WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (14 page)

Seven

I was vulnerable and naked and drying off with a plush bath towel when it drifted inside the fractured walls of my mind. It wasn’t a revelation or an epitome, it was simply the number 500 flashing its neon sign. Most thoughts swirled in chaos through
the rafters of my unstable mind but this one simply sat there like a third thumb. 
Since the divorce it was fairly common for me to drive myself bonkers, over analyzing interpretations of words, dreams, images or random thoughts in my head.
It was a consequence of a broken knob, along with the curse. 
Maw Sue warned me this would happen. 
Her words spoken to me as a child are seeping back into me as if I heard it yesterday.  Time has dulled most of my memory, but from what I can remember, there are p
owerful agents that seek my demise, the shadowy figures of my soul, mind menaces, strange imps who oppress me, and want to claim my destiny as their own. They are everything I’ve ever feared, all thrown together, both carnal and supernatural growing up with me, attached to me, a second skin 
I can’t shed, only wiggle around, adjust, endure.  At full capacity they intercept evil thoughts into my mind and they come to life, as if th
e bowels of hell are clustered in compartments, held up in hidden rooms, inside the house that h
arbors terrible secrets. 

When I wake up, the first thing I do is climb the wondering tree.  Each wave of a tree branch has opened doorways into the unknowns, into the house inside me, into my past. 
Each time I climb down, I see, hear and feel my surroundings entirely different than before. Maw Sue said it was the gift, the eyes to see and ears to hear, a perceived depth of spiritual understanding from the otherworldly places, a disciplined interpretati
on of discerning good and evil and a sight to see the world in a different way. 
Seekers are designed and created to look for the crumbs in daily life, those rare, almost unnoticeable glimpses of another side, the events that are dispensed magically within our world for discovery. Each crumb is made uniquely for individual insight. It appears on its own terms, in its own way, in its own timing, and
only my eyes reveal the magnitude of its appearance.  I am the only one to understand what it means, what it says, what it represents to my heart and my heart alone. 

Crumbs are made for the recipient. 
No one else can understa
nd the relevance of its message. 
When a crumbs is received, accepted and consumed, sweet surging memories are unleashed with each taste, unleashing bits and pieces o
f the past, both tasty and sour as life is bitter and sweet.  The bitter taste is one I’d rather do without but it looms on my tongue and crawls down my throat creating a burn that gurgles when it hits my stomach.  I still taste the bitterness in my mouth so I brush my teeth and wrap a towel on my wet head and hope it soaks all the crazy out.  Good luck with that. 
Sigh.

I face the mirror and the unknown woman’s reflection. A bubbly little girl of yesteryear fades in and out of me, emerging with me and beyond me, unreachable, unobtainable, out of my grasp. A random thought occurs. Talk about poverty—I don’t even own a towel and the borrowed one on my head looks like a big dollop of whipped cream. I can't help but laugh.
True. 
I own very little in possessions,
but in a way, it’s okay. 
Just the woman and the child in the mirror.
 
All I have.
 
There was a time not long ago, when the thought 
of not having
 would send me into a compulsive downfall of blue bell, hair dye, Cognac and risky sex and
God knows what else when the broken knob has its way. 

“Who are you Willodean Hart?” I s
ay out loud. 
“Who are you?”

The mirror answers back through vapored misty lips of a child th
at hovers a ghostly apparition, a shadow of me from a distant time. 

“You are
enough.” She says with a giggle.  Her tone was magic
as if to believe anything else was unfathomable. I almost smiled with her but before I could, I heard a zip in the air and the mirror instantly changed to a darker version of a girl, and she was splattered with gray and black paint and then the specks turned to shadows
until she was as darkened and damaged as I remembered her being.   

“No one loves you.” She said in spite. Her eyes 
deadpanned.  Her
demeanor venomous. The cascade of dark shadows join her
blending in with voices and whispers, condemning and crude.  Her negative energy makes my stomach turn. 

“You’ll never measure up.” She spat. “Look at you. Everything you
’ve done? No one would love you.”  She glares at me up and down. “
They laugh at you, talk about you. When will you see it? You’re cursed. 
It’s in the genes. 
Look at that hair, that nose, your teeth!
Ugly.  Inside and out, ugly. 
You don’t belong! You never belonged.”

She held my gaze in
side a vice so that I was forced to see her, hear her, feel her and taste her bitter crumbs of disdain.  The house inside me twisted and buckled, doors rattled, windows cracked and broke, the wondering tree shook and bent but didn’t break. 

“I know who you are. YOU don’t fool me at all. Go ahead and play along with crumb finding and tree climbing. Pick your damn field of lilies—but don’t you forget.” Her fierce voice turned to a simmering gurgle
and I heard each bubble pop and each time, I jumped. 

“
Nope.  Don’t fool me at all. 
I know your secrets. I know what you did.” 
Her eyebrows leaped upwards on her forehead as if she held all the cards in her hand.  Her voice
was a thousand hissing snakes. An evil laughter followed, from the shadow figures, a dark anthem of my youth, hidden in the chambers of my mind—
a broken mind
with a broken knob.
 
I closed my eyes to bid her away, to erase her from my sight.

“I am enough.” I said
trembling.  “I am enough.”  I gritted my teeth and bit down on the words to hold them inside me, absorb into me.  The girl sh
ape shifted and slid underneath my eyelids, her face a thousand nightmares of remembrance. My black heart believed her words and for a second I wanted to crumble, fall apart but a small part of me, a pin light of otherworldly substance would not let me surrender, it would not let me give in,
not to her.  Not this time.  When I finished wobbling and opened my eyes, th
e only reflection in the mirror,
was my own. 

The big white dollop of whipped cream
sat unmoved on my head.  I glanced down and there was a tube of red lipstick.  Lena Hart’s apparently, left over from the 70’s.  On impulse I
grabbed it and started scribbling on the mirror, on every inch of space, over and over again, leaving only a round circle for my face. I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH! I AM ENOUGH!

A lipstick banner of truth to remind me. 
I am enough. 
Sure…, I realize I’m a mess, a broken house of ruin and regret, leaking and cracked, unrepairable, but if there is something left of me inside the depravity, some smidgen of hope, then there is hope that I too, am enough. 
Everything I could have been, everything I used to be, everything I should have been...is gone. But right here, right now,
I am enough.

I finished getting dressed, something I hadn’t done in months, actually get out of a nightgown.  My mind is filled with all that has happened since I moved in. 
My childhood bedroom has
resurrected a lot of memories including the Tallow tree. 

I was only a kid, wrapped up in a dreamy state of mind while sitting in the tree tops, doing what the tree made me do…
wonder
. Wonder about this, wonder about that…
wonder
.

“Whatcha doing? Wondering in the wondering tree?”
Mag said poking her head out from my bedroom window.  We were seven or eight, I don’t remember but f
rom that moment on,
the Tallow tree garnered its new namesake, the wondering tree.  It made us both happy. 
Just two kids who wondered about life, about love, about growing up, about God, about the here and now, the beyond, what was and what wasn’t, just life in general. Late at night when the moon was at its full, we’d climb
out and sit in the tree while the beams of light shined on us like spot lights from heaven. 
The night creatures were active and loud.
We’d try to figure out their voices, who belonged to what, crickets, frogs, cicada crackles, howls, barks and other weird ones we never did figure out.  Being in the wondering tree, we were safe to talk about things we couldn’t say around grown-ups. How Mom and dad fought and made us feel yucky when they argued, or dad drinking too much and stumbling around the house, scaring us to death. Or Lena getting angry and talking bad about him, how it was all his fault and that alcohol was of the devil. If that was true, then Pine Log was going straight to hell.  Our only refuge was the tree. 
Maybe that’s what adults are missing—maybe they need a
wondering tree.  It didn’t take me long to climb back out my window as a full-fledged adult, and climb the tree.  Instantly, I felt better. 

 When I sat down, another memory emerged out of nowhere
.  It was Maw Sue’s favorite poem, called
Seven
. 

The first time I heard it I asked her, “Why do you want God to make you a number?”
It made no sense to me. 
“What’s up with seven? Why not one? Or ten?”
Of course, I hated math anyway.  It was hard enough passing school
without calculating my own life into the mix. Adults were complicated. Their stories were even
more
complicated. 

“The number seven is complete. The finished product. W
hole.” Maw Sue said answering me swiftly as if not to give the Amodgians any room to snatch them away.  She knew a thing or two about trickery. 
“Remember that space between Adam and God’s fingers?”
I nodded. Her eyes held me in mystery.  I fell into them and before I knew it, I was t
angled up in the mayhem that was inside her, a dark demented void with no bottom.
I had a terrible fear of heights and falling, that sick pit in your stomach when you know you can’t stop, a dream that never awakens, just falling and falling and falling.  When I was sure I’d be a splat on the ground, I wasn’t.  I was still sitting at her feet listening intently to the story of
Seven
. 

“A Cupitor who is naturally a seeker should
be in constant searching mode.  O
n a mission to fill that void in themselves, fill in the gap that separates them from God. You must. It is your life’s work to make a connection. When all is done and your mission complete, you will be a perfect seven, set apart and the seeker shall be made whole. Complete. A Cupitor.”

I was a
mazed and wanted so much to touch the space right then and there, fill up the void, and touch God’s fingers. 
Maw Sue had so many sidelines and stories to the Cupitor legend that it was hard to keep up with all of them. Mag rarely showed
interest at all. 
The rest of the family thought Maw Sue was a whack job full of pills, herbal concoctions and vanilla extract.
 

“But what about the sleeper
s?” Mag said vaguely interested.  She doodled on construction paper, never looking up. 
Every once in a while, Mag would randomly ask a question and I’d get suspicious of her intentions and give her the eye.

“Maggie, sleepers don’t know the void exists.” Maw Sue said with the saddest face I’d ever seen. “It’s up to the seekers to tell them.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility.” Mag said with a huff. 
If it didn’t involve money, Mag could care one iota about it. 
As for me,
a giant just sat on my shoulders, and no matter what I did to knock him off, he wouldn’t budge.  He was heavy and I felt a tremendous burden from that point on. 

“Yes. It’s a lot of responsibility girls but if God made you specifically for it—then with his help you can fulfill it. Why would you want to be something that you wasn’t made to be? And remember—you are a Cupitor by blood. It’s in you to endure.”

 The words spin like ghost spirits, telling me who I am, who I should be, who I could be. I’m grown now, but I feel as if I’m sitting at Maw Sue’s feet, listening to the stories, the legends, the primitive meanings left behind generations ago, passed down to me, a great responsibility to bear, a giant on my shoulders—
and now look at me.
 I have ruined it all. I
am nothing but crazy. 
Tragic.
  Here I am. 
Divorced, no job, no nothing. I have failed at everything. It was my fault. 
It was always my fault.
 I’d give anything to be a number seven right here and now, no question about it. I want to f
ill the empty void that exists between my fingers and God’s, between my heart and his, the big gaping hole in my life.  Fill it.  Fill all of it. 
You do not deserve to be seven after what you have done. You are zero. Nothing.
 The words haunt me,
and echo off the walls inside the house, inside me, reminding me, putting me back in my rightful place.  I am stirred.  I am restless.  I am weary. 
I need peace. I need calm.