The Lovely Shadow (26 page)

I hugged and kissed June and Miss Lilly both
goodnight, told them I loved them and thanked them for everything,
and then stumbled off to bed. I was utterly exhausted—emotionally
and physically—and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.

When I got to my room I saw my socks lying on
the bed and briefly wondered how they got there, but then had a
vague recollection of having tossed them there before supper. I
picked them up and tossed them into the corner where they clunked
against the wall.

‘What the… Socks don’t clunk,’ I thought.
Tired as I was, my rampant curiosity kept me from going to bed and
instead sent me off to the corner to investigate why my socks had
clunked against the wall.

I picked up one sock and found nothing at all
unusual about it, but when I grabbed the other one I could feel
that it had something in it, giving it an unnatural weight.

I opened the top of the sock and stuck my
hand in it, grasping the object concealed within. When I pulled my
hand back out I found a spoon clutched in it. Wrapped around the
handle of the spoon was a piece of paper.

I unwrapped the piece of paper and looked at
it.

La tristesse se lave l'âme, mais il peut se
laver l'âme de suite.

I was confused. It was the same piece of
paper that I had encountered earlier in the day, but I was fairly
certain that I had stuck it in my back pocket when Miss Lilly gave
it back to me in the kitchen.

I thrust my hand into my pockets one by one,
searching for the paper that I was holding in my hands. As I had
expected, all my pockets were empty.

I looked at the paper once more and spoke the
translated version out loud, “Sadness washes the soul, but sadness
can wash away the soul.”

I had very much appreciated June and Miss
Lilly’s attempts to comfort me before, but I had not found comfort
in their words beyond the knowing that they loved me, I loved them
and that I was in a safe place.

But the note in its simple elegance and
infinite wisdom comforted me on a deeper level. I understood from
it that it was right and proper for me to be sad, but if I chose to
wallow in self pity for long enough, I ran the very real risk of
sharing my mother’s fate.

I put the note on top of my dictionary,
stripped down to my underwear, and crawled into bed. I reached over
and shut the lamp off and felt a breeze brush past me just as I
clicked the switch. The breeze brought with it the familiar scent
of roses.

I smiled in the dark, and whispered, “Thank
you,” and went to sleep.

Although it took a long time to get June to
grant me specific details about my mother’s death, I did eventually
get the story—or at least as much as she was able to piece
together—out of her.

After my mother locked me in the basement on
June12th, she apparently left the house and went in search of John.
Having taken full leave of her mental faculties, she was likely
convinced that she could find him down at the factory.

Behind the factory, at the far end of the lot
the factory occupies, is a storage pond that the factory uses to
maintain a cold water supply for cooling the machines inside. The
water is pumped from the pond, into the building through a large
network of pipes, where it enters various water chillers, and once
chilled, is then pumped through water lines in the machines.

After flowing through the machines and
cooling them off, the water is then pumped back out of the building
via more pipes, and eventually ends up back in the storage pond in
back of the building.

On June 19th, about a week before June told
me of my mother’s demise, the water pump at the factory abruptly
stopped working. Maintenance personnel were sent to the pump-house
to see what the problem was and discovered that the drive control
box for the pump had overloaded, and shut down.

The workers reset the drive, and started the
pump again. The pump started up, and the motor appeared to be
functioning correctly but the drive box overloaded again after only
a few seconds.

The workers moved from the pump-house down to
the pond to see if there was an obstruction at the water inlet.
There was. My mother’s bloated corpse was stuck in the water intake
lines, keeping water from entering the pump, thus overloading the
drive.

The police were called, and my mother’s body
was collected. The workers were all interviewed, but nobody had
seen the woman enter the property.

My mother was autopsied and the medical
examiner was fairly certain that she had perished from drowning on
or around June12th or June13th.

Her heavy water logged wedding dress had
pulled her to the bottom of the pond and left her submerged there
for almost a week until the gasses released during her
decomposition bloated her body enough to make it buoyant, and she
was eventually pulled into the water intake.

For about a week the police worked diligently
to try to identify her body with no success. She had never been
fingerprinted, she carried no I.D., there had been no missing
persons cases reported that matched her description, and they were
still waiting on the return of dental records.

Then June entered the police station to talk
to them about my mother, and me, and our situation. The police
asked her for a description of my mother, which she gave them, and
then asked if she would mind terribly coming down to the morgue to
identify a body.

June went, though she desperately did not
want to, and found that although my mother had decomposed a bit,
and bloated a lot, she had more than enough of her recognizable
features left intact for her to be able to make a positive
identification.

We would never know if my mother entered the
pond on purpose or on accident, and we would never know whether she
committed suicide or suffered a mishap. We would never know why she
died, but at least we knew how she died.

The day after June told me of my mother’s
demise we had to start making my mother’s final arrangements. June
was an angel and tried to spare me as much grief as possible during
the ordeal.

June paid for a burial plot for my mother
that was right beside John’s. Joe’s plot was a little further away,
but in the same line as John and my Mother’s plots. We decided that
we would not have a funeral, as we did not have anybody to invite
besides ourselves, and possibly Katelyn, and we had already said
our good-byes in prayers.

June was made the executor of my mother’s
estate, and she set up a stock portfolio for me and placed all my
mother’s assets into it, dispersing the funds through dozens of
start-up technology companies that were just beginning to gain
popularity in those days, as well as into several mutual funds.

After asking me if I wanted to keep the
house, and me deciding that I never wanted to see it again, it was
sold, and the proceeds were added to my portfolio.

With the money my mother had in the bank, the
sale of her car, and house, as well as the sale of the majority of
the furnishings from her house, all placed into a rapidly growing
stock portfolio that could not be touched until I turned eighteen,
it was not likely that I was going to starve any time in early
adulthood.

Two months after my mother’s interment, we
had our court hearing to determine custody. The court had tried
unsuccessfully to determine who my father was, but since my mother
had not added a name to my birth certificate nor ever mentioned his
name to anybody that was a nearly impossible task.

With no father or other family member to
object to the ruling, and Mrs. Fischer’s weighty declarations that
I was safe in June’s house, the court had no objection to June
taking full and permanent custody of me, and we went home to
celebrate.

About two weeks after our custody hearing, I
had my first real day of school. By the end of that day, I was
ready to be done with school and just spend my life as a bum,
panhandling money on a street corner.

School was pure unadulterated Hell for me. I
had never been around other kids, and had no idea how to relate to
them. All the kids at school seemed so terribly childish. Their
interests were juvenile, their vocabulary was appallingly mediocre,
and they were, for the most part, mean spirited, over privileged
little whelps that were in for a really big surprise when life
finally decided to show them just how tough it could be.

I did not make any friends that first year of
school, and I did not really blame the other kids for their
indifference towards me. I could not blame them for the fact that
life had not yet kicked them in the teeth and showed them what pain
and suffering was.

I also could not blame them for the fact that
I already had an education that was far superior to theirs, through
my lust for reading, and likewise, it was not their fault that I
was more intellectually mature than they were.

The one thing I could, and did hold them
accountable for was their cruelty. It was not as if I had not
already suffered enough abuse in my life at the hands of my mother,
I really did not have the patience to put up with their abuse as
well.

Within the first six months of the school
year I had been in seven fights. I’d love to be able to say that I
won every one of them and taught those mischievous little devils a
lesson they would not soon forget, however, they did not call me
Scrawny Johnny for nothing, and I generally got the worse end of
the beatings.

The one thing I did have going for me at
school was that the staff were compassionate towards me. I got
along quite well with the adults; the teachers, principal,
custodians, even the lunch ladies were all my buddies.

I tried to be around the adults whenever
possible to help alleviate the taunting that I would endure if
caught alone.

For the first two months of the school year I
had begged June to let me quit school and just teach myself. I
promised her that I would study all day, every day while she was at
work.

That line of reasoning didn’t work with June,
as she informed me that there were certain policies that the State
had in place regarding education, and not one of them said a seven
year old boy could stay home and educate himself.

With that approach going down in flames, I
changed tactics. I tried to convince June to quit her job as the
head veterinarian at the local clinic to stay home and teach me. I
tried to convince her that if she did that, then she would have
time to take care of all the animals she’d always dreamed of having
but had never had the time for. That approach also surrendered
itself to the flames when June coolly informed me that we would all
starve to death if she quit her job.

I spent awhile trying to think up my next
tactic. I was desperate. I was not gaining any education at school,
aside from mathematics which I was fairly certain I was never going
to need, and I felt trapped there. I needed a way out, and I was
pretty sure I’d found one.

Knowing how much June loved me, and knowing
that she knew how much I loved her in return, I was convinced that
my newest approach was bound to be a sure-fire winner.

One day, as soon as June walked in the door
from work I greeted her with big tears running down my face. “Oh,
June,” I cried in a miserable voice before the door was even
closed, “I missed you so much. I need you to stay home and spend
more time with me, June.” I sobbed and slobbered, and was
relatively certain that there should be an Academy Award in my near
future.

June set down her purse and leaned down
towards me and said very sincerely, “Oh Johnny, I missed you too. I
love you so much that it hurts me to go to work every day, Baby.
And I would love nothing more than to give up working and stay home
with you.”

I threw myself in her arms and gave her a
huge hug to emphasize how much I loved her, and hide the grin I
couldn’t suppress as I saw some modicum of success with my newest
tactic.

June hugged me back and continued speaking.
“The only problem, my Darling, is that you smell like onions, and
you still have to go to school. Now, go throw away the onion in
your pocket and wash up for supper.”

I was flabbergasted. Not only did June know I
faked my tears with onions, she saw straight through my ruse to the
heart of the matter and knew that it was really all about getting
out of going to school. She deserved an Academy Award of her own
for the little ruse she put me through that night.

Eventually I realized that June was too smart
for me and I gave up trying to get out of school. Since I couldn’t
escape, I changed my perspective, and instead of hating everything
about school, I decided to only hate the social aspect of it.

I poured myself into my education. I loved
learning, and over the course of the school year my teacher did
touch on a few things outside the realms of mathematics that I did
not already know, and those morsels of knowledge were enough to
feed me through that year.

I never did learn how to socialize with my
peers that first year, nor did I try to learn, but I did eventually
learn how to silence the bullies with my words rather than
attempting (and failing) to do it with my fists.

Towards the end of the school year my
principal, Mr. Tinken, called for a meeting with me and June. I
figured I was in some deep trouble for something, though I couldn’t
think what, and June did not believe me as I tried to convince her
of my innocence in all matters as we drove to the school for the
meeting.

My heart was pounding in my chest as we
entered the principal’s office for the meeting, and the first words
out of June’s mouth after the cordial greetings were done were,
“What has Johnny done?”