Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My mother was the only person I had ever loved. Love. The word seems strange to me now. It’s something that’s been both present and missing my whole life. Now it is gone and I need to find a way to gain it again. In the past month, with its absence I have become afraid of it. Out of the hundreds of times I asked her the answer was always the same, “Rhea, I loved you long before you were born, the curse came after.” This annoyed me and I tried to ignore her. I never could though, I loved my mother.

She was right, the curse did come after, for seventeen years it had stuck me with and was still going strong. It was the gift of obedience but in my eye and it had always been a curse. Gifts are things you receive and can throw or give away. I wasn’t sure if I had received my curse or been given it. The day I realized something was wrong with me was my first day of first grade. By the end of the day I had found a friend. Her name was Isabella and she had been profoundly teased last year for bringing her teddy bear to every day of kindergarten. That habit had been lost but the teasing continued. And now that we appeared to be friends I fell subject to the taunting. After the school day was over a gaggle of boys started following me as I walked home. When I had had enough of their tip toeing and sniggering I turned around and marched up to them. Of course being only 6 I had no idea what I was going to say. So without using my words I punched the closest one in the face. The boy I had hit was Bertie Bunnser and because he was Bertie Bunnser he hit me back. I had only went over there for the one hit but Bertie had never had a girl punch him in the face so he was intent on winning the fight he was about to generate. The other boys had formed a circle around us and started chanting for me to take him down. This is my first memory of receiving a direct order and it is one my worst. My mind blanked and all of a sudden I had pinned Bertie down underneath me. I was frightened and confused and I ran home crying because I didn’t understand what had happened to me.

My mother did though; apparently my grandmother had had the same curse so she knew how to make me understand. There are three stages to a phase of my curse: number one is the order that the person issues. This has to be direct or it won’t count. Such as Rhea, put on your shawl will work but a request like: Rhea, could you put your shawl on? Will not work. Stages two and three overlap each other because both happen at the same time. Stage two is the blackout that I experience while I am following the order. My mind is shielded from my actions and all I see is darkness. Stage three is fulfilling the order. During this time my movements are rather structured.  I continuously asked mother what could free me from the curse. She said that I had to fall in love with someone to be freed. I asked why I even had it, because I loved her. She always had a good answer for that question.

I couldn’t love my father. I felt it impossible for he had never loved my mother. Money was the only thing he cared for, lived for even. That was the only reason he married Hannah Lansdowne. Before her he was just a poor, desolate man. She fell in love with him by chance and they had me. I often wondered that if I was the product of true love this curse never would have befallen me. But I wonder a lot of things.

She’s gone now. A month ago it happened. Just an accident like all others. Wrong place, wrong time. But it feels different to me, like an invisible super being knows of my misfortune and decided that my mother was the only one holding me back, stopping me from finding love in anyone else. Whoever they were, I hated them even if it was true. If they didn’t exist, just a figure result of my imagination, then I figured I was hating myself. Ha. This was how I coped with pain.

During their marriage of 17 years (my age exactly) both of my parents were perfectly happy. My mother had found someone to love and through them another. My father was now rich and lived a comfortable, easy life. It was the same for me too, until around the time of my fifteenth birthday I discovered that my father had fallen into his old habit of gambling. When I was old enough to understand, my mother told me that before my birth when she didn’t know him yet, father had lost all his money through gambling. To learn that he had been gambling again made me despise him more than I thought possible. For two years he continued this under the nose of mother who was too innocent and loving to believe he would ever resort to it again.

After my mother’s death his habits became extensive. Father was never one to have much luck and it certainly didn’t choose to be present now. We began losing money and I couldn’t save us because he wouldn’t let me get a job. I was required to cook and clean whatever was left in our home. Nothing was working for him and he got desperate. The decision that the only way to save himself he had to remarry was the decision that ruined my life.