Chapter 3 CHAPTER 3
One bad day led to an entire month of functional depression.
Yes, I have been in therapy nearly all my life to know the signs and the labels that come with the territory but someone has to coordinate the burial arrangements.
Someone had to sit down and listen to her friends finally say what was on their minds and someone had to go to the lawyers and get everything in order.
I was going to send everything off to her sister in China who hadn't picked up her call in over twenty years but the meeting didn't go the way I'd expected.
Or maybe I'm truly dumb; I mean she had given me everything in life, what's to say she wouldn't want to do that in her demise?
I guess it's the knowledge that I didn't deserve any of it.
The courts didn't find me guilty, I hadn't intentionally set things on fire and gotten children killed but it was my dreams, not anyone else's, that were the calm before the storm, well, more like a mini volcanic eruption.
“You have been given full reins of everything in Miss Ferguson's name,” the lawyer, a British woman with the accent to match informed me, “and after all debts and taxes have been cleared, these are the remaining assets due to you.”
She handed over some files and gave me papers to sign.
Everything else happened as though I was just a passenger on a freight train and it wasn't until I got back home, the one I grew up in, did I snap out of my reverie.
My phone rang.
It was my boss.
“You know you have taken more than enough time off, right?"
“My Mom just passed away, Mr Harvey,” I gritted out, dropping the glass and carrying the entire bottle instead.
“Yes I know but it's been a whole fucking month! Get back to work on Monday or… just get back here Alira!”
The line went dead and so did any lingering spark in my soul.
I walked back upstairs and focused on getting myself as drunk as possible, which was a difficult task for an anomaly like me, trust me.
But there's nothing four bottles of rum after two bottles of wine, won't do for you.
I did that for another day, and only stopped because everything finished.
And I was hungry as hell.
Mom had just gotten back from a mini vacation before she passed away so there was very little food in the house.
I shuddered at the memory of it, coming back from such a far distance only to get killed by a drunk driver in your own city.
I shook my head and forced myself to take a bath. I didn't want her friends crowding in here again under the guise of honouring her memory by looking after me only to drown me in more guilt. If they saw how I looked before, they definitely would do that.
I have enough of that to last me a lifetime.
With less blurry eyes, I headed to the counter to pick up the keys.
And then I realized I'd not even looked at the things she willed to me.
I was short on cash anyway, maybe there'll be enough to get me as much alcohol as would get me through the harrowing weekend ahead.
I opened the files, going through a tiring list of the things the lawyer paid for, nearly leaving her account in the minus.
I flipped to the last page finally and I was stumped.
Yes, I got the house, thank goodness, this place is the only place that feels like home, but there was also a library that I had never heard of.
Why wouldn't she mention this to me for the entire fifteen years of our relationship?
I checked the address and realized it was about four hours away from where she lived.
Why have a library so far away? Why even have a library at all?
I know Momma loved to read, but this didn't look like a little closet full of books.
My curiosity piqued, I finally found a more worthy purpose for my day than getting drunk so I took a picture of the address, put it in my map, and headed out.
Maybe I can find solace in a book rather than liquor, or who knows? A combination of both never killed anyone.
I drove through the cold December air, blasting Lana Del Rey’s albums as I flew past cars that were slower than mine.
Every time I had to overtake someone, I would feel that surge, adrenaline mixed with anger and a bit of red-hot emotions mixing a dangerous cocktail in my bones.
I've never had to mutter ‘calm down, Alira’ so many times as I did in the four-hour drive that I'd shortened to three.
By the time I got to the I-15 corridor, my short fuse was all fumes, I had gotten into a traffic jam and some idiot decided it was a grand idea to slam into my car from the back.
I hit my head on the steering wheel, seeing a flash of red behind my eyes that had nothing to do with the pain. I then put my hands under my ass to force myself to sit still and allowed familiar lyrics to float in and out of my head along with Momma's voice as she told me to count.
“Count slower, Alira,” she would tell me, “the point is not to get to the end but to take something from the journey. Feel your nerves pick up bits of calmness from every number. Don't rush them.”
“Hey!” I jerked up to see a stout, grizzly man with a tangled mess of white for a beard, staring at me with irritation from my window side. “Get this contraption out of the fucking road!”
I looked back and realized he was indeed the one who bashed my ‘contraption’.
How dare he bash my car and still have the guts to be pissed? I mean, the traffic had moved while I was trying to recollect my nerves which flew out of the hold because of him, but he could be a little less annoying, can't he?
“Walk away,” I whispered, jaw clenched to near breaking and my chest puffing out and in from how much I was trying to control myself, “right now.”
I don't even know if I was talking to him or myself.
“Oh, what? You'll bite off my tits?”
I slammed open my car door suddenly, closed it right back, and drove off.
I may have hit him with it, the guilt that followed was proof enough.
But it was just one more drop of water in an overwhelming ocean.
Deciding the man would be fine since I could hear him cursing, I drove off on the now clearer road, and I turned off the music.
After about thirty more minutes, the map pulled me in the direction of a snowy path that led to a quaint village.
Breathtaking was an understatement to say the least.
The houses were built next to each other, all in a descending order close to a river that I could see on the other end. It made me want to stay back here and watch the sunset, but I had bigger fish to fry.
I pulled out the aged key that had come with the Will and opened the iron doors, snow fell off the roof as I pulled it wider.
My mouth dropped open.
I walked into a big, three-level stuffed library with rows and rows of books.
I turned on the lights and it was like I'd walked into a fantasy world.
I couldn't stop the smile that crept up to my face, it was the first I'd had in weeks after all.