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“Father is a busy man.”
Helena is 4 when she hears those words for the first time, but it will take her until she is 30, until her severed self tries to commit suicide, to truly understand what these 5 words really mean.
As a child, she accepts her mother’s words with a solemn nod and slumped shoulders before being told by her not to slouch in her seat, her voice warm. It’s a Saturday, the weather is not half bad, but her etiquette coach, a sour woman of pale complexion, and long nails that bite into Helena’s skin at her neck each time she makes a mistake, is set to arrive soon.
Years later, and this will be all she can remember of this woman.
Every attempt to dissuade her mother from inviting this horrid woman to come back has failed so far.
As if reading her mind, her mother reminds her to be kind, and she briefly touches her cheek before she is left behind in the dining room.
The long table she is seated at is polished and empty, save for the five sets of tableware and cutlery accurately placed by the house staff in preparation for her lesson. Aside from the unblinking guard at the doorway, her only company is the ticking of the longcase clock, one of many family heirlooms that litter this house. The round clock seems to be trapped in an eye shape.
Helena looks away from a clock she can’t read yet and makes a face at the eating utensils in front of her. She doesn’t understand why there’s three different spoons and forks next to her stacked set of fine plates and why there are rules to how to eat which dish—she has perfectly fine fingers that would do the job.
She says as much once her coach arrives and asks her to point out the dessert fork.
Her suggestion is not appreciated and ultimately ignored.
Helena is 6 years old when she makes the decision to climb one of the tall cherry blossom trees out in the garden that will end with temporary injuries to her left knee and both palms, and a permanent small, round scar above her right eye lid.
In truth, the garden is widespread and the area resembles more a meticulously kept park, really. No grass stalk is allowed to grow past the 3-inch-mark, no fallen leaf remains on the ground for longer than a few hours. A team of gardeners takes care of everything, wrestling nature into obedience, watering the flowers that her mother picks out, carefully cutting the bushes and trees to keep their round and cone shapes respectively. She watches them, sometimes, from her second floor window of her room. Like small ants, dressed all in dark green overalls, they seem to bleed into the garden like they are a part of it, working late into the evening if the season demands it. She wonders sometimes if they live inside their garden, and the thought of them resting up in the trees after dark makes her giggle.
Helena likes being outside. Not that she is allowed to walk the vast grounds unsupervised; even if she is let out of the house in good weather, she only gets as far as to the swing set and the wooden castle with the blue slide leading down into the rectangular sandbox, all placed inside the gated part of their backyard—and far away from her favorite trees that she can look at from her window.
Of course, sneaking away is half the fun. She asks for a glass of water, a request that is relayed by her guard to a member of the house staff that happens to be nearby, always hovering, always waiting. They remind her of penguins with how they are dressed, how stiff their movements seem to be.
Her guard’s brief moment of distraction is all she needs. She smirks briefly when she jumps at the chance that has just presented itself. She has gotten quite good at climbing over the fence and even better at evading the many patrolling guards that keep murmuring into their radio units. She knows quite a lot just by observing the world around her, and her greatest advantage is being seen as “the child”; too young in the eyes of most to see or understand much at all.
Soon after, she stands in front of the cherry blossom tree she has picked to climb for its one low hanging branch that she thinks she will be able to conquer like her wooden castle. It all goes well until it doesn’t; a thin twig catches her skin unexpectedly above her right eye when she turns her head upward and the sharp pain makes her loosen what was previously a tight, secure grip on the branch she was about to climb up. Off-balance and a victim of gravity, she falls down, scratching both of her palms and left knee that try to grasp at the uneven bark, before dropping to the ground, her knee prickling with the burn of having ripped her skin open. She is breathless with pain, and to her growing horror she notices blood dripping down from somewhere—her face.
“It could be worse,” their physician comments later, who arrived just 40 minutes later after her mother had placed the call. He has just fixed a small butterfly closure over the wound to stop the bleeding. Her scratched palms and knee have been cleaned with something that has burned worse than the pain she has felt earlier getting these superficial wounds. “Just a small cut, nothing that should be too visible down the line. That scar will be barely worth talking about.”
Her mother is not looking at her. “Thank you.”
“Of course, Mrs. Eagan. Is there anything else—”
“That will be all.” She motions for him to walk ahead with his heavy leather bag and they leave the living room without another word, a tension in the air that Helena blames on her latest climbing stunt.
Her mother says something else outside, but her voice is too far away, too faint for Helena to understand anything. Besides, she is tired, her head feels heavy and she has this fear, this inexplicable feeling of anxiety sitting in her chest when she touches the small bandage above her eye. An ice pack is resting next to her, used to cool her eye in hopes to bring down the swelling. It is wet with condensation; the melted ice layer that used to cover the pack when it was pulled out of the freezer is slowly dripping onto the leather couch she is sitting on.
Familiar steps walk back inside the living room, but Helena refuses to lift her head. She stares at her bandaged knee with something akin to shame.
“Oh, Helly,” her mother’s voice is admonishing and gentle at the same time. Warm fingertips lift her chin when she takes a seat next to her to make her look into her blue eyes. “You are lucky you didn’t break your neck, or worse, lost an eye,” she tells her, nudging her with her arm in an attempt to lift her spirits. “You are quite too young to run around with an eye-patch, don’t you think?” Her index finger delicately separates a hair strand and pushes it behind her ear, a gesture so familiar it is more comforting to Helena than her words. Something about it makes her feel like crying, but she only allows herself to sniff, to stop herself from betraying her own feelings of distress at the earlier mishap. Unlike Helena’s own dark red hair, her mother’s hair is golden, only goes past her chin in soft waves that have been artfully styled to look close to an almost natural suggestion of curls.
Not for the first time does she wish to look more like her mother, the invisible grip of good-natured envy taking a hold of her. She has inherited her father’s looks, a man she seldom sees and only knows to call “father” because that is what is expected of her; that word means nothing to her. He is a stranger that has passed down his hair and parts of his eye color to her, nothing more.
“I could become a pirate, then,” she replies with some delay, kicking her legs back and forth. Her mother’s hand on her unharmed knee stops her.
“No more sneaking off to climb trees or do any other dangerous activity that jeopardizes your safety, okay? You cannot be so callous with your own life. Childish recklessness has no space in the life of an Eagan, do you understand? It would kill me if something happened to you.” A kiss to her forehead follows those words.
“Yes, Mom,” Helena says in a small voice, the weight of her mother’s worry placed on her shoulders now.
For a brief moment no one speaks. But then, the levity between them returns. The smile she earns a second later will be mirrored in a dim and awkward version on her own face, one day, when the original is long gone, buried and almost forgotten beneath the earth.
“Do I have to be there?” Helena is 8 years old and fiddles with the lapels of her pressed dress, frustration bleeding into her words. It is green and compliments her hair, according to their tailor who has spent the past week adjusting it to her lithe body.
Her mother’s warm hand between her shoulder blades reminds her to correct her posture. “If you want to eat dinner, then yes, you have to be there. Besides, I know that it would mean the world to your father.”
“Right.” She pretends to frown at herself in the mirror and not at the idea that her father loses much thought about her.
Her mother sighs. “What’s wrong now?”
“The dress is not comfortable. I would much rather just stay upstairs, I won’t bother anyone up here. Can’t someone just bring some food to me here? Please?”
Her mother’s pale blue dress that has white gemstones worked into the material twinkles in the light when she moves to lower herself behind her so that both fit into the frame of her mirror, her eyes finding Helena’s in the reflection, kind and gentle as ever. “Helly, sometimes we have to do things we don’t like. One dinner on your best behavior won’t be the end of the world. Besides,” she says, rubbing her hands on Helena’s arms up and down, “if you behave you can have some ice cream before bed. How does that sound?”
“Like a bribe?”
“I’ll even add whipped cream on top, too.”
She pretends to mull over the offer that she has already accepted before the whipped cream was even added. “Fine,” she grumbles, but she can’t hide her elated smile quick enough.
Their brief moment of shared merriment is quickly put to an end when her mother’s personal assistant rushes into Helena’s room to inform her of some unexpected dietary restrictions that one of the guests revealed that has been unknown up until this moment. Apologies over apologies are uttered by her until her mother just briefly lifts her hand, the rings on her hand catching the light. “Just fix the problem, Amanda,” she sighs, waving her off.
Shortly after, the guests start to trickle in, everyone dressed to the nines and Helena can no longer hide away in her room.
She keeps to herself, almost invisible to most of them. Some greet her, few comment on her growth, one woman compliments her dress. She doesn’t care all too much, but her mother’s watchful eyes find hers across the entrance hall from time to time, reminding her to correct her posture, of smiling more, of paying attention.
Her father only looks at her once, as if by accident.
It doesn’t help that she is the only child at this dinner party that she quickly realizes has nothing to do with her family directly and everything to do with her father’s work. LUMON, a name that haunts the hallways of this villa like a ghost. Another family heirloom, she thinks, staring at the longcase clock that has been moved from the dining room to the center of the wall of the entrance hall that is flanked by the wide stairs leading upwards. It stands proudly on a pedestal with a little plaque telling the guests how old it is, who commissioned it to be made and how much gold is in the eye-shaped frame that represents the LUMON logo. Helena could not care less.
At some point the wide, brightly lit space quietens down, her father commanding the attention in order to hold a speech. His voice is bouncing off the walls and high ceiling, the clock at his back. He thanks the guests for coming, goes on to mention their latest successes and how vital their support had been in these endeavors, and lifts his narrow champagne flute filled with sparkling golden liquid. “To my lovely wife, who is my tower of strength. And to Helena, my daughter, who is my future.”
When he looks at her at this moment, it is on purpose, and Helena feels all eyes on her.
She straightens her back and forces herself to smile, like she’s been taught.
Things go on as they always do until they don’t.
It takes Helena a while, but even the best kept secret of this house eventually spills out into the open. Especially, when it cannot be kept a secret for much longer.
Her mother is sick. Terminally ill, is what she overhears one day, not even sure who says it. Could be someone from the house staff, could be a bodyguard—it doesn’t matter, in the end. The words find her when she is on her way back from her private tutors, her head previously preoccupied with the punishing amount of homework she’s been given. Suddenly, all her worries evaporate and her life shifts forever.
No one tells her what it is, of course, but her mother looks paler than her etiquette coach did all those years ago and her voice becomes wispy and faint over time, as if she is gradually disappearing. It fills Helena with a primal fear of not wanting to let go. Like a thief, she tries to spend as much time as she can with her, painfully aware that time is running out for them.
Helena spends most afternoons at her mother’s bedside after she is done with her lessons for the day. Usually, she does her homework, or reads her some short stories, fairytales, anything to take her mother’s mind off the current situation—and her own. The beeping of the ECG monitor and the medical equipment guarding her bed are no longer an alien presence in this room, they seem to have become a part of it. It is almost impossible to remember a time before they’ve been moved into this room, before her mother became too weak to leave her bed that looks like it’s been taken from a hospital.
Her father is not here; he is even more scarcely seen at the villa than before. Father is a busy man.
“Helly,” her mother whispers, frowning at her. “Stop slouching.”
Helena thinks that her posture should be the last thing on her mother’s mind. Unbidden, tears enter her eyes; not for the soft admonishment that she barely pays attention to, but because she doesn’t know how much longer she will get to hear her nickname. Her mother is the only person to use it. She blinks them away, ever the eager student to please her mother, and she forces her shoulder into a straight line. “There, better?”
“You will think of me each time your posture is poor,” she says, her eyes filled with her own unshed tears, a wobbling smile fighting to remain in place.
Helena closes the book in her lap and only at the back of her mind notes how the beeping speeds up a little. “Then why would you ever want me to stop?” She sniffs, even though it is meant to be a macabre joke. The once you are dead part remains silent, but it sits in this room with them, always.
Her mother laughs; it has become such a rare sound these days. “I know you never will. Deep down, this will always be a part of you. Do try, though. Remember that the way you present yourself to the world is how the world will see you. Promise me to remember that, hm?”
Helena takes her mother’s hand in her own, the book long forgotten. “I promise,” she vows with the gravity of an 11 year old that has yet to taste the bitterness of true loss and grief.
Years later, Helly R. will sit with the worst posture known to mankind in her office chair at her desk in the hopes that her outie hates her for it while she stares at the numbers on her screen.
The funeral is a somber, intimate affair. Very few guests have been invited, and none of them have been selected by Helena. Not one of her friends, whose parents are either business partners or investors to her father’s company, are present—she is not particularly close to any of them, so the only huge loss remains her mother’s death.
Her ashes are laid to rest in the family’s cemetery, and an elaborate gravestone made of dark cut marble has been custom made. In loving memory of Vivian Elaine Eagan, reads the engraving. She traces the gold lettering with her eyes, as if to commit them into memory. An enormous bouquet of white flowers is placed at the feet of the towering headstone, and Helena wonders if her mother even liked white flowers.
Her father, his greying hair sporting more white strands than before, is firmly at her side. He doesn’t hold her hand. He barely even talks to her, but he must know she is there as the other guests express their sorrow and condolences to her, as well.
She feels like a ghost.
She feels angry.
“Helena, stop fidgeting.” His voice is quiet and it can be almost mistaken as a gentle murmur. The hand on her shoulder grips her just a touch too tightly.
She stills and glances up at her father’s blank, even face, tracing the wrinkles of his cheeks and forehead and she feels like the wrong parent has been taken from her.
Previously an unthinkable occurrence, Helena is now a permanent fixture in her father’s every day trot. They still barely talk—not like she and her mother used to, anyway—but when they do, it’s about the future. It’s about her place as his heir, it is about his work, about ideals, goals, but it is never really about her and that is by design. Helena Eagan has been born into something that is bigger than her, and she is being made aware of existing in the shadow of her great ancestors, of her father that continues their legacy. She is more a concept rather than an actual daughter to her father. His insistence on cultivating an air of devotion to their ancestors only deepen her secret, simmering hostility over her jailors, the ever-illusive dead people whose names she has to memorize, along with the 9 core principles of LUMON. She despises this ritual before being allowed to go to bed. “They have to become a part of you, Helena,” he tells her one evening, when he notices her reluctance to read them out loud to him one night.
Never does she feel her mother’s absences as harshly as in moments like these. Her death is treated like an open secret; known, but not talked about.
It hollows her out, and scrapes out the parts of her that she doesn’t want to let go of, but that grow more and more faint with the unforgiving passage of time.
It doesn’t help that she is almost 13 years old and on the cusp of puberty, just at the precipice of discovering the sudden hunger for rebellion and spite.
Her head is brimming with those words, meaningless to her and a poor replacement for what has been taken from her—it is, however, a starting point of the chasm between her and her father that will yawn open like an unhealed wound for years to come.
For a blissful few years she escapes her father’s looming presence to get a business degree at an elite private Ivy League university that for generations, the Eagans have been donating obscene amounts of money to—she could have slacked off, kept seeking out one fling after another, and still walked out of there with a degree in her hands.
She doesn’t.
Her presence is kept incognito, as she is using her mother’s maiden name, Riggs. It affords her the privilege of freedom that is not familiar to her, with her roster of bodyguards keeping a respectful distance that almost fools her into thinking she is truly on her own.
And yet, there appears to be a wall made of secrets and mounting trust issues on her part that isolates her even outside of her father’s direct influence. Although, how free can she be of his and her family’s grand influence, if the campus grounds display a Kier statue near the library building (named after one of her many male ancestors), erected there to honor the many financial contributions.
All it serves is to remind her that her place in this life is always in the shadow of those that came before her. Her fellow students don’t know about it, she doesn’t tell anyone who she really is.
She is almost relieved to return home when she finishes her degree.
On the anniversary of her mother’s death, she briefly considers following her. Her life has never felt more adrift than it does right now. Directionless, ambitionless—all she has is a name and the knowledge that one day, she will take over an empire.
She tells herself to get over it and focus on the future, not the past.
“I need you to do this. For the greater good. For LUMON.”
Helena’s fish fork and knife clink against the oval shaped plate that has her half eaten grilled whole trout on it.
It hasn’t been a pleasant talk to begin with, she tells herself when her mood sours at his words, more than eating that whole lemon wedge from her plate would. Slowly, she lifts her gaze and meets his dark eyes over the table.
With a thin smile, she reaches for her white wine glass, the contents dangerously low. “I see,” she says, only seeing a man in front of her that is disappointed to have been cursed with a daughter that refuses to see “the bigger picture,” as he’s just described it, minutes ago. Perhaps, had she been born a son he would look at her more favorably, despite the obvious shortcomings.
The unpleasant curl of his lips tells her that he’s not endeared to her callous disinterest. It ages him, this stern frown. “We all have our part to play, Helena.”
Somehow, her name falling from his mouth in a warning tone hurts worse than an insult would have done. She almost wants to make a joke about never receiving her script in the mail, but her father wouldn’t recognize humor if it stared at him with a loaded gun held to his temple.
She stops herself and elects to be petty, instead. “Then why don’t I see you running to get the procedure—”
“Enough!” He is on his feet and glares at her, any pretense of civilized behavior towards each other forgotten. “If you still don’t understand what’s at stake now, how do you expect me to rest peacefully knowing someone like you will take over this family’s legacy, someone who clearly has no interest to learn? Since childhood I have tried to make you understand.” He wipes his mouth with the dark blue napkin, crumpling it and throwing it onto his half-finished dish. If he is going to bring up her feigned fascination with the first prototype of the severance brain chips she might empty out the contents of her stomach right on this table.
She meets his glare with a face as blank as an unused canvas.
Her quiet defiance, subtle as it is, is met with a sigh. “And to no avail it seems,” he concludes his rant, his voice dripping with disappointment.
For a brief moment she imagines a world where he is dead. As a child, shortly after her mother’s death she has been lost to the morbid fantasy of her father getting ill and dying the same slow and painful death that he deserved but that her mother had to suffer through instead. It is better than the later iteration of her imagining her own death, a habit she put to rest with an iron will and the art of repressing that darkness of her mind.
The only sound in the dining hall is that damn clock.
“You will meet with Mr. Milchick at 8 a.m. to discuss the details of the procedure. Everything’s been arranged, don’t worry,” he reassures her after enough time has passed for him to calm down. He even sits down again, reaching for his glass with sparkling water in it.
From sales pitch to a direct order. This has never been a choice, only a test. The Illusion of Free Will—An Autobiography by The Most Disappointing Daughter in the World has a nice ring to it, she thinks and picks up her fork and knife to finish filleting her grilled trout. Whatever queasiness she feels, she blames it on too much wine.
The gravestone is clean and someone had removed the snow and ice from it not too long ago; she hadn’t known someone was on their payroll to do that, but she is glad for it.
“Hey, Mom,” Helena starts, already feeling silly speaking out loud to a stone. “It’s been a while.” Her throat closes up and she blames the biting cold for it. She folds her gloved hands together in front of her stomach, her eyes following the edges of the engraved name as if trying to hunt down a secret meaning hidden away there. But it’s just the name of a dead woman that has been dead for 18 years now.
“Sorry, this is so fucking stupid,” she admits, more to herself than to the gravestone. Behind her, somewhere in one of the trees surrounding the cemetery several ravens take flight while crowing at the white, overcast sky.
She casts one last look at the golden letters and then walks back to her driver, careful not to slip on the wet, icy ground.
After all, she has a video to record this afternoon and the script for it is sitting on the backseat, waiting for her to finally memorize all the carefully selected words by people that have no idea what her childhood was truly like.
That’s a secret she might take into her own grave.
“Seth?”
“Yes, Miss Eagan?”
“It says here I should write down a name to use for my… well—”
“Your severed half, yes. Usually, the same first name and the first letter of the last name are used to avoid unnecessary confusion in the future. Truthfully, as Jame Eagan’s daughter we thought it… prudent to offer you some more privileges, should you feel inclined to accept them.”
“How thoughtful of you.” Helena looks down at the form and cannot shake the feeling of cold dread creeping down her neck. It doesn’t help that Seth Milchick has a very calming presence about him; he could sell her anything as a good idea, if he were to relax a little. He is very good, but not perfect. “How dangerous is it to use a different name?” she asks next, keeping her voice even.
“Not particularly dangerous,” he says after a brief moment of thinking about it. “None of them know anything when they wake up, almost like children, or rather like very isolated teenagers that have yet to discover what the world has to offer them. Think of them as an unwritten piece of paper, if you will.”
She clears her throat. “I am just thinking—the publicity campaign will be very expensive at the end of it all. It needs to be a clean cut between both sides, to be truly effective, I mean,” she murmurs, not entirely sure where she is going with it. Something about his soft smile unnerves her. Either, because it looks genuine and she is not used to that or because she knows it only looks genuine, but isn’t. The gala, she almost adds, like he would care. He probably isn’t part of the planning committee now that she thinks about it. His place is the severed floor, and soon—
Another reassuring smile. “Whatever name you choose will serve its purpose well, I imagine.”
Helena wonders what her mother would say if she could see her now. She shifts in her seat, relaxing her shoulders. Had she known what LUMON had been working on? Had she supported it aside from being the wife married to the man spearheading this company?
She had married Jame Eagan, yes, and while Helena has been long healed from any childish, misguided notions of love ever having been a part of that equation, she knows that the billions alone could not have persuaded her mother, seeing as her mother’s side of the family is coming from old money, too. It can’t be said that her father is a particularly charming man, but then again—what does she know about relationships that last more than one to three business days?
With her mother dead, it is a mystery that she will never get to solve.
Ironic. Her mother seems to be the puzzling stranger now. Her grief over her loss has healed over like the scar above her right eye has; barely visible, too small to even mention it. Still, just briefly, she wishes she could ask her, talk to her one more time—
“Ms. Eagan?”
She returns to the moment and clicks the pen open. Then, she starts to write down the name for the life that will exist in her shadow.
Helly Riggs.
Seth gets her a bouquet of white flowers after surviving her first day down on the severed floor. It makes her think of a funeral, but she accepts the well-meant gesture with grace, anyway.
Her head hurts.
Soon, her throat and neck will hurt from the choking grip of a white cable.
Helena despises her severed part, and she curses her father for putting the well-being of the company ahead of his daughter’s—not even a suicide attempt by her work-persona is enough to make him care.
Father is a busy man .
And really, if that doesn’t then nothing ever will.
The gala is going to happen as planned, the campaign is in full swing. Natalie fills her days with important sounding chatter about the long-awaited evening, droning on about names, using buzzwords like “brand awareness of the Eagan name” and “optimization of engaging with content”; her life is being gamified as a series of pictures and that dreadful video that has been taped a while ago. It looks like a genuine enough presentation of someone that believes the bullshit that spills from her lips.
Hatred blooms in her heart like the cherry blossom trees did in her childhood.
Helly!
His voice sounds so relieved when he calls her name—only it is no longer hers, she’s traded it away together with a part of herself that apparently gets to enjoy a hug now. Her reaction to both is a split-second too late, a delay so slight she hopes that Mark S. doesn’t notice it.
A brief spark of regret rushes through her when she hears that name, but then she is in his arms and all thoughts on that matter are wiped from the forefront of her mind. Suddenly her feigned breathlessness doesn’t seem so artificial at all, anymore.
No matter how many times she has studied the tapes of Helly R. interacting with him—and she rather refuses to think about how unfounded and puzzling her anger at the discovery of the kiss had been that made her rewatch that scene over and over again—she is not ready to be hit with the real thing. When was the last time dark eyes had looked at her fondly?
Helena soldiers on, telling herself that pretending to be Helly R. down here is no different from presenting a carefully honed version of Helena Eagan upstairs.
Deep down, against her will, she knows she is living on borrowed time of this borrowed half-life.