My Weekend and Charlie

We had an uneventful weekend, and unusually I didn’t take a single photo. As you know I spent a bit of time sorting out a second blog.
I have been wondering how to proceed on promoting Veiled in Shadows, I have few ideas forming which I think might just work, but they are going to take some time to get together and time is the problem.
In the meantime I guess I’ll just go one day at a time.

Valentina has let me go for the moment, but only because I am distracted by another sideline in the WIP.
I need a feed in for a narrator who wouldn’t normally tell her tale and I am trying to find a way to get her to speak. Charlie Bykov might just be the catalyst to get her talking.
This distraction has taken me two generations and to another war. But my character shares similarities with Valentina. Charlie is also distraught and on the edge. I seem to be caught up in characters who are desperate and haunted at the moment.
Ahh well it is all good writing practice.
Once again this is a first draft, I need to read this again and probably re-write it a few times to see if it as promising as it seemed at first.
I give you Charlie:

Charlotte Bykov 2005
I looked for Mom in the crowd as I came trough the arrivals gate. Courtesy of the airline I was in a wheelchair. I had fought it but I had to check my crutches in Germany, some battles you can’t win.
‘Charlie, Chaaaarlie!’
My name, who… at the back of the crowd, ‘Melissa!’
The chick from the airline checked her nails as Mel hugged and kissed me. At first there was no awkwardness, in the excitement of welcoming me Mel left off the questions that always came.
Or didn’t come, but were there anyway.
Of course the awkwardness was mine as much as it was anyone else’s.
I felt disconnected from my life. Melissa looked so fresh and young, as pretty as ever. I was only gone two years, yet I felt ages older. Grief and pain leave their mark.

‘Mom?’
Mel tried, Mel always tried. ‘She has work, she would have come, if she could.’
Mel left me with the airline chick while she went to find a cab.
I wiped a tear aside. I was a big girl now, I had the scars to prove it and big girls don’t cry for their mama. I don’t know why I was disappointed Mom wasn’t there. Mom was never there.

The house was as I left it in ’98. The army was my way out. I was never going back.
Yet here I was.
Leaning on my crutches I traced my fingers over the photos in the hall. Me as a little girl sitting on Mom’s lap, I was there but her eyes were for Derek, my stepfather as she laughed up at him.
A newer pic the unsure teenage me, blonde curls and blue eyes standing on one side of a family portrait: Mom with arms wrapped around Derek and black-haired Mel and Tony. Me, with them but alone.
Always alone.
Then photos I could barely look at:
Me lacing up shoes at track and field;
Me in cheerleader uniform;
Charlie Bykov, beautiful, hot and sexy, young and fit.
Most of all whole.

Mel, lovely Mel, tried to distract me with coffee and cookies. But no amount of coffee and cookies will grow a girl a new leg.
‘I have to head back to school soon, but I can wait for Mom or Dad.’
‘Do you think the gimp needs her hand held?’
‘You know Charlotte you can be a real bitch sometimes.’
She left me alone, staring at the door.