manicalreverie

[manicalreverie]

One of the biggest things she she struggled with was that Eleanor’s killer was never found. There was no closure on the situation and having to live with knowing the injuries some sadistic fuck had inflicted on your six year old child was bound to fuck you up beyond repair. That was what I kept telling myself as I got older. That the reason why my parents were the way they were was because of what had happened to Eleanor. I kept making allowances for them until I couldn’t. The moment I turned eighteen? I wanted out of that house. I wanted to be on my own. Have my own space and a place that wasn’t filled with horrific memories. All the goodness in that place died with my sister.

Some people would think that my chosen career after suffering such a catastrophic loss was strange. Eleanor’s death had sparked a morbid curiosity within me about death and reasoning of murder. It wasn’t so much a fascination with the how and the method, but the psychology of it all. There was a burning need inside me to know why. Was it because we had never seen justice for Eleanor? Or was it because as soon as I was old enough and qualified as a doctor, I had requested her case file? I had friends in high places that had made that request easy. However, reading it was not. I could fully understand why my parents and Alice had tried my best to shield me from it, but some of the details of the crime had inevitably leaked. The nature of her death had been so graphic that several details had never been released. She had suffered. In every single way a human could. She had been tortured, assaulted and mutilated and then discarded like she was trash. The cold, clinical part of my brain that could usually separate the victim and their character from the crime, stuttered and stumbled when it came to Eleanor. All I could think about was how scared she would’ve been. How confused. How much she would’ve struggled. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The fear and dread of my monthly appointment at Steppington Hall only seemed to grow when I had learned of Clarence Thomas being assigned to me.

Clarence Thomas was the most prolific child killer the country had ever known.

I had yet to decipher what kind of message the universe was trying to send me as I pulled up to the barrier and fumbled with my security pass, showing it to Kenny, the wise old guy at the guard station.

“Back again?”

Nodding my head at him, I forced a smile. “For my sins.”

“Get yourself to confession, sweetheart. Jesus will fix that for ya.”

The laugh that escaped from me lacked humor. It lacked everything.

Poor Kenny. If believing that shit made him feel better, it was kinder to leave him laboring under his own delusions.

As Shakespeare said, Hell is empty. All the devils are here.

[manicalreverie]

It was Saturday morning and our father had come home the night before and given us our allowance. Ten whole dollars. I had wanted candy and Eleanor wanted one of those stupid ring pops that got stuck in your teeth. We were only supposed to be gone for a couple of minutes. The store was only a five minute walk down the street and we knew we had to be back before anybody ever noticed. Papa had encouraged us to save our allowance, so we could go to the city and spend it on things we really wanted, but we were children with no sense of patience at all and we wanted instant gratification. The guy behind the counter at the Stop and Shop had watched us the entire time we were in the store. He questioned whether or not our parents knew we were here and the lies had easily flowed off our tongues. They shouldn’t have done, but we were drawn to the thrill of it all. The excitement of being out without our mom or Alice. I studied the candy bars in an almost reverent manner, selecting them carefully before I met Eleanor by the register. She had several ring pops in her arms and I had bars of chocolate in a variety of forms, all of which were going to be hidden in the bottom drawer of my dresser. The nervous excitement in my stomach had me almost hopping from foot to foot as the cashier put them in a bag for me and I handed over my ten dollar bill. “You’re going to get cavities from eating all of that. Sugar is no good for your teeth.” What did he know? He was a pimply faced nosy fucker. I stuck my tongue out at him and snatched the bag, almost skipping from the store behind my little sister. She was so focused on getting the plastic wrapping of her blue ring pop open, that the blaring horn of the old station wagon passing in front of her at the crosswalk that she was about to step out onto made her jump and vault backwards. My heart had kicked up in my chest at the noise and I’d rushed to her side, putting my arm through hers.

“Be careful. Mom would be mad if she knew we were out. We need to get back before she realizes we’re gone.”

“I know that!” Eleanor had snapped at me before she pulled her arm away from mine.

She was more focused on getting the stupid wrapping of her ring pop open than being safe. I’d huffed and crossed the street a couple paces ahead of her, put out by her nasty attitude, holding onto my bag of candy for dear life. If she kept on being like that, I wasn’t going to share with her. We were halfway up the lane to our house, the bright morning sun beating down on the top of my head. I was hoping like hell my chocolate wasn’t going to be melted by the time we got home.

“Wait up!” Eleanor’s voice was muffled as I heard her try to catch up to me, that ugly lollipop thing hanging from her mouth. I turned to face her, my heart beginning to race again when I heard the screeching of tires and a car speeding towards us. It was going too fast and seemed to be stopping all at the same time. It came to a halt and a man jumped out, coming towards me. I began to scream, the fear of stranger danger rising in my chest.

“Run, Ezzy!” I looked back at Eleanor before I took off, not realizing that she wasn’t right behind me.

Had he taken her? Her screams filled the air and I heard the car screech off again, and I ran like the wind all the way home, crying my eyes out. I felt sick with worry. My mom was on the front porch when I got back, red faced and angry.

“Where have you been?!” She immediately took hold of me, her hand connecting hard with my face. It was the first time my mother had ever hit me. I cried out in pain, tears streaming down my face.

“Where is your sister? Where is Eleanor?” She hadn’t given me time to even get my words out. She had then grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me so hard it felt like my teeth had rattled. She...she… “Spit it out, Ezra!” I couldn’t. I was crying hysterically and I couldn’t get my breath, but my mother shook me again.

Alice came rushing out onto the porch and pushed my mother out of the way, her hands resting gently on my shoulders. “Breathe, Ezra. Use your words. Where is your sister?”

“W-we were c-coming home f-from the s-store and s-someone jumped out of a car and took her!”

My mother almost swayed on the spot, holding onto one of the rails on the porch for dear life.

“I’m going to call the police!” Alice went back into the house and my mother just looked through me like I was invisible. I was after that. Our lives became about Eleanor from that moment on and now, even eighteen years later, the guilt that I was the reason my sister had been snatched was something I still lived with.

Eleanor’s disappearance shook our small town to the core. Almost immediately, the police launched a search party to look for her. My eight year old brain was overloaded with all the questions. What did the car look like? How old did the man who’d taken my sister look? Was he white? Black? Did he speak? Did he have an accent? Did I recognize him? Had I ever seen him before? My mother and father didn’t seem to care how much pressure was on my shoulders. The only one who did was Alice. She would insist that it was getting to be too much and that I needed a break. The police were generally very understanding, but my mother wasn’t. While we had never had a normal mother/daughter bond, It was then that our strained relationship really began. She never said it, but I knew she blamed me for Eleanor ’s disappearance. She was the baby, even if she’d never treated us like possessions to be had. My deep seated resentment towards my parents stemmed from how she treated me. My father wasn’t as bad, but in the days after Eleanor had been taken, I felt like she wished it had been me instead. That was something so fucked up for an eight year old to feel, but I had. As the days went from single digits to double, things just got worse and worse. Statistically, as I’d come to know as I grew up, there was more chance of being found alive within the first couple of days. Every single part of me refused to believe that Eleanor was gone. I spent hour after hour replaying that moment in my head, how she’d told me to run. She had been trying to save me, but at such a cost. I wished I could trade places with her. I wished he’d taken me instead and that I’d ignored her pleas for me to go. But most of all, I felt bad that I’d been mad at her about that stupid ring pop. That the last couple of minutes I’d had left with her had been spent with me huffing and ignoring her. She was my little sister. My best friend. I was supposed to be her protector. Ten days turned into twenty and then it was a month. There had been some evidence found down at the local creek. One of her shoes. Her friendship bracelet we had made that matched mine. Eleanor had been missing for nearly six weeks when the police showed up on our porch. A body had been found that matched Eleanor’s description, but it was so badly decomposed that they were waiting on dental records to be able to formally identify it. I can remember wishing so hard for it not to be my sister, but it was. After a month and half of wishing and hoping that she would come home, she had been found. It did a number on me to know that my sister had been murdered. My beautiful, full of light, happy sister. I was never going to see her again. I was never going to hold her hand or laugh with her. It was never going to be the two of us against the world ever again. The loss was devastating. My family was never the same. My father worked away a lot more than he ever had done before and my mother sank so deeply into depression that it felt like a permanent black cloud resided over our house. After we laid my sister to rest, my mother started to drink. There was only so much Alice could take before she quit. I didn’t blame her, but that left me alone with her all the time. Alone to deal with the anger, the devastation and feeling like I was to blame for all of it. My parents, as usual, lived very separate lives. My mother’s alcoholism was kept hidden when he was around. He dealt with his pain with work, and she drowned herself in vodka. I just lived with it. I knew now that no child should ever have to deal with what I did, and it was practically a miracle that I’d emerged from my fucked up childhood in one piece. Things came to a head when my father came home unexpectedly after his meetings had ended early. My mother was three sheets to the wind, in her usual hysterics. She couldn’t even try to hide it. He insisted she get help and like the way everything was usually dealt with in my family, money was thrown around and my mother was taken to a treatment center for her alcohol addiction.

To be continued on next post…

[manicalreverie]

'𝘊𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦. ~

I fucking hated coming here.

One night a month was all I had to do. One night. Not even that, it was a couple of hours at most, but it felt like much longer. My stomach would start to churn the moment I got into the car, my mind slowly shifting up a gear as it tried to prepare itself for what was to come. It took the entire thirty minute journey to delicately dismantle every ounce of fear, loathing and inevitable indignation that had formed from working myself up in the lead up to this moment. It happened every damn time. I would have the most painfully monotonous of days, a cycle of lather, rinse, repeat patients, none of which would cause even a modicum of an issue that could get me out of this. No one flew off the handle. Nobody needed crisis intervention. At the most, there were tears. A little yelling. A lot of inner judgment on my part, but they never would have guessed. Was I even really listening to them as they unashamedly revealed the very depths of their souls to me? Probably not. I was too busy agonizing and dwelling on my monthly visit to the Steppington Hall Institute. The name made it sound like a school for the gifted or some scholarly dwelling for geniuses, not an institution for the criminally insane. Steppington Hall was the place they put the worst of the worst. The ones who wouldn’t survive prison, and not by their own personal choice either. It was like a supermax prison on steroids, all dressed up under the guise of providing the very best psychiatric medical care the government could offer. Three meals a day, a warm bed, every whim and need taken care of. It wasn’t a punishment. To me? It was like a holiday camp for the depraved. From the outside, it looked like a fortress. Gothic Victorian architecture and towering buildings only added to the foreboding atmosphere that the whole place gave off. Of course, I only ever came here at night, but that was because it tended to be quieter in the evenings. That was when all the doctors working under the semblance of trying to do good, even though a sick part of them was getting off on treating these monsters, rushed about the place. No, I preferred to deal with my killers in the moonlight. Somehow, it was just easier in the dark.

In the dark, nobody can see who you really are. Can they, Ezzy?

Ignoring the childlike voice, closing my eyes, I stretched the tension out of my neck, my hands gripping the steering wheel before I started my engine with a push of a button. I missed the key. I missed when things weren’t so fucking technical. What was wrong with putting a key in the ignition and feeling the engine roar to life? This thing barely fucking whimpered, because we needed to save the planet, blah. This steaming pile of shit was as beyond redemption as the vagrants that inhabited it, myself included. I was under no illusions about that.

I drove in silence, tucking every part of my day behind the wall I was erecting in my head. Brick by brick, until that thing was taller than I was. I had to leave every part of my life behind when I was at the institute. Slipping onto the psyche of someone who was beyond the clutches of humanity meant I had to leave mine behind. Maybe that was what made it so hard to come here, month after month. Maybe I clung to the normality of my everyday life because it made me feel like I was doing something other than just going through the motions. I’d fought tooth and nail to carve out a life for myself after the clusterfuck of my formative years.

You said a bad word, Ezzy!

My eyes immediately went to the rearview mirror directly to the backseat, my heart picking up in my chest, feeling what could only be prescribed as palpitations. Jesus. What the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t in the right headspace for this tonight, but I knew I had no choice. A new inmate had been assigned to my caseload and tonight was his first session. He had been at the institute for over a year, after being sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Of course, imprisonment for him meant a life of luxury, but I was digressing again. No, this particular inmate was one I’d hoped to avoid when I heard they were due to arrive at Steppington Hall, but in the case of The Universe VS Ezra Hawthorne, I lost spectacularly.

Clarence Thomas and his crimes were what nightmares were made of.

The winding road up to the institute was usually the place where I finally got a handle on my bullshit and locked myself up tight, but tonight I was undoubtedly distracted. Rain pelted down on the windscreen of my car, the wipers moving at a ridiculous speed to keep my view of the road clear. I could see the familiar floodlights up ahead, knowing I was close. It sounded like fists hammering on the roof of the car as I took the road at speed, the weather becoming almost as chaotic outside as I felt inside. Breathe. It was just a couple of hours. It wasn’t like I couldn’t handle it. I always could. This…he just cut close to the bone.

He’s a bad man, Ezzy. There’s so many bad men here.

“Go away, go away, go away.”

My voice was a whisper as I spoke into the silence. There wasn’t a soul with me in the car, but I knew who that childlike voice belonged to. It was funny how easily my brain could conjure it, like I’d heard it merely only yesterday and not decades ago. The cadence was perfect. The tone, identical.

I was clearly losing my mind, which given my chosen profession was simply poetic.

It brought back memories that I’d had to live with all my life. Memories that had haunted me since I was a little girl. Something that I’d never really gotten over, or never really allowed myself to. It still didn’t feel like I could, even if that didn’t make sense to anyone but me. I could still see her face in my mind, even if the recollection of her smile was blurred at the edges. I still remembered her. My little sister. She was two years younger than me and I liked to think that she had gotten her attitude and determination from me. We had been the best of friends. The two of us against the world. That was my favorite of all my memories of Eleanor. There was a strange kind of indifference between our mother and us. It was like she had never known how to actually be a parent. I knew she loved us, but she never quite knew how to show it. That was the WASP in her. The money. She thought love was material. New dresses. New dolls. Not to comfort me when I fell off my bike or when Eleanor skinned her knees. It was all very strange and back then, I didn’t understand it much. I just knew that our mom wasn’t like the other moms in town. She didn’t take us to the park or have tea parties with us. That was the help’s job. Our housekeeper, Alice, was more like a mother, even if she had kids of her own that were already grown. She made sure we were taken care of, while my mother filled the living room with putrid smoke as she consumed one cigarette after another. I couldn’t even remember if my dad was even there half the time. It was like they lived separate lives. We rarely sat down to dinner together, and if we did, he was nearly always late home from work. My mother would purse her lips and I had imagined her almost biting through her tongue on more than one occasion. Our father was much warmer, even if his love was as sparing as hers was at times. It almost became normal to me. I never really felt alone, though. Not when I had my little sister to keep me company. She took the role very seriously and I had often wondered what my life would’ve been like if she hadn't come along. I also wondered how the hell she had come along, considering my parents barely even spoke to each other at times, never mind bumped uglies enough to produce another child. It was wrong for a child to have to consider that, but my parents' relationship was a mystery to me. It wasn’t that they were at odds. My dad was a lawyer and worked long hours, often requiring him to work in the city. This left my mom alone with me and my sister for long periods of time, with Alice taking the brunt of the work needed to raise us. I could understand how they had become disconnected, but I couldn’t get why we were living day in day out like our family life was normal. I saw my friends going on vacation with their parents. Going to the beach on a summer's day. Getting a random hug or a kiss on the head for no reason at all, other than wanting to show affection. It gave me an unrealistic view with unhealthy perimeters of what relationships were supposed to be like, something that became a common theme when I was old enough to start dating. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to perpetuate a normal relationship, but I wasn’t used to what people deemed that term to be. I craved reactions. I couldn’t bear the thought of just moseying along like my parents had. I needed a connection, whether it be good or bad, and unfortunately for me, it was usually always bad. I don’t think I liked the thought of being alone. It felt like I’d been that way since Eleanor died. When you lose the other half of your two little woman team, it’s almost like losing a limb. The circumstances surrounding Eleanor's disappearance was something I still struggled with. It had been eighteen years, but if I closed my eyes, I could still hear the sound of her voice as we walked hand in hand down the street, soft giggles sounding between us as we marveled about having escaped the house without our mom or Alice knowing.

Continued in next post…