Chapter 10 - The Retaliation
Desperation makes monsters out of small, vicious people.
Three days after the confrontation at the dining room table, the suburban house was empty. My father had checked into a modest residential hotel near his architectural firm, taking only his clothes and his drafting supplies. Chloe had vanished entirely, reportedly sleeping on the couch of an old college acquaintance, refusing to answer Eleanor’s hundreds of hysterical voice messages.
Eleanor, however, did not go quietly into the night.
On Wednesday morning, Daniel was at his firm’s corporate headquarters downtown, and I was working from home in our second-floor study. The street below was quiet, shrouded in a cold October fog that rolled off the nearby river.
The sound that shattered the quiet was the high-pitched shriek of a car horn, followed by a sickening, metallic crunch.
I bolted up from my desk, running to the arched bay windows overlooking the street.
Parked halfway up our limestone curb was Eleanor’s blue Honda Civic—the car she had taken from Chloe. Its front bumper was crumpled against the heavy steel bumper of my brand-new silver luxury SUV.
Down on the pavement, Eleanor was screaming at the top of her lungs, wearing a tattered trench coat, her hair wild and uncombed. In her right hand, she gripped a heavy metal crowbar.
"Mia!" she howled, her voice echoing down the pristine brownstone street. Neighbors were opening their windows, peering out into the mist. "Come down here, you little coward! Come look at what you’ve done!"
*Crack!*
With a ferocious, manic swing, Eleanor brought the crowbar down onto the driver-side window of the silver SUV. The reinforced safety glass spiderwebbed into a thousand opaque fractures, but didn't shatter.
*Crack!*
She struck the driver-side mirror, sending plastic and glass flying across our limestone steps.
My hands flew to my mouth, my heart pounding violently against my ribs. I reached for my phone, immediately dialing 911.
"Emergency services," the dispatcher answered.
"I need immediate police assistance at 414 St. James Place," I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "There is a woman with a weapon outside my home vandalizing my vehicle and attempting to breach the property."
"Officers are en route, ma'am. Stay inside and lock all doors."
I didn't need to lock the doors; Daniel’s high-tech security system was already engaged. But down on the street, Eleanor wasn't stopping at the car.
Dropping the crowbar onto the pavement, she stumbled toward the heavy iron gate of our brownstone. She grabbed the bars, shaking them with violent, rattling force.
"You took my husband!" she screamed, her face pressed against the cold black iron, tears and rain smearing her mascara into black tracks down her cheeks. "You poisoned my daughters against me! You think you can throw me into the gutter? I gave you life, Mia! I made you! Everything you have belongs to me!"
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a glass bottle filled with clear liquid. A rag was stuffed into the top.
A Molotov cocktail.
The air left my lungs in an icy gasp. "Oh God."
She fumbled with a cheap plastic lighter, her fingers trembling wildly in the cold rain. The spark caught once, twice. The rag flickered with a small, dancing orange flame.
Before she could raise her arm to throw it against our front wooden door, two black-and-white police cruisers screeched around the corner, their sirens blaring a deafening, piercing wail.
The cruisers blocked both ends of the street. Four officers jumped out with their service weapons drawn, shouting commands over the roar of the engines.
"Drop the weapon! Drop it right now! Step away from the gate!"
Eleanor froze. The flame was licking up the fabric of the rag, burning down toward the neck of the glass bottle. She looked at the officers, then looked up at the second-floor window where I stood behind the safety glass.
For one second, our eyes met through the fog.
In her eyes, I didn't see a mother. I didn't even see a human being I recognized. I saw an abyss of absolute, unrepentant entitlement—a woman who would rather burn the entire world to ash than admit she was wrong.
"Drop it!" an officer screamed.
With a muffled sob of terror, Eleanor dropped the burning bottle onto the wet pavement. The glass shattered, the accelerant igniting into a sudden, roaring puddle of fire on the asphalt.
May you like
Two officers tackled her to the ground, pinning her wrists behind her back, the cold steel of the handcuffs clicking shut over her wrists as the rain quickly hissed out the flames.
***
