The Swan and the Jackal - Redmerski J. A. - Страница 33

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Cassia

Fredrik carefully raises his warm body from mine and sits upright with his back against the wall. His legs are moved apart, arms propped on the tops of his bent knees. He tilts his head back. His beautiful, stubbly face appears crestfallen and defeated as he gazes out at the room.

I lift up and position myself between his legs, the side of my naked body laying against his chest. I can still feel him moderately hard as his manhood presses against my lower back. I love to sit between his legs. He makes me feel safe. And I melt into him when I feel his warm, solid arms wrap around me from behind.

“My mother and father were very loving people,” I begin. “They would never hurt me. But Seraphina didn’t like them. She said they were evil and that she wanted to help me get away from them.”

I pause, attentive to Fredrik’s heartbeat thrumming through the muscles in my back. I feel the breath from his nostrils warm against the top of my shoulder as he releases a long, deep breath from his lungs.

Still, he doesn’t speak, but holds me very close to him, and I tell him what happened exactly the way I remember it.

Twenty-three years ago…

I thought the girl who moved in next door was a little strange. I never saw her around her parents. I didn’t even know there was a little girl living next door until months after they moved in. I was alone in the shed behind our house—I spent most of my time there because it was quiet—when I heard the girl singing in the backyard. I crept out of the rickety metal door, trying not to let my father know about my hiding place, and snuck around the side to peek through a slit between boards in the big wooden privacy fence that separated our backyards. She had jet black hair cut just below her shoulders. And she wore a pair of pink shorts with a whimsical rainbow printed on the left thigh—I had a pair just like them and was intrigued by that otherwise insignificant detail.

She was sitting on the grass with a stuffed animal of sorts in her lap, tucked in-between her crossed legs. Beside her was a thick coloring book. I thought that was strange, too, as we looked about the same age and I had already grown out of coloring books. She scribbled furiously across the paper with a crayon while she sang quietly to herself. She had a beautiful, melodious voice.

I pressed my face farther against the fence, trying to get a better glimpse of what she was coloring, but she was a little too far for me to make it out.

But then she sensed she was being watched and the singing stopped. Her head shot up and she just sat there for a moment, listening for sounds. I didn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. I don’t know why I was trying so hard to remain unseen because I really wanted to talk to her. Maybe a part of me—the part that knew how dangerous she was before the rest of me did—was afraid of her.

And then she saw me. I only moved an inch because my back was starting to cramp, but that slight movement was enough to give me away.

She watched in my direction for a minute before rising to her feet and approaching me, the stuffed animal—a raggedy, dirty lamb, I noticed as she got closer—in one hand and a red crayon in the other. She left the coloring book on the grass.

“Hello,” she said, tilting her head to one side as if to see clearer through the uneven gap in the boards. “What’s your name?”

“Cassia Carrington,” I answered. “What’s yours?”

“Seraphina.” She smiled toothily.

I smiled in return. I liked her instantly.

She sat down in the leaves next to the fence and I did the same and we talked for a few minutes.

“I haven’t seen you at my school,” I said.

“Nah, I’m home-schooled.”

I watched her through the gap in the fence, only able to glimpse the dirty lamb in her lap and the tip of her index finger tracing around its little beady black eye.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m ten.”

“Me too,” she said. “But my birthday is almost here, so I’ll be eleven.”

“I just had my birthday. My mom bought me a new bike.”

“That makes me older than you,” she said with an innocent air of authority in her voice that actually made me feel sheltered. “But I don’t have a bike,” she added sadly.

I never had any brothers or sisters and had always wanted one. It was hard being an only child, especially when I had no friends, either. At least not until Seraphina. And in ten minutes of talking to her, I felt like I not only finally had a friend, but that older sibling that I always wanted, too.

It took me a moment to realize there had been something sad in her voice when she said she didn’t have a bike.

“Hey, you could come over and ride mine whenever you want,” I offered.

I heard her sigh. “Thanks,” she said, paused and then added, “but my dad doesn’t like for me to go to other people’s houses.”

“Oh.” I flicked the end of a twig with my middle finger and it shot across the grass. “Well, maybe I could come to your house.”

Seraphina was quiet for an even longer moment.

“They don’t like that, either,” she finally said, “but we can still be friends.”

I wasn’t sure how that would work out seeing as how a fence separated us and she wasn’t allowed to have company or to go anywhere.

But we made it work.

Every day after I got home from school Seraphina snuck over into my shed through an opening in the fence that we made at the end of the backyard. I had used a hammer from the shed to loosen the nails on two boards so that we could slide them out of the way and easily put them back in place to make it appear that nothing had ever been moved.

Seraphina and I spent a lot of time in my shed, playing with Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. I even started coloring again and I found that I really liked it.

We were inseparable, like sisters. But as the weeks wore on, I began to see just how different we were, how different our parents were.

One afternoon, the rough voice of her father yelling her name from the back door, caused Seraphina’s whole body to shake like she had been stuffed in a freezer. She ran out of the shed as fast as she could and scrambled on her hands and knees across the dirt and leaves and rocks toward the secret opening in the fence. I guess she was afraid if she ran upright that her father would see her from the back porch.

I helped her get through the fence quickly and I closed it off after she was on the other side. Minutes later, I heard Seraphina screaming from inside her house. I sat curled up inside the shed, shaking all over hearing her blood-curdling cries rock through every bone in my body. I wet myself it scared me so bad. What sounded like a long strip of leather rang out through the air. Over and over again. And Seraphina screamed and screamed until she fell silent. But even still, I could hear the leather strap beating down on her.

I sat curled up in the corner of the shed, sobbing into my hands, tasting salt and snot and bile in the back of my throat. For a very brief but profound moment, I had hoped he’d killed her so she would never have to go through that again.

I didn’t see Seraphina for a week after that, but then one day she was sitting on the grass in the backyard again, just like she was the day I met her.

“Seraphina?” I whispered quietly through the gap in the fence.

She wouldn’t look over, but I could sense that she heard me.

“Seraphina? Are you OK?”

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