Sometimes, Believe

That man didn’t come back, thankfully. Even though the distasteful events that had occurred months earlier were supposed to leave scars and hinder Greta’s happiness, they didn’t. Things never worked out like they were supposed to. Gabriel was sitting down on the floorboards alongside me, watching the program along the family, the family of two.

Whatever was supposed to happen to the mother, it did. Karen’s eyes were red and purple at the same time. Her frequent diet of crying and staying up at night seemed to be proving successful. The other night I had peered over her shoulder to read what she scribbled down on dirty pieces of paper.

I almost laughed when I saw the pretty cursive spewing lies from its own black ink.
Karen didn’t feel safe with him gone.

With my thoughts racing faster than the time that had passed, Gabriel rested his head on my shoulder. Whatever was playing was in black in white, something very rare nowadays, then again, people like Greta and Karen were rare. Any other family wouldn’t live out here in the country side with so many things around to make them prey, they’d live in one of the luxury mega cities with various protective features.

It was good that they were different, different and broken; because the world needed someone out of the ordinary, sedentary, typical person to change it. And if atypical was defined in pictures, it would be this one.

Karen had Greta in her arms, much to Greta’s protests. Chuckling as I remembered the nearly silent argument, “But mommy, I’m six now,” Greta whined when her mother gave her a look that nearly sent Greta into the other room.

“Are you going to take care of her when I’m gone?” Gabriel questioned, his dreamy face now nuzzling into my neck. He gave me goose bumps in all the wrongly right places.

Gabriel is my perfect match, the spaces between his hands fit to my fingers, his hair is just within my reach, and he is everything I need him to be and much more. Usually the much more is the things that pester me and the driving force to all of our squabbles, but just because we’re angels doesn’t mean we’re saints. “Who’s to say that you’re going first?” I rebutted, taking one of those perfectly sculpted hands into mine.

“I can feel it,” Gabriel’s brow furrowed. Something inside of me realized that he was probably right. He was much more prepared to brave the world than I was at the present moment. Gabriel would have to regress three years to be below me.

He didn’t ask those stupid questions like I did, he simply trusted that everything was for the greater good and had faith in what we couldn’t see. I couldn’t do that, and Gabriel had a theory that when I do make it to the other side, he’ll be the one emotionally hurt because of his kindred ways. When he said that, I nearly fainted from the finest example of humility ever presented. In a sense, I was much more progressed than he was because I expected the worst and I am always jovial when people didn’t live up to my expectations for them. “Yeah, well, I know it’s not going to happen that way,” I replied to his rather intuitive claim.

“Yeah, but I feel it,” Gabriel removed his head from my chest. “I know it’s going to…”

“It’s all your fault!” Karen screeched, throwing the girl from her lap. Gabriel jolted from his relaxed position, snapping back into the truth of reality. Once on my feet, I took to blocking the mother from the child while Gabriel attained the task of comforting Greta. “You’re the reason I can’t be safe, or loved anymore!” the out of control mother threw a wine glass through the air, thick with tension and impending disaster.

My hands redirected the wine glass to a quicker descent away from Greta, who quivered under Gabriel’s arms, “I love you though, mommy.”

Karen shrieked, much like something out of a horror movie. She was monster, demon, and werewolf are bundled into one big chaotic, psychotic beast. The out of control witch rushed into the kitchen, turning on the tap for the water to begin running at a quickening pace.

I didn’t focus on that, I just focused on Gabriel. He was so good at that aspect—comforting her and making sure she was alright. Even though Greta couldn’t hear, feel, or see him, her subconscious would. Gabriel prompted her to stand, and they both ventured into her room.

Rubbing my temples, I took a peek around the corner to see the commotion going on in the kitchen. Karen had her pale white button up blouse sleeve shoved all the way up her bony elbows. The metallic grey basin was nearly filled to the brim of relentless chilled water. Reassuring myself that nothing was going to happen, I returned to the room where Greta and Gabriel laid down on the bed, Greta reading and Gabriel singing to her.

Picking up on my portion of the song, screams from the kitchen were heard. Greta’s eyes widened, but thankfully Gabriel was able to keep her in the bed.

Unlike him, I was positively curious. Leaping to my feet, I rushed into the kitchen to see Karen forcing her hand to stay in the now blackened water. When one bobbed up, her wrist’s screamed of bloody horror, the darker red liquid spewing out everywhere. “Shit, Shit, Shit!” Karen cursed loudly, still fighting the urge to pull her hand up to cease the burning page.

“Keep her in there Gabe!” I shouted over the mother’s cries of pain.

How could any mother do that? Fury washed over me and I wanted to let that ungrateful wench die bleeding all over the dirty kitchen floor. It served her right, throwing her own innocent child across the room, trying to scar the beautiful cherub’s face permanently with a wine glass, containing alcohol you shouldn’t have even purchased. What mother buys booze over food, insisting that her bright, pure, grateful daughter can go without food?

A really shitty one that Greta doesn’t deserve, that was the answer. At least by now, I could answer my own rhetorical questions, even though no one really knew the answers anymore. Karen flopped on the floor, losing consciousness, she wouldn’t die though. My fingers dipped into the wounds, holding the blood back so she wouldn’t lose too much more, it certainly wouldn’t feel great when she woke up but she’d still be alive. Karen would get to live when she deserved to die.

I’m no saint for saving a life, I had to remind myself. Although it was something I was supposed to do, there was nothing saintly about it, I was saving a wretched monster. And instead of zeroing in on this woman’s pain and my thoughts of letting her bleed a little more, I listened intently to Gabriel’s repeated and slightly refrained melody. It wasn’t like anything I had heard before.

Each time his voice slightly rose, it fell an octave; the language was unrecognizable as well. From all the dramatic rises and falls of the hearty voice my best guess was an Italian lullaby.
After several minutes of grueling pressure applied to her wrists, they stopping producing the red liquid covering the kitchen, making the room look more like a slaughter house than a place a family would eat. Wiping my hands off on a towel, I returned to the room were Greta was fast asleep; her angelic curls sprawled around the canvas pillow.

“Singing really calms her down,” Gabriel noted as I left the doorframe to come sit next to him. That made two of us then. Nestling my face into his shoulder, I began sobbing, trying to recollect my thoughts during the moment of crisis. The golden tears stained his white shirt, leaving remarks of my saddened heart on his sleeves. “Is everything alright?” Gabriel took the time to turn us both around a wrap me in a full embrace in the middle of the disgustingly grimy and unsanitary wooden floor.

Shaking my head, I sniffled, trying to refrain from thinking how unattractive I probably looked and sounded. He’d think of me as dramatic, someone who couldn’t let go. Opening my mouth, I already knew that he thought that, I had accepted it. It was who I am and there was a reason I am this way.

“You cannot leave me Gabriel,” I expressed my doubts.

“It’s going to happen,” he rubbed my back softly. He wasn’t supposed to say that, I couldn’t handle the truth and I didn’t want to wake Greta up.

But my selfish self continued to cry, even harder as well. “No, it can’t, not right now,” I nearly begged of him, “Everything is falling apart.”

I don’t even see the point in me crying. If anyone had the right to cry, it was Greta, and she already did. Drying it up somewhat, I cursed the stray tears gracing my rosy cheeks. Gabriel still continued to hold me. Occasionally, I felt his body rhythmically move back and forth, he was rocking me like a child, which shouldn’t have astonished me because I was acting like one. There’s something with me and thinking I deserve more than I actually do.

The only exception to that was him. And without that one anchor in my life, I’d be wandering around in this turbulent sea with Greta and Gabriel would find someone worth his time. So I was glad he didn’t have the intention to let me go at the moment. If he was holding me, I still had him here, and he was still mine. “I promise you it won’t happen until you’re ready,” Gabriel broke the long silence.
Those words, since he always managed to find the right ones, brought new tears to his eyes, “We both know that I can’t do what you do, and you can’t do what I do.”

Gabriel chuckled, breaking off the hug. His eyebrows peaked in hilarity, “I think anyone could go in there and put pressure on a wound.”

Even though Gabriel was right, I punched him straight in the side of the face, “But you didn’t do it you pompous asshole,” I slurred. His face was blurred to incoherence through the opalescent film of my tears. “If I can get one thing right, can’t you acknowledge it?” I questioned him, the betrayal notes perfected in my speech.

“No, because then you make it worse,” Gabriel angrily spat back. His hand nimbly rubbed his temple where my fist had contacted it.

Standing up abruptly, I nodded my head, “That may be right, and you may be true, but when you bring it up, what does it make you Gabe?” My voice faltered at his name. My mind was sent into a place I didn’t want it to be. Now, I could relate to the woman breathing shallowly on the filthy floor, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I hadn’t a clue why I wanted to be as far away as possible from Gabriel, just mere time before he crushed my world, he built it up.

He was everything before he deemed me nothing, useless. I am another copy, something replaceable, and the worst part was that it was true. What if he did leave tonight? That would be the final thing we had exchanged. Sure we had fights before, but they were miniscule compared to this heart wrenching reality. We’d begin on the wrong foot.

And even though that possibility scared me, it didn’t instill the amount of fear to get me to muster the courage to apologize when it wasn’t even my fault. In place of what needed to be done, I laid beside Karen, closing my eyes for unnecessary, but needed relaxation.