Slave: The Ghost of Cambria - Book Two

Chapter Nineteen

Kristen couldn't believe she'd taken Tony into her confidence about the conflicts overwhelming her. It felt as if she followed every attempt to maintain a professional relationship with the boy with another blunder of an intimate nature. At least his response had been kind. Kristen wouldn't have been surprised if Tony had simply nodded and gone about pretending she'd never said a word to him.

But the dream of her mother still held a stronghold in Kristen's mind. Thoughts of dialing up her parent's friends were quickly dismissed. Kristen's mother would never have divulged such a secret to a girlfriend. Kristen presumed the woman wasn't even close enough to her husband to speak of such a matter.

Margaret Cole had maintained a diary of her cancer treatments, and there was reason enough to believe she may have mentioned any strange experienced she faced at the time. When she arrived after her father's death, Kristen had come across several notebooks with one of two boxes filled with her possessions, finding her mother's hand-written words before quickly returning the small spiral notebooks to seal them away.

At the time, the very thought of reading her mother's diaries was too much for Kristen to handle. There are levels of intimacy between a parent and child, and this was one Kristen would never feel comfortable perusing, even if the woman's death no longer made it a violation. But the need for Kristen to know she wasn't crazy ruled against her sense of propriety, and she eyed the cardboard boxes in the corner of the guest-room.

Kristen rose from the air mattress, disturbing Penny, who had just laid down beside her. She went directly for the first of two boxes marked 'Margaret,' handwritten with a black Sharpie by her father. Atop it sat the Ouija board game she had chucked into the trash days ago, realizing Tony must've found it and set it in this room for her. Having no more patience for embarrassment, Kristen set it aside and pulled out the prize she was after.

It took Kristen only seconds to open the first 'Margaret' box and determine she had lucked out on her first try. She lifted the three spiral notebooks from within the box, realizing the belongings they sat among still carried her mother's scent. It was a dose of inescapable truth that reminded Kristen these were not merely relics of the past, but her mother's own intimate possessions.

Penelope couldn't resist the opportunity to rise from bed and stick her nose in the box, which Kristen didn't bother to prevent. The woman returned to the mattress with her mother's notebooks, reached in her bag for a pen, and opened the first cover as if she were about to begin some thorough scientific research.

Kristen quickly surmised these journals were mostly notations of her mother's radiation and chemotherapy treatments. There were notations of how she'd felt from day to day, but they were restricted to only the most straightforward description; meals she skipped, how poorly she slept on certain days, or why she didn't go for a walk. Now and then, she included a smattering of extra insight, but these were invariably devoted to her feelings about the treatments themselves or a critique of doctors' input.

To Kristen's frustration, she found that the second notebook began with a dozen pages of the same benign information. Still, she forced herself to turn the pages one by one, resisting the desire to impatiently flip through them like a deck of cards.

And then, Kristen found an entry that stopped the growing anxiety in her hands. She landed upon several pages where each line was filled by her mother's elegantly scripted handwriting.

***

May 24, 2015

Dick was sweet enough to move downstairs into the guest room last week. I explained how sleeping by a schedule has become impossible for me. The exhaustion of this disease makes little sense. Even if I sleep through the night, I still find myself fighting to keep my eyes from closing several times during the day. I've become an old cat in search of a new place to nap every few hours. I only wish I had a feline's strength during those waking hours. Still, I am no longer concerned about Dick's heavy feet waking me - he keeps to himself downstairs unless I call for him.