sierra slipped into a state of quietness as to distance herself from the man in the bag. When those paramedics did arrive first they regarded her with passive glances as if to any curious onlooker. She didn’t make any effort to rectify it. She merely stayed back, watching. They could have asked her to move along and she would have easily obliged. They never asked simply because they barely noticed her. She was like a tiny shadow sat at the end of the driveway.

The paramedics had wheeled him about halfway up the driveway when a woman screamed John’s name. Sierra could remember Maria rushing by her.

Sierra watched Maria run to grab the black bag despite the paramedics’ lax restraint. Maria fell on the bag and for a few moments those paramedics let her.

It was in those moments, as Maria lay across the bag, she looked to the end of the driveway where Sierra sat. Maria stared at Sierra with total absence of emotion in her eyes. To the child they felt like damming, hate-filled eyes.

Sierra could remember her feet moving backward as though the look itself pushed her away. For some great visible distance their eyes remained locked even as they became further and further from one another. When Sierra did eventually lose all sight of those flashing ambulance lights in her driveway, she turned and kept walking the other way. Neither of them, not Maria or Sierra, could have known she would never go back.

Sierra walked some time before using pocket money to board a bus. Without direction she rode the bus for as far as it would go, her only distraction a single piece of unfurled paper she’d been clasping some time. It was John’s suicide note. She must have taken it from the scene.

Under blinking aisle lights she read it again and again as if it could illuminate these events happening around her. It didn’t. All the same she kept on reading. She would have liked to memorise this as the final massage left by John, but the general structure was so formulaic as to have been written by anyone. She could almost guess the next words before reading them.

“I’m not really sure who I’m writing this for. I don’t want Sierra reading this at her age, and Maria, I’m not sure if she’d care anymore. Funny now, writing this I realise how few friends I’ve made in my forty plus years of life. I would have liked to have directed this at someone. But I can guess I’ll just write it to you, whoever you turn out to be. My head’s not together so it’s not a masterpiece, but I guess it wouldn’t be no matter how hard I tried. So here it is - my very own diatribe. Don’t worry, it’s shorter than most.

“The money issues have gotten worse. I’m jobless and my writing isn‘t changing any of that. At this point it costs too much to send them out just to receive rejection letters - so many now. They never bothered me before but now they do. I decided to quit writing last week. I just have to face facts, even if I have lived in denial this long. It was my one great joy in life, but I guess the muse never really found me. Realising that was, I suppose, the icing on the cake for me. That’s when I decided to write this one last piece.

“When it boils down to it everything changed in one day. Things were never great to begin with, of course, but when I woke up that morning I never would have guessed I’d be going to bed without Maria. She was a flame of warmth against all those bad things – I didn’t realise it until she left. Fool. Her friends were right when they said I didn’t deserve her.

“Sierra … I don’t know what to say to her or what message I should leave. Shows the kind of person I’ve been all my life. Sierra deserves a better father. I couldn’t even look after her right. I hope … as she grows she’ll forget about me, forget this sorry old man she used to know. Sierra … I’m so sorry I tried to love you.

“I know this is the New Year, and we’re all supposed to be happy, but I have to do this when I’m at my most low. This is it now.

Goodbye.

Signed – Jonathon Simes.

Chapter 23

Sierra spent her last tears crying against the table. She wiped her face dry then looked back to Maria, who waited patiently drying her own tears.

Sierra looked into Maria’s eyes and she in turn looked into hers. There they each saw a window back to that night some ten years ago when last they saw one another. So it seemed that same expression which drove Sierra away, still hung in her eyes. But what the child had recognised to be hate the adult saw as despair, a feeling of sadness so deep the child in her failed to comprehend – a hopeless kind of loss.

Maria never looked at her with hate in her eyes that night. She never meant to push her away. She merely offered up her one present feeling at the time.

Had Sierra taken a moment to check at the time, she would have noticed the same expression lodged in her own eyes. She never knew it then and only realised it now. 

Sierra never ran in fear of hate. She ran from all the unknown things to follow that alien expression. She ran from unspoken words she failed to understand. She ran from everything her life would become starting that night. That night her life changed in ways she didn’t understand, so she ran.