There Are Limits Read online

  There

  Are

  Limits

  If you could change one thing: A Tangled Fates Story

  MariaLisa deMora

  Edited by Hot Tree Editing

  Proofreading by Whiskey Jack Editing

  Photography by 6:12 Photography by Eric McKinney

  Copyright © 2019 MariaLisa deMora

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  First Published 2019

  ISBN 13: 978-1-946738-34-9

  DEDICATION

  Thank you so much to all my friends.

  Both of ’em.

  Contents

  Beginning

  Memories and pain

  I can stop it

  There are limits

  You need help

  My spirit is strong

  This has to work

  Courtroom

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d be the first to admit that at times there is no rhyme or reason to the way my brain works. I can be riding along in a vehicle, or sitting on the front porch swing, and I’ll begin the “what if” game.

  That’s what happened here. I read a headline for a news article and was off to the races, my mind whirling miles ahead of my fingers as I typed.

  What if there was a family annihilator, but through scheduling issues, he left one person alive? What if that person couldn’t move past the loss, the devastating grief, and begged the universe for another chance? What if something heard that plea…and answered?

  I hope you’ll enjoy this foray into the world of paranormal, at least as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks to Hot Tree Editing and Whiskey Jack Editing for your assistance in polishing my words.

  “I wish” and “what if” are powerful things.

  Woofully yours,

  ~ML

  There Are Limits

  Let’s play a game.

  If you lost all of the things in life you value the most, and escalating events combined to repeatedly tear your world apart, how would you react?

  Would you take it in stride, accepting it as your lot? Would you eventually succumb to devastation and depression? Or would you fight back?

  “I wish.” If you could change everything with a word…would you?

  Beginning

  Sitting on the chilly tile of the bathroom floor, awash in the dull ache of nausea, Misty remembered the last time she had been in this exact position. She and Daryl had assumed it was a stomach bug back then. Seven months later, there had been an unexpected little addition to their family. There would be no such luck this go-around, and that absolute knowledge cleaved her heart in two.

  That long-ago day she’d been parked with a book and a box of tissues, waiting for the bitter saliva to subside, when she’d heard the dreaded shriek of “Moooooom.” Their little tattletale, Ellie, had yelled at her from the bathroom up the hall, “Michael tee-tee’ed in the shower.”

  Misty smiled to herself, relaxing as she dove into her memories.

  Ellie hadn’t been happy about being a big sister for the second time. Her main complaint was how Daryl approached it with Michael, telling him that at three, he’d already been promoted to big brother, and oh how Ellie had whined at that.

  “He can’t be a big brother and a little brother.” Ellie’s strict adherence to rules wouldn’t let her consider the idea. “He’s a little brother, and the baby boy in Mommy’s belly will be the littlest brother. Right, Daddy?”

  Chad had changed so many things in the family dynamic, but it always pleased Misty to think about how her children had so much of what she’d missed growing up.

  It had just been the two of them, Misty and her sister, Dusty. They’d been all the challenge their mom and dad wanted, twin girls who’d had an appetite for trouble. In reaction to their sometimes-lonely duet, Misty had always longed for a big family with brothers she could turn to when boys picked on her and a sister who wasn’t a mirror image.

  She sighed. “We weren’t the worst.”

  At the echoing sound of her words, another wave of nausea rolled through her, and she clutched her stomach, struggling up onto her knees to lurch towards the toilet. The smell of disinfectant and cleaner was overwhelming, and she gagged hard, her belly trying to relieve the pain in the only way it knew. It didn’t care that there wasn’t anything there to bring up; hard, racking heaves continued to round her back.

  Misty ended that session with her forehead resting on the ring of the seat as she reached to push the lever, washing the yellow-stained water down the pipes. Tiredly, she wiped a string of saliva from her bottom lip, falling onto her ass in a heap on the floor, back resting against the cabinet doors. One tissue, then a second to make sure she’d cleaned away everything, as if visitors might burst in at any moment and see her weakness through some terrible oversight.

  The house was quiet, eerily so, to the point she could hear rustling from outside as the wind whipped landscaped bushes against the brick. No music, no TV, no cat meowing—just silence.

  Cable and internet had already been turned off; she’d been startled today when the guy had come out to disconnect the equipment. She’d expected them to do it after she left, but there he’d been on the steps, hat on his head proclaiming the company name. Single woman safety and smarts had been hounded into her, so she’d been sure to ask for his credentials before letting him in. She’d wordlessly trailed him room to room, his efforts at pleasant conversation falling flat. Even necessary as it was, his presence felt like an intrusion after she’d been alone in the silence for so long. Papers signed, tools collected, it had felt like an eternity before he’d been on his way.

  This would be her last evening spent in this house, a place her few remaining friends thought she should have given up on months ago. She couldn’t articulate to them why she’d felt the need to stay, to stick it out until tomorrow, to give herself one final day and night in the place that had become a waking nightmare. Something inside her kept breaking at the thought of leaving, but it wasn’t just the pain that had caused her to stay. Closing that door felt like the severing of a final tie to a past she wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “Moooooom.” In a whisper, she mimicked Ellie’s voice. “Mooooom.”

  Michael’s voice was in that crackly stage, where he couldn’t depend on it remaining stable during the course of a single sentence. His tone could warble up and out of control or dip into the deep bass that sounded so like his father’s. “Mom.” She tried for a near replica but smiled at how far short it fell. Dropping her voice an octave, she gave it another effort. “Mom.”

  That grown-up version of Michael’s voice echoed too close to her fondest desire, and Misty set aside the pain that speared her chest. “Better,” she whispered, then, just to hear it again, used Michael’s voice to say something he’d told her a thousand times. “I’m starving, Mom. What’s for dinner?”

  Chad, her sweet baby boy, had the voice of an angel. He was the only one of her three children who still slipped up sometimes and called her Mommy, and she reveled in it, knowing from experience how quickly he’d grow up and abandon the practice entirely. “Mommy, can I have a…” She couldn’t think of what he’d ask for today. That was unacceptable, and her heart raced faster at her failure. She tried again, stomach rolling with the need to clear the bile away, sick held at bay until she’d finished his question. Her vo
ice was thick and unrecognizable as she forced out, “Mommy, can I have an ice cream?”

  Another lurch for the toilet, head hanging far over the ring as she repeatedly heaved, her body fruitless in its efforts to fix whatever was ailing it.

  Another fall back to her butt on the floor, another handful of tissues to collect and clean away the evidence of her inability to cope, another few minutes with her head back, gaze fixed on the wallpaper border around the room. Something Daryl had argued against, threats of weakening glue the sum of his reasoning, but she’d won, telling him it wouldn’t matter if steam from the shower made it come off in five years. They’d planned to be out of this house within five years and into a bigger one anyway. Times changed, life happened, and when the economy changed, those plans fell by the wayside. She’d been wrong, but so had he, because that border was stubbornly stuck in place. And now here she was, twelve years past expiration on that damn border, and she was the one leaving, not it.

  Eventually she rolled to her knees and winced at the sharp discomfort. She used her hands on the countertop to lever her body off the hard floor, groaning as she did. If she needed to vomit again, she’d risk making the run. Right now, her ass was numb, and she still had to pack her final suitcase.

  The hallway held a series of arranged photo vignettes, and as she walked towards the bedroom she’d been using, Misty passed the groupings that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but her.

  Ellie at seven and seventeen, jeans-clad bottom parked on the bleachers where Daryl played softball in the summer. As a family, they’d spent hours there through the summers, kids making friends with the children of people on his firm’s team. In both pictures, their daughter sported a black eye, something she’d gained when she hadn’t watched out for pop-up foul balls. Her raccooned face looked out from within the frames, with her wide, beautiful smiles eclipsing the sun.

  Chad lying in his tiny toddler bed at three, and leaning back in a recliner at a big cat rescue. In the bed, he’d had a lion toy cuddled to his chest, and in the other picture, he’d been nine and was bottle-feeding a premature tiger cub. His fondest desire was to work with cats in some way. “I’ll run away and join the circus” was a frequent threat.

  Michael was harder to categorize, and she’d always loved that about their middle child. In his pictures, he was solemn, not an expression he often wore, but she knew the moments were profound. He’d been fourteen, positioned in a sled at the top of the town’s hill, leaned forwards with his hands on either side of the tiny plastic saucer. He had his lip pulled back between his teeth, eyes on the prize poised somewhere downslope and out of range of the camera lens. The other was him at not quite four, butt far back on the couch cushions, his tiny baby brother balanced on his lap, a look of such concentration on his face you would think he was solving the world’s hardest problem, not meeting his sibling for the first time.

  Misty stopped for a moment, legs so unsteady she wasn’t sure if she could continue on. She found herself desperately wanting to look away from the wall with the pictures but, like a gawker at a car crash, was unable to tear her gaze from what was unfolding in front of her.

  The next grouping was of her and Daryl.

  Wedding day jitters were a thing, she’d discovered as she stood in the Sunday school classroom off the hallway towards the sanctuary. Her stomach had been flipping over and over, until the door opened and Daryl stood there. “Baby,” he’d said, and she’d run to him on her tiny heels, chosen to keep her from being taller than him. They were of the same height, and he’d said he didn’t give a shit, but she did, so instead of the more elegant shoes her sister had pushed for, she’d worn those, and he’d told her a year later that it meant something to him, her picking out shoes and thinking about him. So she’d dashed across the room, ignoring the squawks of disapproval from either side of her as her mother and grandmother prattled on about tradition. “I just needed to see you.” The picture she’d picked for the wall was from later that day, after the ordeal of the service, which lasted about a year too long according to him and twice that according to her. They’d been seated at the main table, and he’d leaned in, head pressing against her temple, sublime joy on his face. She’d been captured with eyes closed, soaking in how it’d felt as he’d leaned against her, holding her tightly, his words of adoration for her alone. “You’re mine now, Misty. Mine.” They were in love.

  The final image on the wall was from the most recent Christmas they’d celebrated, older kids leaning on his and her shoulders, Chad piled in his daddy’s lap, fingers trying to angle Daryl’s smiling face towards the camera. She’d been looking to the side, matching eye rolls with Ellie, making everyone laugh.

  She made it past and into the bedroom where she’d been sleeping, stomach rolling but the nausea manageable as long as she kept swallowing and telling herself it wasn’t anything. She couldn’t smell anything. She curled up on the bed with its hotel-quality sheets that held the scent of detergent, on a mattress only she had slept on, in a house that had stopped being a home exactly one year ago tomorrow, and finally, eventually, slept.

  Restlessly.

  Dreams filled with memories made her weep in her sleep, and she woke in the morning to circular stains on the pillowcase.

  Swinging her legs off the mattress, she reached for her cell on the nightstand and silenced the alarm. It hadn’t gone off yet. It never did these days, as her body woke her earlier and earlier as if to tell her she’d been lax long enough. There was movement at the edge of her vision, and she turned to look towards the door. Nothing there except shadows cast by the streetlights. “I wish,” she said, as she did every morning, “it never happened.”

  She waited.

  Nothing changed.

  Downstairs, she rummaged through the nearly empty refrigerator and pantry, cobbling together a meal of expired cream cheese on toasted stale bread, too-tart orange juice, and a tiny package of withered sausages left over from Ellie’s sixteenth birthday party. The celebration had been a roaring success, hors d’oeuvres made from recipes dreamed up by six girls teetering on the cusp of womanhood, boys invited as co-ed participants in her party for the very first time.

  Misty stood at the sink and ate, leaning over so no crumbs fell to the floor. Movement in the corner of her eye startled her, and she looked around to find nothing.

  “I wish it had never happened.”

  Maybe one day her wish would come true.

  Her brain conjured new tasks required to close up the house, a vast array of items she wouldn’t be able to complete until well after noon. A delaying tactic, but she was too exhausted to care. What’s another few hours? I’ll just stay until I’m done. Tomorrow at the latest.

  “No,” she told her mother over the cell phone, a call she couldn’t ignore because she knew if she didn’t pick up, her parents would come rushing over. “I’m going to stay just one more night. I’ll leave tomorrow. The movers come Saturday. I’ll definitely be gone by then.”

  “I still don’t understand why you can’t just come stay with us.” Her mother wasn’t whining, not exactly, but the tone in her voice was aggrieved, on the verge of being strident, something she’d turned to more often lately than not. “Your father and I would be happy to have you here.”

  “I know you would,” she soothed, the cadence of her words engineered to pause her mother’s embryonic meltdown. “But I need this. It’s a—”

  “—fresh start,” she told her father later in the same call, feeling as if she’d truly been talking in circles. “And that’s what I need.”

  “I know,” she told her friend Kathleen, trying not to brush away the offer with too quick a response, knowing it came from a good place, the heart of a sweet woman. “But I need this. It’s a fresh—”

  “—start for me, and that’s what I need.” Doctor Whitacre wasn’t as easily swayed, but she eventually listened, as she had for months now, available at the tap of a single speed-dial button. Sometimes Misty thought that might b
e part of the problem, such a quickly attained validation that her anger was normal, that her sadness was normal, that her fears were normal.

  If I’m so fucking normal, she wanted to scream, then why can’t everything just go back to how it was?

  “I wish it had never happened.” Something she often told the doctor, told herself, told the air in the house that could never again be a home. “I wish it had never happened.”

  Alone, she crept through the house like a thief, nothing alive there to disturb the dust motes floating through the few beams of light allowed inside. They’d had a cat—well, she’d had, as none of the children had liked it enough to claim the thing. Daryl had hated it, complaining about needing to buy stock in the company that made lint rollers, peevish about hair everywhere, which was an exaggeration, because it was just one cat who lived outside most of the time.

  She’d rehomed it with a new family about three months ago.

  One night she’d been petting the thing, and Puss—the cat’s name was Puss in Boots, because Ellie had said if they were going to have a cat, it would have a cool name—so Misty had been petting it and agony had rolled over her, because it was there, a steady, warm weight in her lap, purring, alive and breathing while her children were gone. Cold and gone, and irreplaceable. Every time she saw the cat after that, she’d burst into tears. They’d taken to avoiding each other, until Misty decided it needed more than she could offer.

  Misty scrounged up another quick meal from the remains of thousands of meals left in the pantry, settling into her place at the sink again, hip to the counter, elbows held to the sides so all the crumbs fell straight into the sink. Ranch-style beans on the last two slices of stale bread, chased by a tiny can of pineapple juice that tasted metallic and rank but nicely washed away the spicy after-flavor from the beans. An hour later she was on the floor in the bathroom again, entering from the hallway door as she’d done over the past year, never trailing through the master bedroom. She vomited again and again, stomach muscles complaining about the abuse they endured.