Into the Mansion

Chapter 8

                         My mother came home just long enough to pack up her belongings.  Her boyfriend hired a moving company, and two men loaded all of our boxes and furniture into their van.  I was excited about this move, and for the first time, I realized how exciting and healing change could be.  I said goodbye to my brother and best friend and jumped in the car for the journey to the northern-most point of the Metroplex, also known as Frisco, Texas.  Frisco was far enough away from Dallas to be an escape from crime, yet close enough for a commute to work.  The toll road had just been extended to Frisco, so it was growing.

            There was not a single poor person in Frisco.  It was populated strictly with gated communities, country clubs, and expensive cars.  When we approached, I stared out the window at the luxurious homes in amazement.  Coming from a farm where we dug our own septic tank, I had never seen houses like these except on television.  We entered the gated country club grounds through remote-controlled black, iron gates, and wound through rows of mansions on out both windows.  I wondered which one was mine.  We finally stopped at a modern, red brick, home, much taller than it was wide.  My mother led me up the sidewalk and to the door.  I felt as if I were a child who was next in line to sit on Santa’s lap as I pressed the doorbell.  The door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman in all black designer clothes, a string of genuine pearls around her neck, and a highlighted up do.  Vicki had been a friend of my mother’s before she met my father.  She grew up middle-class and attended the same high school as my mother in a less fortunate city in the Metroplex.  My father had forced my mother to give up her friends when they married, so according to Vicki, the only other time I had met her was the day I was born.  Through the years, Vicki had been married twice: once to a wealthy pharmacist who had been born into money, and just recently to a traveling accountant whom she had met on the Internet.  He was never home.  She owned a full-service car wash in downtown Dallas and had employed my mother’s boyfriend to run it.  Between the profits from the car wash, and her husband’s stash, she lived like a queen.

            We entered the massive foyer and surveyed our new home.  To the left was a twelve-foot, Medieval-style wood dining table with an elegant, low-slung chandelier above.  To the right was a spiral staircase carpeted a modern, off-white shade.  The high-rise ceilings made the place feel as tall as a skyscraper.  Walking across the tile, Vicki showed us the elegant living room with plush couches and a flat-screen television (before they were common) mounted on the wall on the right, and on the left was the biggest kitchen I had ever seen.  Vicki loved to cook, so when she designed the house, the kitchen had been her priority.  The stainless steel refrigerator was built into the wall and was just to the right of the island bar taking up the center of the room.  Expensive pots and pans were suspended above the island, like I had seen in the movies.  The pantry was bigger than a normal-sized bedroom and completely stocked with every ingredient possible.  It looked like a mom and pop grocery store.

            Behind the living room were a small bathroom, a quaint bedroom with a day bed and a rocking chair to accommodate Vicki’s mother on the rare occasion that she visited, and the Master bedroom.  The Master bedroom was exquisite with a canopy bed, flat-screen television, and double doors that opened up to the backyard.  The backyard showed exactly how rich Vicki was.  Directly out of the bedroom doors was an outdoor kitchen, complete with a stocked refrigerator, stainless steel bar, and built-in grill.  Across from the artistically laid stone floor was a self-heating, in-ground Jacuzzi with a beach entrance, like a boat ramp in lake, and a well-lit waterfall.   I starred out over the black, iron fence onto the country club’s blinding green golf course that went on for miles. 

            I was in shock, and I hadn’t even made it upstairs yet.   Holding onto the marble banister, I ascended the spiral staircase and directly entered the upstairs living room.  Vicki called this her game room because it had a dartboard, a table with a glass chess set set up and ready to play, and various other forms of entertainment around.  To the left of living room number two was an exercise room with a treadmill and weight machine, and across from it was a bedroom with its own bathroom and double doors that opened directly to the balcony, which overlooked the golf course.  To the right of the living room was a large office with desk, computer and balcony doors, my bedroom which Vicki had decorated in safari prints because she had heard that I liked them, a large bathroom, an upstairs kitchen, and a long hallway that lead to a dark, mysterious room.  Vicki seemed most excited about showing off that room.  She led my mother and I past the upstairs kitchen, through the suspenseful hall, and down a short set of stairs into the dimly-lit room.  My jaw dropped to the ground at the sight of the room’s insides; I was standing in a real-life movie theater.  The projection screen was the same size as the screens at AMC, but instead of uncomfortable chairs like in the theaters, there were sectional couches and chaise lounges on which to sprawl out. Thick velvet drapes at the back of the room hid a closet the size of my bedroom, which housed thousands of DVDs in alphabetical order.  I felt as if I was in a fairy tale. 

            Like the year before, my mother spent all of her time at her boyfriend’s back-wood mobile home hours away, but I loved it at Vicki’s.  The four-story, dream-like mall was close by, and Vicki often took me shopping.  Between eating Vicki’s gourmet meals and getting manicures and pedicures, I read books and watched movies in my own personal theater.  When my car broke down, Vicki let me take out her Jaguar.  This new, luxurious life I had been handed was something I had never expected, and it was a much-needed break from the stresses of my real life and the person I really was.  Things had not changed back home.  I kept in contact with my brother and best friend, but I still was not speaking to my father.  He did not know where I had gone, which my mother and I had done on purpose and by changing our phone numbers, he had no way of getting in contact with me other than by email.  Frequently, I received hateful messages from him calling my mother and me harsh names and accusing us of deceit and treachery.  He had instilled in me the will to fight back to my bullies, him being my biggest one, so in the beginning, I replied with defensive words, but after his messages became threatening and filled with his plans of seeking revenge, I became frightened and stopped writing back.  I knew he was capable of anything, and our restraining order meant nothing to him.

            I never told my mother about the emails.  I had been forced to take on this battle by myself for a year now, and at this point, I didn’t need her to shield me from his blows.  So I pretended like the messages weren’t there as best as I could and went about my high life as usual.  But it didn’t last long.

Author's Note

I'm writing these sporadically to avoid writer's block, then I'll edit them to fit together. They make sense alone, like essays.

Reviews

[MaNdYe]

very suspenseful... I liked it