The Unwanted (Black Water Tales Book 2) (6 page)

Blaire shook her head at the harsh toss off the bull of life. Emma tended to have that effect on her. Though she hated to admit it, Emma was quick to irritation, along with being overly forthcoming and honest to the point of brutality, but her reasoning was always spot on.

“You’re right,” Blaire said. If anyone could make things make sense, it was Emma.

“What? Really?” That’s awesome; it’s been so long since I’ve heard anyone say that.”

Emma’s irritated tone had been replaced by a grateful one.

Blaire wanted to laugh, but couldn’t for some reason, as it just wouldn’t come out.

“Well, go ahead,” Emma relented.

“What?”

“You might as well give it to me now.”

Blaire held back her galvanizing emotions for as long as she could. “Emma, I am not complaining about me. I’m fine with the fact that I don’t have all of the modern conveniences, and I am fine with the fact that the summertime high temperature here is sixty degrees.”

Emma rolled her eyes at her friend’s exaggeration, but held back her sigh.

“It’s not about me or my gay companion, thanks again for that, by the way. It’s the
children
—they are underfed, and they need medical care that is far beyond anything that Travis can provide. I know that we went through some of this in orientation, but what is happening here is more than neglect, it is outright child abuse.” Blaire’s voice vanished into a shaky whisper, and she surveyed the backyard to ensure that she was still alone.

“I know,” Emma revealed.

“You know?”

“I understand that it is difficult to deal with because I have seen it all. I have worked in places where young girls were married off as young as fourteen, where people worked like slaves to barely feed themselves and their families, where girls were mutilated as part of cultural tradition, and I am going to tell you what I have told everyone else.”

Blaire waited for the blow.

“You’re not in America anymore. Most of the world lives in poverty, and so completely different from us that we can hardly even fathom it until it’s right in front of our faces. The United Care program is not just meant to change their lives, it’s meant to change yours as well. Give them your help, give them your knowledge, give them your respect and your care, and that is all that you can do. The conditions at St. Sebastian are not an isolated incident; there are orphanages just like it all over the world where people just discard their unwanted and go on with life. It is a tragedy, no doubt, but that’s just the way it is.”

“Geeze, you are really good at your job.”

Emma laughed. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

“I just didn’t think it would be this bad,” Blaire said.

“You will be fine. Take my word for it.”

Blaire felt exhaustion rolling in like an unannounced storm. “I should go. This call is probably costing me twenty dollars a minute.”

“You can afford it,” Emma responded with a laugh. “Have you spoken to the Bakers?” “No, not yet. Everything in due time,” Blaire’s voice barely penetrated the static that began to invade the phone.

“Hello? Emma?” The static from the phone began to reach inside of her head. As a chill ran through her body, she realized there was someone behind her. She turned just in time to see a figure descending the cement steps that led to the underground door.

Blaire could hear Emma’s voice on the other end, but the static roared too wildly for her to make out what she was saying.

“Emma?” Blaire called once more as she walked toward the stairs. With every step Blaire took, the static became harsher until the noise began to hurt her ears, and she was forced to move the deafening device away from her head. Somewhere far away, Emma was calling out to her. As Blaire came to the top of the steps, her phone went completely dead. Blaire’s fingers raced to her mouth to cover the delicate gasp that erupted from her as a thick puddle of blood began to gush from beneath the thin slit of the basement door, creating a growing
wine
-colored pool. Blood continued to pour from under the door, as if a vital artery within the old building had sprung a leak. It flowed across the cement and did the impossible. As it reached the first step it defied gravity and began streaming up the step.

Blaire stepped back, eyes wide open and transfixed. The blood kept coming, up the second step, and then the third. It was coming for
her
.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“B
laire
!
” A voice called.

S
he
took h
e
r
e
y
e
s
fr
om the
blood for just a
mom
e
nt to
look
up, where she saw a shirtless Travis hanging out of their bedroom window.
Blaire
’
s
e
y
e
s
shi
f
t
e
d b
ac
k to the bottom of
the
door
.

The blood was gone.

There’s something in the basement,
Ivan’s words pulsed through her.

Blaire silenced the perfervid laughter of children that began drumming up in her head.

“Did you get Emma?” Travis yelled down. Blaire looked up once again, grateful to Travis for interrupting the delusion.

“Yes, I’m coming up,” Blaire answered unsteadily, as she took another baffling look at the clean cement.

When Blaire entered the room, Travis was gone. Blaire observed herself in the mirror, fondling the glittering diamonds in her ears. She turned and began studying the ceiling and walls, following the cracks that lined them, which perhaps went deep beneath the surface, keeping the building on a slight, but constant tilt all the way down to the foundation. She felt the earrings weighing her down, and she could not move fast enough to remove the sparkling gems that screamed of her misplacement. She folded the earrings as well as her gold watch up into a pair of
punch
-colored socks and shoved them into the bottom drawer of her dresser.

“What’s up?” Travis asked playfully as he rambled back into the room, freshly, showered, and shaved. He sat on his bed and began shuffling through his toiletry case.

“I have good news and bad news,” Blaire said.

“Good news first, I always take the good news first,” he said, as he got up to place toiletries neatly on his dresser.

“I spoke to Emma.”

“Good…now the bad news.”

Blaire smiled at him weakly. “I spoke to Emma.”

Later that night, it seemed everyone in St. Sebastian slept but Blaire. The third floor was quiet; the moon was high and pumped intoxicating
chrome
-colored rays into every opening of the building. She had been prepared for a fight with Travis to get him to see things the way that Emma had explained them to her, but he was quick to agree. Blaire contemplated Emma’s powerful word, their
unwanted,
the very same word that Marko had used that day
and Blaire knew that she was in the right place.

Hurling the heartbreaking word around in her head, Blaire threw it back and forth, trying to grasp it, but it just kept slipping through the fingers of her mind like the green slime that was gelling at the bottom of St. Sebastian’s pool. People dropped their
unwanted
here, children for whom there seemed to be no more purpose in the world that extended passed the perimeter of this place. Blaire fell asleep still wrestling relentlessly with the strange yet familiar word.

Soft scratching echoed through the room and Blaire woke, tossing on the thin mattress. The scratching continued, morphing into whispers some moments, and then hissing the next.

“Rats,” she whispered to herself, solving the facile mystery. She lifted herself and placed her feet into her plush slippers. Through the blur of sleep she looked at them, and then up at the room, realizing they too did not match this place, fur covered and embroidered with a designer logo that reminded anyone who cared. Blaire removed her feet from the slippers and used her toes to send them sailing under the bed. The floor was cold under her naked feet and it felt good.

Blaire cringed at the loud groaning of the bedroom door as she opened it. She looked to Travis who moved just slightly in his bed, nowhere near consciousness. Blaire’s feet began to drag across the hall floor toward the bathroom when she stopped. Down the hall, by the stairs an almost imperceptible whimper called to her. Whimpering gave way to the cry of a baby.

No babies, no babies. There were no babies at St. Sebastian
, Marko’s words suddenly came charging toward her. Starting toward the stairs, her feet stopped abruptly. She took a step back as the baby screamed now, the excruciating wails blaring. A forceful trembling started somewhere deep inside her as she watched a tiny pale hand reach up over the top step. Blaire cupped her mouth as the baby struggled to pull its small body up. It was coming for her just like the blood on the basement steps. Then it stood there on chubby little legs, with its arms stretched out at difficult angles. Little dimples dotted the knuckles of its stubby rubber hands. Blaire’s mouth gaped open as the headless body of Dolly made wobbly baby steps toward her.

Blaire backed away. With every step that Blaire took back, Dolly took a step toward her. The headless toy moved faster now, and Blaire’s eyes were wide with fear as her feet raced backward. A thunderbolt of pain streaked through her head and shot down her back as she forcefully collided with the wall, sliding down into unconsciousness.

Blaire knew that she was awake when she felt the warm rays of sun streaming through the window, baking her face. She blinked and frowned up at the slightly drawn blinds. Sighing heavily, Blaire lifted herself and peered out the window. Relentless waves fizzled up unto the rocky shore cleaning everything in their path.

The first miserable day at St. Sebastian had taken root in her psyche, it found fertile ground to create negative energy and nightmares that Blaire was intent on overcoming. Today was a new day and it was beautiful. Blaire rolled over with a stretch and saw that Travis’ bed was empty. She lifted herself, placing her feet on the floor. A spell of dizziness warned her to take her time. Blaire’s hand found a place on the back of her head that was sore, and she suddenly remembered all of the details of her nightmare and wondered if this pain weren’t just some trick of her mind. Blaire hurried to the bedroom door and looked out into the hall toward the stairs, but nothing was out there. She looked at the wall that marked the end of the hall, thinking for a moment, and then touching the sore spot on the back of her head once again.

By the time Blaire showered and got dressed, Travis was already working busily in his office.

“Early start?” Blaire asked.

“You know it! I have already gone for a swim, showered, and finished up my
self
-guided tour of St. Sebastian and the grounds.”

“Impressive,” Blaire responded.

“Yeah, I’m an early riser, and I didn’t want to wake you, since I figured you were tired. How did you sleep?”

“Okay, I suppose. You?”

“Like a rock.”

Blaire hesitated, but asked anyway, “Did you hear anything strange last night?”

“The scratching? It’s probably a couple of rats.”

Blaire was relieved that he had heard at least that, but she wanted more. “Yeah, I heard the rats too. Anything else?”

Travis’ face was blank for a moment. “Sure. This building makes so much noise at night that I could have sworn it called my name, but that’s to be expected in a house that’s this old. It’ll get better, once you get used to the place. Maybe you should get some more sleep.”

“No way! I have to get started now if I want to catch up to you,” she said with a chuckle as she straggled down the hall toward her classroom.

Blaire stood at the threshold of the drab room, fighting hard not to become depressed. The only place to start was with a good cleaning. Blaire blew the dust off the windowsills, and then fumbled with the locks that released the windows. For her efforts, she was rewarded with blasts of clean, fresh air, and light. Bookshelves sat along the side of the room and struggled to stand on what Blaire was sure was their last leg. There were a few dilapidated books left, but they failed to sit neatly lined up against one another. Some were slanted and appeared drunk, while others hung halfway off the shelf with their pages flailed out as if they were threatening to jump.

Jump!
Lacey Wright shouted somewhere in the corridors of Blaire’s mind.

On one of the walls was some type of board where Blaire imagined a teacher had once hung A+ papers to boast of her children’s learning, but nothing hung there now. Through the windows, the trees swayed and dipped as if to get a peek at the new teacher, because they too were curious as to what she could do with the old place.

Blaire plugged her phone into the small speaker dock that she brought on the trip and began singing softly with the music as she swept away the remnants of life at St. Sebastian as it used to be. Next, she filled a bucket with hot water and soap, and began to scrub everything in sight. Eventually, the gray walls and floors began to reveal themselves as white underneath. With the hours ticking away, Blaire became lost in the music, in the surreal ecstasy of being on the other side of the earth, away from everything familiar. St. Sebastian gave her a chance to be someone whom she always wanted to be, because no one knew her here, and no one had ever seen her face.

Blaire stared into the whiteness of the wall and with every stroke of her soapy sponge, unsolicited memories of her parents broke through the mental chains of suppression that Blaire had created to keep things in place. They reached their cadaverous hands up through the soil of her subconscious, dragging themselves out of a mind grave. The whiteness of the walls leaked out into Blaire’s reality, surrounding her and she fell into it.

So bright was the sun that almost every object seemed to glow as it marked everything with a warm, dreamy glare. White circles dotted her favorite pink dress. She and her mother sang along to the music that wafted from the car radio, which was playing “Dream a Little Dream.” There was not one worry that could puncture the ignorant bliss of childhood in this moment. Blaire felt a hemorrhage in her body that shook her back into the reality of the classroom at St. Sebastian.

Never before had she experienced a clear memory of that day, never a single clear memory of the day that changed everything. Not one until now.

Blaire took a moment to catch her breath, then plunged the sponge down into the soapy water, where she noticed a pair of
beat
-up white tennis shoes moving uncomfortably, inches from the mop bucket. Blaire looked up to see a striking young child standing over her. The girl was about twelve years old and wore a wrinkled green
t
-shirt that featured a large purple smiley face and distressed blue jeans, which in Borslav signaled a truly troubled lifestyle instead of the fashion statement that it signaled in the States.

“Hello,” Blaire said as she got up to turn down the volume on her music player, which was fighting fleeting stints of static.

“I’m Natalka,” the
freckle
-faced girl said with her hands set halfway in her pockets.

“I’m Ms. Baker. I am going to be your teacher this year,” Blaire said, as she held out her hand for a friendly shake. Natalka’s face brightened, and Blaire took an instant liking to her. Natalka had twisted and pinned her hair with several bobby pins in a way that told anyone who looked at it that she took pride in her appearance and was desperately trying to hold on to some leftovers of individuality, even if her hairstyle was strange and juvenile. The worn pins in her hair were a mismatch of natural, brown, and black colors. Obviously, she snaffled the pins from wherever she could find them, but Blaire was sure that the one in the front must have belonged to the girl. It was black with pink rhinestones, one of which was missing from its socket, though that small flaw did little to diminish the pride that came with wearing the crown jewel in her hodgepodge of pins.

“I like your hair.”

“Thank you! We’ve never had a teacher here before.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“What will you teach?” Natalka asked as she looked around, admiring all that Blaire had accomplished thus far. The young teacher wiped her hands on her jeans. “All kinds of things like reading, math, and science.”

“Will we get to do science experiments?”

“Sure,” Blaire answered and wondered why Natalka was here, why she was…
unwanted
.

“Will we get to cook?” Natalka’s startling blue eyes were wild and had a penetrating stare that made the newly arrived volunteer slightly uneasy. Blaire was a bit surprised at the question and was forced to stop and think for a moment, as she herself was not much of a cook.

“Uh…no, we probably will not do much cooking,” Blaire admitted.

“I like to cook, but there is nothing to cook here.” Natalka appeared to be slightly saddened by Blaire’s honest answer. “Can I help you clean up?”

“You want to help me clean up?”

“Sure.” Natalka gathered some loose hair and reinserted a bobby pin.

“Wow, now there’s a difference from American children,” Blaire said with a laugh.

“What is so funny? Why do you laugh?” The child seemed hurt.