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“What’s that?” I said with resignation.
“If he means something to you,” he said quietly, “and I mean, if hereallymeans something to you, you’re going to have to fight for him. Dante isn’t going to make this easy on you because in his stupid, prideful way, he thinks he’s doing the right thing. You have to prove him wrong.”
He chucked me on the chin then turned to walk away, leaving me as confused as I was before we had talked. Had this family always been so mysterious and confusing or was it a recent development?
I closed the door and locked it. I leaned against it for moral support then decided to trade the wooden panels for a cup of tea and a hot bath, not necessarily in that order.
I walked through my dark bedroom and flipped on the light in the bathroom. Hot water, a liberal sprinkle of Epsom salt and a dash of rose oil. I let the water run while I turned on the light in my bedroom and walked to my dresser. I glanced in the mirror as I bent to open the drawer where I kept my pajamas then froze.
I looked around the room quickly and nothing else was out of order. The brown envelope on the bed wasn’t mine. I hadn’t put it there and I did not recognize it but it was addressed to me in big black letters:Noemi.
My heart skipped a beat as I slowly walked to the bathroom and shut off the water. I stood in the doorway, eyeing first the envelope, then the phone. Someone had been in my home and left that envelope for me to find. Calling the police was my first instinct, but the romantic in me thought... perhaps it was from Dante? A love letter? An apology?
I sat on the bed with a heady reluctance that quickly gave way to my erratic heartbeat. I picked up the envelope and pulled out its contents.
I blinked as I read the first page. Once. Twice I read it. Then again.
What the hell was this? Who would dothis? I read the note for a fourth time. “You know who he is. Now you know what he’s done.”
I looked from the printed note to the paper behind it. It was a copy of my parent’s obituary and a picture. I cried—openly and hard. The picture was a car—the wrecked remains of an ocean blue, 2008 Audi. I remember the color because my mother wanted that particular car because she fell in love with the color.
“I’ve always wanted a blue car,” she had laughed the day she drove it home. “After nearly twenty years of brown cars, I finally have my blue one.”
She loved that car and drove it everywhere, including to a party the night she and my father swerved off the road and hit a tree head on.
I never thought about the details. I never let myself think about the agony they may have endured, but there was no mistaking the car in that photo. I looked at it closely through the tears. No. There was no mistaking the vanity license plate my Mom had ordered, FINALLY 5, alluding to the four different shades of brown cars she had driven before she finally got her blue one.
I wiped away the tears, but it was useless as they kept falling. I still cried regularly for my parents. On their birthdays, their wedding anniversary, the anniversary of the day they passed. The pain of their loss never went away but the tears changed over the years from choking sobs to silent streams to simmering pools. Looking at pictures of mangled metal and broken, jagged glass brought back the gut wrenching cries.
The trauma returned two-fold as I struggled to both catch my breath and draw some kind of connection between the note,“You know who he is. Now you know what he’s done,”and the tragic death of my parents.
My broken heart could only come up with one conclusion. Someone was trying to tell me that the man I loved had killed my parents.
