Full Circle - Day 12

If you are new to this blog, start with the first post (Day 1). Happy reading and don't forget to leave your comments.

Day 12

Ivan nervously cleared his throat. “The night that Camile died,” he continued. “started out no differently than any other night. You raced off to her suite in the basement just as you did each day.”
“Suite?” Victoria asked incredulously, “Suite, Father? Now who’s having delusions of grandeur? I remember the room; It was sparsely furnished and it was always very cold in there.”
Viola started to speak up but was quickly cut off, this time by Alexandria. “Oh, Victoria, no. That was an image you built up in your mind. Camille had everything in her suite that you and I had in here. And then some,” she added.
“But the cold, I remember the cold, Alex,” Victoria said weakly.
“Yes,” Ivan said, softly. “her suite was cold. It had to be kept at a certain temperature because if the room ever became too warm, she…” he paused, tears filling his eyes again. “Camille would have had difficulty breathing,”
Viola reached out and touched his arm reassuring him that they had to do this. There was no turning back now.
Ivan continued, finding the courage to continue down this dark road to the past, in the strength of his wife. “You and Camille played while the nanny sat nearby. You girls were eight at the time, so we knew you knew how to play gently with Camille. Although she could not talk or move about much on her own, her eyes always seemed to light up at the very sight of you.” He smiled sadly, remembering Camille’s angelic face that was always framed by large black waves of curls that fell over her shoulders and midway down her back. She was so beautiful, he often thought she reminded him of the most perfect porcelain doll. ”She adored you, Victoria. And you adored her,” he whispered.
Victoria stared at him now. Her entire face was red and swollen from what felt like hours of crying. “Yes, Father, that’s true. I remember that. All of it. So how then can you even attempt to convince me that I would have done any harm to Camille? How could you dare blame her death on me? How do any of us know that you would even tell us the truth? Nanny’s not here and only Camille and I were the other two people in the room In fact,” she added, slowly. “You weren’t even in the room. None of you were. You just said this minutes ago.”
Now the room became eerily quiet. Ivan cleared his throat, breaking through the silence of the room. “I did say that,” he agreed, “You see, after I finally convinced your mother that Camille had to have her own suite in a private part of the house…”
“The basement.” Camille interjected.
“The basement,” Ivan repeated weakly, his voice seemingly fading with each word. “She insisted on installing cameras in the suite. She loved Camille deeply, and never wanted to feel as if she were ever very far from her, even when she could not physically be in the room with her.”
He looked now into Victoria’s eyes. He saw such a desperate hopelessness there, something he had never seen before in her. Or perhaps, he had never taken the time to look. “So,” he continued. “about two hours or so after dinner, Nanny came rushing upstairs, crying hysterically. But because she spoke virtually no English, we could only piece together that something had happened and that Camille was hurt. That’s when we rushed down there to find you sitting in the corner, your arms wrapped around your legs, face on your knees and you were simply rocking yourself back and forth. We looked across the room and there was… there was Camille lying on her back on the floor.” He paused. Pushing his fingers through his hair, he walked over to the window again. But what he was trying to escape from, would not release him. The horrible images of that night had often haunted him, but he had never shared this painful memory with anyone. No one who knew, ever dared to speak of it. “We tried to get you to tell us what happened,” he said, finally summoning the strength to continue. “But you just sat there rocking and humming. We saw that you were holding something in your left hand, something you absolutely refused to release. We tried to speak with Nanny, but it was just no use. We couldn’t really understand her and she didn’t understand us.” He paused. His throat was beginning to feel the effects of hours of soul cleansing confession. It felt as though it was extremely dry and perhaps even inflamed. Mindlessly, he rubbed his hand up the length of his throat as he continued to stare out of the window.
“But what about the screams I heard?” Victoria asked, finding all of this very hard to hear, yet she was compelled to listen. “Why did I hear Camille scream?”
“You did hear someone scream,” Ivan said, hoarsely. “But it wasn’t Camille. It was Alexandria. She had made something in school for Camille and had come in to give it to her when she saw her lying there on the floor like that.
“I remember that,” Alexandria said, recalling that moment with haunting detail.
Be sure to look for the continuation of this story in about 3 days.