And more! Happy Merry Christmas Eve! :D
Chapter Twenty-Four: Part V
Janine Rimmer lived in a tipsy-topsy world. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, she felt unpleasantly distorted and insubstantial. Not a person, but an image, a reflection that had stepped out of the looking glass only to find she had lost her way back in…
It began at the engagement party. The night she met Frank's parents.
Janine had never been a big drinker. Two family toasts, two flutes of champagne, and already she'd felt lightheaded and a little sick to her stomach. But her mother-in-law-to-be had kept signaling for her glass to be refilled, kept smiling and encouraging more toasts around the table, and Janine had wanted to please her. She'd wanted to belong…
That same night, ugly rumors had begun to circulate through the rarified ranks of Outer Rim society. Janine and Frank had to leave the party early. Janine had spent their engagement night passed out in the bathroom. Janine, the filthy Earth Nehb, was a sloppy, fall-down drunk.
Frank used to fight those rumors. At social events, when the snide looks and whispers began, he used to rise from the table and call the gossips out on their cruel, backhanded bullying, and Janine had loved him for it.
But the rumors had persisted, fed, she knew, by Frank's mother. Cruel ambushes and exaggerated tales were but one sally in her passive campaign – not to order Frank and Janine to part, but to smother their loving connection, poison the ground so the roots of their love would shrivel slowly, on their own…
Frank had refused to see the danger. He'd said Janine was overreacting, that his mother would have to come around once they were married.
But the wedding came and went, and the manipulation only got worse.
Frank's latest promotion had brought the young couple to Mars where, she'd hoped, they'd be free of his mother's shadow. Where they could start a family of their own, be the warm, caring parents she'd always wished she'd had…
Celebrity had come early for Janine, and with it a sense of deep and insecure isolation. From childhood, she'd been told it wasn't her the adults around her valued, but the reflection she cast: a commodity rented out to consumer brands first by her parents, then by the teams of agents and publicists and marketers that had collected and compacted around her shining likeness like ice and dust around a comet. Market research had deemed her image relatable and friendly, attractive yet unthreatening, and therefore suitable to add an air of trust and reliability to any make-up, toothpaste, shampoo, shoes or undergarments associated with her bright eyes and gleaming smile. For years, her camera-flash reflection had walked the runway at Shanghai and Stockholm, flipped its hair and flashed its eyes on monitor screens, encouraging the people of Earth to taste the latest in simulated vegetable proteins.
But at night, those same eyes had stared out from the washroom mirror at a face no one saw or cared to see…a girl with large pores around her nose and spots on her forehead, her dark, damp hair revealing ears that stuck out just a bit too far. A stranger to the world, and to Janine…
Until she met Frank Rimmer.
She'd noticed him at a political fundraising event, tall and dashing in his uniform like a character off the pages of the forbidden romance stories she hid from her handlers in a folder marked 'World Literature'. He'd glanced her way, and Janine had felt her hidden heart begin to glow. From the first moment, she'd wanted this man to see her, to reach through the reflection she cast and pull her up through its glassy surface…
And, to her joy, he'd done just that.
For the first few years after their marriage, everything had seemed to be on track. They'd had a fine home on Mars, two happy, beautiful children. Frank had even been offered a position with Special Services.
But, before long, things began to change. Frank started getting passed over for promotions he'd all but been assured he would get. Months of waiting turned into years, and Frank grew angry, then frantic, then desperate, then despondent. Janine had tried to help him, to support him, but he'd pushed her away. His attitude towards her and their children turned cold, his bitter words laced with slurs against her genes, her education, her Earth background. When she'd struck back, he began to parrot his family's tasteless jokes, the cutting rumors he'd once defended her against.
Then one night, in the tense, quiet aftermath of one of their increasingly frequent fights, he'd told her to have a drink. "You can drop the pretense, Princess," he'd snarled in her ear. "Everyone knows you're a lush."
She'd stared, disbelieving, at his face, she'd searched his eyes…
And for the first time since she'd known him, she'd seen no love in her husband's expression.
Janine had taken that drink. Then another. Then another…another...
She told herself she'd done it because she was hurt, because she was angry, because she'd been scared of losing him, losing everything they'd built...
Her mother-in-law took her late night binge as an excuse to hire a nanny. She'd said Janine was fragile, that she couldn't handle being a mother, let alone a wife. The nanny, in turn, had told the children it was their fault their mother had become so ill. That she didn't have time to play…
Janine had tried to put things right, but the trap had already been sprung. She found herself cut off at every angle, her love smothered, her voice silenced, her intentions misrepresented.
Finally, after years of planting patient seeds, Admiral Rimmer had what she'd wanted from the start.
Janine Rimmer disappeared…
To Be Continued...
Please Review! :D