Theresa Weir - Bad Karma

“That’s too bad,” Cleo had answered when her mother told her Jordan wouldn’t do. “Because we’re moving in together.”

“B-But-” Ruth stammered, indignant, disbelieving. “I forbid it. You have to do what I say. I’m your mother. I’ve done everything for you. Everything!”

It was true. As children, Cleo and her brother had been embarrassingly pampered. Later, Cleo’s shrink had explained that spoiling was her mother’s way of keeping her children dependent, making them feel incapable of taking care of themselves. While Ruth had loved and doted on the children Cleo and Adrian had been, the adults they became were beyond her grasp. Ruth Tyler seemed to resent the grown-ups who had taken her children’s place.

“It’s Jordan or me,” Ruth had announced, confident of her rank.

For Cleo, the choice was easy.

Cleo walked out of her parents’ home that day and didn’t return until a year and a half later when her father slipped out of the world as quietly as he’d lived in it. After the funeral, Ruth tried to talk Cleo into moving back home, going through the usual guilt manipulations, but they no longer worked.

The funeral would have been easier to bear if only Adrian had been there. He would have come if Cleo had begged him, but the last thing she wanted was to make him do something out of guilt. He’d had enough of that in his life. They both had.

“I’m not going, Cleo,” Adrian had told her when she’d called with the news of their father’s death. “She’ll think I’m going for her. You know, I used to resent the way Dad wouldn’t stand up to her, but now I realize he couldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of person.” The conversation drifted back to the funeral. “No, it’s just between me and Dad. And that’s the way I want to keep it.”

Cleo cried right there on the telephone. But it wasn’t because she missed her father. How could you miss somebody you’d never even known? No, she cried because she hadn’t known him.

“I’m sorry,” Adrian told her.

“Make a lot of noise,” she said. What she meant but couldn’t say was, Don’t waste your life. “Just be sure to make a lot of noise.”

If Adrian didn’t understand her, that was okay. She could say things like that to him. She could say anything.

There might have been some harsh words spoken the day of the funeral, Cleo couldn’t remember. And when Cleo left, she wondered if she would ever see her hometown again.

She hoped not.

Six months later, however, she had the accident that left her with a broken arm and cracked pelvis. She had nowhere else to go after she left the hospital but home.

The thing that was the most difficult to take was her mother’s obvious pleasure at the turn of events. She was glad Jordan had died. She kept going on and on about how nice it was to have Cleo to herself, and how things never would have worked out for Cleo and Jordan. “In two years, you would have had a toddler with maybe another child on the way, and he’d be long gone,” she told Cleo one morning as they sat across from each other eating breakfast in the very kitchen where Cleo had played at her mother’s feet as a small child.

Cleo’s toast stuck in her throat. She looked at her mother, thinking she couldn’t have heard right. But she had.

“It was destiny,” Ruth said. “Destiny stepping in and taking charge.”

“Mother, I loved Jordan. And I’ll probably never be able to have those children you’re talking about. I had a miscarriage, remember?” The bleeding wouldn’t stop, and when the doctors were finished with her, she’d been told it was doubtful she’d be able to have any more children.

“The miscarriage was a blessing since you weren’t married,” Ruth said. “It was all for the best. There are other men out there. And children…well.” She gave Cleo a penetrating look. “Children are a heartache.”

For the first time since returning home, Cleo felt anger breaking through the numbness.

Seeing it, Ruth continued. “Of course, if you’re so set on having children, you could adopt. Then there’s that nice Grant Cummings, who owns the lumberyard. His wife left him with three kids to take care of. Still, I always imagined you married to a doctor…”

I have to get out of here.

It was the first clear thought Cleo had had since the accident. And when it came, she couldn’t let it go. She recognized it as truth, as a very important truth. If she was ever to find Cleo again, she had to leave.

Noticing that her daughter wasn’t eating, Ruth reached across the table, spooned a glob of strawberry preserves on her toast, and began spreading it for her. “Here you go. You always liked my strawberry preserves.”

“Mother, I’m full. I don’t want any more.”

Ruth kept spreading the preserves as if Cleo had never spoken. When she finished with the second piece, she put down the knife and pushed the plate closer the Cleo.

“There you go.”

“I can’t eat it.”

“Why?”

“I told you, I’m full. Don’t you ever listen?”

“Don’t you like my strawberry preserves? I made them just for you. When you were little…” Her face lit up, giving Cleo a brief glimpse of the love she had showered upon Cleo as a child. “I remember how you were always in the garden, eating strawberries. You used to pull that little wagon with a stuffed animal in it, and you’d go out and pick strawberries. And then you’d bring them back in, and we would wash them, and sit here at this table and have them with cream. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Cleo said. They’d had this conversation a thousand times. Problem was, Cleo was no longer that little girl whose mother was her entire world. And then she spoke the words she knew would set her mother off. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” Cleo stated, not a trace of emotion in her voice or in her heart. It was just something she knew she had to do. “I’m going back to Madison.”

Ruth shook her head. “What you need to do is move out of that apartment and come home. You can’t take care of yourself when you’re well-how are you going to take care of yourself with your injuries?”

“I’ll manage.”

“You can’t take care of yourself.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I won’t allow it.”

Cleo pressed her lips together. There was no use arguing. She would simply leave. And she did.

She called a cab to take her to the bus station. All the while Ruth screamed at her, following her around the house as Cleo gathered up her things, following her out the door to the end of the walk where she went to wait for the cab. But never helping in any way. No, Ruth Tyler would never help her children leave.

The cab pulled up and the driver put Cleo’s suitcase in the trunk, casting nervous glances at both women as he skirted the car’s fender. And then Cleo was sitting in the backseat. Through the closed window, she saw her mother standing on the sidewalk, her face a mask of rage.

Yes, people said they were the perfect family.

Back in Madison, Wisconsin, in the second-floor apartment she’d shared with Jordan, Cleo opened the door to a pile of mail, most of it addressed to Jordan. Not far away was a piece of dried toast with a bite taken out. On the night of the accident, before they’d left to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cleo had laughingly fed him. He’d taken a bite, then grabbed her and lifted her off her feet, the toast dropping to the floor unnoticed.

One day shortly after her return to Madison, Jordan ’s parents came by to pick up his belongings. They packed, grabbing things that weren’t Jordan ’s while Cleo numbly and silently watched. They asked about school and she said it was okay even though she’d dropped out. She decided not to tell them about the baby. It was too hard to find the right words, and it would just make things more unbearable for them.