Trapped in Forever

69 ~ Annie is Okay

A/N: This is the last chapter, babes. I'm still in shock that it's actually OVER now. I hope you like the ending and please don't ask for a sequeal because it just won't be happening, sorry! But I will have a new novel posted soon in a few weeks. Thank you so much for all of your wonderful support and reads and votes and definitely comments. Without you, I would have never continued to write something that was so hard and made me feel like I was doing it all wrong with every paragraph but you guys were incredible and made me actually feel like this was something halfway decent. Thank you. And, by the way, I totally expect the last sentence of this novel to become a "thing" like "Okay? Okay." or something. ;) 

I spent a few weeks at my parents’ newly renovated lake house, slowly adjusting the changes in the furniture and paint colors, the hardwood floors that didn’t creak and the screen door that didn’t slam when it closed, the door hinges that weren’t rusted and the mattresses without the sharp springs, but it began to feel like an actual home after a week and I discovered that my mother had saved one of the picnic tables in the garage, unvarnished and with the red paint still chipping on the seats and an abandoned bee’s nest in the corner, and my father carried it out into the front yard, and I spent my evenings there despite the slowly descending temperatures, bringing my meals out there or studying for my GED, both much to my mother’s pleasure. I was still learning how to finish a meal or how to take more than a few bites of some kind of meat that wasn’t turkey, but it was a start, according to my therapist, who was a woman in her early forties with brunette hair with a few streaks of silver around the hairline and crow’s feet around her smile when she smiled, and she was a bit of a hippie with her tie dye shirts underneath her black blazers and a multitude of plants in her office so it always smelled like dirt, which I didn’t really mind. It felt less like a therapist’s office and more like a biology class room and she took her notes down on a hot pink legal pad, something she said made her clients feel a little more comfortable for some reason. “It makes it all seem less official and more like they’re talking to a really good friend,” she explained, but although how she got that from the color of a legal pad was beyond me.

Today, though, I decided that I would leave the lake-house and told my mother as she weeded her garden, still trying to preserve the last few flowers before a late October frost came and caused them to wither into brown stalks, that I was going back to Shiloh to do a few things, everything already planned and ready to execute in my mind, and that I would be back for dinner, and asked if we could have pork chops with green beans, and I could still see the wide smile blooming on her face whenever I closed my eyes, her enthusiastic nod causing a few strands of hair to catch on her lips, and she waved me goodbye with one gloved hand, clutching a muddied trowel with her thumb and pinkie, and I waved back to her as I drove away, earning the gravel crunch underneath the tires. My heart was pounding when I thought of the faces I was going to see, the tactics I was going to deploy, and I said a small prayer that I wasn’t about to screw this up.

The first place I stopped was so familiar that it was almost a natural instinct to crawl out of my Smart Car and hear my footsteps pound against the front porch, creaking the wooden planks, and open the door without knocking, shouting out her name and glancing around the first story for her blond hair or blue eyes. But this time I was tentatively to the front porch, my footsteps barely squeaking on the wooden boards, and I pressed my finger into the doorbell, hearing the chimes echoing inside and bouncing off of the walls as I waited, glancing around and glimpsing the worn wicker patio furniture with sun-faded cushions strapped to the undersides, and there was a ladybug crawling on the arm of one of the wicker chairs when I heard the footsteps come tumbling down the stairs, as if she were falling, and I recognized them immediately as her mother’s. I felt a small twinge of fear then, realizing that this was actually happening and that she was actually coming, actually gripping her hand around the doorknob and unlatching the lock, and that I was actually here, and I thought about running away, ducking underneath the wicker coffee table, but I remembered what I held in my hands, grasped it a little tighter, and waited for her to answer.