Chapter Five

The glamour that had been put on Melissa was now off. It had allowed Domma to show her what she really looked like but now no one, other than those that had known her before, could see her. Melissa was used to being passed by in the street without a second glance. The glamour had been of a rather ordinary looking young woman, after all. Now, though, it was obvious that people simply couldn’t see her. It was a bizarre sensation.

 

However, now, it meant that in order to do what Domma insisted needed to be done, finding the Horn of Ceto, meant talking to the one person whom she knew that had a car. She didn’t want to talk to Ben. She didn’t want to see Ben ever again. She, certainly, didn’t want him to see her like this and have to explain, as if she ever could, why she looked this way. She had no choice in the matter.

 

The woman that Ben had left her for lived only a few blocks away in a house near the lake. It was a nice house. Melissa had been inside it once in order to pick up the DVDs that Ben had forgotten were hers. She remembered how to get to the house probably because of the pain associated with it. It was not a place she ever wanted to go to again but now she and Domma were walking that way.

 

Kelly opened the door when they got there and looked passed Melissa. She couldn’t see her because she wasn’t able to use her glamour cloaking yet. She saw Domma, though, and seemed to recognize her.

 

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

 

“I need to talk to Ben,” Domma said. She smiled cheerfully while Kelly stared at her with disgust.

 

“He doesn’t want to see you, Melissa,” she said. “He’s moved on. Let go.”

 

“I know he’s moved on. I’ve moved on as well. I just need to talk to him,” Domma said. Melissa didn’t move, she didn’t breathe, fearing that if she did, Kelly would see or hear her and the illusion would be gone.

 

Kelly sneered.

 

“What do you want to see him for?”

 

To Melissa, it seemed as if Domma changed again but it was clear that Kelly didn’t notice. If she had the ability to see she would have backed off, the sneer on her face would have been erased, her arms wouldn’t be crossed defensively over her chest. Domma’s hair had darkened again, her eyes were black again, and the smile was full of teeth.

 

“I need to ask him a favor. I don’t want to ask him but he’s the only person I know with a car, and at the moment, I need a car. That’s all I want him for.”

 

Her voice was saccharine sweet, innocent, but, to Melissa, the blackness in her voice was clear. Kelly, oblivious, sneered at her once more and stepped aside to allow them both in.

 

Ben was in the back room playing video games. His black hair was jutted out in that boyish way that made women do terrible things for him. When she’d met him, Melissa had fallen for it as well, but now she wondered why. He didn’t look up at her when she walked in.

 

“What do you want?” he asked.

 

“The car. It’s partially mine and I need to use it. Where are the keys?” she said. The voice, the tone, wasn’t hers. It shocked her for a second. It must have shocked Ben, too, because he hit pause on the game and looked up at her. According to Domma, standing next to her, the way the glamour worked was that Ben shouldn’t be able to see Domma and would see Melissa just as he’d always seen her, mousy and brown, attractive but unmemorable. He stared at her for a long time as if he were trying to think of something and couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

 

“You’ve done something with your hair,” he said. “It’s different. Somehow. I like it.”

 

Melissa only stared at him. He had been the dominate one in their relationship. She’d gone to work and come home and made dinner and he’d had a string of dead-end minimum wage jobs and had done nothing else. Yet, she’d loved him, or thought she had, for a while. She’d shared her bed with him and paid his bills. Now, though, something intangible had changed and he felt it. The balance of power had shifted in her favor.

 

He dug the keys out of his pocket and threw them at her.

 

“When are you going to have it back?” he asked.

 

She caught the keys in mid-air with a deft hand that he pretended not to notice. Then, she shrugged.

 

“A few days.”

 

There was nothing. He hadn’t pressed start again on his game yet and she felt that he was waiting for her to say something else. She didn’t.

 

“Okay, I should be fine,” he said.

 

She turned on her heel and left without saying good-bye.

 

The car was in the drive-way. It was a perfectly boring car that he’d bought off his sister when she wanted to upgrade to something that she deemed safer. So far as they could ascertain the only thing different between the old car and the new was that the new one had more cup holders. It was gray and one of those SUVs that were really station wagons with a face lift.

 

“To your mother’s house, then,” Domma said.

 

“To my mother’s house,” Melissa repeated. She was looking forward to this slightly less than she had been looking forward to seeing Ben again. Her mother lived on Snell Isle, a thirty minute drive from where they were and easily accessible to the public

transportation system if Snell Islanders would allow a bus access to their private atoll.

 

They didn’t. The island was full of million dollar homes and the snowbirds that only lived in them for two or three months a year, when the weather was cool.

 

Domma stared out the window of the car, her hair whipping, as she watched the houses far back on their manicured lawns lumber past the windows. Each house was a testament to nouveau riche grandiosity. Melissa had always been somewhat embarrassed by her childhood home. Pulling up to it now, she blushed.

 

The house had been designed by her mother and for her mother. The black, wrought iron gate was closed against visitors, even those who managed to get onto the island might not be up to class for her mother, and there was a terse No Trespassing sign on the front. Melissa rang the bell and waited.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Mother, it’s Melissa, can you let me in?”

 

There was a pause, then.

 

“I’m sorry, who’s this?”

 

Melissa seethed. She never knew if her mother was pretending not to recognize her so that she didn’t have to be courteous or if her mother had actually not recognized her. Either way. She gritted her teeth.

 

“It’s Melissa, your daughter, Melissa,” she said. “Can you let me in? I need to ask you a question.”

 

“Oh, Melissa, I didn’t hear you, darling, of course, come in.”

 

Her mother’s voice was the very definition of sweetness and the black gates swung open silently on well-oiled hinges. The driveway was short, their plot of land wasn’t as large as a few of their neighbors as the house had been built well after the land boom when plots were getting smaller and smaller, but it wound and twisted through the banyans and palm trees to make it seem larger. The car’s wheels crunched on the shells of pink coquina.

 

The house itself loomed far back on the property nearly falling into the water that lay behind it. It rose like a fortress of pink coquina and shining copper. Her mother, a trim woman in white with a large straw hat covering her pale skin, was sitting on the porch in an affected way with a tall glass of lemonade that Melissa was certain was spiked with something. That was they way her mother was. She stood and waved languidly as Melissa’s car pulled into the driveway.

 

“Oh, Melissa, darling, are you still driving that old thing? Why don’t you allow me to buy you a new car?”

 

Janice kissed her daughter fleetingly on the cheek even as she criticized her.

 

“I don’t need a new car,” Melissa said. “This is my friend, Domma.”

 

“Very nice to meet you, Domma. Would you care for some lemonade?” Janice asked.

 

Domma smiled and it made Melissa shiver.

 

“No, thank you, ma’am,” she said.

 

“We’re fine, mom.”

 

Janice motioned for them to sit on the chair across from her and she sipped the lemonade that Melissa was certain was lemonade flavored Kool Aid made with sparkling water instead of tap and with a bit of lemon dropped in. Her mother was like that. They couldn’t afford the house. Not really. Her father, Richard, was a manager at a factory warehouse that sold and manufactured promotional products, and her mother was a savings officer at a bank. Yet, all the time Melissa was growing up, she thought her parents were well-off, wealthy, but it was all a façade. Her mother shopped at bargain stores for their clothes, buying things on sale and on clearance, and repackaging them so that they looked expensive. It was all about how things looked.

 

“So, you wanted to ask me a question?” her mother asked.

 

“Yes, do you remember having an heirloom, a horn, it would have been small, shell, and would have been decorated with black markings?” Melissa asked.

The description had been provided by Domma, she herself had never seen anything resembling what Domma had described, but her mother’s face paled. She took another sip of her lemonade to try to hide it.

 

“A horn? Goodness, no, I don’t recall owning anything like that.”

 

“Mom, please, we would have had it from the time I was born, maybe something grandma gave us?”

 

Her mother’s lips turned up in a sneer.

 

“Your grandmother gave us nothing, dear, remember that. We’ve had to bring ourselves up.”

 

Melissa sat back, hoping to stave off the oncoming storm. She’d heard all of it before and wasn’t in the mood now. Janice and her mother had not gotten along. Her mother reminded her that she was nothing more than trailer trash with a larger trailer.

 

“Yes, I understand, mom, but I’m certain we had this. I can’t really explain it, but I need it now,” Melissa said.

 

Her mother turned her eyes away from her. She seemed to be struggling with something that Melissa didn’t understand. She frowned.

 

“Domma, could you please excuse us for a moment? Get yourself a cup of water, there’s glasses in the kitchen,” Janice said. Domma got up and moved into the house but Melissa knew she was listening, she hadn’t completely left. It made her feel safer in some ways but more vulnerable than ever.

 

Her mother took a while to regain the conversation. She stared out over the yard and suddenly looked very old. When she finally did speak, she turned to Melissa and she could see the weariness that pretending and scrabbling had taken on her. She was a hard woman, her mother, but not inhuman. She’d only wanted what she thought she was supposed to have wanted in life only to get near the end of it and find out that the sacrifices had been too much for the rewards.

 

“I always wanted a daughter,” she said. She smiled, and her eyes were tired. Melissa was about to say thanks but the look in her mother’s eye stopped her. “And I thought you were perfect when I first had you. You were just like me. Then, sometime around your first birthday, you changed. It was like night and day. And so suddenly. I thought you must have something wrong with you. No one knew about Asperger’s Syndrome back then, but now I think, had I known, I would have thought that was it. But, I don’t know, it’s not that, is it? You just changed, your entire personality. I grew away from you. I didn’t mean to and maybe that makes me a bad mother.”

 

She shrugged her shoulders. For the first time in Melissa’s life her mother seemed frail rather than thin. She seemed like a skeleton with her flesh stretched across the frame. Melissa wanted to hold her mother but that distance that she was talking about was there and she could sense it.

 

“All I know is that when I went to pick you up I found that shell. It was strange. We’ve always lived near the water and I assumed that you’d found it on the beach. I didn’t like it but I could never get it thrown away. I tried, though, Lord knows I tried. I just always forgot about it on trash day or something always happened. Like your father’s old USF

shirt,” she said.

 

Her mother smiled at the thought of the holey, stained shirt that her father frequently wore on lazy Sundays and when he was doing chores. It drove her mother crazy, that shirt, and she’d threatened to throw it away a million times but it never ended up in the trash.

 

“I finally gave up and put it in the top of my closet. If I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away at least I wanted it close so that I could remember where it was so that I didn’t stumble on it when I was least expecting it. You have no idea, Melissa, how much I hate that thing.”

 

“So, why didn’t you give it to me when I moved out?” Melissa asked.

 

Her mother sipped her lemonade again and her eyes drifted away.

 

“I don’t know.”