Much later, when Dani would stop caring about Maris altogether she would see, humiliating as it was to admit, that Maris had broken up with her at least three weeks earlier in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, she would understand that Wal-Mart was the perfect place for a breakup because it left no room for a confrontation; who wanted to break up in front of a parking lot full of Wal-Mart shoppers? Who wanted to break up under the watchful eye of the great toad, Alex.

They had decided to make a day of it, drive south to Rutland and shop at a variety of second hand stores, including the expansive Treasure Chest Antique Center in Diamond Run Mall (where Maris bought a ‘50’s era salt and pepper set that she insisted on paying for herself), stop for lunch at Denny’s and take in a matinee then shop for school supplies at WalMart and round out the day with a nice dinner at one of Rutland’s many mid-range restaurants. Overall it had been atypical, the usual except that Maris insisted on paying her own way, going dutch at Denny’s and even paid for Dani’s ticket at the theater. Dani was pleased to see her suddenly determined to pay her own way rather than let Dani pay for everything just because she could.

Dani had been mellow, basking in the warmth of the late summer heat, giving Maris her undivided attention – for once – and even pickedout a few vintage pieces of jewelry to give to Maris at dinner. But then the whole glorious expedition unraveled when they reached WalMart. It was Thursday – pay day for many so the parking lot was at capacity. A steady stream of shoppers coming and going flowed around them like water eddying around two rocks standing side by side in a busy stream. Dani attempted to take Maris’s hand but the hand was suddenly busy adjusting the long strap of Maris’ shoulder bag. Maris scanned the parking lot with interest until her eyes lit on Alex sharing a cigarette with Bobby at the SAM’s soda dispenser situated near the entrance and just like that, their twosome had turned into a group and Dani spent the rest of the shopping trip competing for Maris’ attention.

Bobby was there to distract Dani, but she blew him off and with a spurt of real disappointment, paid for her supplies – Alex and Maris had wandered off – and drove back to Middlebury at an ungodly speed with music blaring loud enough to almost drown out her most vicious, punitive thoughts of revenge against Alex and the acidic litany of every major or minor irritant she had spent three years tolerating in Maris. Her first stop in Middlebury had been to Good Will Industries, to drop off the gaudy sparkling blue brooch and the necklace, earing, bracelet set – still in the bag with the receipt – and without a backward glance drove across campus to the gym where she worked out for a couple of hours until her rampaging thoughts ran out of gas; she was physically exhuasted and emotionally drained. After a shower she sat at the dinette and reviewed one syllybus after another until Maris finally returned home near midnight.

After Maris had settled she sat on the futon wearing a pair of rosebud cotton pajamas and stared at Dani until she finally worked up the courage to break the heavy silence.

“How could you ditch me in Rutland and leave without a word?”

Dani put down the syllabus she was reading and crossed her arms over her chest. She hoped to God Maris could not see that under the dinette her legs trembled violently. Except for that she felt nothing at all. “You were with Alex. I assumed you would get a lift from her.” She did not ask what was uppermost in her thoughts: where had Maris been all evening? Even if they had shopped for an hour and stopped for dinner, it did not take five hours to drive from Rutland to Middlebury.

Maris frowned and shook her head. “I have never felt more humiliated.”

She managed to sound genuinely affronted.

Dani tried to find any emotion to direct her next move, but she was void. She shrugged.

“I finished shopping and I couldn’t find you, so I came back.”

“I waited and I waited. Thank God Alex waited with me because otherwise I might have been stranded there.”

"I knew you would get a lift back with Alex.”

Maris flushed.

“We were supposed to go out to dinner.”

“Well I supposed with me out of the way, Alex would take you out to dinner.”

“You and your stupid jealousy; we had a perfect day and you spoiled it.”

Dani felt something then but it was the last emotion she wanted to entertain: doubt.Had she misread the situation? Had she been wrong to assume Alex’s presence and the chance meeting at WalMart had been arranged? Had Dani overreacted and blown the whole thing out of proportion? If so then she had wasted a perfect opportunity to wine and dine Maris and instead of finishing the day making love, they were now in separate corners with a chasm of mistrust festering between them.

Maris wanted her to believe it was her fault. Had not Maris humiliated her by wandering off with Alex in the midst of their otherwise fantastic day out? They had not made love in months, the long summer was finally ended and Dani was free to live off campus and yet, here they were, starting the year with distrust when they should be celebrating their new start.

Doubt in her own judgment grew. The trembling in her legs increased. Dani wanted to believe Maris was faithful to her so she swallowed the tormenting question that almost sprang from her lips. What had Maris been up to in the intervening hours, why had she not at least called Dani on her cell phone the minute she realized Dani and her car had vanished from the parking lot? It killed her to do it, but she wanted everything to be right again, so she apologized.

“I’m sorry; I don’t know what came over me.”

That had been a mere four weeks ago and now it was perfectly clear that her fears had been merited and her jealousy justified.

Dani stepped over the small puddle of blood and hurried to the bathroom. She ran water over the cut and proceeded to clean the jagged tear with soap. It stung like hell. Diluted with water her blood swirled down the drain carrying with it threads of tiny pink soap bubbles. Gritting her teeth she reached for a towel.

What the hell? Where were the towels? After several terrified seconds she spotted a lone washcloth on the floor just outside the bathroom; clean, still folded. Keeping her hand over the sink she reached for it. The bathroom was not much more than a cubicle with just enough room for the stand alone shower stall, a sink and the toilet. She scooped up the cloth and pressed it to her injured hand. For a split second she glimpsed her image in the mirrored medicine cabinet. Her face was white and her deep blue eyes wide, the pupils tiny. The scant sprinkling of freckles looked like garish age spots. She looked old and haggard. She opened the cabinet. The last thing she wanted was to see her own heart-shaped face. She scanned the contents of the cabinet looking for bandages, butterfly stitches, tape, peroxide, and extra strength pain medication. She gathered the supplies and cleared a spot at the dinette of spilled salt and pepper with a sweep of her arm.

Dani was prone to injuries and was used to doctoring herself. The cut was not too deep. She hoped she could keep it closed with the butterfly stitches because the alternative was to drive one hour to the emergency room in Rutland and be asked questions about how the injury happened. She could not very well tell them, “I have no idea.” The next thing you know they’d be recommending her to the resident psychiatrist.

It took a while to get the blood flow to slow and to dry the skin around the wound enough to assure the bandages would adhere. After she had the cut closed up she applied a dollop of anti-bacterial ointment to a large gauze pad, secured it with tape and then wound her hand several times with gauze strip and secured everything with an ace bandage from the supply she kept in the closet. It was not easy to perform all this with her fingers shaking – especially the butterfly stitches and clips. She was feeling a bit woozy. The pain was finally beginning to kick in, throbbing in sync with her pulse. She used her teeth to remove the cap on the pill bottle shook out four tablets and then swallowed them with water directly from the kitchen tap.

In the single stainless steel basin she spotted several small splinters of glass: red, orange, green, yellow and blue – the dinnerware -- and one white shard of ceramic with a tiny red arrowhead marking one edge. Whatever had happened, it had begun here, because the last thing she remembered was looking at the matching mugs, both now gone. There was one spray of blood droplets arcing at midpoint on the basin wall and up over the spigot. The blood was almost completely congealed. Then she took a good look at the apartment. It was in a shambles, a chair toppled, the futon mattress bloody and half hanging off the frame at an angle at one end, books on the floor in front of the bookshelf.

Droplets of blood appeared nearly everywhere on the floor and the furnishings. There were several smears on the wall above the bookshelf where two identical posters filled with thousands of scattered brightly colored buttons once hung side by side. All that remained of the posters was one long vertical strip dangling from one red push pin. Salt and pepper was scattered across the far surface of the patterned pink table top, but the shakers were nowhere to be seen. Dani followed the trail of blood all the way to the door, keeping her left arm folded to elevate her hand. The highest concentration of blood was on a cardboard box on the desk. It was the box that was supposed to be in the back seat of her car holding her athletic gear.

Shaken, Dani examined the box. It was taped up. A blood smeared sheet of white printer paper, folded in half and addressed to Maris’s post office box in shakey handwriting, was taped to the top. On the desk, the gooseneck lamp was toppled on its side, the flexible neck broken in half exposing a glimpse of green and yellow wires.

In a matter of days Dani realized that staying in the efficiency was out of the question. It was barren of anything that had once made it homely and personal. Now that it was emptied of Maris and her stuff and everything else that indicated there had ever been an us, Dani rattled around in it like the last remaining bean in a dried up bean pod, clinging tenaciously to a withered old vine.

She contacted the office of the Dean of students and inquired about a dorm room, but was informed all were taken and she would have to wait in line until one became available. The Dean added her name on the waiting list, Danielle E. Knapp. She threw herself into her studies with a fury, only to find her mind wandering, only to catch herself in the middle of class staring blankly out the window or rereading a single paragraph a dozen times without comprehension. She worried that her grade point average would suffer.

She struggled for three weeks. She barely ate. She couldn’t sleep. She threw out the box addressed to Maris, reasoning that silence and getting on with her life with as little drama as possible was the best way to get over the breakup quickly. Besides, all that blood would have raised questions and would invite unwanted pity and she was already deflecting piles of questions and comments from nosey classmates and the locals. Several of her friends assured her the best revenge was to recover quickly by hooking up with someone else. She could not help but wonder if they were probably the same friends who had commiserated with Maris on the great mystery of Dani’s sexual orientation and its supposed link to her missing mother. A few, male and female, assured her they would be willing to help her get even with Maris but she declined. The whole sordid affair left a bitter taste in Dani’s mouth.

Only her closet friends, those in her study group, restricted their question to her well being and kept her distracted by pulling her into their studies.

At the end of each day she opened her phone, sat for several minutes with her finger poised over Barb’s number and each time she snapped her phone shut, turned out the light and went to sleep. Their friendship was still new, yet to Dani it felt as if they had been friends forever. They clicked. Of all her friend’s Barb was probably the one who qualified as her mother substitute. The irony was not lost on her either, Barb being straight and all. A friend and confidante, Barb would listen to Dani, she would say all the right things, soothe Dani’s hurt feelings and with heartfelt sympathy – with honest heartfelt love. It would be so easy to call her but Dani had to be strong. Barb was happy in Texas, at work on a nursing degree from Texas Baptist College. The last thing she needed was Dani’s cloud of despair raining misery on her head.

Oh, but she missed Barb.

Almost immediately after Maris’ escape, Dani’s mommy dreams returned. She treated them in the same way she had these last several years by taking a long hot shower and chasing it with a steaming cup of black coffee while conjugating a choice verb in every language she knew. Since her coffee maker and the towels were now at the landfill -- Dani bought new towels but decided the purchase of another coffee maker represented permanence so did not replace the old one -- she nightly drove two blocks to the local Double D on Route 7A that went through the center of town and ordered an extra-large black coffee. She parked the car and sipped the scalding drink while conjugating verbs until there was no room left for the details of her dreams.

In the past few years she had endured these nightmares shaking them off easily, forgetting the details, but this one repeated nightly. One night she dozed off while parked in the big Double D parking lot in the middle of conjugating the verb move in Hebrew and woke with a start to the call of her mother’s voice so loud Dani looked to see if Mama was in the passenger seat.

“Shut up,” she muttered. “Will you just shut up?”

A Toyota Camry slowed and pulled into the parking lot. Its headlights swept Dani and the interior of her GEO as it moved by and drove to the back of the building where the drive thru menu was situated. At this early hour the restaurant was closed – only the drive thru remained open all night to accommodate night travelers, truck drivers and delivery vans.

Her window was half open letting in the cool pre-dawn air, the scent of autumn, and the rattling sound of a lazy wind chasing leaves across the pavement. The weather had remained dry and unseasonably warm. All it would take was a day of steady rain and a strong headwind to knock all the leaves off the trees and now in mid-October this far north they were long overdue.

She took a long drink of lukewarm coffee, hearing Mama’s voice echoing, “Wake up sleepy head, sunshine and raindrops or you’ll miss the bus.” It was total nonsense as ridiculous as the trembling panic that still coursed through her muscles. She had to talk to someone about anything, before the nagging voice of her dreams drove her insane.

Conceding defeat she flipped her phone open and called Barb; who answered on the third ring.

“Who died?” Barb asked in her sleepy mid-western drawl

“I’m sorry Barb. What time is it there?” She forgot about the time zone difference, was it an hour or two hours?

“Night time. Are you all right?”

“Can’t sleep. Do you want me to call you back later?”

“No; give me a minute.” Dani heard rustling, and Barb’s voice, speaking quietly to someone else. “It’s nothing, go back to sleep.” A door opened then it closed.

“I’m putting down the phone for a moment; don’t go away.” After a few minutes she came back on, emitting a long lazy yawn.

“I’m sitting on a window sill at the end of the hall. My roommate’s a light sleeper.”

“Sorry,” Dani said in a lame voice, feeling foolish for being a nuisance.

“Sorry that she’s a light sleeper?”

“Sorry for calling at this ungodly hour.”

“I welcome hearing from you any time of day. Besides, you know I’d tell you if you were making a nuisance of yourself. You sound a little sad.”

Oh God, was she that obvious? Obvious to Barb, maybe. The girl heard nuances of emotion other less sensitive people often missed a talent that would make her an excellent nurse.

“Am I cold?” Dani blurted the question before she thought it, simultaneously understanding that had been the main message in Maris’s letter and that she had sublimated it completely.

“You? Au Contraire.” Falling back on their habit she continued in French.”You are a bit reserved, but I would never describe you as cold. Who told you that?”

When Dani did not answer, Barb supplied the answer, “Maris.”

“You heard about the breakup?”

“Uh-hmm, I have been expecting your call.” Her tone left no doubt how little she thought of Maris’s opinion. “I should be so lucky to have a mate as loyal as you are.”

She stopped short of insulting Maris directly. Dani half wished she would go ahead and speak her mind but she was sensitive to Dani’s regard for Maris – look what that had gotten her – and Barb was too fine a person to bad-mouth even cowardly little Maris.

Barb’s insightfulness only made Dani want to open up even more.

“Guess where I am.”

Barb recognized the deflection and accepted it. “Dunkin Donuts?”

“I am sitting in my car drinking black coffee and conjugating verbs.”

“Like we used to, but at four o’clock in the morning?”

“The time is five a.m. here.”

“Oh, I forgot about the time change. Would it not be simpler to make a cup of coffee at home; economical too?”

“My coffee maker died.”

They spoke for several minutes continuing in French, Barb catching up on old friends and campus gossip. Dani asked her about the new direction she had taken. Flipping from language studies to nursing was a big leap, coupled with a desire to take nursing into missionary work among poor and indigent families. It was clear she was happy with her decision.

“I keep dreaming about my mother.” Dani blurted when their conversation wound down. It was easier to say it in French. “I fell asleep a few minutes ago in the middle of a conjugation and I thought she was in the car with me she was so loud. I wish she would shut up and leave me alone.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dani rubbed one thumb around the curve of her steering wheel but did not answer.

“Maybe your unconscious is trying to send you a message.”

“It is, but it won’t take no for an answer.”

Dani imagined Barb’s mouth curving into a smile in response to her wit.

“You are a little fighter,” she said in an approving voice. “But you have so much sorrow bottled up; it’s bound to come out, either naturally the way God intended, or in other less savory ways. Please tell me you are not a danger to yourself or to others.”

“No,” Dani lied. Her eyes settled on the livid scar on her left hand, the only evidence left to remind her that something terrible had happened that night. So far she was a danger only to herself and a variety of inanimate objects.

Barb changed the subject abruptly. “I got curious, you know, about all the things you did not tell me about your mother so I read her trilogy over the summer. It really was quite good, full of spiritual metaphors.”

Last semester, right here in this parking lot on a windy March afternoon, Dani had told Barb about her mother’s inexplicable disappearance seven years ago mere hours after her father’s murder, information anyone could find easily with a bit of effort. It was the story she told everyone after declaring – with a bit of defiance – that she was an orphan. Oh yes, she had her entire extended family, enough people to organize a small militia, but bottom line, her parents were gone and she was an orphan. Only Barb had picked up on her tone of defiance and had recognized the challenge in it so she had pressed Dani for more information. (Maybe others had heard the defiance but until Barb no one had shown the courage to address it) Dani had broken down and told her everything she could remember – except the strangest parts -- those she had kept to herself.

Now the pressure to tell Barb the whole truth turned into a giant choking lump in her throat, the need was even more visceral than wanting to let her pent up emotions go. However, some things you do not dare say out loud because ordinary people might suggest a wardrobe change – in like, You wanna wear this nice straight jacket Dani?

Barb was silent on the other end of the line.

“I don’t want you to think I’m crazy.” Dani reverted to English. She had sat on this secret so long, a secret so dangerous not one person in the family dared speak it, though they all knew they were thinking the same thing. She was breathing hard and sucked in a long calming breath, held it in and let it go slowly.

“I would never think that about you.”

“It’s about the main character of Mama’s books, the Orphan Prince”

“The Orphan Prince?”

“All I ask is that you suspend disbelief.” Dani pushed forward.

Barb murmured her consent.

“The Orphan Prince is real.” The car did not leap into the air and come crashing down, spilling warm coffee from the Styrofoam cup. Dani spoke in a rush wanting to get her confession over and done with, before Barb cut her off with some scoffing remark.

There was no ridicule, blatant or implied, in Barb’s query when she said, “Real?”Before Barb could articulate any protest, Dani hurried to get the truth told before she lost her nerve, before she sprouted feathers, turned chicken and ran.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three