AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He eyes me doubtfully and then presses his ear to my chest and listens and my heart beats and beats and finally he’s satisfied. I’m so used to odd behavior from him, but this is very strange.
“Finn, are you ok?”
He nods. “Quite positive. It’s just déjà vu, I guess.”
I let it go, even though it makes me uneasy. If I don’t shield Finn from distress, he could have an episode. Obviously, I couldn’t shield him from losing mom, but I do my best to protect him from everything else. It’s a heavy thing to shoulder, but if Finn can carry his cross, I can certainly carry mine. I unfold another sweater, then toss it in the Goodwill pile.
“After mine, we’ll have to do yours,” I point out. He nods.
“Yeah. And then maybe we should do mom’s.”
I suck in a breath. While I would like nothing more, just in the name of moving forward, there’s no way.
“Dad would kill us,” I dismiss the idea.
“True,” Finn acknowledges, handing me a long sleeve t-shirt for the Keep pile. “But maybe he needs a nudge. It’s been two months. She doesn’t need her shoes by the backdoor anymore.”
He’s right. She doesn’t need them. Just like she doesn’t need her make-up laid out by her sink the way she left it, or her last book sitting face down to mark its page beside her reading chair. She’ll never finish that book. But to be fair to my dad, I don’t think I could throw her things out yet, either.
“Still,” I answer. “It’s his place to decide when it’s time. Not ours. We’re going away. He’s the one who will be here with the memories. Not us.”
“That’s why I’m worried,” Finn tells me. “He’s going to be here in this huge house alone. Well, not alone. Surrounded by dead bodies and mom’s memory. That’s even worse.”
Knowing how I hate to be alone, and how I especially hate to be alone in our big house, I shudder.
“Maybe that’s why he wants to rent out the Carriage House,” I offer. “So he’s not so alone up here.”
“Maybe.”
Finn reaches over and flips on some music, and I let the thumping bass fill the silence while we sort through my clothes. Usually, our silence is comfortable and we don’t need to fill it. But today, I feel unsettled. Tense. Anxious.
“Have you been writing lately?” I ask to make small-talk. He’s always scribbling in his journal. And even though I’m the one who’d gotten it for him for Christmas a couple of years ago, he won’t let me read it. Not since he showed it to me one time and I’d freaked out.
“Of course.”
Of course. It’s pretty much all he does. Poems, Latin, nonsense… you name it, he writes it.
“Can I read any of it yet?”
“No.”
His answer is definite and firm.
“Ok.” I don’t argue with that tone of voice, because, honestly, I’m a bit nervous to see what’s in there anyway. But he does pause and turn to me.
“I don’t think I ever said thank you for not running to mom and dad. When you read it that one time, I mean. It’s just my outlet, Cal. It doesn’t mean anything.”
His blue eyes pierce me, straight into my soul. Because I know I probably should’ve gone to them. And I probably would’ve, if mom hadn’t died. But I didn’t, and everything has been fine since then.
Fine. If I think hard enough on that word, then it will be true.
“You’re welcome,” I say softly, trying not to think of the gibberish I’d read, the scary words, the scary thoughts, scribbled and crossed out, and scrawled again. Over and over. Out of all of it, though, one thing stood out as most troubling. One phrase. It wasn’t the odd sketches of people with their eyes and faces and mouths scratched out, it wasn’t the odd and dark poems, it was one phrase.
Put me out of my misery.
Scrawled over and over, filling up two complete pages. I’ve watched him like a hawk ever since. He smiles now, encouraging me to forget it, like it’s just his outlet. He’s fine now. He’s fine. If I had a journal, I’d scrawl that on the pages, over and over, to make it true.
“Hey, I’m going to go to Group again today. Do you want to come with? If not, I can go myself.”
