Previously…

 
More than a smile passed between them…some new understanding, seeing beneath the strength on the surface to the soft underbelly of the vulnerabilities they shared.

“Good.  Now I don’t have to kill you,” Helena laughed.

“Could have gotten messy,” Shane agreed.  “It’s all good.”

“Yeh,” Helena nodded.  “Let’s go see what’s troubling Alice.  She looks seriously annoyed.”

Arms around each other, the two guardians followed the walkway to join Alice, who was swearing and gesturing wildly.  “Shit Shit Shit!  Hell!”

“Now what?” Helena asked.

“She won’t go in,” Alice huffed.

“Who won’t?  Cinnamon?”

“Yeah!  Cinnamon!”

“Why not?”

“She won’t say!  God, Helena, I’m so tired, I just want….”  There was just the hint of a whine in Alice’s voice.

“You go on inside, get settled, get comfortable,” Helena soothed.  “I’ll speak to Cinnamon.”

“You want…?” Shane started.

“No, you go on in, too.  I think this is between Cinnamon and I.”  She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it, or even how she knew it, but there was some bridge to be crossed with Cinnamon before she would enter her house.  It was time. 

Approaching from the walkway, Helena could see that beneath Cinnamon’s burnished skin, muscles were twitching and shaking. Backlit by the candles inside, Cinnamon had wedged herself in Helena’s doorway, arms braced against the jambs in a posture that said “I shall NOT be moved”. 

The distance between now and then, here and there, is seldom as great as we believe.  It only takes some small thing…a taste, a smell, a familiar sight…and time can fold in on itself and slingshot backwards in a single breath.  For Cinnamon, it was the carpet:  champagne Berber, expensive beyond her frame of reference.  She knew something about fancy carpets and the people who owned them, even though she’d grown up in a dirt floor shack and hadn’t lived in a house with a wood floor until her brief marriage to TeeBeau, who built their home with his own hands from cedar and pine he logged himself.  The carpet stretched out before her, pristine, and she knew….

She knew she’d never catch Claire before she made it upstairs.  Her long-legged playmate could outrun anyone on the Chevalier plantation.  But she tried, oh yes, from the time they clambered out of the bayou, pounded across the clean-swept dirt yard, and into the house.  She could feel the bayou mud, caked and drying on her 12-year-old legs, topped with a dusting of red Louisiana dirt.  She knew the mud had already begun to dry between her toes.  Something about it felt odd, like she shouldn’t be feeling her toes at all.  She knew….