One: Breathing Bubbles Is a Silly Thing To Do

All was silent and serene in Charis’s watery world. Small bubbles danced towards the surface, little pockets of air hoping to escape to their home in the sky above. They grazed the girl’s skin lightly as they floated on their way upwards, tickling her and cause her to smile. She would have laughed, except that she could not breathe underwater like a fish did because she was just a girl, and to laugh just then would have been a tragically silly thing indeed. A particularly large bubble rose up in front of her face and the girl wondered if she knew just how much air it held, could she manage to breathe it in without taking in water as well. It would be a curious thing, she thought, to breathe a bubble. She watched the pocket of air rise and decided that there was no way she could know how much air the bubble held and she’d likely breathe in more water than air. No, she thought decidedly to herself, it simply would not do to try and breathe bubbles.

Bright beams of sunlight filtered down in the water and scattered into a million bright rays of sunshine. Charis lifted her hand sluggishly in the water and tried in vain, but with much delight to capture the scattering sun beams in her palm. Suddenly a dark shadow loomed over the spot where Charis sat and her sunbeams died. The girl looked up, squinting through the wavering watery surface to see a figure standing looking over the water. The figure beckoned to her and waved her upwards toward the surface. Could it be, the Queen of Heaven beckoning her towards the realm of air? Charis figured it was possible and that she might as well, her lungs were beginning to ache anyway.

The girl unfolded her legs and pushed off from the bottom and swam gracefully towards the surface. She imagined herself a mermaid swimming toward the prow of a passing ship or an angel ascending towards heaven. When Charis’ head broke free of the water however, she was met with stark reality.

“CHARIS MONIQUE BERGERON!” a growling yell pierced through the girl’s once serene mind. Charis peered up with confusion, for what she had thought to be the Queen of Heaven, was only just her angry mother. “How many times have I told you not to sit at the bottom of the pool like that?! Do you even know how long you were down there? You always wear my nerves with your silly games!” she continued to rant at the girl. Charis mumbled an apology and climbed from the pool reluctantly, a captive to her mother’s frustrated tirade.

“No one even knew you were out here! What if you’d been drowning? And weren’t you supposed to be helping me get ready for the party tomorrow?” her mother ranted and turned for the house fully excpecting Charis to follow behind her. Charis followed morosely her head hanging as she was reprimanded. Still she could not help but imagine her mother as the strict lady of a noble house doling out chores to be done to her work weary servants. An entire array of thread bare slaves and workers would walk behind the lady, just as Charis was doing now, their faces grave and unhappy as the lady continued droning on, ever so often cracked a riding crop on the heel of her hand.

“It’s your birthday and the whole family is gonna be here! We haven’t even started decorating the backyard! Luckily the cakes are done and the gift bags have already been organized and tied off…Oh but your hair!” her mother exclaimed suddenly stopping in the middle of a stride and turning on her. The young woman was jarred from her day dream and she halted quickly, almost falling backwards to avoid from colliding with her mother’s prominent hips. Her mother reached out and gingerly touched the curly black tendrils of hair that laid plastered all over Charis’ head.

“I just relaxed your hair and got it to curl just right for once. And you had to go ruin it by jumping in that chlorine filled pool. What am I going to do with you?” Her mother agonized. Charis didn’t answer, she just shrugged and kept quiet and stared at the ground. She knew talking at this point would only serve to make her mother angrier; although, she did find her mother’s face to be quite silly when she was angry. It got all pinched and wrinkled around her nose and right at the tip is flushed pink underneath the brown. She reminded Charis of a very funny, very large, chattering rat when she was angry. She almost laughed at the thought of her mother as a chattering rat, but laughing definitely would make her mother even more angry; so instead, Charis bit her tongue. It hurt, but it was the much safer course of action.

 ”Well come on.” her mother said with a sigh and she turned back towards the house. “We’ve got to get you ready for your big day. Again…”

“Yes, ma’am.” Charis conceded, allowing the only two words that probably would not get her in trouble with her mother. She followed along behind the older woman, keeping silent otherwise, while her mother ranted in volumes about what needed to happen before tomorrow and the party. Charis would have been lying had he said she was listening to her mother droning on. But for once her mind was traveling on a track at least somewhat close to the one her mother would have preferred. For tomorrow, her father would be arriving from Hong Kong, as a gift for her eighteenth birthday.

Charis’s father was a very successful businessman, you see, and he was always traveling to some interesting and exotic locale; anyways, he was never home. He returned only for short visits, mostly for Christmas and rarely for Charis’s birthday. Only in the last two years he hadn’t quite been able to visit. Christmas was done over web conference, and for her birthday she got a recorded “video card” of her father and some amazing shots of where he was staying in India at the time.

The young woman didn’t think that he meant to be away from her for so long, when she was much younger, she and her father had been best friends. He would spend the entire summer at home away from his many international offices. They could always have been found hunting about the yard for strange insects and treasures which they would then bring in to show off to Charis’s much annoyed mother. Still somewhere along the way, he stopped visiting so often. Though Charis knew he still cared for his “little dreamer” as he called her, for she could hardly go more than four days without finding some great and interesting gift or another waiting for her in a box by the front door. Still she missed her father.

It had been especially hard of late. Charis’s mother had received a noticed very recently, from her mother-in-law, saying that she expected very much to come of Charis and the young woman’s future. She hadn’t seen Charis in ages, but she fully expected her to join the family business almost the second she turned eighteen, never mind college; she could take correspondence classes. Besides what would she need of college as the heir to a multinational, multimillion dollar corporation? Only, Charis’s mother was afraid that come her birthday celebration tomorrow, her grandmother would not approve of the granddaughter that was raised far away from the rest of the rich and proper Bergeron famliy and that not even one share of the company’s stock would be given to the young girl.

Which of course was why her mother was so insistent that the entire affair be perfect and that Charis appeared the perfect young lady. This was all well and good for the adults to be worried and concerned with Charis’s future, but no one had thought at all to ask what it was that she wanted. That was the custom on birthdays, was it not? The birthday girl was supposed to have the run of things and was allowed to eat cake, play games, and open presents until she was buried in mounds of wrapping paper. And Charis so very much, just wanted to have a day of fun with her father, much like the summer days they used to have.

And that is precisely what the young girl wished for that night as she readied herself for bed. Her nails had been freshly painted in the style of the French which Charis’s mother assured her was a very prim and delicate look. Her hair had been twisted into a framework of curlers which sat wrapped in their silk cocoon until the morning when she would release them into a mass of fine baby curls that would hang down around her face and her French twist like the Wisteria that was hanging throughout the yard outside. In the corner of her room hung a short, wispy spring dress that looked as if it were made of silkened gauze and underneath it sat a pair of rather stylish, as far as her mother was concerned, sandals that looked like something an Ancient Greek woman might have worn in days of antiquity. In all Charis thought that tomorrow she would look very much the part of a pretty china doll; and she hated to think of it.

Instead she pried open the bay windows of her room that over looked a lake and crawled up into the seat her father had made for her when she was small. She peered out into the dark sky above and picked out her favorite constellation. Her father once told her that stars were like tiny pin holes in a veil that hung between this world and another and that when you wished on one that people in another world felt your whispered wishes as soft, cool breezes on a gentle sunny day. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and whispered a simple wish upon a star just then.

“Please, please, whoever you are. Please make tomorrow bearable at least.”