The Lady in Vermilion
by Allison Haag Waldron

I don’t claim to know the truth. All I know is what I was told, truth, heresy, and lies tangled together in an indistinguishable mass. All I can do is tell you the story as my father told it to me, with lies and truths blended together. You decide for yourself what is fact and what is fiction.

Villagers here say she walks the cliffs at night, searching for her lover, her babies’ real father. She died ten years ago this very July when she threw herself over the jagged, gaping orifice down to the water’s edge, choppy and pleading.

Her daughter’s name is Jade Valentine and was born unto wealth beyond most people’s wildest imagination. The name Valentine was a name that demanded respect, a family that was among the most elite and successful in the entire world. Her father, the President and CEO of Valentine Pharmaceuticals, Inc., was a well-respected, highly regarded businessman. When he wasn’t working he was entertaining along with his wife, Chantela, at their estate in Montauk or their mansion in Connecticut.

They only had one child, Jade. Mrs. Valentine had miscarriage after miscarriage after Jade was born. Mr. Valentine wanted a son to carry on the family name, but after his wife’s fourth miscarriage, he made her get her tubes tied and she did not protest. The losses took their toll on Chantela and her husband. He could no longer take the pain, and neither could she.

Despite the operation that finalized their decision to put an end to conception, she fell into a deep depression, which ultimately required her to stay a few months at Oakview, a private mental health facility where she received electroshock therapy every other day for the length of her stay.

After her release, she began to slip into a deep melancholia, which took her voice, leaving her catatonic, a shell of her former self that sat around all day in a rocking chair staring into oblivion. Her looks began to fade as the pallor of her skin became a milky-blue tinge and the hollow of her cheeks became more defined, razors instead of apples. The dark smudges under her eyes dripped down. The tissue surrounding the sunken orbs looked like black caves and her eyes were pinnacles surrounded by shadows, temples of desperation, of pleading, of yearning.

The darkness, the sadness, was pulling her under it’s wicked current. She was drowning.

Mr. Valentine grew wrestles and sought refuge in the arms of another woman, a married whore of a woman who belonged to the same "elite" group, a jet setter.

As his wife petrified and became a statue, a background ornament, he continued to live the high life, the life of the rich and famous. He would be damned if she was going to ruin his good time.

Jade grew frightened of her mother. When the little girl would visit Chantela in her room, the shades were always drawn down against the sun.

"Please Mother. You need fresh air and sunlight. Let’s sit outside," Jade would plead but to no avail.

"What about Daddy and I! Are we not deserving of your love? All you care about are those babies and yourself. Those babies are dead! Daddy and I are alive, as are you, so rejoin the land of the living and stop being so damn selfish," Jade screamed at her mother one-day late in August. It was hot, unbearably hot on that particular day. She opened the drapes and the sun, a white-hot crucible in a too-blue sky assaulted them, blaring down on the blacktop driveway, making it a river that seemed to melt into the surrounding green sea of grass. Jade had enough; the heat was too much for her, and even as a child it made her moody.

No response.

"I hate you," Jade screeched. That was the last time she saw her mother alive.

The sweltering afternoon gave way to a storm. Dark, threatening clouds invaded the vast expanse of sky. The cornflower blue hue gave way to a gloomy gray, which enveloped the village below, accosting it like a gigantic tidal wave.

The rain came crashing down with torrential force. The thunder exploded like fireworks in the distance and the lightning flashed with electrical vigor and stealth that only nature could conjure. The storm rolled in that fateful evening with unabated fury.

Chantela mustered the strength to move that night. The storm stirred her and brought her back out of her shell. She put on one of her many cocktail dresses, a strapless number with a matching, sheer shawl.

No one was home. Jade was with the servants in the maid’s quarters; for she was still a little child that needed tending too, and her father was out with one of his many mistresses.

Chantela took her wedding ring off, left it on a trestle in her room, and made her way into the stormy night. At the cliff’s edge, where she would meet with her lover, Rafael, before he was killed in a boating accident the year before, she stopped. She took her shoes off, tied her wet, tangled hair back with a red ribbon that held a medallion Rafael had given to her.

Then, she hurled herself off of the cliff’s edge toward the dark, malevolent surf below, bubbling and frothing like some wicked witch’s brew. The sea swallowed her that evening along with her sadness, her shattered heart.

The town’s people say she haunts the cliffs, sometimes with a baby in tow and sometimes alone. You can hear her cries on the wind, her screams of utter sorrow breaching the shoreline at night along with the pounding of the surf.

Sometimes, you can hear her call for Rafael, searching for her long lost love along with the very fruit of his loins at her breasts. There is such desperation, such guttural woe in her outcries for her darling Rafael, for her dead babies, but never for me.

My last words were "I hate you!" There are no tears shed, no loss calibrated for me.

Sometimes, the surf beckons to me, begging to swallow me up. In my vermilion colored dress, I walk the cliffs, crying out to the sea, weeping for my long lost mother.

©2002 Allison Haag Waldron

Allison Haag Waldron lives in Long Island, New York and is 27 years old, she has been writing for a little over six years. Her favorite book: Stephen King's "Pet Semetary" , heri nspirations: Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite.  Other publications: "Visage of Death" on The House of Pain website. "A Poet's Penance" on Dreadful Dreams e-zine -
http://www3.sympatico.ca/konrad.olen/index3.html and a poem entitled   "Butterfly" published by The International Library of Poetry in a book   entitled "The Eternal Sea." ("Butterfly" was also published as a sound  recording on "The Sounds of Poetry" - A CD compilation also published by  The International Library of Poetry). I was also awarded with the Editor's  Choice award for this poem. "Butterfly" will also be featured along with a  another poem, entitled "Reaching" due to be published this spring (2003)  in a book entitled "The Best Poems and Poets of 2002" (also published by  The International Library of Poetry).