Page 13 of Brutal Legacy

“Sorry, I’m not feeling good. I should go. I’m cramping your style.” I nodded toward a hipster-type dude at the bar giving Erica the eye.

“You don’t have to go,” she pouted, sending a smile in the hottie’s direction.

“Yes, I do… Have fun.” I summoned a smile for her from somewhere and grabbed my jacket and left. It wasn’t cold. LA seldom got cold enough to wear anything heavier than a light jacket.

I wandered home along quiet streets, lost in the halls of memory.

The message played over again and again in my head. It was too early in Italy to call, with the time difference. I had to wait. It was sure to be a sleepless night until I spoke to someone.

I got home and fiddled with the lock. It refused to open.

“Just open,fanculo!” I rasped, tears pressing on my eyelids.

I rattled the door, twisting the key this way and that, until the damn thing bent. I sank down against the wall and leaned my head on my knees, tears pushing up and out, uncontrollably.

Why could nothing ever be easy?

My work paid well enough, but living alone in the city was expensive. Being a widow in her thirties, I didn’t want to share a space with roommates, so here I was, in a place where the door didn’t even lock and I was too scared to call the landlord about it.

I couldn’t go home to Italy; I’d rather die in my little apartment alone than relive all that I’d experienced there. Not to mention the paralyzing fear of flying I’d discovered when I left. So, I was stuck. Life had stopped, and there was no restarting it.

By the time the knees of my jeans were soaked through and my cheeks burning with salt, a soft sigh sounded. I looked up just in time to see Old Albert standing at his door across the hall from me.

“The lock again?” His voice was the result of a pack-a-day habit over the last seventy years. He sounded like the Crypt-Keeper and yet was the healthiest ninety-year-old I’d ever met.

I nodded.

He shuffled out of his apartment, screwdriver in hand.

“Nothing to cry that much over,” he remarked lightly, jiggling the lock.

I watched him work. His gnarled old hands were like knots of wood. A rush of gratitude threatened to overwhelm me.

“I’m not crying about the door… I’m just wishing you could be my dad,” I muttered.

Old Albert chuckled. “Dad? More like granddad.”

“Whatever. Family, I guess.” I glanced down at my hands. “I’d trade my own family in a heartbeat.”

“Family is as family does. You can choose your own, I reckon, if you want,” Old Albert said kindly and swung the door open. “There you go. Right as rain.”

I stood and impulsively hugged him.

He patted my back.

“Go on in and get to bed. Everything will feel better in the morning; take it from someone who’s been around the sun a few times more than you.”

I nodded and gave him a smile. He went back to his apartment, and I waited until the door closed safely behind him then slipped into my own. My tiny, piece-of-shit, hole-in-the-wall with a door that barely worked, no AC, and a landlord who liked to come over in person for the rent and remind me that I could pay a reduced rate if I let him watch me shower once a week. Not free rent, just reduced. How flattering.

I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I set down my keys.

My dark eyes stared back at me. Erica was right. I seemed off. I was haunted, but that made sense, in a way.

I’d always been haunted by the past. The year I’d turned nineteen, a bomb had imploded my world, and the aftershocks were still rocking me.

I’d never get over them.

My necklace glinted in the darkness, and I pulled it out from under my hair and held the beautiful silver locket between my fingers, rubbing my thumb over the smooth metal. Inside the locket was a perfectly preserved sprig of heliotrope.

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