Thresholds

By Adrianne Hall

Everyone has a secret. Some of those secrets cross over the threshold to being outright lies. Winter Bernard and Carley DeVries are two college co-eds who, while harboring their own deep dark secrets, befriend each other and through a series of heroic events find themselves embroiled in unfolding the life-altering truth about another co-ed's tragic death.
Throughout the twists and turns that their lives take, the characters in Thresholds come face to face with the realization that nobody really knows the impact that secrets and lies will have whether or not they are discovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adrianne Hall
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989718806

Adrianne Hall

A Monrovia, California native, Adrianne is a lifelong connoisseur of fiction that is packed with intrigue. She began writing poetry as a child. The Twilight Zone, her favorite television show, shaped her writing of short stories from adolescence through young adulthood. These early literary experiences have inspired the creation of THRESHOLDS.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The 3rd floor Point room was a popular hang-out for the dorm residents of the Ladies Residence Hall at Praise Christian College. Or to be more accurate, it was a popular hangout until one of the young co-eds committed suicide in that room at the start of the Christmas break last year. Now the other dorm residents preferred to stay clear of the room because they believed that it was haunted.

Prior to taking her own life, Victoria Conrad had been excited that she was barely one semester away from her college graduation. Her excitement was derailed when just days before leaving to go home on Christmas break she found out that she was pregnant. She planned to tell her parents during the holidays and make some decisions regarding what to do or not to do about the baby. First she thought she had better inform the baby’s father about her condition.

The father of her unborn child was a tenured professor at the college who wanted to keep their relationship a secret. He claimed that he and his current wife were going through a messy divorce and if his soon to be ex found out about their relationship he could lose everything.

Victoria and the professor had been secretly seeing each other for close to four months. But when she told him about her pregnancy he went ballistic and accused her of trying to trap him into leaving his wife. He pompously denied the possibility of the child being his at all. Feeling confused, betrayed and devastated Victoria decided that she needed to teach the professor a lesson.

On the Friday before Christmas break, she mailed letters to the members of the college board of directors and the professor’s wife explaining all the sordid details of their relationship. She then retreated to the Point room of the women’s dorm and ingested the contents of a bottle of sleeping pills and guzzled down a bottle of caustic soda drain cleaner.

When the women’s dorm residents returned three weeks later from the Christmas break, they were greeted with a putrid stench that was so horrible they had to go back outside to breathe. Building maintenance was called to track down and eradicate the foul odor. Once they realized that the smell was drifting down from the Point room, it didn’t take long before Victoria’s decomposing body was discovered.

For a few months following the grim discovery the Point room was under quarantine and locked. This was perfectly fine with the residents of the dorm whom had no intention of ever stepping foot in that room again.

WINTER

Summer is now a slowly fading memory and fall semester has started to put down roots at the college. Mixed within a barely noticeable breeze is the noise and excitement of first year students just realizing that they have temporarily escaped the watchful eyes and sonar ears of their parents. Upperclassmen, known as sophomores, juniors and seniors understand fully that they are on their own journey into young adulthood.

Returning dorm residents barely remember the details surrounding Victoria Conrad’s suicide over the Christmas break last year. The facts of the event have been watered down with stories devised of speculation, untruths, and tales of angry ghost sightings. Believing that those stories might contain bits of truth in them served as visitor repellant for the Point room where the suicide took place.

For the room’s one and only living occupant, the lack of visitors fit perfectly in with her current plans. Winter Bernard appreciated the peace and solitude that came with her self-imposed albeit temporary exile. She didn’t want to be bothered. She was pissed off at her mom and dad, and missed her normal boring life. With classes back in full swing she needed to pull it together and quickly. A quiet space in which to sort through her thoughts without interruption was just what she craved.

Winter had just recently come face to face with the realization that she was no longer immune to disappointments. She would have turned to her parents for comfort but they were the root cause of her troubles. They were going through something difficult, and keeping her in the dark about it.

They were her phenomenal, loving, superheroes. Always there to make her world a better place. After a quarter century of marriage her parents still adored each other immensely which was obvious by the way they took care of each other. They held hands while walking, kissed in public, and laughed out loud on a regular basis after sharing a private joke or two between them. They could actually complete each other’s sentences which once annoyed Winter to no end. Now she wished they’d go back to being annoying.

She went home for a quick visit a few weekends ago and found the tension between them thicker than oatmeal. They were in the midst of preparing to go away on vacation to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary and she wanted to see them before they left. Throughout the weekend they tried unsuccessfully to convince her that everything was just fine. Neither of them would have won an Oscar for their horrible interpretation of normal.

The living room sofa had been replaced by a new one and they didn’t offer the slightest explanation or comment regarding it. This puzzled Winter because all of the furniture in the living room had been replaced just three years ago. She started to ask about it but her instincts told her to leave it alone.

Her mom’s bloodshot eyes were the telltale shade of faded crimson, which was proof to Winter that she had been crying. When she asked her mom what was wrong, she averted her eyes and lied about having allergies. She never suffered from allergies before.

Her dad, her very own man of steel was on edge; which was a definite break from character for the self-proclaimed mister cucumber. When she asked him what was troubling him, he mumbled something about a deadline on a project that he needed to handle before leaving on their trip. She thought he looked like he wanted to crawl out of his skin. He was certainly not living up to his motto of being too blessed to be stressed.

Within a few short weeks her parents had turned into liars and they were horrible at it. Initially Winter thought they might have had an argument just before she arrived. They were both strong willed and definitely opinionated. But they never had a problem debating hot topics with each other for hours at a time without getting seriously upset. By the time Winter left to return to the dorms, she could feel as deep down as the marrow in her bones that something much worse than a disagreement happened between those two.

Now she was angry with them for not trusting her enough to talk about whatever it was. She wasn’t a child any more. She was twenty freaking years old. Maybe she couldn’t drink legally, but the US government felt that she was old enough to join the military and vote for crying out loud.

Without having much of anything to go on, she narrowed a dozen or so scenarios down to just two. Either her uncle Patrick had done something to piss off her dad again which he hadn’t done in a very long time, or her aunt Alayne’s health crisis is much more serious than they initially thought.

Winter took a deep breath and said a silent prayer for Alayne. As for her uncle, her parents refuse to even acknowledge that Patrick exists.

Alayne was her mother’s baby sister. Before he passed away from Alzheimer’s, Winter’s grandfather blurted out something one day about Alayne having had something terrible happen to her when she was younger. He was quickly hushed up by her parents and nobody ever said anything else about it again.

Winter believed at the time it was just the ramblings of an old man because Alayne didn’t seem to have been affected by anything from her childhood. She went through college, medical school, and ultimately settled nicely into a successful practice as a psychologist before the age of thirty. She even volunteered a few hours each month to counsel pre-teen and young adult female assault victims.

Winter was her aunt’s biggest fan and admired her work and strength. They were only about fourteen years apart in age so Alayne was like a very cool big sister. She even shared most of her secrets with her aunt without the fear of her parents finding out about them.

A tragic event resulted in the death of one of Alayne’s twelve year old clients, when Winter was in her junior year of high school. She remembered how devastated her aunt was at the time. The girl was going through counseling for post-traumatic stress syndrome after suffering through years of being molested by her step-father.

The stepfather had been convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for his crime. While incarcerated, he appeared to be truly remorseful for everything that he had done to the girl, and after serving only thirteen months, was granted an early parole and released due to severe overcrowding. No one called the girl’s mother to warn her about her ex-husband’s early release, and two days after he got out of prison the girl ended up dead.

Apparently he had waited for her after school just to tell her that he was sorry. He was planning to move out of state and stay out of her life forever but he thought he owed her an apology first. When the girl saw him, naturally she screamed and ran. Frantically she attempted to cross to the other side of the street and was hit by bus. She died before paramedics were able to get to her.

The girl’s social worker called Alayne later that same evening to tell her what happened. After hanging up the phone painful memories from her own childhood mixed in with the pain she felt for her young client and started twisting, and curling into a jagged hot ball deep down in the pit of her stomach. She ran to the bathroom, flipped up the lid on the toilet and threw-up for what seemed like an hour. When her stomach finally settled down, she curled up on the cold tile of the bathroom floor and cried.

She had never grieved over her own lost innocence and she would only allow herself a sliver of time to grieve over the death of her young client. The next day she went back to work because first and foremost, she was a professional and had patients to see. She had no business getting emotionally attached to the plight of any client or letting her own past life interfere with her present.

It only took another day or two before she realized that her client’s disturbing circumstances had completely unleashed painful memories of her own childhood assault which she thought she had neatly stashed away in her subconscious. Unlike her young client, she was not provided with counseling as a child. Things were dealt with differently back then. Her family didn’t talk about it, and she was left to try and suppress the horrible memory of being sexually assaulted by a dirty old man.

They say that doctors make the worst patients and as a psychologist she refused to seek help as a victim. Her memories had stayed suppressed for years. She just needed to let the past work its way through and she would be alright. So she put on her best professional persona and during the day she was ‘Supershrink’. At night, in the comfort of her home she drank until she was either numb or unconscious.

That plan worked for about a week then one evening, after deciding that it was not doing her any good to continue to drink alone, she walked to a pub a few blocks up the street from her home. She figured that she could mingle with some of the locals, and maybe find someone who could help her forget her troubles. She met Ernie, a handsome, charismatic, copy editor from a local magazine. He was fighting a demon of his own while nursing a beer and a few tequila shots when she sat down next to him at the bar.

They exchanged pleasantries as she placed an order for an Amoretto and Coke. Four beers, six tequila shots and two more Amoretto and Cokes later they were involved in a conversation about something that Alayne couldn’t remember when she woke up the next morning hung-over and naked in bed, in a not so upscale hotel room. Ernie was gone.

He had neatly folded her clothes and laid everything including her purse on a chair. She scrambled out from under the covers and checked through her purse happily finding that everything was still there undisturbed.

She dressed slowly as she tried to work through the horrible headache and left the hotel. While the brightness of the sun sent needles through her eyes, she hazily glanced around to get her bearings and realized that the pub was directly across the street. She walked home, showered, and decided her tango with drinking was over. It was time to move on from her past.

Call it Murphy’s Law, bad luck or just plain karma but past mistakes can decide to come back and take another stab at you when you least expect them to.

The next few years went by uneventfully. Although she thought about him from time to time when she drove past the pub, she never saw or heard from Ernie again which was perfectly fine with her. She didn’t know that the demon he was wrestling with on the night that they met was heroin. His boss found out about his addiction and confronted him earlier that day with the option of either cleaning out his desk, or getting himself some help.

The morning after Ernie met Alayne at the pub, he woke up with a clear head and decided that he had to get his life right. He quietly rolled out of bed in order not to wake Alayne who was sleeping soundly. He dressed quickly then neatly folded her clothes which had been strewn around the floor. He glanced back at Alayne, smiled and left the room. He paid the bill on his way out of the hotel.

Ernie checked into a drug rehabilitation center that day. It took almost a year before he was confident that he was on the road to recovery. He returned to the pub a few times hoping to see Alayne and apologize for disappearing, but he never saw her again.

Ernie lived clean and sober for two more years until he died suddenly from pneumonia. His autopsy results indicated that his immune system had been compromised with HIV/AIDS. He must have contracted it when he was on heroin because back then he didn’t care where or who he got his fix from. He was just chasing after a repeat of that first heroin high. He died not knowing he had the disease.

Ironically around the time of Ernie’s death, Alayne began having stomach problems. At first she thought she had become lactose intolerant so she cut down on eating dairy products. But the problem didn’t go away. She then cut out foods with gluten and reduced her sugar intake. That didn’t help either. When she started rapidly losing weight she decided to see her doctor for a complete check-up.

Of course when you go to your doctor for an unknown ailment, you might try to think of the worst thing that you could have. That way when you receive your diagnosis and it’s not as bad as your worst thing, you automatically feel better. Imagine the disappointment when your worst thing is better than what you actually have?

When her doctor called her a week later asking her to come in and discuss the test results, she believed that her worst case scenario was diabetes. Her dad lived with it for over twenty years so she knew the routine. She was going to have to check her glucose levels and possibly have to take insulin for the rest of her life. Of course she was going to have to change her eating habits which sucked because she loved sweets.

The fact that her doctor was nervous when he met her at his office door let her know she didn’t have diabetes. Pancreatic cancer was not on her radar and being told that it was already in stage four was mind blowing. But she knew that it was some kind of sick cosmic joke when the doctor said there was no way to treat her at this point in time because her blood work showed that she also had AIDS.

She tuned the doctor out while she tried to rationalize her double diagnoses. There was no common denominator for pancreatic cancer. But she knew immediately how she got AIDS. There was only the one time in her adult life when she had unprotected sex. Ernie was just a guy she met at a bar and had a one night stand with. If she had been in her right mind at the time instead of inebriated she would have insisted on his using a condom. People do stupid things when they are drunk, but how could she have been that stupid? She heard her doctor say that she had maybe four months left before the pain would no longer be manageable. Of course he would do everything in his power to make her life as comfortable as possible.

When she left the doctor’s office, she had three things that she needed to do immediately. First she had to call her attorney and get her finances in order. Second she had to completely edit her bucket list. Third and probably the most important of all, she needed to put the truth down on paper in order to correct a twenty year old lie.

Winter’s pride was bruised after believing that her parent’s felt justified by not telling her what was going on with them especially if it had anything to do with her aunt. This only cemented her decision that it wasn’t the right time to share her secret with them. Young people in general don’t always think clearly. Of course in their world life revolves around them which props the door of hypocrisy wide open. Her parents would be back in a few days from their vacation and hopefully they would also be back to their normal selves.

The view from the stained glass window in the Point room wasn't at all spectacular. There was only the walkway that ran in front of the dorms, the parking lot across the street, and a two story