WORTHY, Part 3 (The Worthy Series) (2 page)

“I just don’t want people thinking that the only reason I’m getting this is because you guys are my parents,” I said. “And you know that’s exactly what people are going to think.”

“The board was very clear,” my father said. “They said that out of all the applicants, yours was the best essay by far. They were completely impressed, Michelle. You should be proud of yourself.”

“They had to be impressed with me,” I said, rolling my eyes. “My parents own the whole company. You’d probably have shit-canned them if some other kid had gotten picked.”

“Watch that mouth, young lady,” my mother warned. “I don’t know where you picked up that nasty habit from, but it’s going to stop.”

“I wouldn’t have even applied if you all hadn’t forced me to,” I said, feeling as if my life was over. It was going to be so embarrassing to endure the applause of all of those people my parents basically paid to give me some pointless award. They’d all say, though, after the ceremony was over and we were gone, that the only reason I got the scholarship was because of my name: Smith. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to make my own way in the world.

“This is a tremendous honor, Michelle,” my father said, “and, let’s face it. Ten grand doesn’t just fall into laps. You have to earn that kind of money, and you’ve earned it.”

“Don’t talk about it like that,” my mother said, turning toward my father and wrinkling her nose a little.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “When you say it like that, it makes money seem vulgar somehow.”

“It is vulgar,” I piped up, and my father groaned.

“See what you’ve done?” he asked, playfully slapping my mother on her knee. “You’ve instilled your scandalous upper crust predilections in our daughter. I didn’t need two of you.”

“One of me is all you can handle,” my mother said, kissing him on the cheek.

“If you all are going to be disgusting, please wait until I’m out of the car,” I said. “And I have everything all planned out, anyways.”

“Oh, really?” my father asked, his voice full of humor. “Please tell me. I have been trying to have everything all planned out for my entire life.”

I knew sarcasm when I heard it, but I proceeded anyways. “I’m going to get a job,” I announced. “And that’s the money that will pay for college.”

“Along with the scholarship,” my mother put in.

“If I must,” I sighed dramatically.

“What’s the job?” my father asked.

“I’m going to work at the gardening supply store,” I said. “Mr. Monroe already hired me. I’ll be working with the plants outdoors and only manning the register part of the time. Mr. Monroe said that I’d learn even more about the uses of plants and how to treat any diseases they might have. I could even diagnose problems when people bring their plants to the store.”

“A plant doctor,” my father teased me. “I’ve always wanted one in the family.”

“You can laugh if you want,” I said, my face hot with self-righteous anger. “But it’s what I’m going to be doing, and it’s what I want to be doing.”

“That’s the most important thing, then,” my mother said. “As long as you’re happy and active.”

“And I’ll be able to pay for my own college,” I pressed.

“Michelle April Smith,” my father said, my full name the sign that I had exhausted his well of tolerance. “You have been blessed to be born into a very successful family. I don’t know who put it in your head that you should be ashamed about it, but you shouldn’t. A lot of kids have to work their way through college, and a lot more are left in horrifying debt afterward. You shouldn’t have to dig a grave for yourself before you are allowed to pursue your future. You, though, Michelle April Smith, will be one of the lucky ones who will be free to pursue whatever you want. Accept it, darling. We would never let you — Jesus fucking Christ.”

The curse had been vicious and completely unlike him. My father never uttered anything saltier than “damn,” and then my mother started screaming. All I could see was a bright white light, then a crushing impact and flames made me realize I was screaming, too.

I looked down in my lap and saw a little girl with Jonathan’s blue eyes and my blond, curly hair.

“Don’t be scared,” she said as those gorgeous curls ignited. I kept screaming as the right side of her face started to melt away. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

I woke up with a long gasp, the echo in my loft telling me that I’d been screaming just as loudly in the real world as I had in my dream. Coughing heavily, my damaged vocal cords protesting my rough treatment of them, I switched on the bedside lamp and got a swig of water from the glass I kept there.

I’d gone for so long without nightmares that it was almost like welcoming an old acquaintance back into my life after a long absence.

It had been about the wreck that had killed my parents. That much was certain. One of my biggest regrets had been the fact that I’d been a brat at the time of their deaths. I tried to comfort myself sometimes with the idea that maybe they liked my spunkiness or my pluck, but I was being bothersome. Maybe if I hadn’t been so snippy and persistent, we wouldn’t have been talking at all and my father would’ve had his complete attention on the road.

Maybe he would’ve seen the drunken driver crossing the centerline in time to veer away, in time to save all of us.

Instead, I’d stubbornly balked at accepting my parents’ company’s scholarship. I was so certain that I wanted to make my own way through life that I was willing to turn my back on whatever help they had to give me.

It had made me seem ungrateful, which hurt worst of all. I was so grateful for all the love that my parents had raised me with. I knew that I was lucky and blessed. I knew they would do anything for me.

I just never knew how hard it would be to go on without them. Just like wearing my scar without getting it fixed had become a sort of punishment for my behavior at the time of my parents’ deaths, so too was my abhorrence of their money. I could’ve had access to millions of dollars if I’d just gone to the family lawyer to work everything out, to hash out the estate. I would’ve been set for life. Instead, I’d fled to the cottage, running away from people and my problems and the world.

I’d seen how well that had turned out, though.

I frowned as I remembered perhaps the most troubling part of the nightmare I’d just endured. That little girl, the one who’d been sitting on my lap, definitely didn’t belong in my dream. She was an outsider, someone who hadn’t been there at that time. She hadn’t even been a thought at the time of the wreck that had changed everything.

That little girl was the daughter I lost. I knew she was. She’d looked like the perfect blend between Jonathan and me. She was perfect.

But then, the fire had taken her, scarred her just where I’d been scarred, and all the while, the child had assured me that it didn’t hurt.

That I shouldn’t be scared.

All of this shit scared me. All of it. I got out of bed, giving up on sleep for the rest of the night, and padded around the loft. Everything was new and impersonal. I didn’t know what I was looking for. All of my personal effects were either at the Wharton compound or out at the cottage, and I could go to neither.

I would be a stranger at the Wharton compound, which gave me a small degree of comfort. Without my scar, none of them would know me. They wouldn’t believe me if I attempted to tell them the truth, and that was a bigger relief than I cared to admit.

The bulk of the things that actually mattered to me were back at the cottage, and that was a place that I could never return to. Even if it had been my home for years after my parents had died, there were far too many ghosts there for me to cope with. It was where I’d met and fallen in love with Jonathan, after all, where he’d asked me to marry him and where I’d said yes, of course, nothing else makes better sense than that.

But now, the cottage was a tomb, a mausoleum to my failed marriage and its hateful end, and the site of the accident where I’d lost my unborn child and nearly my life. I didn’t want to go back there, not even for the goat I’d purchased and named George, not even for the chickens that I was sure were already fodder for some of the predators that slunk through the woods. If I went back there, I’d find a porch full of deliveries, cardboard boxes stuffed with books and onesies and bottles I’d been stockpiling for my baby.

That cottage was a graveyard, never mind a haunted house. My dreams had died there, and I could never return.

After about twenty minutes of aimless shuffling around, after touching the laptop and the phone and the television remote, I discovered that I needed a drink. The bottle of vodka in the freezer ended up being the answer, after all, and I splashed it over ice, eager to cool the burning I’d distinctly felt while dreaming. I wrote it off as bed warmth, dismissing the idea that I’d actually been back in the backseat of my parents’ car, holding my deceased child.

The vodka went down smooth, letting me know that I was getting better at this drinking thing. I’d vowed to never imbibe again after that horrible night with Jane and Brock, the night that had made Jonathan doubt me forever. Brock had definitely taken advantage of me, snapping suggestive photos while I was blacked out drunk. But I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t.

Now, though, vodka was becoming my only friend, besides Ash Martin, and I had to embrace that. It was good to have friends, good to have a purpose in life.

I poured another couple of fingers and thought about Lucy, a single cog in the machine that made up the Wharton family staff. She’d been my friend, once, but that hadn’t lasted. We ended up being from two different worlds, way too different to ever have anything genuine.

There was no one for me.

I carried my vodka into the bathroom and nearly dropped the heavy glass at my reflection. My own smooth face was now a source of terror, too, apparently. I had trouble recognizing the latest incarnation of myself. The woman who peered back from the reflection looked like she should be proud and brave and strong, like she shouldn’t take shit from anybody, least of all bad dreams or exes. She should have lots and lots of friends, people dying to hang out with her no matter what the hour.

She should have purpose.

I thought back to the day I left the hospital, the day I’d been so clear about my future and the path I would take to get myself there and stop dwelling in all of this excruciating past. All I’d done was move into my new loft. Everything else had been put on hold for … nothing. I was just in limbo here, unsure of whether I was ready to move on.

Fuck being ready to move on. I needed to just get the lead out and go. Limbo was no place to stick around. It was time to build a new life for myself.

I found a pair of scissors and tested them, gnashing the blades together. They’d do just fine. Then, I took a lock of my long, curly, blond hair and snipped it off.

Snip. Just like that.

It spiraled down through the air and burst into hundreds of different strands in the sink. I stared at it for a long time. My parents had never allowed me to do anything fun with my hair, and by the time I was alone, I honored their memory by never changing anything. But now I needed more than change. I needed a complete transformation in order to leave behind this old life and step into my new one.

I needed my parents gone, and I needed Jonathan gone.

Most of all, I needed the child I’d lost gone. I couldn’t abide the ghostly movements I felt inside of myself sometimes. And I also hated the way I’d sometimes forget myself and talk to it.

There wasn’t even an “it” anymore. That train had left the station in a bloody mess.

I took another curl and snipped it, then another. I made a snip to represent each and every thing I needed gone, every portion of my past that caused me pain, that I needed to jettison, to swim away from. I cut so harshly that I lost all semblance of curls at all, and gazed at myself with straight hair — without using an iron — for a long time.

Was this really me? At the exact same moment I wondered that, I realized there wasn’t a “me” anymore. I couldn’t ever hope to be myself — the person I was before I lost everything — ever again.

I’d learned this lesson before, I knew, when my parents had died. I knew that it would be ludicrous to believe that there was ever any chance to go back to any semblance of normality. I’d made peace in the woods, living at the cottage, with the fact that I’d caused my parents’ deaths.

Maybe peace was a bit of a strong word.

I’d accepted that there wouldn’t be any going back. There, that was better. I’d understood that there wasn’t anywhere I could go to that constituted “back.” People didn’t come back from the dead, and unless I was going to join them sometime soon, I simply had to cope with the fact that it would be a long time before I saw my parents again — if ever, depending on my religious views of the moment.