Chapter 4: Part 1

She stared down at a lie as two men prepared to shut the casket, a final act to preserve the readily fraying veil of peace in her heart. A final comfort needed only by the living. A disguise painted onto the one person everyone had come to see. Did they want to see their friend, their partner like this? She didn't want to see her mother like this.

A weathered hand rose to the crematorium technicians, breaking them from the trance of their regular duties. The man who owned that hand stepped up to his dead wife. He slipped a leather tube case as long as a walking cane into the casket and placed a lifeless arm atop it. The man shuffled back and without further prompting, the casket lid lowered. A tremor threatened to secede from Theoline’s otherwise stony face as she studied the older, near perfect reflection of herself in the moment before the world would shut them apart forever.

A face, paler now than even Theoline’s, expressed for one final time, an unnatural serenity. If that moment when a frown slackens, when a maelstrom calms could be bottled her mother was plastered with the foul stuff and sculpted into a complete facade. Where were her wrinkles, where were the signs that this woman had truly suffered and loved the toll that is life? Theoline knew better, and for her knowledge she raged. Who would dare to force her mother into a role as baseless as this? Who would fucking dare to powder that nose and choose a costume for this warrior's final act on stage? Would only a few know the truth? Her mother would demand naught but armor and a firm jaw for her march into eternal denouement.

Only one person had the authority to do this. To paint over the truth of her mother's life with the brushes and colors of his own design. Theoline knew he would be looking at her now, harboring his own thoughts just as covetously, a false face reinforced with iron forged from decades of practice. Unabashed, she brandished her icy gaze like a fencing foil, flicking its edge up toward her father. She halted her coup de grâce, instantly disarmed by something less than a face, more a stretched husk of sunken skin and wispy hair. Freya had said Sebastian Monet looked tired. Unlike her friend, Theoline was cursed by the hindsight that only his daughter would know. Where there had once been a paragon of vitality, only a bent shadow remained. She could see the tension in his shut eyelids as they struggled to open.

...and those eyes! Like ghosts of emeralds, same as your fathers...

Her father muttered a few final words to the operators, but Theoline heard only the memory. Absent in thought for one moment, she found herself absent from the room in the next. The ghosts of emeralds, her mother used to say. Theoline felt ghostly herself, stalking the garden outside with chilled penitence, her stalwart companion. Like her father, she had adopted the mantle of deuil blanc or 'white mourning' which furthered her method-acting for the titular roll of a sleepy spirit number one. A peculiar fondness for the ancient tradition of wearing white to celebrate those gone had somehow persisted in the Monet family. The ideals behind it, however, had failed to cross the generational gap to Theoline, but that didn't mean she'd ignore it.

An oppressive gray mass of cotton-like clouds smothered the sky above since morning, wrapping heavy exhaustion tight around her already spent emotions. She wanted a place to sit. Needed one desperately. Needed water, needed to breathe, needed... just.

Her half-lidded vision took in a sparse copse of trees to her right. How she ached to be on the hunt, making waves, moving forward. She stumbled from her dull trance, having trudged up to a solitary red maple tree. Where sunlight would have flirted the leaves to their proper blush, they instead looked to have lost that part of their souls where the deepest shades of scarlet would pulse. She knelt to one knee before it, not a care in her core for the grass stains that would doubtlessly set into the edges of her dress.

"Will you marry me?" Theoline asked the tree, "Because I feel like the sort of sticky shit that lives only in the wet corners of Satan’s armpit and -well- you don't look your best either. Makes us a bit of a power couple, I think."

The tree shrugged it's branches by the slightest suggestion of a breeze.

"My dear, your enthusiasm is a comfort to this love-sick heart." Theoline said. She leaned back toward the tree and shifted about, sampling the different patterns of gnarled bark pressing through her dress until she delighted upon a tolerable vintage of discomfort.

As it turned out, time itself, the cunning bastard, had become her prison, rooting her here until her mother's transfiguration had run its course. Well, if she were to weather this short bout of incarceration, stealing a few diamonds of quiet seemed only proper.

A procession of mourners in white trickled in from the parking lot, lending their numbers to a concentrated mass at the entrance to the crematorium, satellites waiting to orbit around her father, most likely. From this distance, the congealed mass looked more like a cloud had lowered from the sky, a celestial elevator to take the freshly departed into whatever paradise they imagined would come next.

Theoline lounged in the purgatory of semi-consciousness, spending what final currency remained of her energy to keep vigil until her attendance was required. Only too soon, did that pesky obligation make itself known. What had once been a disordered mass of people had inconveniently decided to form crescent ranks before an arboreal guardian of their own, a drooping titan of a willow that looked to have strong opinions against shears, against any trimming accessories, as it were. If a grimace could be wielded like a hammer, Theoline was sure she could reduce an anvil down to atoms, and then probably expand her ambition into the arena of the sub-atomic.

She fought rusted joints and slumbering limbs until her legs found a rhythm that wouldn't threaten to send her sprawling. A small touch of luck had made it, so her approach came from directly behind all in attendance. She tightened the shawl around her shoulders, a fruitless endeavor to soak up any warmth the thin silk might have been hoarding for itself. She slowed to a stop at the very back of the group, behind a man about her own -already considerable- height. Her mistake was realized just one moment too late. If it were not for today’s batch of jumbled soup, sloshing about in the bone bowl where a brain was rumored to lurk, she would have clocked the familiar richness of caramel skin and that uncanny shine of black hair hanging to angled shoulders.