2019-11-29 - Some Unspoken Thing

Isabella returns to the empty, Tudor-style Reede residence in Bayside in an attempt to get it ready for the holidays.

IC Date: 2019-11-29

OOC Date: 2019-08-14

Location: Reede Family Home

Related Scenes:   2019-11-30 - Learning Is Good   2019-11-30 - We've Got Some Work To Do Now

Plot: None

Scene Number: 2989

Vignette

Isabella

By the time she finished organizing the living room to her liking, it was approaching seven o'clock in the evening.

Low lighting burned yellow in the homey living room, glinting off the brass accents that frame the heavy oak mantlepiece situated above the brick fireplace, still holding the traces of ash from the last set of pine logs it burned last winter. It took some doing to arrange the furniture in the manner she remembered every time Christmasses were spent in the Tudor-style home, but it wasn't as if she didn't have a plethora of photographs to use as a reference. Normally, it was her mother who made all the arrangements, Christmas was a time when she experienced the most joy, nevermind that it was in the middle of winter in Gray Harbor.

But Irene Baxter Reede was gone, and with her father away to grieve in peace somewhere else, the task fell to her.

Isabella rested back on her heels, on her knees in the middle of the room after clearing out some room in the center for the Christmas tree she ordered from the Hammonds, her head rolling backwards to look at the high ceilings and the wooden beams that criss-cross underneath the plaster. She had forgotten just when she started. Old issues of Reader's Digest, The New Yorker and National Geographic have been bundled to the side, to be recycled once she had a minute to drive to the nearest center. She had originally come by the house only for the purpose of looking after her father's extensive armory; the former Navy commander kept plenty of his guns in the basement vault and with him out of state, she had to look after those, also. But with that responsibility handled by the time the early afternoon set in, she found herself unable to stop and simply kept going.

It was finally done, and her green, gold-flecked eyes wandered from the archway that led out from the living room to where she could glimpse of the stairs that led to the second floor landing, where the big job awaited her.

"Okay," she murmured, slapping her hands against her cheeks and rising to her feet. "Okay."

She found a bucket and a pair of dishwashing gloves from the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink, some scrubbing brushes, and dumped bottles of bleach and cleaner within, as well as a few ratty towels to mop up the moisture after. Old, but sturdy wood creaked under her weight as her boots led her up to the upper levels of the house, and down the hall where the door waited for her. The pale, white appendage that led to her twin's old bedroom skimmed over her senses, as heavy as a pile of bricks, but she ignored its presence. It was still locked and sealed from the last time she had visited the house.

Taking a deep breath, fingers pushed the bathroom door open, streamers of light spilling into its darkened confines from the hallway.

The splashes of blood have long since dried, looking black under the permitted illumination, obsidian veins crawling along the pale tiles and the white ceramic of the clawfoot tub where her mother breathed her last, choking on fountaining scarlet as she drowned. Grief, barely attended to and brutally suppressed, wrestled with the bitter tangles within her stomach. Alexander had offered to do the heavy lifting before she returned here, and while he didn't say it, she knew him well enough to realize what he meant and now that she was looking at the Rorschach patterns her mother's murder had left behind, she couldn't help but wonder, in this instance, whether her pride had been truly misplaced. She felt absolutely sick to her stomach.

You can't accept that from him, she told herself, firmly. She was your mother.

She tugged the gloves on and filled the bucket with hot water. She opened the bottle of bleach, its astringency lacing the air and leaving it heavy. Her hand closed over one of the brushes she had brought upstairs and bent herself to the work, scrubbing the mixture right into the tiles. Heat and chemicals did their job; the colors shifted from black, to red, to pink until there weren't any traces of them at all, leaving the tile spotless and pristine.

"Okay," she said again, rinsing the brush in the bucket, water turning into rust the moment the bristles found it. "Okay."

It took another hour to erase all the splashes, spots and flecks, another ten minutes to do a rinse, and five more to use the towels and wipe everything down, leaving the tub, the floor and the wall spotless and white.

She rolled to sit against the wall, tossing the towel away and pressed her head back against it. It was only then that she allowed herself to do it, to absorb the silence of a house once filled with noise and uninhibited life. Her exhale was deliberately slow, some part of her was loath to disturb it, but it was so quiet that it sounded loud and damning in the stillness of it all.

The hard part was over.

She moved to strip off the ugly yellow dishwashing gloves, feeling them snap against her skin. It didn't feel all that long, but the undertaking felt like a never-ending thing, as if she had consigned herself to a purgatory of her own making. Maybe she did, but that couldn't be helped, either. She couldn't ask anyone else to do this, let anyone else do this. Her father had already saved her from seeing her mother's body in the state that he had found it - she wasn't about to let him come home to the morbid mess her killing had left behind.

Her hand lifted to rub her eyes. She lowered it against the tile, in an effort to push herself up and stand.

Without warning, the floodgates opened.

She felt the pain, first. The savage tearing at the side of her throat, making its way across in a grisly smile, so vivid and real that she could almost see how blood coated her fingers as she looked down on them, staring at those sunkissed appendages as her brain attempted to catch up with what was happening. And then came everything else.

Fear slammed into her skull with the speed and force of a truck, threatening to dash her brains against the wall, the mad scramble for something, anything to prevent it setting her nerves on fire. Determination before it drained away with the rest of her life, and as resignation filled the poisoned spaces of her, the others came crowding in.

Sorrow, at the realization that this was the end, dwindling into that last, quiet whimper for all the words that remained unsaid. The weight of all of her regrets, and the sharpest edges of a mother's heartbreaking longing, the kind that could only come from a heart that was incapable of holding anything back, carved at her from the inside and tore a hole into her chest.

She tried to fight it, to claw her way out, but it continued to pull her under, and as she remembered the state of Isidore's room, the state of hers, kept in the exact configuration they had left them when they abandoned this house, she continued to sink. Because it was too much, her longing was too much, and she knew that the reasons why it was there to begin with, and why it was so intense it would defy living flesh and the salient boundaries of memory, was because she put it there.

Up until the end, all her mother ever wanted was...

She couldn't stop it. The inner landscape that reflected Irene Reede's last moments filled her mind, coalescing and tightening into a bomb that dropped into the center of her chest, where her heart raced in breakneck speeds.

And when it finally exploded, the house wasn't so quiet anymore.