Chapter 27 Then #2
She looks confused for a moment, memories from the night clanging together.
They aren’t together anymore, are they? Or maybe they are again…
. She turns to go back inside, almost slipping.
I’m relieved when one foot makes it safely back into the room and then the other follows.
She almost falls over getting back to the bed, but thankfully, it’s a mere step or two away from the window.
Still furious, I turn back to Marc, who is gazing lazily out at the pool below. “You can sleep somewhere else tonight.”
He laughs, and his laugh is pitying me. Who was I to stop him from doing exactly what he wanted? Was I really going to stop the athletic, rich white boy from doing anything at all?
“I’m going to sleep in my bed,” he says with a shrug. “You can sleep where you want.”
I don’t mean to do it. Or, at least, I haven’t planned to. I can’t say exactly what would have happened next if he’d remained silent, if this had been enough for him. But it wasn’t. For boys like him, it’s never enough, and he says,
“God, you lot are so entitled.”
And I lose it, storming up to him.
“Fuck you,” I say, shoving him firmly in the chest.
He’s actually still smirking when he takes the first step back. It’s only when the second step finds air and not roof that his face comes alive with fear. Perhaps it’s the shock of it that means he doesn’t cry out, but the only sound is the sound of his body hitting the concrete.
Part of me wants to run down there, to see if I can help him.
I didn’t think I’d pushed him that hard, didn’t mean for him to go over the edge.
There’s a chance he just has a broken arm or leg.
But the silence scares me. Marc is not the kind to bear pain in dignified silence.
I creep to the edge of the roof and look down, see the blood spreading out from his skull.
He already looks very dead. And I think of going to check for a pulse to be extra sure, but I know what it would look like; the brown girl found kneeling in a pool of the golden boy’s blood doesn’t get off with a slap on the wrist. There’s nothing I can do for him now.
At first, I’m surprised I’m not freaking out.
But his is not the first dead body I’ve seen.
My dad’s had looked much like this when I’d emerged from my bedroom on the night he’d died.
Granted, this time there’s more blood, though.
But I’ve already learned another lesson from my dad’s death: some men are better off dead.
And Natalie will certainly be better off without Marc in her life.
When Mom comes to pick us up in the morning, she gives Ghanaian professional mourners a run for their money.
She weeps like Marc was her own son, even though Natty had pointedly kept them apart, clutching hands to her chest and stomping at the ground as she gets out of the car.
The police have cleared us to leave, and parents are rushing in, grabbing their precious, alive children away and staring, hard, at our mother.
Even they can see she needs the therapy she refuses to seek out.
Ultimately, these aren’t really my friends watching our mother melt down, but I can see how embarrassed Nat is. How this is more difficulty heaped onto an already difficult morning.
The first words Mom says to Natty are “You look terrible.” She stops to pull Natty into a brief hug and then releases her, fresh scrutiny in her eyes. “Really, baby, you look horrible. Have you not even washed your face?”
I watched my sister withdraw even further into herself. If she withdraws far enough, our mother’s sharp words can’t reach her. But I can’t reach her, either.
“Can we go?” she asks, not waiting for an answer. Her hand is on the passenger door handle and her rear in the seat before Mom can give any kind of reply.
Mom is soon also in her seat, with me in the back moments after.
As soon as the car door clicks shut, the theatrics stop.
It was like that when the police came after Dad died, too.
She was quiet as anything before they turned up, but the second they stepped foot in the house, she grieved like the most devoted of wives in ancient Greece, preparing to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre to burn with him.
The second they left, the house sank into quiet again.
In the end, I think the quiet, how it persisted, was too much for her.
In the absence of Dad, there was no chaos to control, nor an outlet for her tirades on her little lot in life.
But it was better to just let Dad be gone than try to keep him alive.
Our mother’s paroxysmal fits at the mere mention of him weren’t worth the upset for her or us.
Seat belt secured, Mom takes a moment to turn to me and pat my cheek.
“You’re a good girl coming to look after your sister.
” I’m embarrassed to have nothing to say to her.
A defense of my sister has already risen and died in my throat.
I’m not sure why it’s like this, why our mother is the only person I can never speak back to, and the only person Natalie can.
The irony is that Natalie follows our mom’s rules far more than I do, but our family has somehow assigned Natalie the role of problem child, and me, the good daughter.
It was only a few months ago that a boy sent me flowers and chocolate to the house for Valentine’s.
He’d played the lead in the school play, had a talent I found compelling.
He told me all about his auditions for drama school, mesmerized me with his monologues.
We started hooking up in the drama center on Thursday lunchtimes when it was empty.
Our sessions were fumbled and juvenile, but they kept me entertained for a little while.
When Mom found the flowers and summoned us both to the kitchen, yelling about teen pregnancies and “boyor matters,” I stood frozen.
In the end, Nat said they were hers. It was Nat who raged about Mom needing to let us have our own lives, a notion I’ve keenly felt and never been able to express.
With Dad gone, Mom’s depressive episodes are less frequent, but her attention, suffocating.
“If I hear anything about being up to no good with boys—” Mom barks.
“She was good.” Natalie. She has no idea if this is true, but she says it anyway.
Mom checks her mirrors, begins to pull out. She doesn’t reply to Natalie, just throws her voice back to me. “Good. Because you can’t go blindly following your wayward sister.”
“Mom.” Natalie. “Can you not?”
“What? I told you to stay away from that boy, to focus on your studies.” She pauses to huff for emphasis.
“You told me your party was girls only, at Emily’s.
And now I’m picking you up from that boy’s place after doing god knows what, and the boy’s had the fancy to go and split his head open like a coconut—”
I wonder if Mom thinks of Dad’s dead body in that way. A piece of food gone wrong. A gingerbread man with his limbs snapped. He hadn’t looked much like a gingerbread man to me when I’d crept out behind my sister that night. He’d looked very much like a dead body.
“Mom.” Natalie’s eyes are screwed shut, fists flexing closed and open.
I lean forward. “Mom, this is a hard morning for her. She’s grieving—”
“Hard for her? Do you know how mortifying it was calling Emily’s mother and having her realize my baby had lied to me about where sh—”
“Please, Mom,” I say.
But Natty simply waves a hand. “Leave it, Care. It’s fine.”
And so she sits there, absorbing it all so that I won’t have to, as she always does.
I’m indebted to her for this, I know. Not that she expects anything of me in return.
But still, the guilt gnaws at me as I sit, listening.
And I promise myself that I will always work to repay this favor.
After all, Natty needs protecting sometimes, too.