I felt the world holding its breath, waiting for me to do something. To cry, to scream, to shatter into a thousand obnoxious shards so the town could say, “See, she was always going to end up like this.”
I stood there, a scarecrow in borrowed black, and felt all those eyes pressing against my skin. The church ladies, the ex-friends, the men in work boots pretending not to know me.
I recognized them all, even with their faces aged and their hair thinned and their shame showing at the edges.
The priest finished her prayer. The dirt was waiting, piled up like a dare. Everyone stood in a crooked semicircle, not sure whether or not to put their arms around each other.
The funeral director gestured to me, his hand a well-practiced invitation. I stepped forward, my knees numb. I picked up a pinch of earth. It was cold, gritty, not the rich, living soil I wanted.
I scattered it, watched it dust the top of the casket, and felt my stomach knot.
I hated that box. I hated the dress they put her in, the paint on her lips, the way her memory had been flattened into a one-hour slideshow for strangers.
But most of all, I hated this feeling: the emptiness, the erasure. My mother was gone, and all that remained was a catalog of her.
Suddenly, I couldn’t remember all the times she neglected me while off on a drug binge. I couldn’t remember the times she would say the nastiest things to me as if I were the beast. I couldn’t remember the times she would treat me like a ghost in our own home, looking past me as if she did not have any children.
All I could recall was that she was my mom, and how she was lying in the coffin.
Dead and decayed.
There was no closure, no hope for her to get better and wrap her arms around me while saying, “I did it, sweetheart, I got better, now I can be the mother you’ve always wanted.”
All that remained was this biting, blackening hole inside of me that was building, building, and building so high like a volcano until?—
It broke.
It started as a tremor in my jaw, a little shiver that I tried to bite down, but then the air in my lungs turned liquid, and my hands went slack at my sides.
I wanted to scream, or run, or claw my nails into the shine of that coffin until I ripped a hole big enough for my mother’s voice to crawl out and echo one last time.
The noise that came out of me was not a scream, not exactly. It was the sound similar to a bone breaking, a wet snap at the center of my chest that echoed into the hollows of my skull.
I doubled over at the edge of the grave, fists driving into my sternum as if I could pound the pain into something solid, something I could spit out and bury with her.
I felt my knees hit the cold, dead grass, the grit of it scraping through my tights. My mouth was open, but nothing coherent came out.
The mourners startled, faces turning as one, a hydra of awkward concern. I watched their eyes flick away again, unable to bear the spectacle.
I was the show now, the part they’d gossip about later. I would be a legend: the girl who lost her mother twice, once to addiction and once to the dirt.
I thought about biting down on my tongue, drawing blood, anything to give my grief a body.
Instead, I just rocked there, my palms pressed into the rim of the grave as if I could climb in after her. The wind cut across the hill, slicing through my dress and burning the salt from my skin.
Then, without warning, Caiden was at my side. He didn’t try to pull me up or hush me. He just crouched, steady and silent, and wrapped his arms around me from behind, his hands locked over my ribcage like a tourniquet.
“I can’t do this,” I rasped, voice gone. “I can’t?—”
He held me tighter, so tight I thought my bones might fuse together. “You don’t have to,” he whispered. “You’re done. You did it, Amelia. You can let go.”
But I didn’t want to let go. Letting go meant admitting there was nothing left. That every hope, every apology, every impossible wish for my mother’s redemption was already rotting in the ground below me.
I don’t know how long we were like that, kneeling in the mud, the mourners receding to their cars, leaving us alone in the graveyard, the air echoing with my weeps and screams.
The crows watched, heads cocked, unblinking. They did not flinch when my voice tore through the air. Their patience was infinite. They would wait until the end, and then they would feast.
Caiden’s grip never loosened. He held me as if he were the last tree left in a hurricane, and I clung back, breathless and shaking so hard I thought I might pull us both into the earth.
