In the Image of Grace

By Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

Text copyright © 2011 by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

Cover photograph © 2011 by iStockphoto/cc-stock

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……………………………………………….

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to
actual

persons, places or events is just mere
coincidence.

http://caschlobohm.wordpress.com

……………………………………...

I would like to thank Heather Bon

for believing in the truth.

………………………………………

..................................

This story is sold as fiction,

But it’s all true.

It was supposed to be a memoir of sorts,

But nobody would believe me,

So fiction it is claimed to be.

……………………..

Everything started with the death of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth always had a sense of doom and somehow we knew her life
would end too soon. She took it herself, by her own hand. I found
her in the guest bathroom on the second floor, leaning up against
the bathtub with her head bent back as if looking up into the
heavens she had planned on entering. The scene was quite serene, a
look of peace and gentleness on her face.

Her cuts were neat and precise, two vertical cuts,
one on each wrist up against her pristine white skin, the skin that
seemed to belong to a porcelain doll. Perfect and delicate even in
death.

I knelt down next to her not caring that I was
kneeling in the pools of blood that collected under each wrist
washing over the entire bathroom floor, coating the octagonal white
ceramic tiles, staining them pink for a lifetime. The blood ran
through the thin vein like spaces between the tiles where grout
once was, carrying it through the body that was the floor.

I wasn’t shocked when I found her. I was deeply
saddened, but somehow not entirely surprised. Her whole life
Elizabeth was haunted. Almost every night she would wake up
screaming. A woman screaming haunted her in her dreams and in her
waking hours. We weren’t sure if that was what caused her
depression or if her depression was an entirely separate state. I
think they just worked hand in hand.

When she was younger she had tried to take her own
life several times. The doctors said they were just accidents while
she was sleepwalking. She might have been sleepwalking, but they
weren’t accidents. The first incident was when she was about five.
I don’t recall too many memories from that time period because I
was only four, but I do remember that day and that she was a very
young sad child. As she grew older the sadness grew and was soon
accompanied by her sense of doom.

It was late at night, probably around midnight. I was
awoken by a cool breeze sweeping over me. Isabelle and Clarissa
were asleep in the other room. They were just toddlers. It took me
a while before I opened my eyes because I was enjoying the breeze
over my face trying to incorporate into my dreams, but then I heard
a snapping sound, like someone stepping on a twig, that finally
made me open my eyes. Everything in the room was illuminated by the
moonlight. Our white four poster canopy beds glowed. The material
from the canopy softly blew around in the breeze. Our dressers were
in the spotlight of the moon, the trinkets of carousel horses and
music boxes proudly on display. I loved that music box that sat on
my dresser when I was younger. When you opened it a little
ballerina popped up and it started playing a sweet symphony. A gift
I always pretended that my mother gave me, so I could always
remember her.

I looked over at Elizabeth’s bed and realized she
wasn’t there. I softly called her name. Perhaps she just went to
use the washroom, but then I heard her voice softly riding on the
breeze into the room. That only meant one thing. She was on the
roof outside the window.

I looked out the window and there she was with her
back towards me, her body outlined by the moon. Her nightgown and
hair gently blew with the breeze. She was whispering, “As I lay me
down to sleep.” At the time I didn’t know it was a prayer because
we had never even gone to church. I called out her name, but she
just continued on. “Elizabeth,” I called again. She responded by
bending her knees and pushing off with her toes, sailing into the
night sky.

My scream was loud enough to wake everybody. Isabelle
and Clarissa instantly started crying. Our father ran into the room
where I just stood pointing at the window. “Jesus,” he said somehow
realizing what had happened. Somehow Elizabeth escaped uninjured.
We were on the second floor, but she managed to fall limp enough
that nothing broke, or was barely even out of place. She lay neatly
sprawled on the front lawn, looking like she was asleep. A look of
peace, it was like how I found in her the bathroom, when her death
actually did happen for real.

When she was nine we found her in the bathtub in the
middle of the night, floating there in her nightgown and her hands
crossed over her chest. The paramedics were able to revive her.
Another case of sleep walking is what the doctors said. When she
was thirteen it was the bottom of the stairs and when she
seventeen, when she was finally successful, in the bathroom with a
cut on each wrist. I reached up and touched her neck. There was no
pulse. All her blood seemed to of already all drained out. There
was nothing to stop. I placed my forehead on her chest and softly
wept. My older sister was gone. She was only a year older than me,
but the closest thing to a mother that Isabelle, Clarissa and I
had. We never knew our mother, who she was, what her name was, what
she looked like, we had the slightest idea.

Growing up Elizabeth was the one who answered any of
our questions about the world or life. She bathed us and she gave
us attention. I use to always like when she would brush our hair,
so it would lay perfectly smooth and in place. If she came across a
knot she would sit patiently and piece by piece pull all the hairs
out of the little knotted wad. She would then have us open our hand
and she would place the little tumbleweed of hair that once was the
knot in our palm. All things our father took no part in. We rarely
saw him. At times it felt like it was just us four girls living in
that big house alone.

Our house was an old Victorian sitting at the end of
the street which was mostly made up of brick apartment buildings
built in the twenties. There was another house to the left of ours,
a smaller Victorian where an elderly couple lived. There was one
other house across the street that was surrounded by a garden of
wild flowers and a white picket fence. A polish woman with a crown
of fluffy hair lived there with her daughter who was just barely
done with being a baby.

Our house kind of stood out even though it wasn’t at
the front of the lot. It was pushed back with two swatches of
neatly trimmed green grass on either side of the walkway that led
up to the porch steps. A tall wrought iron fence surrounded our
property. You could only get past the gate if you were buzzed in.
Once past the gate and up the cement walkway you got to the covered
porch that spanned the length of the front of the house and wrapped
around it to the left. The left hand side of the house also had a
turret that extended an extra story up past the actual height of
the house. The house was three floors not counting the basement and
attic.

The first floor had the main living space. You came
into the main foyer when you walked in with the stairs to the right
and to the left was the living room or parlor as I’m sure it was
once called. It was a dark room with brown leather sofas with gold
upholstery tacks. The end and coffee tables were a deep mahogany
wood with ornate carvings on the legs. Some tall potted plants were
in the one corner of the room near the windows. The windows were
draped in a heavy velvet maroon. The room seemed out of place. To
me it looked like it should have been in a university library or
something.

There were French doors that led into the dining
room. You could also access the dining room if you continued down
the foyer. A great stained glass window rose above the buffet that
held the china that was said to be priceless. I can’t even say
family china because we were unsure that our father had any family.
We couldn’t imagine anybody ever being his mother because he was so
cold it seemed he never received any love that a mother would
give.

In the back of the house was a large room, where most
people would use as a family room and watch TV. We had couches and
armchairs in that room, but no TV. There was also a long wooden
table with wooden chairs with the straightest backs one probably
would have ever seen on a chair. That was where we ate our meals.
Off that room was the kitchen. It was a small dark space. The sink,
stove and cabinets were on the left side. If you looked straight in
you saw the refrigerator and to the right was an old white wooden
back door, a small wooden table with two stools and a little
rectangular window above that table. Out past the back door was a
small covered porch with three steps down and a small pathway that
led you into the garage. The garage was made of stone and until
recently had the original carriage doors from when it was first
built. It was only a couple years ago that my father had an actual
modern garage door put in.

If you went back to the front of the house, the
stairs would take you straight up almost the whole way, until where
there was small landing and to the left was the last seven stairs.
Once at the top of the stairs was the hall guest bath, where I
found Elizabeth. At the end of the hall to the left was the room
Elizabeth and I shared when we were younger, as we grew older I
moved to the room to the right of it. It was the room with the
turret. In between the two rooms was a washroom.

Next to the hall bathroom to the right was a laundry
room and next to that were the stairs that led you to the third
floor. Staying on the second floor if you went to the right past
the stairs were the other two rooms with the same setup as
Elizabeth’s and mine. The house was slightly modernized when we
were younger. That’s how we got the bathrooms between the bedrooms
because in the house’s original state there was just the one bath,
the one we grew to call the guest bath.

The top floor of the house was where our father slept
and where he also had his office. We never saw the attic because
you had to access it from the third floor and our father told us to
stay off of what he called his floor of the house. He always said
there would be severe consequences if we went up there and we
believed him, so we never did.

We never saw the basement either just the top wooden
steps leading down into it. That was where we sat if ever asked a
question about our mother. Our mother was a topic one just did not
talk about in our house. If we asked something like, “What was our
mother like?” Our father would instantly grab us by our delicate
little wrists, open the basement door and say, “Go sit with the
demons.” Needless to say we were always too frightened to go beyond
that top basement step because we feared there really were demons
in the basement.

That was the kind of man our father was. He had no
problem putting fear in his children’s hearts. We really didn’t see
him all that often. He left early in the morning and came home late
at night, even on the weekends. Our father was a professor and
researcher at Bradwell University. He was highly regarded in his
field and had many published papers in journals and even a couple
books. We weren’t exactly sure what he did. Elizabeth always said
his field was blasphemy. Whatever it was, it seemed more important
to him than us. He just had us kept in the house. We never even
left the house that much before Elizabeth died. The only occasion
we would really go out would be to some event where it seemed
important that his children made an appearance. We’d make our
appearance and then we’d be shut back up in our prison of a
house.

We didn’t even go to school. We had a private tutor
we called Mr. Carl. Mr. Carl was a younger man. I’d say about
twenty-five. He was thin with dangerously sharp elbows, always was
garbed in corduroy and his hair was a sandy blond color in tight
little curls that clung closely to his head. He wasn’t one for
talking. He tutored us for a few hours a day and then was gone. The
only other person we saw during the day was Ms. Dunderfeltz. She
did all the cleaning. She would leave after dinner. She always
stayed so she could do the dishes. Elizabeth generally cooked the
dinner, but Ms. Dunderfeltz always offered her gentle guidance. She
mainly kept to herself. She had a quite nature and thanks to her
the house was always immaculate.