Story of grief (WIP)

 Had a dream after my dad died that seemed like it’d make a good story. I am still working on it so it’s only in parts and very rough. The asterisks indicate a break where I just went on another thought train. Ignore any spelling mistakes or grammar issues.

It’s extremely personal and fairly autobiographical  my relationship with my dad could complicated but I did love him. 

Ainsley sighed as she left the warmth and light from her grandmother’s house and stepped off the porch into the pouring rain. She stood at the end of the driveway, face turned up to the sky and let it soak into her black sweater and jeans, fully aware that she’d be extremely uncomfortable soon enough. She also knew that her rideshare driver was going to be less than pleased to have a soaking wet person sitting in his car but she didn’t care. 

She didn’t care about much of anything right now. Her father’s passing had been sudden and shocking, throwing Ainsley’s already chaotic life into more turmoil. Her mother had been inconsolable and her grandmother devastated, having only seen her son hours before he died. 

But Ainsley resented how her grandmother tried to paint the past as something rosy and beautiful when it had been a difficult few years. More than a few years actually. Ainsley hadn't really known her father. Not in the way her mother and grandmother had before he was struck by a car while riding his motorcycle at 21. It completely changed the trajectory of not only his life, but the life of those surrounding him.

Her parents had separated briefly after a series of serious and escalating incidents before getting back together after a year and a half. As they mourned together, her grandmother had said to just remember the good times.

The young woman scoffed as she spotted the headlights of the rideshare driver slowly making his way down the street. It’s not like you can forget any of the bad that happened before Ainsley’s father died. But that could be an argument for another day because right now all she wanted to do was to get home, have a hot shower and fall into bed to sleep for the next thousand years.

A dark-gray sedan stopped and the driver rolled down the window to peer at her through the dark and the rain.

“Ainsley?” he asked with a slight accent, scowling at the sight of his waterlogged passenger.

“Yep.”

He reached down in the passenger seat and tossed what looked to be several towels into the back seat.

“Lay some on the seat so you don’t get it soaking wet and use another to dry yourself off,” the man said. “Don’t you have an umbrella?”

“I forgot it,” Ainsley mumbled, doing as he had asked.

She carefully placed herself and her luggage, which was wrapped in a garbage bag, into the rear of the car and began toweling herself off and squeezing the excess water out of her dark hair. The driver began heading towards the train station and the young woman shivered at the coolness of the car. Ainsley asked him to raise the heat just a bit and stared out the window, watching the streetlights pass.

She jolted with a start 20 minutes later when the car came to a halt outside of the bustling station. She had either fallen asleep or had been so out of it, she hadn’t realized they were so close to her destination.

Ainsley gave her thanks to the driver as she yanked her bag towards her. She gave him a decent tip using the rideshare app, noticing how dangerously low her battery was. The little red battery icon mocked her with its five percent notification. Great, she had to hope she had her battery brick and charge cord in her suitcase.

She grumbled to herself as she moved through the expansive train station, barely concentrating on where she was going. As Ainsley looked at her dying phone to text her mother that she had made it to the train station, her elbow hit something hard. She looked up into the angry, dark blue eyes of a taller man wearing a gray apron.

“Excuse you,” he snapped. “Pay attention to where you’re going.”

She muttered a quick sorry and scurried away, feeling that gaze drilling into her back. As she went to round the corner to hopefully grab a cup of coffee, a man in a slate blue uniform stopped her.

“Ainsley Travers?” he asked in a deep voice.

The young woman jumped, not expecting anyone in the station to pay attention to her, let alone know her name. The man was tall, with broad shoulders and sandy brown hair that was closely cropped on both sides with the top being longer. A black belt crossed over his chest and connected to the belt at his pants, a holster at his waist.

Ainsley realized he must be a cop or some kind of security within the train station. She panicked slightly. Had something else terrible happened?

“Yes? Can I help you?”

“My name is Captain Enzo Carnell and I need you to come with me.”

Ainsley gave him a frightened look and then glimpsed past him, noticing a whole group of people waiting behind him looking anxious and agitated. 

“Please, Ms. Travers, “ the captain said, laying a gentle hand on her crossed arms. “It is of the utmost importance that you come with me.”

Feeling uneasy, the woman picked up her suitcase and let him lead her and the other dozen or so people back the way she had come. The group that trailed Captain Carnell consisted entirely of men, which struck her as odd and off putting.

As they walked past where Ainsley had bumped into the man in the apron, she noticed he joined the group and that a graceful woman, also wearing an apron, had taken his place. Her apron was not pristine like the man’s had been. Hers was spattered with color and a light gray, looking more like a Jackson Pollock painting than clothing.

The man Ainsley had bumped into walked next to her, not even sparing her a glance. Captain Carnell brought the group to a door diagonal from the shop the woman was at and opened it, ushering them inside.

As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Ainsley saw small, chipped blue tiles lining the walls and floor. Every two feet or so, there was a round drain glinting in the fluorescent bulbs overhead. On one wall, there was a row of shower heads and on the opposite wall were stainless steel racks to place things on, fluffy looking towels on the top shelf. It was what she assumed prison showers looked like from the movies and television shows she saw.

“Line up under a showerhead and place your luggage on the shelf behind you,” the captain ordered everyone.

“Wait a minute,” a deeply tanned man, several years older than Ainsley, said angrily. “What is going on?”

“I promise everything will be explained but before we can continue, you’ll need to wash,” Captain Carnell said.

Wash? Ainsley thought. She was still soaked from her lack of an umbrella. Her waist long brown hair had started to slowly frizz and curl as it began to air dry.

“It is important that you do this before you can move forward,” the broad man said, his eyes serious.

“Wait a minute, Enzo,” the man she knocked into said. “I’m supposed to be leaving. Why am I here?”

Captain Carnell shrugged.

“Things change,” he said before turning his attention to everyone else. “You’ll need to strip down and clean yourselves. Towels are behind you.”

Ainsley yelped.

“You expect me to get nude in front of an entire group of men?” she asked shrilly.

The tan man side-eyed her as he began stripping.

“Trust me, you don’t have anything we’d be interested in anyway, sweetheart,” he said.

Ainsley shot him a death stare before turning her concern back to the captain. He didn’t seem particularly phased or bothered.

“We’re all the same at our base levels,” he said cryptically. “If you’re that uncomfortable, you can continue to wear your undergarments.”

She glared at the man before slowly peeling off her damp sweater and jeans and placed them on the rack behind her. It seemed as if she had no choice in the matter and found herself shivering in her very unattractive bra and panties.

To her left, the man in the apron was carefully placing a beautifully painted mug on the shelf. The word ‘Jagger’ was written at the top in a flowing script. Ainsley turned to him as he reached up to turn on his showerhead.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she whispered.

“No one ever does when they first get here,” he said back in an unfriendly tone.

Well that didn’t make sense at all, but Ainsley decided to preoccupy herself by turning on her own showerhead. Which was of course too high for her to reach and she was sandwiched in between a jerk and what her mother would call a “crankysnotapotamus.” Had she been a woman who wore high heels, she would have plopped some on her feet and easily could have turned it on. Instead, she was struggling to stay balanced on her tiptoes as she futilely swiped at the showerhead. She stumbled, knocking into the tanned, rude man who swore at her and pushed her.

Ainsley slipped on the now damp floor and felt herself fall. The hard smack of the tile never came. Instead, she was jolted as the man in the apron grabbed her arm and pulled her upright, shooting the tanned man a nasty look.

“You could have just said you needed help,” he said, reaching up and turning on the water.

Slightly hot water began dribbling out of the showerhead and onto Ainsley’s face and head. The man frowned, fiddled with the head again and the water began coming out at a faster pace.

“You didn’t see me struggling?” she sputtered through the water.

He heaved a huge sigh.

“No, not really,” the man said. “I had my mind elsewhere, like why I’m still stuck here and not leaving like I thought I was.”

Ainsley was confused. Both this man and Captain Carnell acted as if they couldn’t leave the train station. Hysterical laughter began to build in her throat and she fought to push it down. What the hell was happening?

She scrubbed at herself half-heartedly before asking the man to turn off the water for her. Ainsley wrapped one of the large towels around her tightly and waited for Captain Carnell to speak.

The captain cleared his throat and everyone’s attention turned to the burly man.

“From here, I will bring each of you to a supervisor who will explain what is going on,” Captain Carnell said. “You can get dressed if you have other clothes. If not, clothing can be provided. The clothing you took off will be washed and returned to you later.”

“What do you mean later?” asked a man near the back.

“You will be here for the foreseeable future, but the supervisor assigned to you will explain everything,” the captain replied before he escorted the person closest to the door out.

Tears began to well in Ainsley’s eyes. She was stuck here? What about her life and her mother? She would be devastated that her daughter disappeared without a trace. She couldn’t have that happen to her, not after everything her mother had already been through.

Sobs ripped through her as she sank to the cold, wet tile. Apron man knelt down beside her, looking uncomfortable. He touched her shoulder and Ainsley turned her red-rimmed hazel eyes to him.

“My father just died,” she managed to say through her heaving cries. “I have to go back to my mother.”

The man gave her an understanding look.

“You can’t right yet, but you will be able to in time.”

Ainsley began to cry even harder.

“I can’t disappear off the face of the planet! I can’t be kept here against my will, you have to let me go,” she said.

The man sighed and ran his hands through his unruly light brown hair.

“I wish it were up to you or me but it isn’t,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

She remained on the floor crying as Captain Carnell called people’s names and led them out of the room one by one. Soon it was just her and the man in the apron.

“Jagger, back to Orphelin,” Carnell barked, jerking his thumb out the door. 

Ainsley barely acknowledged that she has learned the man’s name before he had grabbed his things and slipped out the door, leaving her and her echoing sobs behind.

Captain Carnell approached her and stared down at Ainsley for a minute before he crouched low. Her sobs had slowed to small hiccups and she was startled by a white handkerchief with the initials EC embroidered in green at one corner.

“Here,” Captain Carnell said, offering it to her. “Dry your tears.”

“But my father just died and my mother needs me,” she said, feeling more tears burning at the back of her throat. “I need to go home. I can’t stay here.”

“Everyone is here at one point,” the man said to her, still holding out the handkerchief. “I promised it would be explained to you. And Orphelin is one of the best supervisors there is so you’ll be out of here in a jiffy. Not sure why Jagger is still stuck here though.”

Captain Carnell’s last comment seemed to be more to himself than her. She sniffed and took the fabric from his blunt fingers, eliciting a small smile from the man.

"I know grief can be difficult," the captain said, standing and offering Ainsley his hand. "But it is a journey, just like everything else in life."

"Grief is shitty," the woman spat, voice hoarse from tears and exhaustion.

"Yeah," Captain Carnell agreed. "Yeah it is. But grief can root you in place and never let you go. That's not good. That's why it's important to process it."

Ainsley nodded as she took Captain Carnell's hand. He pulled her up and turned his back as she threw on a pair of black yoga pants and a heathered green, long-sleeved shirt.

She hung up the now soaked towel and gathered her luggage before following the captain out of the shower room. She was still sniffling slightly and her eyes were beginning hurt from all her crying as Captain Carnell led her to what appeared to be a pottery store.

Jagger was standing near a display of bowls with a scowl on his face and the spotless apron back in place. The beautiful and tall woman Ainsley had seen before appeared to be lecturing him. He seemed very involved in dusting the display and polishing the shiny finish on the bowls, trying hard to ignore the woman.

"How is it that you always seem to be left behind?" the woman asked. "Out of everyone I've helped, you've been here the longest."

Before Jagger could reply, Captain Carnell cleared his throat, catching the attention of the pair. Jagger's eyes narrowed at the sight of Ainsley and her breath caught in her chest at his look. It was a combination of hostility and pity.

"Enzo, welcome!" the woman said in a loud cheerful voice. She glanced past him and noticed Ainsley trying to hide behind his bulk. "Hello, dear. No need to hide. I won't bite."

"Orphelin," the captain acknowledged with a nod. "I've brought you another ghoseh."

“This is a waypoint station,” Orphelin said slowly as if the young woman standing before her couldn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth. 

“Oh my God, am I dead?” Ainsley asked the other woman. “This isn’t some Chronicles of Narnia crap where the train I was on derailed and killed me but I don’t realize it?”

The older woman snorted. “Of course not!”

“So I’m not waiting to be let into heaven or hell?”

“Hell would honestly be more preferable than this,” Ainsley heard Jagger mutter underneath his breath.

Orphelin must have heard him too because she shot him a glare and he began cleaning the mugs on the display table a little faster.

“No, this is just a jumping off point in your journey forward in life,” Orphelin said.

“That sure makes it sound like I’m dead.”

The woman huffed, annoyed.

"That's not it at all. God, you're worse than Jagger."

The man heard her and turned around.

"Hey!"

"Don't sound so insulted," Ainsley snapped.

"Listen," Orphenlin began. "For lack of a better word, you're stuck. It's not up to me to say who is to stay and who is to go. But I do know that everyone here is here to let go of grief."

"So you're telling me that everyone in the world comes to some sort of spiritual way station when they're grieving?" Ainsley asked.

"No, not everyone," the older woman explained. "Just some. The people who are here are people who have been found to not be able to move on."

Ainsley frowned at Jagger and Orphelin. Jagger just shrugged at her and went back to rearranging some plate display.

"So some benevolent… God? Determines who stays and when they go?" she asked.

Orphenlin shook her head.

"Who needs this place, yes, but said benevolent being doesn't determine when you leave," the paint splattered woman said. "That is entirely up to you."

*****

In her second week at the way station, Ainsley began to explore whenever she wasn't constantly rearranging the displays at Orphelin's pottery shop or bickering with Jagger.

On her third or fourth poke about the vast area, she happened upon a booth with Customer Service written above in big, bold letters. Sitting behind the desk, filing papers, was a neatly dressed man with combed hair, a brightly colored polo shirt and a name tag that read 'Locke.'

Locke glanced up and caught a glimpse of Ainsley and paused his work. He threw a thousand watt smile her way, making her dislike his perfectly white teeth.

"Well, howdy there!" he called in a cheerful voice, a heavy drawl creeping on.

****

Anger

"You clearly have some unresolved issues and anger in regards to your father," Locke stated.

It took every ounce of self-control in Ainsley to not roll her eyes at the man.

“Oh, you don't say?" she said with heavy sarcasm.

The older man gave her a disapproving look.

All her life, her father's world had been dominated by some kind of pain and some kind of turmoil. Her first real memory of medical problems for her father was in the second grade, when his hand began to turn blue because of a blood clot. Then it slowly began escalating from there.

She remembers the fights from high school when his medication would turn him into something she didn't recognize. He tried to kick her out at least three times her senior year of high school. When she was a sophomore in college, he went to rehab in order to help deal with the withdrawal symptoms of getting off his prescribed methadone.

And then in her senior year of college, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. It led to being put back on strong opioids. He beat it, just as he beat testicular cancer at 25 but it left his body and immune system decimated. And that led to physical limitations that frustrated her father and that led to more fights between him and her mother. And fights with her.

It never turned physical with Ainsley but it could have. Once he broke his cane over a gate close to her face. She never thought her father was capable of getting physical with anyone, he was a frail man, until it happened.

That was what caused the separation. She still doesn't know all the details surrounding her parents' brief separation but she knows there's more than what her mother has told her. And she understands to a point.

"How is it possible to be so angry at someone yet love them so much?" Ainsley asked.

Locke gave her a knowing and sympathetic look.

"I think that's a common thought," he said. "People we love anger us all the time."

"I feel terrible that I'm horrible for still being so angry with my father for everything he put my mother, his family, his friends, me, through," Ainsley said. "It infuriates me that my grandmother wanted to pretend like nothing had ever happened."

Locke stops typing on his computer and looks up the clearly frustrated young woman.

Ainsley continued to rail against her grandmother and her obvious blindness against how her father had treated people in the past.

"I mean, she was there when he and I had a big blow up and yelled at each other," she said, her angry voice echoing off the tiled walls. "I wanted to scream at her to open her eyes. All my life people have told me I had to make accomodations for my father because he was sick or he was in pain. But they never understood the abuse my mother and I lived with! Which is why I am still so angry with him!"

Hot, angry tears streaked down her face and she did her best to prevent herself from completely breaking down.

"Listen, Ainsley," Locke said in a serious voice. "I can't tell you when or if that anger will ever subside. You've spent most of your life in a vicious cycle and you're allowed to be angry at your father and hate him, even while loving him. I think you're being too hard on yourself. Grieving is an unpredictable process and clearly you have some unresolved feelings towards his behavior."

Just then Jagger walked in, causing the two to look at him. The man's face turned red as he noticed Ainsley's upset state.

"Oh uh, I'm sorry," he said, hands raised as he began to back up. "Don't let me interrupt."

Ainsley sniffed and wiped her nose with a tissue.

"No, it's fine," she said, standing. "I was just about to leave."

"I was under the impression we were still having a conversation, Ms. Travers," Locke said. 

"I'm not sure if I can finish this conversation quite yet," Ainsley said as she brushed past Jagger. "I'll be back some other time."

The woman disappeared into the bustling crowd leaving behind a confused Jagger and concerned Locke.

****

“Why are you here, Jagger?” Ainsley asked. “Who are you mourning so deeply that you’ve been stuck here for as long as you have?”

The man glared at her, ocean eyes flashing dangerously. She had gotten to know Jagger well enough that his look meant he was about to lash out.

“Drop it,” the man growled, shifting his gaze to the ceiling.

“You can’t leave because you’re just so angry all the time!” Ainsley shouted at the man.