Things that Go Bump in the Night

Chapter 44: The Escape (Part 1)

A/N: So it is not as long as I wanted it to be but with so many people asking for an update and my promise to update this weekend I figured I should at least upload the first half of the chapter everyone has been waiting for. The Escape. This chapter will have two parts (both of which will be in Juniper's POV). Chapter 45 will be in the  POV of the Monster, because everyone seemed to like that idea. Happy Reading :)

Chapter 44: The Esape (Part 1)

 

I sat in silence for a long time after Chey ran out of the room. It was so quiet that I could hear her sobs through two rooms, a hallway and a heavy wooden door. For the fifty thousandth time in my life I felt so helpless that the emotion nearly made my breath stick in my throat as I listened to the sound.

I couldn’t save my father, I couldn’t save myself…and now I couldn’t even comfort my own sister.

The helplessness I felt was wearying and made my whole body numb and tired. I was too tired to cry. I was too tired to do anything except sit back down onto the couch and hold my head in my hands. I rubbed my face through my fingers and looked up despairingly at the books on the coffee table.

An old photo album of mine caught my eye and I slowly reached my hand toward it, pulling it to me and delicately weighting the booklet in my hands before flipping the cover open. The first picture I saw almost made a soft sob come out of my mouth. It was a picture of my father and I sitting together on the dock, splashing water at each other. I was grinning ear to ear and so was he, the skin crinkling around his eyes as he looked at my ten year old self with amusement and an expression of love so strong it could only be from a parent to a child.

I missed him.

I missed my dad.

It made my throat choke up and my eyes water just to look at his face. I turned the page and the feeling got even worse. It was a picture of Cheyenne and me sitting on the river bank together, her child size body cowering behind me as I was taking a fish off the hook of her fishing pole because she refused to touch the slimy wiggling creature. It wasn’t until I got to the third page that the first tears of the night actually began to stain my cheeks.

It was a picture of my mother holding me the day we left the hospital after I was born. She was holding me in her arms like I was the most important thing in the world. My mother had been hauntingly beautiful. She had rich mahogany hair that held a red sheen in the sunlight and large green eyes that I saw copied in my own features when I looked into the mirror. I had studied this picture many times in my life, examining my mother’s every feature and expression. My father always showed me this picture on my birthday and told me the story of how happy he and my mother were to finally be taking their little Junibee home. 

But for some reason the expression that always caught me in this picture was not the tender way my mother was holding me or the loving smile that graced her lips.

It was the sad almost far-away look in her eyes as she looked down at my sleeping baby face that was always stuck in my mind.

To me it didn’t look like she was the ecstatic new mother that my dad always told me about. She was happy but pensive, loving but sad, so close but somehow distant.

And I would never know why she was looking at me like that, looking at her two day old daughter like she knew she could lose her. Like she would lose her.  I guess she did lose me.

I let my fingers run over the photograph slowly, touching the image of my mother’s face.

What was it about my family that was so unlucky? What had we ever done to become cursed this way? I didn't know the answer to that question and I knew that I never would but still the mere thought of it made my stomah clench, the thought of being cursed.