Society Rules (4 page)

Though she tucked them back into hiding every day, the feelings of nameless despair were beginning to feel a little more insistent. They began to press on her throat in a sudden escalation on the very day she had married Will. For ten long years, she had denied the angst its place on her forehead, forcing it to live in her belly and burn like a forgotten coal in the barbeque . . . quiet mostly, but flaming up suddenly, and taking her by surprise.

In more unnerving moments, she had the skin prickling feeling that someone was calling to her, but just out of range, always elusive. It was like a dream, she supposed, although she could not actually relate to that experience.

Today, the vague shadow grew until Indie felt sure that she could taste it’s slightly metallic flavor on her tongue.

She swallowed convulsively, and pulled on her plain light blue scrubs, throwing her shoulder length dark waves into a ponytail and sighed at her reflection in the mirror.

“Now I really do look like a high school kid,” she thought with a laugh.

The world would just have to suffer through it she supposed, and shut her eyes, picturing the family members of her patients, and how it seemed that their days were incomplete until they could tell her once again, how ridiculously young she looked.

Oh yes, it was a good thing she liked that kind of attention, wasn’t it?

She flicked on the news to catch the weather report for the day, and heard the tail end of a news story about a local girl, brutally raped and murdered by her uncle. Indie leaped to snap off the television, too late, and felt the tears spring into her eyes, her hand pressed to her belly. The story made her sick . . . and made her question humanity . . . the direction the world was taking.

It filled her with a sadness that would probably seem extreme to some. Indie knew that she would carry this story in her heart, quietly mourning this young life, taken so senselessly. She often felt as if she couldn’t bear the suffering of the world. The tough front Indie presented to the world was her only way of protecting the soft underbelly of her emotions.

Shaking her head to clear away the tears, she drew a deep breath. With an effort, Indie pasted on a happy face for the kids, though she still felt faintly ill, and entered the hallway calling out to the twins. They were standing outside the front door on the deck, their backpacks slung over their shoulders.

Indie watched as Cassidy raised her small hands into a frame, and peeked up through them at the bright morning sun.

“What are you doing, Cassidy?” Indie called out to her daughter. “Nothing, Mommy . . . just checking. It looks different today!”

“Well, you know not to look directly at the sun, right?” Indie knew that the warning was unnecessary, but some mommy phrases can’t be fought. They just roll off the tongue at moments like this.

Cassidy looked back at her mother and rolled her eyes, grinning. “
Everyone
knows that, Mommy!”

“Okay then guys, are you ready to face another day?” she fought a sudden tremble in her voice that came from nowhere, and tried to smile through it. The twins eyed their mother slyly and sang out “Yes, Mommy” in unison and in a deliberately goofy tone that she could tell was designed to make her laugh.

And so Indie laughed, a little too loudly, as they stumbled their way out the door.

Chapter 2

When Fate comes to claim you

In the stark light of day

His hand, so persistent

Grasps firmly His prey

Don’t bother to struggle

To cry or to fight

For Fate has no pity

For your mere mortal plight

Just follow His lead

You have no recourse

Just go without doubt

No fear, no remorse

“Go In Peace”

Katherine Whitley

Every day after Indie dropped the kids off at school, she played out her ritual of stalking the Cumberland Farms convenience store, where they have good coffee, cheap.

Health wise, it was her only vice.

Okay, make that coffee and chocolate. Dark chocolate could always give her a nearly drug-like high, but she indulged infrequently. She tried her best to behave herself, and scarfing down a family sized bag of Dove dark chocolate treasures, didn’t particularly strike Indie as constructive.

The coffee, however, was a must. And it had to be large enough to have its own undertow for it to suffice.

Technically, coffee could be made at home, she supposed, but making amazing coffee that came in unlimited quantities on demand, just happened to be one of the very few skills she had never mastered. Indie figured as long as she worked, she had no reason to deny herself this (very) small indulgence.

She parked her car in the farthest parking space from the front door, as she always did.

All part of her life of boring predictability; an attempt to keep her natural tendency to accidentally unnerve others at bay. She couldn’t bear the frightened looks on people’s faces when they noticed the occasional slip up, and some form of her oddness broke free from their self imposed restraints.

It wasn’t so much the fact that it made her feel like an oddity, but she truly hated to upset others, or cause distress that she knew was fully her doing.

She swung out of the car and hopped up onto the walkway, sidestepping lightly to avoid a small pack of high school students that had congregated around the front of the store on their routine pilgrimage to buy the unhealthy but necessary items that would carry them through their brutal day of learning. Their bantering and keyed up speech made her head hurt, as though she could hear all of their thoughts at once.

A thin sheen of perspiration gathered on Indie’s forehead instantly, and she brushed it away, glancing upward. Winter had come to an end with a creak and a groan, and an early spring had attacked central Vermont with the enthusiasm of a Jenny Craig dropout confronted with a Dunkin’ Donuts buffet.

It was crazy hot today, she thought as she gently but firmly squeezed her way through the swarm of backpacks and book bags.

The sound hit her with a nearly physical force. It made her feel as though her knees had been removed and replaced with overcooked pasta, or something equally supportive. Indie grabbed the cement post in front of her hastily, in an effort to remain upright.

It was . . . what? A gasp, maybe? Someone’s sharp intake of breath that she instinctively knew was directed toward her. At the same moment, she felt an odd warming sensation on the back of her neck.

Alarmed, but determined not to attract attention to herself, she shot an uneasy glance over her shoulder.

Nothing but the oppressive crush of teenagers.

Indie felt an instant, desperate need to get away, and quickly.

She darted into the store with the same feeling she used to get when she had to take her Aunt’s dogs out at night when she was a kid. The feeling she recalled that began once she was walking back toward the safety of the house.

When she just
knew
something large and fang-y was walking right on her heels, drooling with anticipation, until finally, it would force her to lose all composure that last few feet and run in panic through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

Yes, it was like that.

Indie raced to the coffee bar, poured with ferocious speed and sprinted to the counter, only to meet with toe tapping frustration as the cashier slowly counted the contents of the drawer, looking up only when Indie waved her money in the air.

“Excuse me . . .”

The girl jumped, her pierced eyebrow shooting upward in surprise. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t even see you there!”

Well that was the running theme of Indie’s life, was it not? Utterly forgettable.

Of course you didn’t,
she thought irritably. The unrest continued to build as the girl gave her back change, until Indie finally made her escape to the safe confines of her car. Flipping the locks shut, she laid her head back on the headrest, panting.

“What is
wrong
with me?” she wondered in disbelief. A crush of unease was seeping into her belly, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong with today.

“Stop it. Everything is fine. Look around. No one is paying the slightest attention to you.” This was her baseline, wasn’t it?

“See”, she spoke to herself, trying to soothe her clenched intestines. “Perfectly normal, right?”

She took a deep breath, and tried to look around casually. Her head began to pound with the pain that began while she was in the throng of kids.

No doubt, her brain was trying to claw its way out of her skull, and was very close to making its escape. Indie had to laugh shakily at the visual.

She needed a Tylenol, which was positively unheard of for her. Luckily, where she was going, they had plenty of benign, over-the-counter, painkilling pharmaceuticals. Backing carefully out of the parking lot while trying to keep the coffee steady, Indie drove determinedly toward her workplace.

As Indie pulled in to her usual parking spot, she sat for a moment and considered the sound that had forced her to take flight. The feelings created by the sound were four steps beyond disturbing to her, yet . . . why? It was a sound of shock.

Surprise . . . or maybe fear. What could someone have possibly seen in
her
to generate that kind of reaction? No answer spontaneously popped into her head.

With small sigh, Indie decided that she couldn’t play chicken with the time clock any longer. She had to get her butt in there and do her thing. She flew into the building through the back entrance to use the stairs to the second floor where she worked.

The front entrance had only the elevator to get you upstairs, and although no one spoke to her, it always made her uncomfortable to ride in what she felt was awkward silence.

Indie was painfully inept at the art of creating conversation just to fill an empty silence, although she had little trouble speaking to people when there was something meaningful to say. She was rarely armed with anything interesting when she met people in the hallway or in small confined spaces, but it just seemed plain rude not to try.

And, if forced to admit it, she would have to say that there was a part of her whose feelings were constantly hurt by the surprised looks on people’s faces when she spoke to them, reinforcing the paranoid feeling she sometimes grappled with, that she had been invisible to them before she had opened her mouth.

Every time it happened, her self-esteem took another swan dive off the edge of a great canyon. She had to be very careful now, because there wasn’t much left.

Swallowing down that depressing idea, Indie loped up the stairs. She switched from being afraid, to becoming thoroughly disgruntled as she thought back to the stop for coffee.

What really happened, she asked herself, more calm now as the trauma was left behind. Did I overreact? Did I imagine something strange in a perfectly normal setting? She wondered.

She wasn’t able to think about it anymore. The instant she greeted her co-workers in the nurses’ station, she was assailed immediately by a worried voice.

“Maggie Conner isn’t looking so well.” Ashley, one of Indie’s best nursing assistants was speaking and looking stressed as Indie set down her purse and coffee. She tried not to panic.

“Really? How can that be? She was just fine yesterday.”

Ashley jumped at the sound of Indie’s voice, and then repeated her concerns about the wiry little woman whom Indie had come to love.

“She’s refusing to get out of bed, refusing breakfast . . . she wouldn’t even open her eyes and look at me. And her breathing sounds bad. I told her I was going to get her nurse, and she told me, “don’t bother!”

Ashley looked around the nurses’ station and shrugged. “I’m ‘bothering’ anyway. She’s acting really weird.”

The news made Indie’s heart go pat.

Miss Maggie was one of the residents with whom Indie truly connected. She felt a strange kinship with her, and enjoyed being in her room talking about anything and everything with her, while her radio played a constant accompaniment in the background.

It was never shut off, even in the night; the small notice taped to the front of it stated in no uncertain terms, “do not touch!” was placed there by Indie’s own hands, after well-meaning nursing staff would sneak in to the room, thinking Maggie asleep, and turn it off.

The interruption of Miss Maggie’s music was perhaps the only thing that could take the smile from the face of the gentle and patient woman. This Indie could totally understand, having an extreme love for music herself.

Their conversations were fascinating; the older woman was well-traveled and able to talk happily about any subject that happened to pop up, even though she could be a little loopy, Indie had to admit. She had once casually announced that she was very nearly three hundred years old. Indie had laughed.

“Well, we seem to have your age down as closer to ninety five!” “Oh, I know all that,” she’d replied, waving her small hands delicately in the air.

“What would people think, after all, if you went around trying to convince them that you were nearly three centuries old?” She had laughed her sweet, clear laugh.

She didn’t seem to have any kind of dementia, other than claiming to have lived an unusually long life. One thing had always struck Indie as odd, though. She had often appeared as though she wanted to confide something more. Something further, and, most likely along the same line as that unbelievable revelation, but something always seemed to keep her in check. Maybe it was the way that Indie would immediately steer the conversation back to reality, whenever it seemed that a detour was coming.

“I’m going down to check on her,” Indie said to no one in particular. Who was listening anyway, right?

She quickly trotted down the hall to Maggie’s room, and entered cautiously; stepping carefully to avoid knocking over the multiple stacks of books that were the room’s only decor, save for one silver frame on her bedside table. The shiny five-by-seven outlined the handsome face of a white haired gentleman, of whom Maggie had always refused to speak.

Sure enough, she found her in bed, which was already a bad sign and no, she did not look good.

“Miss Maggie?” Indie whispered anxiously. Maggie kept her eyes firmly shut. She quickly took in the rise and fall of the thin, pink cotton gown covering the frail ribcage of her only . . .
friend
. The movements were irregular and the respirations fast.

Yeah, this was bad.

Indie inched closer to her bed, afraid of what she would feel in her belly . . . of what she would
know
, if she put her hands on her.

“Go ahead, Indie, come closer,” Maggie said softly. “You know, don’t you?” she whispered.

“I don’t know anything, Miss Maggie,” Indie returned the whisper.

Maggie laughed weakly. “Oh, you do so! And, you know, it’s really ok. I’ve been alone for five long years . . . and after all, I
am
nearly three hundred years old . . . I think I’m ready!”

“So that’s it then, ready to pack it in after only three centuries?” Indie nervously tried to joke, just so she wouldn’t start bawling. Maggie laughed again before she was overtaken by a spasm of wet coughs that seemed to strangle her.