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It was the nightmares that led him to me the first time. Or my reaction to the nightmares really. The constant crying.
It was five years ago when I was in ninth grade and he was in tenth. I turn around as a chill flows up my arm, traveling to the back of my neck and causing every hair in its path to stand on end. I’d sag against the hard door if my body wasn’t frozen at the memories.
Her scream.Screams. The shrill sound still wakes me up at night, tears streaming down my face as I try to keep my heart from leaping out of my chest.
When it happened, I was cross-legged on the floor of our townhouse one block down from where I am now, and my friend Andrea was on the sofa.
Justice Street. Ironic isn’t the right word for the name of the street I grew up on. It’s pathetic and riddled with agony that the word is allowed to exist in this city. I know now that she was nearly two blocks away, in the alley right across from both the park and the bars she had frequented.
The fact her screams carried that far, is evidence enough of how desperate she was for someone to help her.
The first scream came at 11:14 p.m. I remember how the red lines of the digital display shone brightly on the microwave’s clock.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Andrea asked me with wide, disbelieving eyes as she slapped the phone from my hand. It fucking hurt. The memory brings the sting back, making my left hand move on top of my right. Absently I rub soothing circles over it, staring straight ahead although I don’t see the hall to my uncle’s home. Technically, it’s mine now, but I don’t want to feel any sense of ownership for a damn thing in this city.
She coughed on the hit she took from her blunt and I remember the sound so clearly.
All I see is Andrea’s angry expression, but fear was also evident as she locked her eyes with mine. My heart beat faster back then, knowing I needed to call someone to help whoever it was that was screaming. But now it beats slow at the memory as if my body wishes I could stop time. As if it’s doing everything it can to try to make that happen, to go back.
I heard another faint cry for help and Andrea followed my gaze to the open window. The smoke billowed toward it. I sat there numbly as she quickly ran to the window and closed it.
“We have to call--” I tried to plead with her, knowing deep in the marrow of my bones that whoever was screaming was in agonizing pain.
“No, we don’t,” Andrea pushed back, waving the smoke from her face. “The cops can’t come here,” she argued with me. “Someone else will call… if whoever that was even needs help,” she told me, but both of our eyes strayed back to the window at the muffled sound of another shrill scream.
I didn’t move to my phone.
Instead, I took a shower. Of all the things I could have done, I stepped into a stream of hot water, listening to the white noise of the shower, praying for the water to wash the feelings away. The guilt, the disgust, all of it.
But that’s not something water can do.
When I stepped out of the shower, I swear I heard it again, but it sounded exactly the same. Andrea said I was crazy and that it was all in my head. That it was only the one time anyone had screamed at all, which she corrected to two when I stared back at her.
The last faint cry I heard was well after midnight. Andrea convinced me it was just a couple fighting; the Ruhills were good for that on the weekends as they were both angry drunks who spent their paychecks at the bar, but now I know that’s not true.
Over an hour had passed. And no one went to help her. Not me, not a single person in this city.
It was nearly 9 a.m. when the police banged on the door and I answered. I thought my mother had lost her keys and locked herself out. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When I opened the door, it still hadn’t dawned on me that the screams had belonged to her.
She was the one I didn’t help save.
No one did.
Not a single person for blocks around helped her.
Andrea wasn’t the only one to close the window and tell the cops that’s all they’d done. Screams in this place are a constant. Cries for help come often. And everyone assumed someone else would call the cops or offer street justice. But it didn’t happen that way.
That fucker, Barry, the one who turned up dead in the news today, I’ll never forget how he laughed at the bar as he bragged to anyone who would listen about how he’d turned up his television because she wouldn’t stop screaming. He’d shut the window and turned up the volume until he couldn’t hear her cries anymore. He’d heard her, he’d known she was begging for help, and yet he did nothing and dared to be arrogant about it.
It was easier to hate him than it was to hate myself for knowing I could have helped her. I could have tried to help her. I could have done something, anything—rather than listen to Andrea.
I never spoke to her again. Not that she cared much. With my mother gone, there’d be no one to fill my medicine cabinet with what Andrea referred to as the good shit.
The terrors that came with my mother’s death are justified. I deserve so much worse. I would do anything to go back.Anything.
My numb body finally moves to prevent what’s coming next. The memories of who my mother truly was, an abusive alcoholic who never wanted me. They’re joined by the fears I had back when I was a kid, that she was coming to punish me. That I deserved so badly to be punished.
“She’s long gone,” I whisper as two kids yelling up the street remind me that I’m here, in my uncle’s house, only a block away from my childhood home. And even farther away from where my mother was raped and murdered. More importantly, it’s years later.
