The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (15 page)

             
“You've gotten so weird since you moved out! You used to be able to make me feel better no matter what was wrong! Now you're
weird!
”

             
“Alright, you are very upset right now.” I told her, “And you're saying things that would be hurtful if it wer
en't for the fact that I...”

             
“...that you're a cyborg!” She exclaimed, pulling away from me, “I just killed Miranda!”

             
“Miranda who?” I asked.

             
“Miranda! My best friend Miranda who you've only met like, a hundred times!”

             
I had seen the girl around the ho
use every day of every summer since Violet had been in seventh grade. The two young friends were inseparable from the moment they had met. Why Violet would resort to murder to dispatch her best friend, I was not sure. A simple “I think it's time we go our
separate ways” would have sufficed.

             
“Stop having weird thoughts! God, they're so loud!” She shrieked as she covered her ears. My heart plummeted several feet and my stomach churned dangerously. My threshold for tolerating strangeness was beginning to less
en. Violet was telling me now that she could hear the mental dialogue occurring inside of my head. Her ability to do such a thing and the fact that she could read into my innermost thoughts were upsetting to both my mind, heart and stomach. I ran my finger
s through my hair as I tried to keep my breaths steady.

             
“What are you talking about?” I demanded and when she didn't answer, I grabbed her arm and shouted, “Violet, what are you talking about?!”

             
“I am well aware that this keeps getting stranger and stran
ger.” Violet told me, “That's what you just thought. 'This keeps getting stranger and stranger.' I don't know what's happened to you today...” She stopped, looking off at something I couldn't see, “Brynn, what...”

             
“What are you doing right now? Violet, st
op it!'

             
I didn't know what I wanted her to stop. Something about the sudden change in her, though, was giving me a feeling of unease that turned my stomach and made my head spin. James had parked in front of our house and turned around to look at us, his
eyes wide with curiosity and concern.

             
“When you said that...” Violet was looking at me now with her luminous brown eyes, “They cut off. When you told me to stop, the stream stopped.” She shook her head slightly and whacked herself in the face with both ha
nds. “What is happening to me?!” She threw her arms around me again and this time, I squeezed her back as my love for her and my fear for her life exploded inside of me; that blast swallowed everything in its path.

             
The explosion. It was coming.

             
“Listen t
o me.” I took her head and lifted it somewhat abruptly, “I want you to go inside and pack a bag. We know what's coming. We know what you saw in your dream.”

             
“An explosion and everyone...” She stopped to breathe heavily with one hand grasping her chest. I
put my hands on her face.

             
“Violet, I need you to focus. I need you to pull it together just for right now. Later, we'll talk about everything. James and I will explain everything we know and anything that you need to say, you can say it. But right now, we
have to get the hell out of here. Understood?”

             
I hadn't barked like a drill sergeant rousing his lazy troops but I had certainly come close. A new urgency was consuming me now. It was reminding me that with each passing second, the imminent end moved clo
ser and closer. We were running out of time.

             
Violet nodded and in a voice trembling with the same pure, child-like terror that I was beginning to feel but refused to show, whispered: “Brynna... what were those
things
?”

             
I shook my head and replied brusque
ly, “Later.”

XXX

             
“Was Maura watching Penny today?” I asked Violet hurriedly as the three of us went storming into the house.

             
“I think so. Why?”

             
“Because she's coming with us.”

             
“What about Mom and Dad?” Violet asked and another look passed between
James and I. He had told me that my parents had basically been voted off the island, or in this case, the ship. I figured
that the time to tell my sister that little detail would be much later, once we landed on Pangea. But the question I faced right then
was whether I should lie and say that they would be meeting us there or if I should just dodge the query entirely.

             
James solved that dilemma for me when he said, “Right now, we just need to get your stuff together. Everything else can wait, Violet.”
             
She
nodded and scampered off to her room.

             
“Only necessities, Vi!” I called after her.

             
“Is there anything that you want here?” James asked me as he observed the foyer of my parents' lavish home. I found myself scanning the familiar surroundings, feeling nothi
ng but an icy resolve to feel nothing. Even as I took in the sight of the two-sided staircase I had come hurtling down as a child on my rush out the door every morning before school, I was expressionless. Even as I glimpsed the kitchen with its warm yellow
walls where Maura had made me breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, my heart was not stung with even the slightest twinge of pain. As I looked at each formal picture of my mother, father, and siblings placed apart in perfect distance from the last that a
dorned the walls, I only frowned slightly and closed my eyes until every terrible feeling that could possibly roar to life and every acidic tear that could emerge into my eyes fizzled away into nonexistence.

             
As I said, I had always been good at feeling
nothing.

             
“There's nothing here for me, James. There never has been.” I walked past him, beckoning for him to follow me, “Maura!”

             
“Who is that?”

             
I heard the voice that had been ever-present in my life for as long as I could remember and instantly, the ha
rried anxiety I felt lifted. It was for a moment as brief as death but it was a moment I have never been able to shake. I found myself running to meet her as she came into the kitchen, followed closely by my youngest sister, Penelope.

             
“Brynn!” Penny excla
imed, her excitement upon seeing me as refreshingly childish as it always had been. Despite the circumstances growing ever dire as the time progressed, I couldn't help but smile as she threw her arms around my middle and squeezed me as though she hadn't se
en me in years.

             
“Hey, turnip.” I greeted her softly as I leaned down to kiss her forehead.

             
“Maura, Brynn came home to see us!”

             
“I see that.” Maura said through a joyful chuckle as she wrapped her arms around my neck. She broke away from me abruptly and
held her hands up in mock apology, “I'm sorry. I know you no longer like hugs.”

             
Maura had come to America from England about ten years before I was born. She had been an exchange student set to attend Yale the following fall. However, her scholarship fell
through when she met my father there. He enticed her with his charisma and good looks, only to drop her abruptly when she became pregnant with their child. She found herself so despondent as a result of the sudden breakup that she stopped attending classe
s. For years, she took every job she could in order to stay in the country before my father contacted her out of the blue many years after their last meeting to tell her that my mother was pregnant and they would be needing a nanny. He offered her good mon
ey and a place to stay that he would help her pay for.

             
I try to think that my father did all of that to assuage the damage done by how badly he had hurt her. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt. I try that only to be snapped back to reality by the
fact that the only reason he hired her was so he could have a woman on the side who would take care of his needs when my mother shunned him. I feel no sense of regret for Mom but I do feel slightly sorry for Maura.

             
“Young and naïve...” She had told me onc
e after imbibing a little too readily one night, “Don't ever fall victim to their wiles, my dear. The only person who will pay for it in the end is
you.
”

             
After many more of those drunken conversations, I finally got up the nerve to ask her why she didn't
tell him, in colorful British terms, to go screw himself. England surely would have been a
welcome sight after so many years. Even though my own home was as painful to view as a particularly nasty roadkill pile on the side of the freeway, she had no reason
to hate her home country. Why didn't she return to it?

             
“What, and leave you?” She had asked with a bitter laugh, “I shudder to think of it, Brynna Claire.”

             
But, I digress...

             
“Have I ever liked hugs? Isn't that the real question here?” I asked her befor
e narrowing my eyes.

             
In response, she rolled her own and looked up to the heavens for the answer as to how to deal with such crassness. I heard James laughing to himself in the background.

             
“And who is this?” Maura looked from me to James and back again,
“Are you making friends in the city?”

             
“I guess you could call him that, if by friend you mean,' irritating cling-on with no sensitivity.'”

             
James was still smiling as he reached his hand to Maura for her to shake.

             
“You've been dealing with this for
twenty two years? You have my greatest sympathy. I'm James Maxwell.”

             
“Maura Taylor. I suppose you could call me Brynna's nanny. And you're Brynna's...”
             

             
“Friend.” He replied simply.

             
“You better be
only
her friend, James Maxwell.”

             
“Okay!” I threw my han
ds up in the air, “Can we get serious for a moment?”

             
“I was being very serious.” Maura informed me and I didn't have time to decide whether she truly was or not.

             
“Look, I know this is all very exciting, given that you haven't seen me in ages and I have t
his striking fellow following me around. But I have to tell you something. It's serious. It's gravely serious and you might want to sit down...”

             
“Oh, dear Lord...” Maura closed her eyes and grasped one of the chairs around the kitchen table, “When is it d
ue, Brynna?”

             
I hadn't utilized a DVD-spewing box in front of a convenience store or even visited my local library in quite a while. If I had, I certainly hadn't told her about it, as both occurrences would be quite unremarkable. Besides, both would not wa
rrant the sudden change in her demeanor and the way she immediately went pale.

             
Perhaps she believed that I had gotten myself into debt with some loan sharks in a smoke-filled casino, though for the life of me I didn't know what had given her that idea. Ev
en though I was vastly intellectually superior to the neanderthals that frequented such establishments, I had never had an interest in gambling. Plus, the closest casinos were miles away. Someone who had no interest in gambling wouldn't drive hundreds of m
iles away to gamble.

             
“Whoa...” James said suddenly as he realized what she was getting at, “Ms. Taylor...”

             
“Is that who you are, Mr. Maxwell?” She asked sardonically, “Are you the father?”

             
“Is he the what now?!” I exclaimed, my eyebrows raising in alarm
, “Maura, you think I'm pregnant?”

             
“I told your parents you were not ready to live on your own. With your potential, Brynna Claire, how could you just throw it all away... After everything I've told you! After I told you about what happened to me...”