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  Ascent

  A Novel

  M. C. Zappitello

  © 2012 by M. C. Zappitello

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means―electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other―except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  .Dedication

  “To love at all is to be vulnerable.

  Love anything, and your heart will be

  wrung and possibly broken.”

  ―C. S. Lewis

  This book is dedicated to those who have suffered

  much (most especially you, my Love),

  with profound gratitude for the

  Help available to us all.

  M. C. Zappitello

  Chapter One

  Not again.

  It was the late afternoon of a beautiful fall day, and I was supposed to be helping her with trigonometry, but Sam (a/k/a Samantha) Miller―friend and self-appointed amateur therapist―was pestering me about it, again. It was her unshakable opinion that the missing years of my childhood couldn’t have been all bad, and that I should “try harder” to remember them. Somehow, she still hadn't grasped the fact that the “try harder,” with professional assistance, had long since been unsuccessful, and that it felt safer to just leave it alone. So, whenever Sam caught wind of any kind of reunion, fact or fiction, such as the one she had apparently seen on the previous evening’s news―

  “Hey, Cassie, maybe you’re really from a rich family, and were kidnapped, and they’re still looking for you.”

  I frowned. This was not the first time she had suggested such a fairy tale-like scenario. “Right. And maybe you’re the long lost daughter of the Tsar of Russia.”

  Sam frowned back at me. “That's ridiculous. There hasn’t been a Tsar in Russia for a hundred years.”

  “My point exactly. This entire conversation is ridiculous, especially when you have a trig test on Monday, we’re not even halfway through the practice test, and you still can’t tell the difference between tangents and secants. Back to problem twelve, please,” I quietly insisted.

  “Oh, alright. But you can’t be as smart and pretty as you are for nothing.”

  Pretty? I stared at her. With my 4.0 GPA, she knew I wouldn’t try to argue the “smart” thing, but ”pretty”? This was highly questionable.

  “Well, you would be,” she responded to my unspoken challenge, “if you would put on some makeup, at least to bring out your eyes. And cover up those circles under them. And do something with your hair. You have so much of it. It’s not fair, you know. But it's so long, and you just leave it down all the time. It would be so cute layered and permed. And with the clothes you wear, it's impossible to even guess at your figure.

  “Oh, and those big words you use all the time―the ones that nobody knows but you. It puts people off, you know. Especially guys.” Now that, I reassured myself, was a blatant exaggeration. It was not “all the time,” and I wasn’t the only one who knew what they meant. At least, I didn’t really think so.

  “And if you weren’t so antisocial,” she continued. “You are such a . . . a hermit.

  I sighed heavily, then countered with, “And if you didn’t worry about all that stuff so much and were even a little antisocial, we wouldn’t be spending a perfectly good Saturday doing trigonometry. Problem twelve, please?”

  “Alright.” Sam looked at the alarm clock on her nightstand. "I need to be finished in time to get ready anyway. Jason is picking me up at seven." She gave me a sideways glance. "Say, Todd is free tonight. You want to double with us?" This was not the first time she had tried to set me up with her older brother. He was nice enough, and rather attractive, but . . . well, there was just nothing there. And never would be. Besides, I doubted that he would want to go out with me even if I were willing. Which I wasn’t.

  Sam knew all this quite well, as I reminded her with the look on my face.

  “Okay, okay,” she conceded. Subject closed. For the moment.

  Sam really was quite smart and a much better than average student, but since she had decided that those characteristics didn’t fit well with the “It Girl” persona she had assumed the previous year while we were juniors―much to her father’s chagrin and her mother's delight―she tried not to expose them any more than necessary. Her father, Brad, still missed the tomboy that used to shoot hoops and work on cars with him and her brothers. (Sam had three brothers: Todd, who was a year older than she and living at home while attending community college; Joel, who was almost two years younger; and Cody, who was about a year and a half younger than Joel.) Her mother, Debbie―given to fashion conscious leanings herself, as evidenced by her owning Belle's Boutique in town―was thrilled that her only daughter was finally “acting like a girl instead of one of the boys.”

  So, Sam could be frustrating at times. But her open, straightforward nature was easy for me to be around. Well, easier anyway. Most people were confusing at best. What they said was not really what they were thinking or feeling. And what they were really thinking and feeling was not always nice. (Understatement.) In fact, a lot of the time it was downright painful.

  Sound a little intense? I thought so, too. But that's the way it was for me.

  And the more people there were around me, the harder it was. Like at school. One class at a time had become manageable over the years―with tremendous, persistent effort―but I avoided the school cafeteria and assemblies as much as possible. If avoidance wasn't possible, I stayed on the fringes. When I sat very close to an exit so I knew escape would be quick and easy, I could usually stick it out. Sporting events, however, with adrenalin and feelings running abnormally high, were worse. Granted, a lot of the atmosphere at those was positive with people cheering for their own team. But it was still too much, and I still didn't go.

  Dances were the hardest―all the failed expectations, social maneuvering, and critical, cutting attitudes. A concentrated microcosm of daily school life. And, strangely enough, the romantic goings on―though not inherently negative―were just as difficult for me to bear. Boyfriend envy? I had asked myself. No. Although I felt a very real hole where something should be in my life, it was not a "boyfriend." There was an unclear, yet undeniably strong sense of something different―and more?―that had clung to me for as long as I could remember. Which remembering, taking into account my lost years, did not extend into the past as far as that of most seventeen-year-olds. To my mind, these two phenomena were undoubtedly linked. And there was nothing that could be done about either one.

  Oh, well. Back to the subject of dances―

  There was one time during my freshman year that I went to a casual school dance, sort of. Mark and Gina, my adoptive parents, insisted that I needed to have the experience, just once. So I tried going in, then came out almost immediately. The avalanche of emotional and cerebral input was overwhelming. It felt like my heart and brain were literally being crushed. So I found a quiet tree to sit under and recuperate. By the time the dance was over, my head still hurt, but my breathing and shaking had calmed down, so I walked home. Mark and Gina could tell it had gone badly. They didn't say much at the time, but, thereafter, left choices regarding my social activities entirely up to me.

  You see, I was very aware―far too aware―of what was going on around me, particularly what other people were thinking and feeling. I could sense people’s inner workings so clearly, I could almost see them. Sometime
s it seemed that I could hear the actual words they were thinking. I had never risked trying to directly confirm that with anyone, though. Too much potential fallout. And, what was happening had become so obvious that confirmation seemed superfluous.

  It was like having all the channels on a big screen TV going full blast in my head twenty-four/seven. I didn't like it. And, hard as I tried, I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.

  It was quite out of the ordinary, I had discovered, to be so sensitive to such things. That’s why I hadn’t shared these experiences with anyone since before I came to live with Mark and Gina. The negative reaction that such revelations had elicited from the staff at the treatment center (where I was initially placed for evaluation, and the first place I really remembered) was not helpful, and I ended up recanting in order to smooth things over. Better to keep it to myself than to be considered stranger than I already felt.

  What could anyone do to help me, anyway?

  And maybe that’s why I had been abandoned in the first place: I was beyond help.

  So I struggled along on my own, doing the best I could to tune out the world or, what worked better, stay out of the world as much as possible. Hence, Sam's accusation, “hermit.”

  Although I didn’t want to admit it to anyone else, I couldn’t deny to myself that, after all these years and more than half my life, I was still preoccupied with wondering who I really was, and what had happened to me. And why was I so odd? I hadn't found any answers, and I had grown to believe that I probably never would.

  There were no clear memories of early childhood for me―just vague impressions: An underlying sense of warmth and light interspersed with intense flashes of cold, fearful darkness. And pain. Physical or emotional, I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. I wished I could remember. It surely wouldn’t be pleasant. But maybe these disturbing non-memories would then stop intruding themselves into my dreams every night, and I could finally sleep.

  At the same time, I was also relieved that I couldn't remember. Maybe clarity and detail would just make it worse than it already was.

  As if my life weren't confusing enough to begin with.

  In any case, the first thing I was sure that I wanted to recall clearly was being taken to Mark and Gina Campbell’s house by an adoption caseworker. I say “house” because it didn’t feel like a home to me then or for some time after. But Mark and Gina never gave up on me.

  They were wonderful. I don’t know how they made it through that first year particularly. I wasn’t exactly the easiest child to bond with. But Gina has always reassured me, “You were worth it, Cassie. And you still are.”

  Throughout their years together “B.C.” (“Before Cassandra,” as they nicknamed the years before they took me in)―commencing as high school sweethearts, progressing through college marriage, and continuing into their careers as educators―they had always planned on children “down the road.” Gina had an affinity for younger children and music, while Mark gravitated toward adolescents and sports. And so they believed they were uniquely qualified for whatever scenario might come up with children of their own―except for not having any.

  They tried all the natural and medical means they could find for years, but nothing worked. And, somehow, they were okay with that. In fact, Mark teased Gina about it. He would give her his version of an alluring look, then say that he didn’t think they had really tried hard enough with the “natural methods,” and that it might not be too late to provide me with a younger brother or sister. Gina would blush, roll her eyes, and giggle. Then they would both decide they were unusually tired and go to bed early.

  Mark―who, in the meantime, had completed a master’s degree in education administration―was an assistant principal and the athletic director at the high school, and they could afford for Gina to quit her job as the music teacher at one of the local elementary schools in order to stay home to care for a child (which they had planned to do anyway). So, they decided the best thing they could do―now that they were in their mid-thirties and farther “down the road”―was to adopt a child. And not just any child, but one who “really needed them.”

  I’ve been told that when the adoption worker heard that, she immediately pulled out my picture and profile. I don’t know if it was the utterly lost look on my face or the fact that I couldn’t remember anything about my past that tugged at their hearts, but Mark said they knew then and there that I belonged with them. And Gina concurred.

  They were told that I was an intelligent child, with no mental or physical disabilities. I appeared to be appropriately educated for my age, and was actually ahead in at least some areas. But I had a total block to any memories from before I was found sitting on the steps in front of the local police station, and only sketchy awareness for several days after. All I could tell them was that my first name was Cassandra, that my birthday was August 29th, and that I was seven years old. "Unknown trauma" was the determined cause.

  It was also determined that I was hypersensitive to my environment due to the unknown trauma I had suffered, and that this was the reason for my fearful and withdrawn behavior. Although my “symptoms” did not improve, extensive observation and testing during an uneventful three month stay at a residential treatment center resulted in the conclusion that I was ready to be put in a fost/adopt home while the time ran until I could be officially released for adoption.

  And that’s how I ended up with the Campbells.

  No evidence was ever found regarding my identity, so when the required time had elapsed, I was theirs. We went through the court proceeding, with the judge smiling and pictures being taken. I didn’t like being out in public at all back then (not that it's less of a challenge now), so instead of taking me out to eat, we picked up dinner and a cake and celebrated quietly at home.

  Mark and Gina could tell I wasn’t comfortable calling them “Mom and Dad,” and said they understood. I can’t say that I did. I just knew it didn’t feel quite right. So I’ve always called them by their first names.

  Now, as I walked home from Sam’s house, having successfully completed the review for her trig test, I marveled again at the monumental understanding and patience Mark and Gina had shown me during the years I had been with them. They must really love me. And they loved me in spite of how unlovable I must seem; how unlovable I must be. After all, I must have been entirely unlovable to someone to be "traumatized" and left like I was.

  How bad would a seven-year-old girl have to be to cause what happened to me? It was a disturbing question I had never allowed to go beyond my own thoughts.

  It was only September, but the weather had started turning cold earlier than usual. I took my time walking home, slowing down to make sure I stepped on all the dried leaves on the sidewalk that were brown, leaving the yellow, orange and red ones to blow around in the breeze that had come up. The sun was sinking low in the sky and it was getting cooler by the minute, but that meant there probably wouldn’t be many people at the park and I might even be able to have it all to myself. My jacket would keep me warm enough for a while yet.

  I loved this time of day. It seemed so much more calm and peaceful when the bright blue and white of the daytime softened into pinks and peaches, sometimes soft reds, and finally, a deep blue that was almost black with countless twinkles of light in it. And I could more often be alone.

  The large park was empty. Although it was next to the sports fields of our high school, the football game was out of town this particular Saturday night, and all was quiet.

  I found my favorite swing and lowered myself into it. Should I see how high I could go, maybe even jump out of it like I used to do years ago when I half believed that I would fly instead of hitting the ground? (Gina said it was a miracle that a sprained wrist was the worst injury I had ever sustained from doing that.) It had been a long time since I had tried. Maybe I was “too old,” but I looked around carefully and, sensing no one near, started swinging.

  I timed each pass perfectly, pushing harder with my
legs to go higher, and higher. My eyes focused on the beautiful, muted tones of the clouds in the distance between me and the almost set sun, wondering what it would be like to fly through them. The cool wind blew my long hair behind me, and I felt as though it were offering to lift me up in the air. I closed my eyes and imagined that if I could just get a little bit higher and let go at precisely the right instant . . . .

  “You aren’t really going to jump, are you?” inquired a male voice.

  I froze. And started to panic. Who was that? How did he get so close? I always knew when there was someone around―I could always sense it. Why not now? This had never happened before. What was wrong with me?

  But, then, there was something about the voice. Something stirred deep inside me. Something on the edge of memory. Something familiar and . . . safe. Something comforting and warm. This hadn't happened before, either. Something, someone trying to push through the haze; trying to be heard; trying to be seen . . . .

  I let the swing come to a stop and sat there, eyes still closed, straining within myself to see and hear. What was it? Who was it?

  “Are you alright?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then opened my eyes to see that the sun was now entirely gone, leaving in its wake the faintest wisps of light and color just above the horizon. Maybe this hint of a good memory would fade, too. And the positive feelings that came with it. But since they came with the voice, maybe they would stay as long as the voice did. As long as he did. If I spoke, would they go away? Would he?

  I replied quietly, “Yes. I'm fine. Just enjoying the sunset.” Were the good feelings gone? No. Still there.

  “And the swing, I see. Mind if I join you?”

  I could have come up with an excuse like I always did―such as I need to get home for dinner, or it’s getting late (both of which were true)―and run away like he had the plague. But this time I didn’t want to. This time, this person, felt very different, and, surprisingly, I wanted to stay. So I instead murmured, “No.” Then I finally looked at him.