Chasing Spring(46)

Chapter Forty-Six


August 2013

Blackwater, Texas





Elaine didn’t know where she was going, but she’d been running all her life. Her body knew what to do; she was built to flee. Her feet hammered against the pavement. Left, right, left, right. She’d lost her breath a mile back, but the sobs kept coming, ripping through her like they were trying to tear her in two.

She’d already lived a week without her friend, she wouldn’t last much longer. The police would find her and haul her back to jail. She’d have to deal with Donny’s people on the inside.

It will never end.

Lilah would never have the mother she deserved. She’d spend her weekends visiting Elaine in jail, wasting her spare change on the vending machine in the visitor’s room.

It will never end.

She hadn’t slept since Hannah’s death. Every time she swallowed, she was reminded of the raw flesh of Donny’s grip around her throat.

It will never end.

She was done with the suffering.

She would make it end.





Chapter Forty-Seven


Lilah





Saturday morning I found myself standing outside Blackwater Cemetery. I leaned on the wrought iron fence, dropped my chin to my arms, and counted down the row of gravestones until I landed on the one tenth from the left and five from the back. That was where Hannah Matthews had been buried a few months before my mother had taken the plot beside her, just like they’d requested.

They’d had wills drawn up before Chase and I were born that detailed their wishes after death. The wills had been short and silly, the result of two eighteen-year-olds trying to plan for an event they’d assumed would be seventy-years in the making. The concise instructions dictated their wishes to rest beside one another, two gravestones with a three-word epitaph. I didn’t need to see the front of their gravestones to remember the three words chiseled in memory of their lives.

Mother. Wife. Friend.

Three words inscribed in that order. At eighteen, they’d been young, pregnant, and in love with our fathers. Those three words seemed fitting, but now it all seemed like a cruel joke. Hannah’s words were correct, but out of order. Her epitaph should have read: Friend. Mother. Wife. After all, it was her unyielding friendship with my mother that had killed her in the end.

While Hannah’s words were out of order, my mother’s were just plain wrong. She wasn’t a mother, wife, or friend. I stared at the back of her gravestone and wished I could scrape off the lies inscribed on the other side. Chase had shown me how to forgive the living, but I couldn’t bring myself to absolve the dead.

The seed of sadness Chase had planted on the stairs the night before had bloomed into full-blown grief overnight. The details he’d revealed had torn open a wound that had never managed to heal properly in the first place. The bandages were rotten and so easy to tear.

I'd gone two years thinking I was fine, even relieved that my mom was gone, but as I stared at the back of her gravestone, rage boiled deep inside me.

I had thought you couldn’t be mad at a ghost.

I had thought once someone died, it’d be hard to look back in anger.

I’d been so wrong.

You can be mad at a ghost. You can be so royally pissed at a ghost that your entire body feels like a live wire about to explode.

I felt for the camera hanging around my neck—the one Chase had given me—and I focused the lens at the back of my mother’s gravestone. I adjusted the exposure and zoomed in. I pressed down and the shutter snapped, breaking up the silence of the cemetery.

Chase had given me the camera so I could use it like a private investigator, but my very first photo wasn’t taken to uncover other people’s secrets, it was to acknowledge my own.

…

I took the long way home from the cemetery, thinking over my confrontation with Chase. By the time I walked through my front door, it was well past dinnertime. I peeked into the kitchen, relieved to discover that the person scribbling at the table was my dad, not Chase. I couldn’t confront Chase yet. I felt like a glass vase teetering on the edge of a table; one soft breeze and I’d scatter across the floor into a million sharp pieces.

The soft glow of the overhead light cast my dad’s face into shadows. His head dipped forward as he jotted down notes onto a yellow legal pad. One glance from across the room and I knew he was working on baseball stats. It was his own form of therapy—everything was right in the world whenever he had a yellow legal pad.

I watched him run his hand through his thick salt and pepper hair, and then he finally glanced up at me as I rounded the table toward him.

“Hey, Lil, I was just about to call and see where you were. Are you hungry?” he asked, dropping his ballpoint pen on top of the legal pad with a thud and scooting his chair back against the hardwood floor.

I held up my hand to stop him from standing up. “No. I'll try to eat something in the morning.” My stomach was too knotted for food.

His brows scrunched together. “Is something wrong? You look pale.”

I didn't want to talk about it, but I had to know the truth. It would have been easier to turn and run, but instead, I pulled out the dining chair in front of me and sat down. Unable to meet his eyes, I said the words slowly. “I’m still mad at mom for what she did to Hannah.”