Guarding the Goddess Read online

  I laid the pliers on the bed and stood up, crossing the creaking wooden floor to the full-length mirror in the corner of my new room. I wasn’t sure who had stayed in this room before me, but it was made up like an old-fashioned nursery. There was a rocking horse in the opposite corner and several china dolls with blank faces crowded each other on top of the bookcase.

  Actually, it was kind of spooky.

  Ignoring the blank stares of the dolls, I examined myself in the mirror. A girl with long, dark brown hair and green-gray eyes looked back. All the woman in my family had the same eyes. My mother had them too, but she’d been dead almost two years now.

  I pushed the morbid thought away and looked at the necklace which felt heavy and cold around my throat. If I painted, I would have done a self-portrait and entitled it Girl with Key. Or maybe Girl with a Freaky Necklace that Won’t Come Off. Ha-ha, Megan, very funny.

  Hesitantly, I reached up and brushed just the tips of my fingers against the jewel-studded black metal. The key throbbed at my touch like a live thing and I jerked my hand away with an indrawn hiss of breath.

  I’d read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy—not because of the movies or for AP English but because they were the kind of books my Dad used to recommend to me. Before Mom had died and he became an absentee parent, that was. Anyway, the key around my neck reminded me of Tolkien’s one ring. Especially the way he described it as Sam and Frodo got closer to Mordor. The way it got heavier and heavier—the way it seemed to have a mind of its own…

  The comparison freaked me out. It was bizarre and more than a little scary.

  I thought about trying to talk to Aunt Dellie again, but when I opened my bedroom door, I heard the faint sounds of Middle Eastern music drifting up the broad central staircase. Oh right, she had told me she was teaching a belly dancing class this evening—that was the whole reason she was in such a hurry to get home. Well, that and the fact that she wanted me to get plenty of sleep on the night before my first day of school.

  Like that was ever going to happen.

  I closed the door and decided to try and forget about the necklace and its weird key and concentrate on my clothing options for tomorrow instead. Not that I was some kind of a fashion maven, but school had already been in session here in Frostproof for a couple of weeks so I was walking into hostile territory.

  It’s always best to be prepared.

  Of course, I had always gotten along fine back home in Seattle. I more or less blended into the background—just another college fast-track academic nerd. But there was only one small high school in Frostproof and I was sure most of the kids there had been friends since kindergarten. Any hope I had of fitting in, or at least going unnoticed and being left alone, might depend on a good first impression—or maybe no impression at all.

  What I needed is a nondescript outfit that didn’t draw attention to me, I decided. I began to unpack my one large suitcase, hanging clothes in the single dusty closet. I considered my options as I went along.

  Unfortunately, everything I owned had long sleeves.

  There was a good reason for this. I pushed up my Henley’s sleeves and looked at myself critically. The neat rows of tiny pinkish-white scars marching up and down my inner arms looked like a ladder. They were much too visible against my pale skin—much too noticeable.

  I didn’t need to spend my first day at school being labeled and judged. So it looked like I’d be wearing a long sleeved shirt no matter how hot it was. I sighed as I look at the scars again. But I didn’t regret a single one of them.

  Yes, I was a cutter—or I used to be, anyway. But not for the reasons you might think.

  I had started back when Mom was dying. Dad and I both knew she was going and she knew it too. That was awful—too awful to think about and yet it was all I could think about. I literally couldn’t turn my mind off.

  That was why I started cutting. The physical pain seemed to release the emotional hurt somehow. When the blade sliced my flesh, I had a brief moment of respite from the never-ending loop of Mom’s dying, she’s leaving me, I’ll never see her again, she’s dying that ran over and over inside my head constantly. It always came back, of course, but in that brief moment of bright, sharp pain, I was free of it.

  I’ll take physical pain over emotional agony any day.

  So yes, I did start cutting for the usual reasons. (Well, if you can call your mom dying of terminal lung cancer usual.) But that’s not why I kept it up.

  Near the end, Mom was in so much pain that nothing they gave her helped. The cancer had metastasized which is a technical way to say it spread all over and it was eating her up from the inside out. She would lie there in bed, her face shiny with sweat, and try to talk to me like nothing was happening. But I could see the pain in her gray-green eyes. And I could hear her moaning when she thought I couldn’t hear.

  It was awful.

  One day it was too much. I was sitting with her when she woke up crying, the pain was so bad. I rang for the nurse and then ran to the bathroom. I knew I ought to wait until I got home but I couldn’t help it—I needed to cut.

  I took out the tiny, thin razor blade I had wrapped in tissue and hidden in the folds of my battered Choco Cat wallet. Mom had given it to me for my twelfth birthday when I was still into all things Hello Kitty. Remembering that made me want to cry, made me need to cut even more.

  With trembling fingers I drew the blade across my arm, making a shallow slice just below the crook of my elbow. And suddenly, I felt it—an agony so deep and throbbing it took my breath away. It filled me like water fills a cup, pouring into my body until I didn’t think I could stand any more.

  But at the same time, my mother’s cries lessened and then ceased. Despite the weird pain, I had a moment of blind panic—was she dead? Feeling like I was one big ache, I opened the bathroom door a crack to reassure myself that she was still all right. To my surprise, she was breathing peacefully, a look of relief on her thin, wasted face.

  “Mom?” I made her name a question and she turned her head to look at me and smiled.

  “Megan,” she whispered, smiling. “It’s gone. I don’t know why but the pain is gone.”

  I frowned. “Did the nurse come already to give you something?”

  She shook her head. “No, no one came. They’re giving me everything they can but up until now it wasn’t helping. Maybe…maybe it just kicked in.”

  I had my doubts about that. But it seemed too far fetched to believe anything else.

  “Maybe so,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”

  I retreated back into the bathroom and washed the shallow cut in the sink. I still felt the dull, aching pain but it seemed to lessen as the water ran clear and the blood stopped flowing from my wound. By the time I put a tiny bandage on the cut, the weird pain was almost gone.

  I went out of the room, hoping to have a real conversation with my Mom for once, instead of just asking her if she was all right when I could see clearly that she wasn’t. But she was already asleep.

  I kissed her forehead and left but the incident had planted an idea in my mind. An idea which refused to be uprooted or pushed aside, no matter how crazy it seemed.

  Could it be that I had somehow eased my mother’s pain? Had I transferred it to myself in some way and given her a moment’s release? If so, would it be possible to do it again?

  It was and I did.

  I cut more often after that, but not because I needed to relieve my own emotional pain. The horrible feeling of helplessness was gone. Yes, my mother was still dying, yes I was going to lose her, but until that happened, I had found a way to ease her anguish and that stopped the endless loop in my head. So the cutting was no longer for me—it was for her.

  I came to see her every day after school, cut in the bathroom, and then sat with her until visiting hours were over. I usually cut once more before I left, to give her a few more hours of peace. The effects of my strange little ritual seemed to last anywhere from two to five hours,