Kathryn Dahne - Curse of the Nun

Another thud sounded from overhead. Anna tried not to wince.

Donna glared at her accusingly.

“That better not be a busted pipe,” she said scathingly.

Anna wasn’t sure how a busted pipe would have been her fault in the first place, but she knew better than to attempt to say so. The joke about the gun in her purse was starting to seem more like a viable option by the second. Anna firmly reminded herself that she wanted to move into the new house and not jail.

Donna critically inspected the floor. “Hardwood is scuffed. That’s a two-hundred-dollar fix. I’ll need that by Thursday.”

Anna clenched her fists in irritation as Donna moved over to the cupboards and opened them.

“Don’t forget your dishes, I’ll need those out by Thursday.”

Anna gaped at the cupboards, unable to process what she was seeing. Neatly stacked ceramic dishes, whole and sound, sat innocently in the open cupboards - the very same dishes she was certain she had just thrown out in pieces moments before.

Aunt Donna continued to talk, oblivious to Anna’s inner turmoil. “So between the paint, the writing on the wall, and the hardwood, that’s—”

“Wait, what writing on the wall?”

Anna’s overloaded brain snapped back into the moment.

“In the guest room, there is crayon on the wall.”

“I was just in there, and I didn’t see anything,” Anna protested.

Warning bells were going off in Anna’s head. Something was very wrong here. Anna just hoped that it wasn’t something wrong with her. She had thrown out those pills last night, hadn’t she?

Donna just shrugged, completely dismissive. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

They both looked up as the sound of another muffled thud came from overhead.

“I’m calling my maintenance guy,” Donna said decisively. “You’ll be at the house all day, won’t you? I don’t like him to be here by himself.”

There was a pointed implication in her expression that she didn’t particularly like Anna being here by herself either.

“Do I have to be?” Anna asked.

She honestly didn’t want to stay in the house another second. Too many strange things were happening and the little hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end. Some tiny voice of instinct in the back of her mind urged her to run.

“I need to be at the new house by six,” she added.

Not that Donna cared for one second about other people’s schedules. Least of all Anna’s.

“Yes,” Donna replied. “I’ll tell him to be here at six-thirty.”

Anna gaped at her in disbelief. She knew she shouldn’t be as surprised by the nerve of the woman as she was. Donna left with the air of someone who fully expected to get her way in all things.

“Unbelievable,” Anna muttered under her breath. “What a bitch.”

Having finally worked up the courage to go inside after avoiding it most of the afternoon, Anna peered into the room that had been Claire’s. Sure enough, the word “STAY” was scrawled in red crayon on the wall opposite of the bed. The letters were angry and harsh looking, each one easily the height of her whole hand. There was no way to miss them.

Anna ran her fingers across the word, noting the waxy texture under her fingertips where the crayon had been applied with a good bit of force.

A feeling of deep unease settled in her gut. It certainly wasn’t Claire’s handwriting. More importantly, Anna knew, she knew , that the writing hadn’t been there when she’d done her walkthrough of the room before Donna had arrived. Anna would have been inclined to think that Donna had written it herself, if she hadn’t known the woman would never stoop to devaluing her own property to get one over on her. Plus, there was no way in hell that Donna would ever want her to “stay”. She tried to run through every logical explanation she could think of to rationalize the bizarre events that had occurred over the past twenty-four hours. She was starting to come to the conclusion that there wasn’t going to be a rational explanation.

She opened up her phone to snap a picture of the word, needing proof in case it, too, decided to inexplicably vanish like the word on the hardwood flooring. Was this just her own mind trying to play tricks on her? Maybe her own fears of inadequacy were manifesting as some sort of hallucination to keep her trapped in her past.

Or was it something worse?

She looked down at the picture and almost choked on her next inhale. In the photo, the “T” had been replaced by a sharp, silver crucifix. Instantly, Anna’s eyes snapped back up to the wall.

Nothing but uneven red crayon. Not a crucifix in sight.

She almost jumped out of her skin as her phone rang in her hand. Off balance, Anna answered it without looking.

“Hello?” she asked.

Any voice would have been welcomed at that moment. Even Donna’s.

“Anna? It’s Lex. I saw you had called—”

Anna promptly panicked and hung up. Nope. Lex was the last person in the world she needed to talk to right now.

“Shit,” she muttered.

She needed to pull herself together. This was getting out of hand. She tried to focus on the new house, all the things she was going to do with it. She just had to get through one more day. One day. She could do that.

Maybe she was just overly tired. Anna got up and headed towards what had been the bedroom she and Mike had shared, hoping a nap would force the world to make sense again. At the very least, it would make the remaining time go by faster.

She flopped down on the neatly made comforter with a weary sigh, staring up at the featureless ceiling overhead for a few moments. As she drifted off she couldn’t help but fixate on the part of her that still felt unsure about this move. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the new house, or Mike, or the future he was painting for them. She did, of course she did, but a large part of her still felt like she didn’t deserve it.

Anna Winter: foster-kid, ex-junkie. She was a high school dropout with a GED. It had been easy to understand why Lex had wanted to be with her. They had both been two kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Maybe they had made some silly vows about wanting to take on the world together, but Anna had never really expected her life to be more than dead-end jobs and a two-room flop house that they could barely keep up paying rent on.

Getting pregnant with Claire had changed everything. Anna had realized that as awful as she felt her life was, or how much she maybe deserved it, that it wasn’t want she wanted for her daughter. She didn’t want to become like her own mother, her daughters forcibly taken away from her by the state because she cared more for chasing her next high than feeding her children. She couldn’t stay with a man just because her teenage self had thought it was love and couldn’t imagine anyone better wanting her anyways.

When Anna drowsily turned her head to the side to look at the clock on the nightstand, it boldly displayed 6:15PM.

“Almost there,” she told herself soothingly.

Her phone buzzed to indicate another incoming call. This time Anna checked the ID instead of blindly answering it.

“INCOMING CALL: LEX”

Anna resolutely punched decline and put the phone aside on the nightstand. Lex was not someone she felt she could talk to with her head in this much of a mess. He shouldn’t even be calling her. The terms of the restraining order were very clear on that point.

Maybe she should have changed her phone number as Mike had suggested once, but Anna had been depressingly certain that Lex would have figured out the new one somehow. Or worse still, actually shown up in person.