Reflections

The drive home is excruciatingly uncomfortable and quiet. I stare dizzyingly out the back window as greenery melts into an optical illusion and cars whoosh past in a speeding frenzy. I feel us turn down my street in an achingly nostalgic way – the same familiarity that would wake you as a child, and you pretended to still be asleep so your parents would carry you inside. That feeling now turns sour, spoiled by shame and dread. My house comes into view – a two-story, red-bricked, suburban family home, complete with a big oak tree and tire swing that has been flat since I was twelve. The car comes to a gentle stop – no one speaks, and no one moves for a moment.

“You have” the driver checks his watch, “…fifteen minutes,” he states. “Detective Andrews and I will be coming with you…for safety and security reasons, of course.”

I nod briskly, my eyes still trained on the three of them on the porch – how could I face them? They hadn’t moved. They hadn’t looked away. Had they even blinked?

Dad: overgrown eyebrows and mustache twisted into a scowl, hands stuffed into the front pockets of worn, work jeans, hair unkempt like he had been running his hands through it.

Mom: one hand around her slight waist and the other at her mouth, presumably biting her nails, dressed in her favorite raggedy green cardigan, and graying-brown hair haphazardly thrown on top of her head.

Abby: long flowy skirt dancing in the wind, perched on the balls of her feet, hands clasped mannerly behind her back.

I think I will remember them like this forever – this image of them branded itself onto the backs of my eyelids. I see it every time I close my eyes.

That fairytale vision of them faltered like a mirage in a heat storm, but their eyes tracked my progress up the driveway. When I enter the house, my senses are immediately overwhelmed: the scent of Abby’s guava shampoo, the scrape of Dad’s stubble on my left cheek, and the fragility of Mom’s shoulders under my hands like bird wings. The constant surge of memory drowns my consciousness, and I unwillingly relive the last time I walked into this kitchen:

“What?” I asked in my brattiest tone.

“Don’t what me, Jordan.”

I opened my mouth to continue the brewing fight, but Mom cut me off.

“Eat, or your food will get cold.”

Dad looked from me, to her, back to me again. He breathed a huge, dramatic sigh. No one looked at one another. The tension buzzed all around us like a pissed off hive. The rhythmic scrape of Abby’s fork on the plate was searing my eardrums, until I shot her a look with enough meaning behind it to make her stop. Everyone was afraid to speak – afraid of saying the wrong thing – afraid to start the fight. Mom got up first, and Abby quickly took the cue, following her to the sink. I could not bear the burn of Dad’s stare.

When I stood, he practically growled, “Sit. Down.”

I paused for a few heartbeats that were so loud I swore the entire room could hear it – the ticking of my patience ready to explode. It took nearly all my self-control to reply submissively, “I should help with the washing.”

“What you should have done is not leave the fucking house last night.”

“I know,” I replied, and hurried towards the others, towards my safety net. He followed, crackling with a fury so intense, the walls should have been curling with flames. The weight and speed of his footsteps should have put holes in the floor, like a prehistoric monster leaving its mark on the world.

Shit. Why did he follow? He only ever involves my mother and sister in our fights if he’s abhorrently drunk, and supremely angry. I feel a surge of panic for putting them in danger…I completely and selfishly miscalculated the situation.

Then my mother pleaded, “Michael, please don’t”.

I know she meant it to come out sternly, but her voice wavered with fear and desperation. Her breaths came shallowly and sharply through gritted teeth. Abby stared wide-eyed like a baby deer – her face was plastered with terror at the image of our red-eyed, pulsing father. I think we all barely recognized each other in this moment. The air stilled with suspense before the weight of our decisions shattered into thousands of shards on the wrong side of the scale. Before someone reached across the counter…

Then the AC kicks on, snapping me back into focus like a sucker punch. I blink my vision back into focus and suck in a huge rush of air, like I’d been holding my breath. I feel a cold dampness pooling at my palms and at the base of my neck. I probably look like I’d just seen a ghost…maybe I had. The detectives regard me with quizzical eyes, cocking their heads like curious dogs.

One of them nonchalantly asks, “Remember something?”

“No,” I reply too automatically. “It’s just being here feels weird, you know?”

They exchange a glance. “Weird…how?”, the other inquires.

The honest to God truth is that…I don’t know what is happening to me. Everything is jumbled in my head like some sick puzzle I’m expected to solve. Fragments are locking into place in no particular order, and the force of them stuns my entire body into a terror so paralyzing, I lose myself into the world of memory. The only thing I can compare it to is Alice falling for the lure of sin and into the chaos of Wonderland. Saying as much to the detectives would be, in its own right, an admission of guilt. What I truly feel is indignity and misery – my mandatory therapist calls it survivor’s guilt. The detectives wouldn’t understand “the complexities and intricacies of grief”, as the therapist had put it. There’s no sense in attempting to articulate myself to these amateurs – they’re trying to trap me into saying something they can twist to their advantage – and I’m so tired of everyone poking and prodding around in my brain for answers I don’t have. So, just like any other teenager dodging questions, I simply shrug.

I turn into the hallway too abruptly and I let out an audible groan as my stitches threaten to tear. I hate showing the eagle-eyed detectives any signs of weakness, but then again, maybe I can use it to my advantage. I was treated so gently when I was recovering in the hospital. The bright, bustling nurse, who made it her duty to be my bedside mother, protected me when I grew too tired, or the questioning became too intense. Now I feel like game being toyed with by hunters before the big kill. Something is happening to me in this house, and I’m obviously not hiding it very well, if at all. I was brought back here to see if I remembered anything else from that night, which I do, but nothing useful and certainly nothing that changes the course of the investigation.

The detectives follow me into my bedroom. I am allowed to take a few changes of clothes with me for now, and they make me turn every pocket inside-out to ensure I’m not tampering with evidence, I presume. After all the legalities and closure of the investigation, I’ll be allowed back. Although, I know I will never set foot in this house again. I had wanted to run away so badly before this happened. I desperately wanted to leave and never look back, to make my own life somewhere else. It felt easier then, I think, because everything would still be here. I would still have the choice to come back. Be careful what you wish for, I think wryly to myself.

I stuff my sorry-excuse-for-a-wardrobe into the provided duffel, and we make our way back towards the entry way. I feel shadows creeping just outside the peripheries of my vision. I swear I hear Abby giggle – that innocently joyful laugh – and a breeze caresses my arm sending an electric shock up my entire body. Sunrays glow through the kitchen window at an angle that catches specks of dust in the air, and shimmers seductively off the kitchen knives, just as they had that fateful night. I remember red – viscous, metallic red – in my mouth, in my eyes, and all over my hands. It didn’t hurt when that glistening blade plunged into my chest. I’ll never know if the others felt pain…I hope the shock numbed them too. I know if I turn the corner deeper into the kitchen, I will see them as I had left them – blank and unseeing eyes, faces twisted in anguish, and pools of blood creating a red sea in front of my eyes. I feel the memory threatening to drag me under like a dropped anchor. It can’t take me back there if I don’t look.

Frozen in indecision, I allow the detectives to lead me out of the house and back to the car keeping my eyes trained at my feet the entire way. The car door is opened for me and my bag is taken from me. I plop back into the cracked leather seat and face the thin, black bars separating me from the front of the car. Suddenly, and terrifyingly, I feel, for the first time, like a suspect. Now, that can’t be right…can it? I think the house must have made me paranoid. As soon as the thought crosses my mind, the back of my neck prickles and chills with that primeval instinct telling me that I’m being watched. I steal a look back at the house, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. And there they are – three sets of eyes boring into my bones.

Abby: poised once again on the balls of her feet, her crimson-stained skirt weaving with the wind, and a deep, fatal gash across the width of her chest.

Mom: cradling her bleeding heart, her favorite green cardigan hangs loose to expose one bony shoulder, and wearing an expression caught somewhere between fear and disbelief.

Dad: standing at attention, his ghastly waxen face starkly contrasted by a hideous, linear gash across his throat, looking old and worn, like his favorite jeans.

When I can no longer bear the intensity of their stares, I turn my head back slowly, and catch my reflection in the side mirror. I barely recognize the person staring back at me – bloodshot eyes, sunken and hollowed orbits, and sharpened cheekbones. There is something darker there too, looming in the periphery, exuding dread and anxiety. An unearthly evil had opened our front door and made itself at home. It festered, slowly, and methodically, and poisoned our air and our food. We fed it with anger, fear, and weakness, and it coated everything it touched. As we drive away, the three of them fade away at the edges until they disappear entirely hopefully taking that evil with them. But only that evil and I know what happened that night. We will carry the weight of that secret to my grave.