The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (58 page)

             
“You can
sit here and cry, if that's what you need to do. But I'm not giving up on her.” I grasped Penny's hand as she rubbed her eyes sleepily. “Let's go, Penny.”

             
“Have you found Brynn yet?”

             
“No. Not yet, honey.”

             
Elijah followed after us, kicking rocks and stew
ing over his thoughts quietly. When we sat down to eat, he took his bottle of water and his bag of indistinguishable edible contents and hid behind a tree several feet from us.

             
“Why is Eli so mad?” Penny asked as she winked in the sunlight to look at me.

             
“He's just mad.” I shrugged the question off easily, knowing that she would not be dissuaded from getting her answer so easily.

             
I was not skilled at hiding the emotional turmoil that was ever-present in our daily lives the way Brynna was. Under her watch
, Penny had never known a detail of any familial conflict. That was quite a feat, considering that our family had more than its fair share of catastrophes, ranging from the mundane to the explosively devastating.

             
“Is he mad at me?” Penny asked, “I broke h
is cellphone.”

             
“Of course he's not mad at you!” I replied with a smile, “And what does he need his cellphone for, anyway? How did you break it?”

             
“I dropped it in the potty. He was letting me play with it. I was pretending that I was calling Jackie and I
tripped over my shoelace. It fell in the potty.”

             
“Oh.” I couldn't help but chuckle softly.

             
“Do you think Jackie is here?”

             
“Maybe.”

             
“Do you think Mommy is here somewhere? I thought I saw her the other day but it was just a lady who told me to go away an
d to tell my daddy he was a mean man!” She mimicked the woman by raising her voice, putting one hand on her hip and wagging her finger at me. I found her impression to be amusing but the fact that a woman had said such a cruel thing to Penny made me angry.
Our father's actions were in no way my five year old sister's fault and it was certainly not her responsibility to deliver messages of discontent.

             
While I had been walking through the campsite with Nick, I had been well aware of the hateful glances that
were being thrown my way. Of course, no one said anything out of fear that I would report back to my father. If I did that, their food and water would be kept from them, most definitely. In actuality, though, I wouldn't have said anything to him, of cours
e. I would have handled it myself.

             
“Mommy will be here soon.” I lied uselessly. Penny may have been only five but she was still apt to tell a lie from the truth. It's at that age that children begin to see through the farces of adults. The lies we tell th
em become nothing more than an inconvenient roadblock they have to hurtle over in order to reach the truth.

             
“Did Mommy stay on Earth?” She asked me and immediately, her huge blue eyes filled with tears.

             
“No!” I reached out and embraced her quickly. “Of c
ourse not! She's here somewhere, honey. We just haven't found her yet. As soon as we find Brynna, we'll all go out and find her. We'll have her back with us in no time.”

             
“Will Maura and Daddy come find us?” She croaked out through her tears.

             
“Yes. They'r
e meeting us soon.”
             
I was digging the hole deeper for her. I was doing her absolutely no good by continuing that charade of optimism. But I couldn't break her little heart. I would leave that task to Brynna. Penny was still so young and Brynna allowed her
emotions to flow unchecked. Despite how uncomfortable outpourings of grief made her, Brynna was able to comfort Penny more swiftly and effectively than anyone else alive. Our mother's death would be the first bombshell. Dad and Maura's subsequent abandonm
ent would be the second. I did not envy Brynna's position in the slightest.

             
If I had been stronger, I would have taken that responsibility from her. I would have told Penny myself to spare Brynna from having to inflict such pain on our sister.

             
I was
stunned at how quickly my anger had dissipated. I had truly hated Brynna during our time on the ship. After I had learned that she had left our parents to die, the only reasonable reaction was to loathe the very sight of her. It took seeing my father behav
e so brutally towards her for me to understand that if she had felt it was right to leave him, she had certainly had her reasons. Her relationship with my mother had been one of quiet hatred. At first, it had been one-sided; my mother began to hate Brynna
the day my younger brother died. As her animosity grew, Brynna's defenses went up. Part of her defensive strategy was to hate my mother back. The mutual loathing spared her the pain of bearing my mother's punishment, which consisted of cruel and unbreakabl
e silence followed by periods of harsh verbal abuse.

             
Our parents had decided to have Penny eight years after my younger brother was dead and buried. Even at twelve, I was well aware that Penny was meant to fill the void left by Lucien. But after she was b
orn, Mom and Dad weren't satisfied. Their old, still-stinging grief was not rectified by the angelic baby girl. The brunt of the responsibility the baby presented fell on Brynna's seventeen year old shoulders because Brynna had insisted on caring for Penny
herself. During the day, we had gone to school. Maura would feed and change Penny. At night, Brynna came home and became Penny’s mom. Everything she had needed to know about child-rearing she had learned from some parenting book with a really long title.

             
“I can teach myself to do anything.” She had told me proudly one night as she expertly swaddled Penny, who was crying hysterically despite being fed, changed and cuddled. “See? I saw this in that book. It really does work!”

             
Penny had stopped crying almos
t immediately after she was wrapped tightly in the blanket.

             
“You're so smart, Brynna!” I had told her with the pride and admiration that is ever present in younger siblings.

             
Our mother poked her head in frequently. But when she found Penny asleep or cont
ent with Brynna, she would slink back into her bedroom and drink herself to sleep or into a stupor.

             
I could understand Mom's grief, even then. Her feelings had never changed towards Elijah or me. But her maternal feelings towards Brynna were broken, irrep
arably, and towards Penny, they were never formed. She had observed her growing belly with sadness in her eyes, as though the expansion was a malignant stomach tumor, not a child. Her rages and fits of tears had forced my father to lock her in their room.
After Lucien died, she had taken a long vacation from work that left her feeling restless and ready to return. Working didn’t heal the wounds but it certainly bandaged them.

After she got pregnant with Penny so many years later, though, she wanted nothing
more than to shut herself away, hiding from the eyes of the world that would see how terribly she regretted ever conceiving her.

I had no reason besides her treatment of my sisters to create such an anger in me. But that reason was enough.

             
Once, when Pen
ny was three and Brynna was turning twenty, our mother had stumbled into the room. Brynna had come home to visit with Penny, as she did every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Normally, she left before my mom and dad came home from work or their recrea
tional time out. But that night, my mom had returned early. After seeing Brynna, she shook her head, sighed in disgust and went upstairs.

Brynna ignored Mom completely and continued to show Penny how to write uppercase letters. Maura was in the background,
cooking dinner and looking over her shoulder at us every few seconds. I was leaned over my schoolbooks, looking up at Brynna and trying to remember how to spell the word “catastrophe.”

             
“Are you going to stay awake this time, Brynna?” My mother had slurre
d at her cruelly after making her grand re-entrance into the room.

             
“Mom, why are you walking like that?” I had asked her innocently before gasping in horror, “Are you drunk?!”

I had never been aware of her drinking habits before but watching as she trippe
d over herself displayed them clearly to me.

             
“
Shh!
” She snapped as she pointed at me. “Should I sit here and watch? Make sure you don't kill another one of my kids?”

             
I didn't understand. I started to cry.

             
“Mom, stop!” I begged as I wiped at my eyes.

             
“Mrs. Olivier, you need to go back to your room.” Maura had told her. Even after twenty-two years, Maura had insisted on calling her “Mrs. Olivier.” Maura was even a few years older than my mom and yet she still called her by our last name. That had always
confused me.

             
“Don't tell me what I need to do! I
need
to protect my little girl!” She had run her hands sloppily down the back of my hair and leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “You shouldn't be alone with her, honey. She killed your brother! She ki
lled him when she fell asleep! So
selfish
!
My little boy!” She broke down into a drunken fit of hysterics so shameful, I'm surprised Brynna didn't slap her. “I don't care what happened to you! I don't care if it was ten men...”

             
“Walk away, Mother.”

             
Brynn
a had only just begun to call our mom “Mother.”

             
“My Lucien is dead! My baby! Everyone knew…” She sniffed and breathed heavily. “Everyone
knew he was my favorite! He was my baby! I miss him. Every year, I’ve thought that it will get better. But I still mis
s him so much.” She raised her voice to a vicious shout. “It should have been you! I wouldn't have cared
at all
, Brynna Claire!”

             
I couldn't understand how she could say such terrible things. I was in the dark as to what she was alluding to when she had sa
id “ten men.” But there was little interpretation needed to understand the implications of the other words she was saying. I didn't want Brynna to die, especially after losing Lucien years earlier. So, I put my face in my hands and cried harder.

             
“Take you
r homework into the living room, darling,” Maura closed my books and packed them into my bag, “Brynn will be in to help you in just a second.”

             
“I will, Vi. Go on.” Brynna had agreed with a small, reassuring smile.

She was distracted instantly when my moth
er reached out and grabbed both of Penny's tiny hands. Brynna's eyes flashed with a rage we had all become very familiar with over the years.

             
“Get off of her!” She barked so loudly that I had to cover my ears.

             
Upon seeing the terrifyingly furious look on
Brynna’s face, Mom had released her grip on Penny.

             
“You wouldn't even be here if he had lived!” Mom slurred in Penny’s face as tears fell freely from her eyes. “I wouldn't have bothered with you! I wouldn't have wanted you! I
didn’t
want you! Your
daddy.
..
” She said the word with such awful contempt, “
made me have you! He wanted another son like Lucien! You wouldn't even be here if your brother hadn't died!”

             
Penny was more afraid of that outburst than I was. I suddenly understood that my mother wasn't he
rself. When Maura engaged in the same reckless imbibing, I understood the same. But Penny had no idea. Remembering it, I felt a harsh pang of pity for her.

             
Brynna understood it perfectly, too. She didn't excuse my mother's childish behavior or Maura's, be
it alcohol-induced or not. She didn't hold with excusing the cruelty of two fully grown, supposedly mature women.

             
At my mother's words, she allowed herself to snap. Her human frailty overcame her ability to suppress every last flicker of emotion that cro
ssed her dying heart. Tears leaked from my eyes as I remembered the look on her face as she brought her hand back. Then, without hesitation, she slammed it hard across my mother's face. The look was not one of malicious, revenge-seeking fury. It was one of
deep heartbreak and also, undiluted fear.