Page 28 of Miserable Marionette

I frowned at them, annoyed that they were here in the middle of the night. They worked with him, I mean you’d think they knew when he wasn’t going to be home. My mood further soured when they fidgeted, asking for Mom, refusing to tell me why they were here. It was about then the sleep wore off, fully letting the panic set in, the realization. Everything that happened next was done in a blinding haze. I watched it from somewhere outside my body as they told me how he flipped his cruiser an hour earlier. Chasing some stupid kids from out of town, joyriding in their mom’s van on back roads. The cruiser slid after it flipped, slamming into a light post on the highway.

He died before the ambulance even got there.

My dad, the only stable thing left to hold our home together was gone. It happened hours earlier as I sat and did my homework, eating a lukewarm TV dinner, paying more attention to a rerun of Out of This World than the papers. The TV I promised him I wouldn’t turn on until my work was done. I’d promised.

It’d been blaring the second he’d pulled from the driveway.

It took them two days after that to find out where Mom had buggered off to. That was the first time I’d set foot in the Bell Funeral Home since my best friend had left it. Where I had seen his mother, and so many others before her. It should’ve been Mr. Bell taking care of Dad, Gideon helping hold my hand while I stood numbly beside the casket.

I think that’s when the anger started, at the Bells. At the Bell Funeral Home sign, that taunted me every time I went outside, every time I looked out of a fucking window. I was a ball of grief and rage, walking the halls we grew up in without him. Rubbing salt in an ugly, festering wound. The distant cousin and new unfamiliar faces ran it just as well as the family had before, but it was colder. Colder without the cold, angry boy who lived in it. This clock watched me smile, blush, laugh, and sob. It watched me grow up from its stoic place below the mirror in the foyer. The world had stopped turning three years earlier when Gideon had left. After Dad died, it kicked into hyperdrive. Autopilot. Hours, months, and suddenly years passed in a gray haze, the lump never leaving my throat. The guilt I felt at that deceitful tendril of hope, that maybe, just maybe, they’d return. You know, to offer their condolences, to be there for me.

They didn’t. I had even heard a few people mention when Mr. Bell had stopped into town over the years, but I never saw him. I stopped looking for him or his son. Honestly, I stopped seeing altogether.

It’s the raw memory of that feeling that has me quickly running back upstairs, shutting off the water, mopping up the puddles on the floor with a hand towel, and heading into the abandoned office that now serves as a painting room. I don’t want to forgive Gideon, not yet. But I don’t think I’m ready to be without him again either. Even if I’m only worse for it in the end. Even if this sudden finality in my chest is just a way to think about anything other than the Jordans.

The canvases are dusty the further back I go, digging until I find the worn one. Years of being handled over and over again. Taken out, scribbled on and shoved away rougher than necessary. I shift the current canvas off the easel Dad bought me, grabbing the colored pencils in the purple sparkled box I’ve had for just as long. Avoiding the nubs that remain from Uncle Rodney’s set. I don’t use them anymore, haven’t in years, but I keep them in hopes their prophecy still rings true. Like they can infect the other pencils in the box with their goodwill.

It takes several deep breaths before I can look at it, the half-drawn picture of a little boy pushing an even smaller girl on a swing. She’s laughing, her curls dancing in the wind, oblivious to the frayed rope above her head.

14

Just A Mother

Audrey, Sixteen Years Old, 1984

My black shoes scrape across the carpet of Bell Funeral Home as we wait in line so Mom can sign our names in the mourner’s booklet. The gaggle of sniffling people and murmured conversations adds to my growing anxiety as I smooth out my dress. My eyes dart around the sea of black, looking for Gideon, hoping the concealer I blotted under my eyes to hide the puffy dark circles there is working. My muscles are still worn and sore for how hard I trembled as I walked through the woods last night. I don’t even know how long I sat there in our grove, listening to the trinkets we hung off the branches of the large tree dance in the wind. Telling myself I was being silly, a big baby when I flinched over every rustle of a bush. I’d felt him… Gideon.

At least I thought so.

I could’ve sworn sometime before dawn I’d smelled fresh linen on the wind.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking.

He never came out.

I sat there quietly, Krissy hugged tightly in my arms all night.

Alone.

At least mostly.

People handle grief in all sorts of ways. Most just need time, Dad had reassured me when he caught me sneaking back into the house, just as the sun’s rays bled through the sheer curtains in the living room. He’d sipped his coffee, looking at me over the newspaper, watched the tears streaming down my constantly raw cheeks and snotty nose before sending me up to my room to get some rest before the funeral.

I didn’t rest.

I didn’t eat as I took my seat by the window and watched the house across the street come to life. Watched the lights come on in the viewing room, trying my best not to let my thoughts wander to the still, pale, nude body of Gideon’s mom. How different she looked compared to Uncle Rodney, even though they’d both taken their lives in the same way. How it’d taken me months to stop seeing his body every time I closed my eyes. A year and a half to stop waking up in the middle of the night to crawl into Mom and Dad’s bed. Will Mrs. Bell be the same? Their bed hardly seemed like a comforting place anymore without either of them in it.

In that moment, with misery and exhaustion weighing me down, I’d wanted nothing more than to run across the street and crawl into Gideon’s bed until it was time to go downstairs. I never fall asleep as fast as I do when I’m curled against him, sucking up all his warmth. His fingers playing with my blonde curls. My lip wobbles for all the wrong reasons, and I can’t shake the feeling that something has changed.

That everything has changed. That I’m being selfish and horrible about the whole thing. That I can’t stop.

We file into the service room, and I swear my heart shudders when I see him. Gideon’s harsh eyes are already locked on me, his face blank, maybe even colder than usual as he watches me enter.

I have to dig my teeth into my inner cheeks to stop from smiling at the sight of him. It wouldn’t have been a happy smile, just maybe a relieved one. It’s inappropriate either way.

My feet get the best of me. I’m not three steps down the aisle, heading straight for him between the pews, before Dad’s rough hand snags my forearm, tugging me back into the line so we can take our seats. “There will be time later, Audrey. Take a seat.”

But will there? I don’t believe him.