Page 4 of Chaining Daisy
Flickering rows of red votive candles full of prayers light the wall behind her, but no one realizes that instead of summoning angels, there’s a demon in their midst.
Daisy weeps for joy as she walks down the aisle towards me in an innocent tea-length dress of pale yellow, full of the belief that her mother gets some sort of fairytale ending. Sweet, innocent little Daisy has no idea I wanted to be her villain, not her mother’s prince.
Stuck in a tux with a bow tie that’s cutting off my air flow, my smile at Daisy is genuine. But so is my attraction, which always crops up at the most inconvenient times. My girl takes my breath away as she walks toward me, and I have to cup my hands in front of myself to hide the hard-on I got just from staring at her.
I try to talk myself down. I have to remind myself that she just turned nineteen—is about to have to inhale and swallow a shitstorm of pain—and this is the long game I’m playing. I have to remind myself that Darla’s a good person, a good soul, and even if she isn’t my soulmate, she created my soulmate and deserves the utmost respect.
I tell that monster in my chest that wants to grab at Daisy’s hands instead of her mother’s that he has to wait, and I rein him in. Control him. Just like I do with everything else in life.
I speak the vows to be loyal to Darla for the rest of her life, but both she and I know the truth. It’s only a matter of time. Treatment isn’t working. Even the experimental program I’ve gotten her into—one where she’d be so pumped full of radiation that we wouldn’t be able to be in the same room with her for a week at a time—won’t do much but delay the inevitable.
I’m buying her time, not a cure.
But time is a gift Daisy needs.
I take Darla’s hands in mine and speak halting vows in a gruff tone after the chaplain. But on the line, “I will be yours for all the days of my life,” I glance over at Daisy instead of her mother. Because I speak those words to her.
GUNNAR
12 MONTHS LATER
“Daisy, hurry up! You’re going to be late!” I call up the stairs as morning light filters in through the arched front hall windows. My voice echoes off the tiled floor but soaks into the adobe accent wall, the mud bricks swallowing the sound. I sigh as the grandfather clock in the corner ticks on, the pendulum a little squeaky because I need to get it serviced. It’s close to eight, and if she doesn’t get a move on, my sweet Daisy is going to miss her first class.
There’s no response from above.
Dammit.
I’ve been trying to give her space and let her mourn. Trying not to let loose the animal inside my brain trying to tell me it’s finally time. The one who makes me stand outside her door at night, listening to her even breathing after she’s cried herself to sleep. The one who makes me go inside and stare at her. I won’t give in to him. Not yet. I know I won’t be able to hold him back forever … but she’s not ready yet.
I’m going to have to be patient. She’s still healing.
I start up the stairs, wondering what the hell I’m going to be up against this morning. The first two weeks after her mother passed, Daisy was practically comatose. Understandable. The two months after that, she would get out of bed to shower and eat and then slide right back under the covers. The past two months, I’ve coaxed her into getting up long enough to go volunteer at an animal shelter for a couple hours a day. I’ve been taking care of her: cooking for her, teaching her to cook, helping her do chores when she’s too melancholy to get up.
But after four and a half months of mourning, I have to do something. She can’t stay holed up in her room forever—she’ll never move forward that way.
Darla was a good woman. I might not have loved her, but I respected her. Even at the end, the woman had grit—sarcasm and banter pouring from her mouth during her final days. And I know exactly what she’d want for her daughter. She’d want Daisy to go on living. Find happiness. And happiness isn’t lurking behind her bedroom door. I am. I’m not going to be a lurker much longer though.
The second semester just started and my girl is finally going to start college.
I push open the second door on the right, the door to Daisy’s bedroom. Her room is nothing like the rest of the house, which has typical Southwestern decor. I had it decorated for her when they first moved in, and her choices had surprised me. Daisy had wanted everything shabby chic, light-blue walls, a hand knotted rug, a quilt, and that old furniture that’s repainted white to look worn.
She hadn’t wanted a TV, telling me that watching it before going to sleep was bad for you, with a pointed look that said she disapproved of the sixty-inch monstrosity on my own bedroom wall.
In addition to the typical teenage collection of band posters and twenty pounds of unnecessary makeup, she also had a collection of teddy bears.
I’d scoffed when I helped her unpack them all those months ago.
“Aren’t you a little old for these, Daise?” I’d asked, pulling one of a dozen bears out of a box. It was a small white bear in a black vest, hardly as big as my palm.
“Excuse me,” she’d grabbed her precious stuffed animal out of my hands and hugged it defensively to her chest. “But do you even know the origin of the teddy bear?”
“No.”
“It was named after Teddy Roosevelt because he refused to shoot a bear on a hunting trip.”
“Okay…” I’d tried to follow her logic and not the way the bear drew my attention to her breasts.
She’d turned away, and I still remember how her white sundress had swirled around her legs as she marched over and set the little white fur ball on her bookshelf as she continued, “Someone else caught the bear and tied it up for him to shoot. But he said it was unsportsmanlike.”
