Calla-Chapter 10

“Where to Miss?” The cabby looked in the rearview. ---

Anne sat in the back seat with her hands wrapped tightly around the handle of her umbrella. Where could she go? The last train back to San Francisco had left. Besides it would be callous of her to leave at a time like this. She was stuck in Seattle. Damn him! --- --- “Miss, I need to know where were headed.” Anne hesitated. “Capitol Hill, The Conservatory.” The words rolled off her tongue and she hated that they did. She could almost see him smirking the way he did. Even now she couldn’t escape his supremacy. --- The Great John Hibbert! A sudden desire to snap her umbrella half rose inside her. What kind of a person was she? --- He had raised her to follow in his footsteps at the time of his passing, and now that time had come. He had lured her back by her own sympathies, baited her with her own inheritance to carry on his legacy. Put her name to paper even and low, he had passed in the night before she could even contemplate her own word. And now legalities would hold her to it! --- She was stuck. Bequeathed to a life she loathed. The one she had fought to get out from underneath by her life of independence. Hadn’t it been bad enough being dragged around the world her life through being filled with the pomp and rhetoric of his scientific community? Being raised as a horticultural savant; shown off at parties to recite Latin to adults carrying on in conversations far beyond her years! She had found herself a social cripple by her peers knowing nothing the small talk of fashion and music! Too passionate and serious with an exacting nature, lacking the same abandon of youth that most people around her felt. She often left parties humiliated, having said too much. --- He had made her this awful way and now left her behind in it. --- She wanted nothing of the life left behind. His life. The one that made her strange and isolated and lonely. --- At least with him alive she had someone to be angry with, someone to blame. Now it was just her alone in her rage and loneliness. She wanted to die with him or wished she had died before him so that he could feel this weight and not she! Damn him! God Damn Him to Hell! ------- Suddenly the cab stopped. The Conservatory. “Fifty-five cents, ma’am. You want someone to walk you in?” She dared not answer. Her rage crippled mind was betraying her countenance and she hid her crooked face from the driver as she handed him a dollar. She ran from the cab as he called after her. “You alright Miss?” --- She thrust her hand into her purse and pulled out a key and unlocked the door to the Conservatories main entrance, slamming it shut behind her. Turning toward the exotic displays, an awful animal utterance escaped from her mouth from her gut. It was an ugly sound somewhere between crying and yelling. Sadness and anger. “YOOOOOOUUUUU!” She shouted as hard as she could against the interior walls of the glass house until the last bit of breath expelled from her lungs, and she pushed the more until nothing was left but a helpless spittle of a groan. ------ Silence. ------ And there he was. All around her. ------- She could see him in the Sego palms and Dendrobiums that covered the walls of the room. Smelled him in the Narcissus papyraceus of the autumn display. She could hear him in the pond as it splattered against the rocks and shook the fronds of the Blechnum spicant waving at her like a tease. And she could feel him in the towering Livistona chinensis, far above her shoulders looking down at her from on high. -- And finally, the tears came. Not mild and sad, but hapless and ugly. An old familiar sadness that told her that she was alone and strange and impossible to please. And she found herself missing him in the most surprising way. She missed the anger that she felt for him. The anger that helped keep the sadness at bay. The blame that made the loneliness stop. He had raised her, and she hated him for it. --- In life she could not escape his vain grandiosity and now, in death it would be no different. She was tied to his intentions, whether she liked it or not.