Chapter 31: The Fall

The next day was just like any other day. Reluctantly, Jo left my room in the morning and went to hers, and I went down to breakfast. Marty sipped his coffee and read the paper. Katie sipped her tea. Holly and Judd bickered and played with their food. Jo ate a little and occasionally touched my foot under the table with hers. We had French lessons in the classroom. I was teaching the kids longer sentences now. We ate lunch. We went out to the pool to play. Jo got in the pool with the kids. We played with blocks. We ate dinner.

At sunset, Katie wanted Jo and Judd to go outside and move some of the gardening equipment for the gardeners who were coming the next morning. It was an odd request. She never cared about the work of the gardeners. They always got the equipment from the shed themselves. At sunset, they went outside, and Holly went to watch them. Since it was almost dark, I decided to go up to my room to take a shower for the night. I remember walking up the stairs, turning down the hallway. I remember the feeling of the cold doorknob in my hand, the way my fist turned around it, the sound of the door opening.

My heart rattled in my chest, and every muscle in my body stiffened as I opened the door and looked up to see Katie sitting in the chair at my desk. She was in a dark pink robe tonight, her blonde hair in a loose, curly beehive. She had her pearl necklace and pearl bracelet on—I never saw her without jewelry. Matching pink lipstick coated her lips that were pursed. She was looking down, the eyeliner around her cat eyes stretching upwards with her skin. I followed her stare.

First, I saw the top drawer of my desk open, and then I saw the picture of Greg sitting discarded on top of the desk. My first instinct was how I felt when I had seen Jo with the photo—to grab it and hold it to my chest and feel betrayed that another pair of eyes had seen him.

Then I saw what she was looking at. It was my journal. Not my movie journal. Not my French journal. My diary.

Katie didn't even look up at me as her red fingernail cut through the top corner of the pages and turned the page, her eyes moving to read. "Jo kissed me softly. It was sweet and a little desperate. Her hands were holding my face with upmost gentleness."

My body started to shut down. Katie's voice, as she read the words I had written in the diary with the intentions of no one but myself seeing them, faded out of my ears and turned into a harsh buzzing noise. The room, lit only by the desk lamp that illuminated Katie's figure and the pages of the journal, from which I could see my handwriting where I stood, started to spin. My heart started to pound hard behind my ribcage, my chest aching so sharply as if it were being stretched thin and threatening to rip right in half. My stomach turned painfully in my gut. My knees grew weak.

I thought it was a dream. I thought it was a nightmare. I even blinked, hoping that when I opened my eyes again, I would find that it was all just a hallucination. I'd rather have been put in a mental hospital for seeing things than for that to be real.

But it was real, and it hit me like a ton of bricks when Katie's eyes, sharp as lightning, flashed up at me. She closed the journal and gently set it down on the desk. It scared me how carefully she put it down. I would've felt better if she had thrown it at my head.

"Close the door," she commanded, her voice steady and even, lulling like a cat.

I couldn't move. I felt frozen where I stood. She watched me for a moment, her face not making one expression or another, before she sharply stood up and stalked towards me. I thought she was going to strangle me. She stood right in front of me and reached behind me, pressing the door shut. But she didn't stop there. She raised a finger to my chest and dug her sharp, manicured fingernail right into my sternum and pushed me against the door until my back was flat against the cool wood.

"You sicken me," she spat, towering over me. Visibly trembling, I stared up at her with wide eyes and a parted mouth. I felt like I was looking into the jaws of a lion. "I knew from the first look at you that you were going to be no good for my family."

I tried to get away from her finger that was cutting into my chest, right on my skin where the collar of my shirt dipped and exposed me. I wish I had worn a different shirt.

"You," she began, her dignified voice raising in anger, "have come into my home, under the grace and kindness of my husband and myself, and have ravaged my daughter."

My mouth moved to argue, but I couldn't get my throat to open up. It was squeezed shut tight, burning and aching with a hard lump that formed.

"You're a poor, dirty, lowlife nobody who thought you had a free ride to squeeze your way into my family and get what you wanted. My daughter, or was it just our money?"

I shook my head as much as my muscles allowed me. My palms, flat against the door, sweated until they started to slide.

She raised her chin, looking at me like I was the ugliest thing she had ever seen. "You're pathetic." Her fingernail cut harder into my chest, and if I could have made a noise, I would have squeaked from the way I felt my skin break under her nail. It felt like she was going to stab right through and rip my heart out, though it was already shattering and cutting up my insides.

She just stared at me for a moment, taking a good look at me, remembering everything about my appearance as if she needed it as an alibi. I thought she was going to kill me. I could hear Judd and Jo talking outside, the sound of them dragging bags of mulch out of the shed. I could hear Holly rambling about something. They didn't know I was stuck in this room, pinned against the door by Katie, feeling like I needed to say my last prayers.

"You will leave tomorrow," she said, in nearly a whisper. "You will leave tomorrow and never speak to my family again. If you don't..." She came even closer, her nose nearly touching mine. I turned my head away and winced. "I will tell everyone we know that you are a disgusting sodomite. Do you know how many people Martin knows in New Orleans? He would tell that professor who sent you here. He'd tell everybody at the university. Your poor mother would know. You would never work again. Your life, as meaningless as it already is, will be over. And as for Jo, I have enough reasons to cut her off from this family as it is. If you stick around and influence her any longer, I will have no choice but to throw her out."

I could feel wetness where her fingernail was cutting.

"Do you understand?" Her voice was low, menacing. She dug her nail deeper, and finally, I squeaked.

"Yes," I breathed, feeling tears well up in my eyes. She stared at me for a moment longer before she took her finger away. I moved away from her, and she opened the door and left, slamming it shut.

My knees hit the floor, my hand slapping itself to my chest—not because of the little bloody scratch there, but because I thought I was having a heart attack. My heart throbbed so loud that I could hear it in my ears, so I shoved my hands over my ears and crumbled to the floor, feeling a maelstrom of emotions swell up inside me.

One was fear. Fear of how Katie had intimidated me, how she threatened to tell people about me, how she threatened to cut Jo off, which was the one thing that Jo was scared of the most. Another feeling was anger. Anger that she went into my room and looked through my personal journals, anger that she was so prejudiced against me, anger that this had to be the way that things ended.

The biggest thing I felt was grief. Grief because I was cornered, and there was no way to save what I was going to be losing. Grief because Jo was being taken away from me.

A sob escaped my throat, and I pushed my head hard against the floor, hoping it would crack. I couldn't breathe. The tears came quickly now, rushing down my face. My entire body convulsed and ached as I sobbed and cried into the floor, wishing that I would die—wishing that I could turn back time and never write anything in those journals, never let Jo stay the whole night in my bed, never let her kiss me in the first place.

I heard voices outside. Crawling like a pathetic child, I went to the window and looked into the backyard. Katie was down there now, pulling Jo to the side away from Holly and Judd who were playing with some rakes, pretending to swordfight. Katie was speaking to Jo, and I could see Jo's face drop. She stepped away from Katie, covering her mouth with her hand. Katie reached for her, but Jo ran, sprinting wildly into the trees until I couldn't see her anymore. Katie turned and just simply walked back to the house while Holly and Judd stayed blissfully unaware, still poking each other with the rakes.

I knew from the way their brief conversation went that Katie had told Jo about the journals. Or maybe she just told her that she knew, and that I was going away now. Maybe she told her she was cutting her off.

My heart ached at the thought of Jo losing her entire family over me. As dysfunctional as it could be, this was her family. This family was her only lifeline. I was stupid to promise her that we would get an apartment together. I wouldn't make enough money teaching to support the both of us. People would start to find out about two unmarried women living together. We could've ended up like Greg.

I was crying so hard that I was choking on my own tears. I slid down to the floor under the window, curling my knees to my chest. I'm not sure how much time passed before I fell asleep, but when I woke up in the same position, it was dark. My face felt puffy and sticky from the crying. I thought maybe it really was just a bad dream, but I looked over at the desk and saw the picture and the journal sitting on top where Katie put them, the top drawer still open.

I needed to find Jo. I needed to make sure that she was okay, to make sure that she understood what was happening. Standing up wobbly, I placed my hand on the windowsill to steady myself and looked out at the moonlit yard.

To my surprise, I saw something white in one of the trees way in the backyard. It was the tree above the bench. Jo was sitting way up in it.