home-grown {goravich house}

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Klaus Goravich

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Klaus used to take his children to the Games with him. Each year, as the time approached, the sick knot in his stomach would grow thick and unwieldy. The nightmares would start, right on cue, eight weeks prior to that train journey, the clock in his mind tick-ticking as he pushed Penelope on the swings or helped Daisy with her homework. Annually, the content of the children’s bedtime stories changed, the princesses and mermaids replaced with dragons and goblins, brave knights wielding swords, wicked witches who were doing their very best. In these stories he weaved lessons he hoped would provide armour for the horrors their little eyes were about to see, the comments, so careless, they were undoubtedly about to hear. He knew no amount of stories could shield them from it, not really.

The day that Daisy was old enough for her own name to be entered in the reaping pool was the day Klaus decided it was time for her to stay behind. When you have risked fate and survived, there is safety in that. Her name, on one single scrap of paper, somewhere in that bowl, possessed Klaus until the moment another name was drawn instead - the relief that he had felt burned a hole right through the middle of who he thought he was. There was pain with every child reaped, regardless of their District, or family, regardless if whether they were a tiny twelve year old or a reckless eighteen year old career, volunteering boldly, grinning from ear to ear. Klaus believed, would have told anyone who had listened that it made no difference at all; a life is a life, a loss is a loss, a child is a child. He kept up this lie to himself until it was his own child, and then it crumbled around him, leaving him in the ashes of the lie he had built for himself. That year, he took ten-year-old Penelope in hand and the two of them boarded the train together. 

The following year, he stopped telling stories. The girls were sick of them, anyway. Too old, they said, too grown up for that sort of thing. Each year, extra copies of their names were added to the bowl, and the pain that Klaus hadn’t thought could possibly get any bigger grew, and grew, and grew, until, finally, it burst. When the final name was drawn the year Penelope turned eighteen, the knot inside Klaus loosened, just a little. It was a selfish satisfaction, one that Klaus thought was probably evil. How can you celebrate that someone else’s child will die, now, in place of your own? How can a good person feel relief that a baby someone else rocked, instead of you, will discard their humanity, trade it for a cursed crown? It was sickly sweet, poisoned, and the best moment of Klaus’ life all the same. 

.    .    .

On the day Goravich House had opened, Klaus had shone with pride. The place was unrecognisable; transformed into the vision he had had on the day he first viewed the property. He had imagined the faded, curling paint replaced with bright colours. If he looked closely, he could see in the corner of the drawing room where the children had painted pictures of one another with wobbly edges and big smiles before they had gone over it with a second coat. There was a stain beneath the largest bookshelf in the library where Atticus had spilled a cup of tea. His arm had been knocked by one of his children running into the room to tell him about a bird’s nest they had found in a tree outside. The flowers that bloomed had been planted by Penelope’s steady hands, and the conservatory had been the place that Klaus had watched his grandson take his first steps, one sticky hand clasping Daisy’s on his left, the other clutching Lena’s skirt on the right. Everyone had cheered the baby on, and he had laughed gleefully, impressed with himself. To open the house, now complete, was to bookmark a year of hard work punctuated with glistening memories, a year untarnished by the outside world. By the garden party that marked the house’s opening, it was time to let them in.

It was only at the end of the day, as the sun set and everybody went home, and Klaus slept his first night in the empty house, that he realised what he had done. In the morning, the children would arrive - each of them newly gifted his last name and a bedroom to call their own. The next day, the halls would fill with running feet and shouts and laughter. Klaus would be so happy to see them come, ready to grasp a new life with both hands. He would welcome them, tell them, “Make yourself at home!” and later, he would walk them to the reaping, over and over again, watch the bowl of names, over and over again, climb the steps up to the train station platform, again and again and again for the rest of his life. The greatest gift and the cruellest curse.

This year, Klaus left all of his children behind. Daisy, with her own three babes to look after, each of them the spitting image of her own infancy, bestowed with blonde curls that she had received from her own mother. Penelope, strong, independent, brave, vowing to look after the house while he was gone, promising to protect the children for him. She thought he was dramatic, he knew that, the way he dwelt on the journey. She thought he should be used to it by now. To the Capitol and back again, just a couple of weeks. She shook her head at him and laughed, her smile equal parts fond and despairing. “We’ll be fine!” she promised him. 

The ghost of her ten-year-old self followed him there. 

She, grown, took the children back to Goravich house, and made them supper.

Klaus and Atticus met the tributes at the train station. This year they were fierce, apparently unafraid. One of them — Felicity — sat in the seat that used to be Daisy’s. 

Somebody else’s child, somebody else’s baby.  

And so he left, taking nobody with him at all. 

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