Page 5 of Queen of Ruin

“Darren, I never meant to hurt you.”

He laughs cynically. “You never meant to hurt me?”

He sucks in a breath and then shakes his head while staring down at the desk. “The reason for marrying a prostitute was to avoid drama,” he scoffs.

The word prostitute penetrates every vulnerable part of me, but I’m not going to let him know how much he hurt me.

I place my hands on my hips, willing myself not to break. “If you didn’t want drama, you’d have to take yourself out of the equation.”

He looks annoyed, pressing his lips tightly together.

“Look, this happened in the past,” I try to reason with him.

“But it’s not in the past, Evangeline. It’s sitting here on my fucking desk,” he growls. “I need to get the fuck out of here.”

2

REVISIONIST HISTORY

DARREN

“If this is where you go to escape, then I’m seriously worried about you.” I turn to look at Alistair, who’s wearing a lopsided smile with his hands shoved into the pockets of his gray wool overcoat, looking pleased with himself.

“Do you remember coming here on our seventh-grade field trip?” I ask him, and he walks up the rest of the stone steps to meet me.

“Of course,” he replies as we both stare straight ahead at the Lincoln Memorial, a temple-like frame flanked by limestone buttresses, and in the center, Lincoln sits with his left hand clenching the arm of the chair. It’s imposing and awe-inspiring, an impressive feat of what man’s hands can accomplish when put to the use of good; a symbol that even a country torn apart by war can come together and create something beautiful.

“Did you know that Lincoln is carved from twenty-eight pieces of Georgia marble?” I ask without looking at Alistair, but I already know his attention is on something else.

“I was too busy chasing Poppy McBride around the columns to pay attention to our tour guide,” Alistair chuckles lightly.

“Why does that not surprise me?” I smile deeply.

“Because you know me too well,” he answers, the hint of a smile on his face, lifting his cold pink cheeks.

“There is a lot of information the tour guides don’t tell you about the Lincoln Memorial. For instance, one of the workers must have grabbed the wrong stencil and chiseled an E instead of an F for Future,” I explain, pointing towards the North chamber where Lincoln's second inaugural speech is chiseled into the limestone. “They fixed it by filling it in with concrete, but you can still see the flaw if you look hard enough.” At this distance it’s barely discernible.

“I guess I didn’t miss as much as I thought,” Alistair muses, propping his foot on the step above as he leans against his thigh.

“I know you don’t like history, Alistair,” I sigh and look back at Lincoln as he stares past me, perhaps to Washington's memorial across the reflecting pool. “These steps have witnessed history-making moments, such as King’s I Have a Dream speech, and yet the tour guides don’t tell you that the dedication ceremony was racially segregated.” I laugh cynically.

“That’s fucked up,” Alistair scoffs. “But why are we here, Darren?” he inquires.

“Revisionist history, Alistair,” I say, pointing my finger in the air before taking a seat on the step.

It’s an unusually lovely day in Washington D.C. with only a few clouds dotting the sky and the sun lighting up the reflecting pool, making it look like tiny diamonds resting on its surface, yet there is a chill in the air, a sign of winter on the horizon when snow will cover the city, bowing the branches of the white oak trees that flank the lawn.

Alistair takes a seat next to me, stretching out his long legs over the marble steps.

“We look back on history and memorialize a great man, but we forget about the flaws; we minimize them. His martyrdom makes it impossible to point them out. It’s true that Lincoln had one foot in the 20th century, but the other foot was still planted heavily in the 19th,” I lament, “and yet here we sit, on the steps of this memorial that holds the daily pilgrimage of thousands, and we forget about those innate things that made him human.”

“We’re not really talking about Lincoln, are we?” Alistair asks astutely.

“I didn’t get along with my father,” I say as a matter of fact. “That’s never been in question; a constant since as far back as I can remember, and yet I always looked up to him.” I sigh, tilting my head towards Alistair who looks down at his clasped hands resting on his thighs. “But I always thought I knew him. Lately, I’m beginning to question that, to question a lot of things.”

“Anything in particular that you didn’t know?” he inquires, lifting a brow.

I pull out the envelope and hand it to Alistair. He takes it with questioning eyes and then pulls it open to peer inside at the very thing that makes me question my father’s martyrdom. Tough, passionate, a workaholic – everything the Priest said at the pulpit during my parent's memorial – a loyal husband and father – and now I wonder if it was just revisionist history.

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