Not Alone

By Chantal Bellehumeur

Not Alone, By Chantal Bellehumeur: Harmony Goodhumor didn’t always get along with her younger sister Katherine, but the girls became close after their mother’s death. When Harmony moved to another city for university, she missed Katherine very much. The girls tried to be there for one another as best as they could whenever a personal problem would occur, but there was only so much they could do for each other. There came a time when Harmony started feeling depressed and alone. One summer, Harmony decided to go visit Katherine in her new home. During her short trip to Moncton, New Brunswick, Harmony did more than just spend time with her sister and something unexpected happened during an excursion. When Harmony returned home, she started missing Katherine again as well as other loved ones. But, during her moment of blues she makes the realisation that she is not as alone as she feels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chantal Bellehumeur
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310360749

Chantal Bellehumeur

Chantal Bellehumeur is a Canadian author born in 1981. She has several published novels of various genres as well as numerous short stories, poems and articles featured in compilation books, magazine, plus a local newspaper.For a complete list of publications, including free reads, visit the following website: author-chantal-bellehumeur.webnode.com/products-/

Book preview

Not Alone

All Rights Reserved

Copyright 2014 by Chantal Bellehumeur

Author’s notes:

I was originally going to write the real story about my recent trip to New Brunswick, in the form of a memoir. However, I had a change of heart soon after I began typing. I decided to write about a lot more than just my one-week vacation in New Brunswick, and also embellish it with a lot of fiction as my mind started to come up with various scenarios I simply could not ignore. I always preferred to write fiction rather than stick to facts alone. That being said, please note that although my trip to New Brunswick was the main source of inspiration for this story, it is a work of fiction

Dedications:

This book is dedicated to my sister Karyne Bellehumeur for being a good hostess during my stay in Moncton, and also to Anna-Marie Weir from Roads to Sea for being such an awesome tour guide.

Thank you:

I would like to thank Anna-Marie Weir for providing me with useful information and answering my questions while I was writing this story.

Thanks to Chris Black for taking the time to proofread my work.

Also, thanks to everyone who show me their support.

Part one

Hi. My name is Harmony Goodhumor. Before you ask like most people I meet, yes, I like to live in harmony with others and am generally in a good mood. However, as I am human and therefore not perfect, I don’t always live up to my name definition. From time to time I am in an unpleasant mood and sometimes get made fun of because of it.

I will admit that I had problems living harmoniously with one particular person in my youth. Wow! The last part of my statement just made me feel really old! I actually just celebrated my thirty second birthday and hope to live until I am about triple my current age.

Anyways, my younger sister Katherine and I did not always get along when we were kids. In fact, we argued a lot. Most of our arguments were about movie rental selections, and the uncleanliness of our playroom or the small bedroom we shared. Sometimes we would cause scenes over stupid things, like the fact that one of us looked in the other’s window during a long car ride or even went over the invisible line of the middle car seat that separated our sides. I always sat on the left and Katherine sat on the right. We shared the middle seat and were pretty anal about our spaces. Not even our toys or books could go over the other’s side without us arguing. We would also annoy each other by placing the tips of our fingers close to the other’s face. When we would yell out Stop touching me! the other would say matter of factly I am not touching you. We drove our parents nuts. Of course, they always told me to show the example because I was the oldest and it irritated me. My sister seemed to find it amusing and always stuck out her tongue at me.

As we grew older though, Katherine and I started appreciating each other’s company and became closer to one another.

I think the fact that our mother died when we were children made us realise how important it was not to take your family for granted. I was fourteen and my sister eleven years of age when we found out that our mom had cancer. It was a complete shock to us both, and to our father as well. My mom just went to a doctor’s appointment and came home with the bad news. We all thought that she would fight it, but the disease had already spread too much by the time it was discovered so the chemotherapy treatments didn’t do anything to improve her well-being. It seemed to just make her sicker and lose all her beautiful long black hair.

My mother died six months after her diagnosis, at the age of forty-five. I was holding her hand in the hospital when she took her last breath. I don’t remember ever crying so much in my life. I don’t think I ever saw my sister cry so much either, and she used to be a real cry-baby. My father tried to be more discreet about it, but he wasn’t fast enough in wiping his first tears. Katherine and I told him it was okay for him to cry in front of us, something we had never seen him do. He ended up crying a river just like us.

There had been deaths in the family since my birth, but I was much too young to comprehend what was going on so my mother’s death was the first that affected me. My father’s parents passed away when I was just a baby, and my mother’s dad died when I was three. The only grandparent my sister and I really knew was my mom’s mother. I cried a lot when she died, but that came many years after my mother’s death.

My mother’s funeral was the first one my sister and I ever attended. We helped organize it as best as we could because our father couldn’t do it completely on his own. He kept breaking down in tears whenever the funeral director asked him to choose something so my sister and I told him what we thought our mom would want. Our selections were sometimes pricey, but we all felt that my mom deserved the best. I am pretty sure my mom’s life insurance covered everything.

My dad had no siblings to help him cope emotionally, and his best friend from childhood was away on a business trip when my mom died. I have learnt that men don’t tend to talk about their feelings, but I am sure it would have helped him to have somebody there for him anyways.

My father barely knew our mother’s three brothers and two sisters, who all lived outside of Ottawa. My grandmother was in too much shock to be able to bring anyone comfort. She had just lost her youngest daughter and needed comforting herself. I overheard her say in a fit of tears that no parent should ever have to bury their child. I silently agreed. Katherine and I tried to go visit Grandma Miller whenever we could after our aunts and uncles, practically strangers to us, returned home.

We had all tried being there for one another when it was time to get together and say goodbye to my mom. All of us cried a lot the day of the private funeral. My sister and I continued shedding tears for many days after. I kept having bad dreams of my mom’s snow white modern metal casket being lowered into the ground. It was an unpleasant image I couldn’t seem to get out of my head.

It was very hard for my sister and I to get used to our mother no longer being around after she passed away.  It was quite the adjustment since she had been a stay at home mom. She had always been there when we came home from school, prepared the meals, made delicious desserts…Our mom told good jokes, did funny things that made us laugh, played with us when we were bored, invented cool stories, and came up with the best games. My dad wasn’t nearly as creative or imaginative even though he tried to be. He worked long hours, often doing overtime, and sometimes had to go into the office on weekends. After my mom died, he did his best to work less but we really needed the money so I often found myself alone with Katherine. We were not allowed to have any friends over without adult supervision so all we had was each other most times.

I started feeling like I needed to take over some of my mother’s previous responsibilities to help out. I would start making dinner on weekdays long before my father would get home from the office, make lunches for everyone, and take over my mom’s love for baking goodies so that we could continue eating the sweet treats. I volunteered to run errands for my dad sometimes and did a lot more housework than before.

I also felt the need to nurture my sister. I took care of her the same way that I took care of the many children I babysat. Sometimes I had to bring Katherine with me when I was asked to babysit because my dad had to work too. Luckily, the other parents didn’t mind. Their children really liked me and got along with Katherine. I sometimes pretended that she was my adopted daughter but none of the kids believed me.

Katherine started seeing me as a mother figure. She accidentally called me mom once when I tucked her in after reading her a bedtime story. We both looked at each other surprised and burst into tears. I looked a lot like my mother and since I started acting like her too it was only natural for Katherine to slip. We promised each other that night that if our father ever remarried we would never call his new wife mom because we were afraid that it might make us forget our real mother.

I thought about my mother every single time I looked in a mirror and I am sure that Katherine was reminded of her by looking at my face too. Aside from having long black hair just like my mom used to have, I also had the same hazel bambi eyes, fair skin, and slim figure.

I think my dad saw a glimpse of my mother each time he looked at me, which is why he started distancing himself from me as I grew older. I reminded him so much of the love he lost and it hurt too much. I didn’t fully understand it then, but I do now.

As much as we often didn’t understand our father, there were times where my sister and I felt misunderstood by him. I know he did his best to deal with our girly mood swings and female problems but he didn’t seem to understand us at all. I hate to admit it, but we often picked fights with him.

Katherine and I often turned to our grandmother when we needed to talk. We had always been close to her and