Blessed (20 page)

She had realized all of these things while she was in the shower that morning. She was an adult and could take care of herself. She’d make a plan, get everything in order, and go for it.

She may be a little off in the emotions department, but that didn’t mean she was broken. Some people simply didn’t like to make an ordeal out of things. She wasn’t sure when she had become one of these people, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad change.

She may have lost her parents, but she still had her grandmothers, Piper, her ward, and most of all, she still had Kaiser. He had become a part of their family while her parents had still been alive, so, in a way, he was kind of like a sibling. Something left of their legacy other than her.

She knew she was going to be okay and life would go on. People go through losing their parents all the time. Some people lose their parents at birth even. She had had twenty-one wonderful years to get to know and love her parents. She was thankful for that and had faith that she’d see them again someday. That was part of her Heavenly Father’s plan.

“Let’s get you home.” Piper had used her voice that was made for a two year old that had just had its shots.

She turned the key in the ignition and pointed the car in the direction of the freeway.

One of the great things about the Salt Lake Valley is; you can get from anywhere in the valley to anywhere else in the valley in less than twenty minutes. The other great thing is, it’s so cold during the winter that the roads are almost always icy and it can require some concentration to maneuver on them.

The combination of those two godsends equaled a quiet fifteen minute drive back to her house. Piper was so busy trying to avoid all the idiots that refused to slow down for the icy conditions that she didn’t have time to pepper her with questions or smother her with concern.

It was the most peaceful part of her whole day.

After assuring Piper that it was okay that she went back to her house for a while to finish up some homework and grab some clothes, she closed the door and waved to her friend as she drove off. She was sure that it wouldn’t be more than two minutes before her phone started chiming at her, telling her she had a text message from Piper. She was equally sure that the message would be some variation of “Are u sure ur ok?”.

Sure enough, as she was letting a very excited Kaiser through the back door, her pocket chimed. The screen read, Let me know if u need anything. xoxo. She chose not to respond and stuffed the phone back in her pocket.

Kaiser finished his business, which she chose not to clean up right then, and came back inside. She ruffled his ears as he walked past and sent his tail into a frenzy. She smiled as he walked over to his dish and sat, tail thumping noisily against the island. She really was going to be okay.

After sitting in the too-quiet den, watching a too-loud TV for about fifteen minutes, she decided that she needed to be moving. Sitting still was making her antsy and she didn’t like it. There was plenty to do and her body was telling her that she needed to get it done before it was too late.

She decided to start with the living room. She couldn’t stand looking at it. It kept giving her flashbacks to the night the bishop had sat in the formerly tidy room and delivered the news that had spurred the events of the last eighteen hours. She swept the ash from the hardwood floor, scooping it up with a snow shovel and dumping it into the garbage can she had placed at the front door.

Then she started wiping down the walls. The slight texture had created perfect little shelves for all the ash that had been blown up into the air by the air conditioning vents. She stared at the hole in the sheet rock for a few minutes before deciding that she could fix it. She’d seen her dad do the sheet rock in the basement when he had finished it. It didn’t look that hard.

She skipped mopping on account of the fact that she would be cutting and hanging the powdery material and painting the next day.

She moved on to the kitchen. There was dust on almost everything, so she dusted every surface she could reach and then wiped them all down with a damp rag. She washed the few dishes that were in the sink, then dried them and put them away. She didn’t think that the dust from the sheet rock would get as far as the kitchen so she got the mop out and mopped the tile floor until it shone.

She headed down to the den next. She picked her books up and made a neat stack with them on the coffee table next to her laptop. She wiped down every surface she could see that needed wiping and even most of the ones that didn’t. She got the vacuum from the utility room and vacuumed the carpet, couch cushions, under the cushions and under the couches and tables.

She was slightly irritated when she saw that the guest bedrooms had been left spotless and moved on to the guest bathroom. There was
always
something to clean in a bathroom. She hunted down and eliminated every water spot she could find, wiped down the clean shower, scrubbed the clean toilet bowl and emptied the single receipt out of the garbage can.

She moved up to the top floor of the house, intentionally avoiding the master bedroom, and proceeded to scrub her bathroom until it shone the same as the guest bathroom.

Kaiser watched her intently the entire time with the canine version of a slightly worried look on his face.

She looked over at him sitting in the hall outside of the bathroom and assured him as best she could. “I’m fine. I just needed something to keep me busy. There’s so much to do all of a sudden! My body is telling me that I need to get my butt in gear, so I figured cleaning was a good distraction from thinking and it is also considered getting something done. No harm in that right?”

He cocked his head to the side and thumped his tail on the ground halfheartedly. He still seemed to believe she had lost her mind.

She chose to ignore his pitiful face and focused all of her attention on scrubbing the tile beneath the toilet tank. She didn’t realize what a pain it was to reach back there and wondered how long one could go without cleaning it before the grime had to be removed with a putty knife and paint thinner. It made her glad that she was a very clean person and could never let things get that bad. She involuntarily thought of this very spot at a bathroom in a frat house. She shuddered and considered the merits of tossing her cookies into the porcelain  bowl.

It would give her an excuse to clean it again.

She vetoed the idea on account of her severe hatred for vomit and told herself that there was still plenty to clean in her bedroom.

She shoved the frat house visual out of her head, finished scrubbing behind the toilet and quickly dusted the pipe under the sink before mopping the floor and heading to her own room.

She had neglected it for the past couple of days and was surprised at herself when she had rounded up a full load of laundry from the floor. She packed the basket down to the utility room and put the load in the washer.

She never worried about separating her clothes, everything she owned was bright and colorful, and generally made of cotton, so there really was no point.

She grabbed the vacuum on her way out and headed back up to her room. She finished tidying up, made her bed, organized her desk, straightened all of the picture frames that hung on her walls then kicked on the vacuum.

When she had finished and returned the vacuum to its proper place, she plopped down on her bed. The sense of urgency that had egged her into this meth addict cleaning binge was still there. Telling her to get up. There was still so much to do.

She ignored it as she felt the aches from so many hours of scrubbing sink into her muscles. It felt good.

As she lie there relaxing, Kaiser sat at the foot of the bed, still watching her like she had gone mental.

“What?” She asked.

He finally stopped looking at her long enough to point his nose at her bottom drawer and let out a single high pitched whine.

When she didn’t move to get him what he wanted, he looked at her again, then back at the drawer and whined once more.

“I’m not putting that thing on. You can forget it. I have way too much to do to take a vacation with you to la la land. Have you ever planned a double funeral before? It’s not exactly a cake walk you know!”

Instead of backing down like she had expected him to, he pawed at the drawer and whined again.

“Kaiser, I said no! Now can I please just lie here and enjoy the burn, please?”

His response was a whine and a bark.

She’d had enough. She sat up and glared at him before storming over to the dresser and pulling the drawer out so violently that it came clear off the track. She grabbed the box out of the corner and ripped it open, causing his lock of hair to fly somewhere across the room as she grabbed the necklace by the chain and dropped the box on the floor.

Finally, she settled it around her neck and screamed, “There! Are you happy now? I put the damn thing...”

The world tilted precariously to one side and then violently to the other as someone pinched the skin on her chest.

She spun on her heels and stormed towards the fountain, the sky darkening to an ominous midnight blue as she stalked up to him. A fierce wind picked up, blowing the few short strands of hair sticking off the top of his head around with it. Lighting flashed in the distance and the flowers all seemed to cower close to the ground.

“What, Kaiser? What do you want? You got me here, now speak you lousy dog! I’m
not
in the mood to play your mystical cryptic spirit guide games, so come on! Out with it!”

She stood, fuming, in front of him. The smile on his face only incensed her further, and a pelting rain began to fall.

“It’s good to see that you finally trust in what you have here. It’ll make it easier to trust in what you have at home. He’s coming, Ardra, and I believe he’s coming for you. I can’t find another reason that I would have been assigned to you and given the instructions that I was given. You have a very short time to learn how to use the gifts you have been given in order to protect yourself and defend the world as you know it.”

The rain lightened and the wind let up just a little bit. It was now akin to a summer storm instead of a full-on hurricane.

“You said you wanted the outright truth. I gave it to you. Something bad is coming after you and whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to deal with it to survive. You’ve been tossed into the middle of this by some cruel turn of fate. Personally, I wish there was some way that I could change that. I don’t want to see you stuck fighting this battle. Sadly, that’s just not an option.”

She let the lightning hit the ground dangerously close to the place where he was sitting.

“Now, Ardra! Is that really any way to treat your pet and trusted confidant? I’m shocked at this temper tantrum!”

The playfulness in his eyes said otherwise, but nevertheless, she was reminded of the tantrum she had thrown over the necklace during Christmas break. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she was still soaked, and so was he, but the sky was back to the brilliant color of his eyes, the wind was gone, the temperature was back to normal and the flowers were back to begging for her admiration. The way her world was supposed to be.

“See? Now isn’t this a much more pleasant way to have this conversation?”

He shook his head violently, spraying her with water.

“You’ve been spending too much time as a dog.” She told him. She sat down next to him and politely rung her hair out into the fountain. “Now, would you kindly explain what you mean by something is coming to get me? That’s not something I would put at the top of my list of things to hear during our first real conversation.”

Like it or not, she knew he was right. He was one of the few people that she had left in her life and she couldn’t afford to turn him away. Although, she was still pretty sure that she preferred his dog form. He wasn’t nearly as cocky when he couldn’t speak.

“Well, I mean exactly what I said when I said that something bad is coming after you. There’s not much mystery behind that statement is there?”

She sighed in frustration before pressing for more, “Who is this someone? And why are they after me? What do I have that makes me such a threat? These gifts that you refer to?” She emphasized the word “gifts” by making air quotes with her fingers, “Well, if they’re making me a target, feel free to tell your bosses to take them back. I don’t want them.”

He smiled and the fact that she could almost call it a sad smile broke her heart. He was built to be happy. “I wish that was an option. Unfortunately, the gift is for you and you alone. As for who is after you, he’s known by many names. At the root of it all and behind the many facades, he is Chaos.”

“Chaos?” She raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

“Yeah. Chaos. In the flesh, so to speak. He is the embodiment of all the madness in the Universe. Thrives on mischief, loves to cause mass hysteria, and has a taste for  power.”

“Lovely.”

“You don’t know the half of it. I can give you a brief run down, but that’s really all we have time for. You have a lot to do and not nearly enough time to do it.”