"He'd Entice Any Woman, and So He Has Done Me..."

[psalm_onethirtyone]

I wrote a story last night. :D Yay me. It is a present for a RL friend, and I really really really need concrit for it, if anyone is willing to give. <3333

I wrote it in six hours last night, which involved being up until two-thirty, which is not a time I generally enjoy being up to. ^^;;; So it may very well be horrid. I desperately need to know.

Anna Maria

"Anna Maria, you're home now. Smile for me, sweetie."

It's hard to smile. She's lonely. This bright house, these happy people, are so different from the grey place she has lived the last three years. Her mother tickles her and spreads a new dress out on the bed, one with silver drops along the collar that remind her of spilled milk in the morning, when the moon is the only light still dancing in the sky, and even the sun hasn't yet awoken.

It's a beautiful dress. She hasn't had anything beautiful in a long, long time. (Mordecai could not afford anything beautiful, and even if he had been able, they were so far from all people that there was no one from whom they could have bought things. For three years she only wore brown coarse cloth.)

She walks to the windows and looks out at the river. (There was a river where they lived, a long one that stretched off into the forest and out of sight. Along it things grew, silvery trees and brambly brush, little patches of mushrooms, little scatterings of flowers. Mordecai used to take her walking by the river.

He had a peculiar smile, warm as rabbit soup, soft as milkweed. She had trusted his smile. It meant that things were good. It meant that everything was right.)

The river outside her window goes out of sight, too. It's busy, full of boats of all shapes, crossed by bridges. The water is blue and rich, like an oil painting. Her mother comes up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder, says, 'Isn't it like you remember? I used to stand here and wonder where you were. I used to pray that you were all right.'

(Mordecai prayed, too. He told her that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. He said that when he prayed it was to the same God. He said that God is always that same; the difference is in what people call Him. 'Shiva or Jesus or the Great Spirit', he said, 'they're all God. We just worship Him in different ways and give him different names, because we different. We don't name the pieces of the world around us the same things, so why would we all name God the same thing?' Mordecai had a Star of David painted on the walls of his house, and a Christus Rex, and many, many other symbols in different colours and shapes. 'They all mean God', he said. 'I like to be somewhere that speaks of God.'

He wore a prayer sash and carried a rosary, a Turkish eye, a Thor's hammer, rounded stones that he said were earth prayers. 'I am keeping my pockets holy', he said.

She asked him for something of her own to keep with her, and he gave her a string of prayer beads, green and gold and shining. She tied them around her wrist and never took them off. Mordecai smiled at that. In the dark of the evening, as they sat by the fire and he read from the Koran, she rubbed them and held them and thought of home--sometimes she wanted to be there, sometimes she wanted him to be there with her, and often she was content where she was.)

"Anna Maria, you're home now. Come and have breakfast with us. Waffles."

(They almost always had eggs. There were birds in the forest, and Mordecai always knew where the nests were. She doesn't try to tell her parents. She pours maple syrup on her waffles and is quiet. Maybe, her mother thinks, she cannot fit back into normal life as well as we hoped. Maybe she should see a therapist or a psychiatrist. Of course she should. We thought that it would be easy for her to come back to her family, but all those years with Him couldn't have had any other result. Maybe He did something to her that she didn't tell us. I'll make a phone call after breakfast, her mother thinks. Her mother always thinks of That Man in capitals.)

She walks down the sun-warmed street after breakfast, wearing the beautiful dress from her mother. her mother remembers after all this time how much she likes pretty, shining things. Anna Maria has almost forgotten it, herself. The skirts of the dress swirl around her ankles like long grass, but silkier, brushing and blowing.

The more she tries to let the blank, silent summer mute it until she can't feel it, the more she imagines Mordecai lifting her with his hands at her waist and twirling her in the sun. She imagines them dancing through the house to the sound of waltzes on his old LPs. She imagines them spilling out the door like light through a window, and standing on the doorstep looking out at the world. Look what God gave us to-day, Mordecai would say.

Then he would smile.

She wanders down to the playground and sits on a swing. All the children are in school. When they grow up, they go to college and get jobs. When they are grown up, they work. Finally they fade like flowers. Anna Maria is grown up, a grown up girl swinging by herself at the playground, not ready to go back to work, not ready to face the interviews and the resumes and the sense of drive and push that isn't there any more. All her friends have moved on after three years. They have lives that don't need Anna Maria in them. Who would call that wrong? Her mother was the only person who didn't believe she was dead. And now it's hard to reconnect, hard to touch, hard to make a phone call or take a hand, after three years and jobs and marriages and periods of mourning that ended and made everything seem so final.

(Sometimes she wonders how everything happened as quickly as it did. It took so long for her to be happy, and then she was happy for so long, and now as overnight as the first frost on the grass she is home.

It makes her insides dull. She should be happy, and part of her is happy. The rest is lonely and tired, still with weariness.)

The doctor who examined her when she first came home explained to her mother that she was perfectly healthy, that no doctor would suppose she had been living in captivity for the last three years. He said that she showed no signs of mental trauma. He said that she was perhaps even ready to enter again into normal society after a very short period of recovery.

She had smiled for the doctor, and answered his questions sometimes even truthfully. No one pressed her too hard. She had just come back to her loving family after years of what other people filled in with their heads; maybe atrocities unimaginable, maybe isolation and emotional deprivation. It wouldn't be right to ask too many questions, to expect too many answers. 'Be gentle with her', the doctor told her mother. 'Be gentle with her. Let her recover. Help her where she needs it, and if she seems too distant or depressed contact a psychiatric professional. But let her recover at her own pace, and please be gentle. It can only help.'

It does help. Anna Maria pushes the ground with her toes until her swing begins to sway, and then to glide, back and forth, high into the air like a kind of dance. No questions means no explanations, no answers. It keeps her safe.

"Anna Maria, you're home now," she whispers, swinging high towards the sun, towards the tops of the tress, towards weightlessness and a chance at flying. "Why don't you come down?"

(Because the first time she saw Mordecai, he was breaking out of prison. She only remembers the whirl and rush and noise of that first time, the people on the television narrating what it all meant. A fugitive, they said. A dangerous man, they said. 'He has escaped after twelve years in prison and he is doing a life sentence for murder and he has gone into hiding. Police are adamant that he will be found as soon as possible and returned to prison.' But I'm not part of that, Anna Maria thought. And the next day she went to the city to buy a new dress.

She was standing in front of a window looking at something beautiful when Mordecai took her shoulders gently. I'm sorry, he said. 'Please stand in front of me. They won't shoot you.' There was shouting and a sudden gunshot which might have hit her, but Mordecai moved her out of the way too quickly. He had taken her hostage. People don't ask her about it, but Anna Maria is not sure what she would say if they did. It didn't feel like hostage. It just felt strange and stilted, jerked, as though something smooth had been happening and then caught, like a record repeating the same thing over and over.)

(The rest of it is bits and pieces. She remembers travelling, so fast that she learned very little. Finally she remembers their finding the house where they lived those three years. Almost three years. Part of it was the travelling.

Finally she remembers that they began to talk.

Mordecai was always gentle of her, but he was even more gentle once he was no longer frightened and running. One night while they were sitting by the stove, she asked him where they were.

'My brother built it a long time ago,' he said. 'He built it for me so I could live here alone when I left prison.'

'Who did you kill?' asked Anna Maria.

'A man. I didn't do it in self-defence, and I had no good reason to kill him. All I know now is that it was evil to kill him, and I did not know that then.'

'Why did you--?'

'Because he was different from me. Because he made me angry.' He smiled slightly at her, and it was a smile that was old and quiet. 'That's a terrible reason to hurt anyone. And it's been twelve years, and all I've done is been thinking. My brother made me this prayer shawl,' he showed her, 'and this rosary. God gets called lots of different names that all mean God, and killing gets lots of different excuses that are all there to hide something that's really either just stupid or evil. I realised that about God about the same time I realised I did an evil thing.'

'Then why did you break out of prison?'

'I used to have a house like this one out in the woods, and that's where I like it. I hate big crowds of people and things. There's too much noise and too much going on. And I would've stayed in prison as long as I was supposed to, because I know I deserve to be cut off from all people if I am evil towards any one of them, but I couldn't stand all the noise, and hearing the people around me being cruel or evil all day and all night. It wasn't just other prisoners. Some of the prisoners were like me, and so were some of the personnel, but some of them were just as evil as murderers. And I was afraid.' Mordecai's eyes seemed almost like an apology. 'I told my brother secretly to help me, and he did.'

Anna Maria nodded and looked around the house. 'So you won't hurt me.'

'No.')

And nobody would understand--would they? What it's like to be so far from Mordecai, not to know where he is. To feel sorry for him, to hope he always hides in good places, always runs further away from prison and the crowds. Always to pray for him to be safe and secret, and to have learned true things from a murderer. To have learned about good and grace and keeping from evil, to have learned about trust and kindness and love, to have learned about acceptance and respect from a murderer.

The only thing that makes me happy, Anna Maria thinks, is that he isn't caught yet. He's still somewhere. That's the happy ending.

And she walks home from the playground for lunch, because the time has already passed, just her and the swing and thinking have passed four long hours, and it's time to go home.

"Anna Maria, you're home now. Thank goodness, I thought we might have to look for you. We're having ham sandwiches."

(He mother is always frightened when she doesn't know where Anna Maria is. I shouldn't be, she thinks. I should trust her. My stomach shouldn't always twist. But I lost her for so long, and I always am afraid that when she's out of sight she won't come back again. No girl gets kidnapped twice. She's safe her. I shouldn't be always afraid.

But they haven't caught Him yet...)

(Mordecai kept them in food by hunting rabbits and squirrels, sometimes birds. Once a month his brother came with a carload of food and groceries, things they couldn't get out of the woods. He always looked askance at Anna Maria. He always asked Mordecai when he would take her home.

'I don't know,' said Mordecai. 'We're all right'.

'This isn't what I got you out of prison for. I didn't mean for you to keep this girl from her family for all this time. I didn't think you'd take a hostage at all.'

'They were shooting at me.'

'You should have let her go as soon as you got away.'

'I was frightened,' Mordecai said. 'It's no excuse. I know that, and I'm not trying to make one. It's only the explanation.'

'But you're safe now. Why's she still here?'

Anna Maria would listen, sometimes; part of the time she'd be running through the woods with vines in her hair. She had never felt freer.

Sometimes she thought she knew why Mordecai had never let her go. She had never asked to go, and the memory of home almost seemed to fade, to flow in and out of her consciousness like the river sometimes taking one path and sometimes another. It wasn't because she didn't love her home, or her family. It was just that it seemed so distant then. It wasn't anything Mordecai did or said. It was just that as they drove away from that city store window where she'd looked at the dress a part of that morning's life seemed to come away, like a lizard leaving its tail behind in the beak of a predator.

Then later the answer was simply because Mordecai loved her, and was afraid to let her go.)

Ham sandwiches remind her of something far away and muted, but good. The feeling of food in her stomach is good. Her mother and father exchange looks across the table, in turns loving, concerned, quiet, unsure.

Afterwards her father goes back to mind the store, and her mother tries to engage her in conversation. She answers questions distractedly for a while, and then goes away upstairs to sit on her bed and look out the window again. Mordecai didn't have a second storey. It was just four rooms: the kitchen, the bathroom, two bedrooms. The bedrooms were filled with all kinds of books, but mostly art books full of paintings by dead artists. Some she naturally knew, like Monet and Titian, and some were unfamiliar to her, like Goya and Stubbins. In the evenings they would sometimes read through them together, looking at the pictures, and Mordecai would tell her that he had seen some of them and describe the museums and houses they'd been in. He was four years older than she was, thirty-five to her thirty-one, but he'd been all over the world when he was a teenager.

('So at least you got to see a lot of things before--'

'That's true.' He smiled at her, his warm smile. 'Jacob and I went everywhere you can think of. Our parents died when I was just a little boy, and Jacob was afraid we'd be separated by foster parents, so he ran away with me. He worked, and I helped, and we went everywhere.'

Anna Maria tried to imagine what everywhere was like. She'd never been anywhere, never even gone out of the state. Except now, she suddenly realised.

'Where are we now?' she asked.

'I'm not sure,' he said, laughing.

'Are we out of state?'

'We're in North Dakota. We're about fifty miles from Jacob.'

'I've never been outside New York.'

'There's a lot to see in New York,' said Mordecai.

'I think it's more beautiful here. All the trees, and the river. I like living here.'

'Really? Are you happy here?'

For a moment, she really thought about it. Here--they were in her bedroom, lying on her mattress to read the book--far away from everything, surrounded by woods, watching the river flow out of sight. Only Mordecai, only Anna Maria, sometimes Jacob, hundreds of books.

'Yes,' she said. 'I'm happy.)

She sits by the window, watches the boats begin to travel, the water stir, the cars move across the bridges. Hears the faraway shouts, the noise of the motors and the boats churning through the water. Her mother calls up the stairs that the afternoon mail just came, and there's a letter for Anna Maria. She comes downstairs and takes it into the living room to read. There's no return address.

Anna Maria, it says, it's me. I've been praying for you. I pray you're well, that no one has accidentally hurt you with words or otherwise. I'm trying to be glad you're home, but I miss you so much. But God knows I should never have kept you so long. I pray you're well.

I'm all right. I'm afraid to tell you where I am. Maybe someone who shouldn't will read this letter, like in a detective story, and track me down with it. The postmark is as close as I can get you. I'm so sorry for leaving you. That should have been the first thing I said. I wanted to go back. Jacob wouldn't let me. I know he was afraid. Don't blame him. If you are angry, be angry with me. I shouldn't have left you. I pray they didn't ask you too many questions or do anything to hurt or scare you, if they asked you where I am. You're home now, Anna Maria.

I love you. I love you.

The postmark is from a town in Wyoming. I want to go to Wyoming, she thinks. Why is New York so far from Wyoming?

Her mother comes in to open the curtains. 'Was it a friend?' she asks.

'Yes,' says Anna Maria, softly. 'It was a friend.'

(When the police found her, she was making herself toast. Jacob had brought them a toaster the month before, and it was so nice to have toast again, toast crispy but also soft with butter. Mordecai was out hunting for a rabbit for supper. Jacob was due again that day, and sometimes he brought them meat, but he was all Jewish, instead of all everything, like Mordecai, and he didn't like putting meat in with the milk. 'I don't know why,' he said. 'It just feels funny. I know you two don't care. I don't even like having them in the same house together, let alone the same car. Besides, I'm a vegetarian, and I shouldn't enable you.' Mordecai always laughed.

So she was making toast, and then police knocked on the door. She thought it was Jacob, and went to open it, and that was when everything changed. Of course they recognised her. She was still on missing posters, her mother told her. And Mordecai was still wanted. They only found Anna Maria, though, and took her away with them.

As soon as she could, she called Jacob from a pay phone in a panic. He told her that someone had found out about Mordecai and called the police. He'd driven over and found Mordecai in the woods and convinced him that Anna Maria was all right by herself. They drove to Jacob's house, and Mordecai hid in the storm shelter dug deep into the ground in the barn, its door covered over with hay, until the police had finished questioning him. He hid there for a week, and then Jacob got him out of the state.

'Where?' asked Anna Maria.

'I can't tell you,' Jacob said. 'I can't tell you whether he'll contact you. And please don't call me. The police are still dropping in on me at random. They were suspicious of me when he escaped in New York, and now that I'm in such close proximity to your house, they're even more suspicious. I need you to leave me alone.'

'Okay', she whispered.)

"Anna Maria, you're home now." Her mother opens the curtains wide and light streams through. "Is there anything you want to do?"

'That's okay,' says Anna Maria, her letter folded up in her pocket.

In the evening, she settles into bed early because there isn't anything really worth staying up for. She and Mordecai always went to bed some time between early and late, so they could read together. They were always the right kind of tired when they got into their beds and turned out the lights that reminded her of fireflies in a bottle. In the winter they'd have the fire going in the stove in the kitchen, and she'd be able to hear the crack and popple sometimes from her room. She remembers snuggling deep into her quilt, a quilt that used to belong to Mordecai's grandmother, and listening to the silence of snow outside.

Outside now things aren't silent, aren't still. The city is too close. She can hear cars and trucks going by outside, the horns, the tyres, the noises that all become one noise which is traffic.

But a little silver something is in her stomach now. There is a town in Wyoming. There is a letter in her pocket.

I love you. I love you. Maybe some day-- maybe he won't stop writing. Maybe he'll give her an address to write back to. Maybe she'll fly out, or drive out, or take the train-- Maybe her mother will let her without worrying too much. Maybe this silver stirring will wake her up again (she has been sleeping, it feels like a dull sleep, ever since the police found her), and she'll find a job, start life again. Like a car engine that has to warm up before it can work right. Maybe--

Suddenly she gets out of bed, goes to her dresser, and takes out the string of prayer beads hidden in the back, runs them through her fingers, presses them against her cheek. She closes her eyes. Maybe God is there. Maybe He's saying her name.

Anna Maria, you're home now.

Be brave.

Comments

[mhari.livejournal.com]

I. Um.

*flails around a bit*

I'm never sure what to say. Your original fic is so different from your fanfic, in some ways, and you have this way of starting out utterly mundane, almost too much so, and then gradually it turns into something magical and not quite real and yet very very real.

I don't know. I think if I have a criticism, it's that I want it to be longer, and go into more detail about them. I bet that's not what you wanted to hear. XD

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

*flails back*

Thank you so much. Also, see edited version for more detail. ^^

[tomecatti.livejournal.com]

... You have a beautiful way with words. Simply beautiful. This feels more like something that took six days than six hours. It's amazing.

I adore the construction of it, with the parenthetical memories and mother's thoughts; that took me a minute to figure out and i was going to say it was confusing, but it should be a little hard to understand immediately, i think. Also, the slow release of information is amazingly well done. At first, i thought she was a little girl, not a grown woman, and once she said she was a grown woman i only half-believed it (maybe that could be clearer?), and the other half thought that perhaps he was the leader of a cult, and had taken her for his wife and brainwashed her.

There are a few incongruities. Anna Maria sometimes remembers and it's not in parentheses, like after she gets the letter, and after she eats the ham sandwiches; but the ham-sandwiches one goes into similar parenthetical memory soon after, so you may have meant it and i'm just missing the obvious difference in the kinds of memories. In the first paragraph, you say that the place she's been for th elast three years was a grey place, but later it's very much a florid, foresty place, with greenery and vines(in her hair) and such, and even if the house was grey it doesn't really fit with her memory of it.

The bit about Mordecai's smile seems a bit out of place where it is now; I would put it somewhere after a reference to a smile, like most of the other memories follow a reference to what they're about, like the river; but memories are funny-flowing like that, so you may like to leave it there.

I think-because i watch Law and Order too often-that the police would be over-questioning her as well as Jacob despite any warnings by a psychiatrist, and there's no indication of the police questioning her at all; Mordecai's letter even refers to them possibly questioning her. It seems like something she would think about in the midst of all this.

This is a really tiny thing, but it's a bit unclear whether she was 31 when he took her, in the middle of the whole thing, or when she came back, and it relaly doesn't matter very much at all but it might be nice to know?

(is the last bit supposed to draw a parallel between Mordecai and God, because Anna refers to God as "He", and her mother was earlier thinking of That Man in capitals, even as a He?)

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

Thank you so, so much. ♥