CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Did I Ever Leave Her Funeral?
LAKE
Can’t stop checking Ma’s socials. I know it’s a stupid idea, but I think about my parents’ way more than I like to. She texted me today, telling me she’s disappointed I didn’t go over. Dad wanted to say happy birthday to me.
She didn’t get the date right.
My body boils every time I become mindful of how unaware my parents are, living their lives like they didn’t screw up their daughter. Once she got away from a lifetime of bullshit, tried to heal herself from it all, she died on one of her adventures.
River missed out on half of her life, so she wanted to live to the fullest. Sometimes, I think she pushed herself too far to compensate for lost time.
She deserved a full life. Happy and whole. She’d meditate on tall rocks and breathe in pine trees. Her eyes closed softly, knowing in her heart she escaped the trailer and was reborn, but her rebirth wasn’t even a decade long. Not a decade at that second chance, and she was gone. All of it taken from her.
I remember her funeral as if I just walked out of the building. My addiction had started to spiral.
Coke is an everyday thing for me, and pills. I’m always on some pills that aren’t prescribed to me. It’s the hardest thing I could’ve done that day, but I pulled myself together. Brooks let me borrow a suit, and I spent fifteen minutes buttoning and unbuttoning the dress shirt instead of snorting something up my nose. I stayed clean the entire day.
The only thing I smoked was cigarettes. I sucked them into my lungs like I was popping back candy. I can’t say how many times I slipped free from the funeral’s after party to smoke.
But before then, at her casket.
My sister, my second mother. She lays in a dark green dress. Her arms are in her lap, and her eyes are shut. The bottom half of the casket is sealed, and nobody can look inside, because her legs killed her, snapping and tearing her spine, mangling her lower body, before she hit the back of her head.
I puff out a breath, struggling to not fall apart.
Brooks and me both stand there with our hands clasped in front of us. He arranged her funeral. He’s the reason her dress is green instead of black or navy, and why all of her jewelry is still on. Including her charm bracelet, covered in different colors. Each charm being a place she’s been, or a person she’s loved.
I can see the small circle with my hand-written initials engraved into it, and right beside that charm is a square with Brooks’ initials. I glance at him, and there’s just nothing. His face is stone. No tears in his eyes, not a lick of emotion, either. He’s gone blank. I don’t even think he’s consciously here.
My voice cracks. “Brooks—”
There’s a loud bang as the doors to the funeral home clap into the walls. Everyone turns their heads to see what’s going on. Before that noise, the funeral was peaceful. Broken, but peaceful.
My parents stumble through the aisle with their hands locked together. Their feet are clanking and twisting against the carpet. I can see the silver flask sticking out of my dad’s pocket.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Brooks mumbles. He moves into the front row, not paying them any mind, just zoning out at our sister’s casket.
“Oh, Lake!” Ma tosses on the waterworks the second she realizes everyone’s looking at her. Took her some time, because her eyes are bloodshot. She throws her arms up, tripping over herself and another guy before reaching me.
God, all I can hear is loud glass shattering off of pavement. Over and over. That’s how this situation is resting on me. “Are you drunk?” I whisper, grabbing her by her elbows when she almost knocks the both of us on the floor.
Brooks’ father was giving him space a few rows down, but the arrival of our mother provokes him to speed up the aisle and sit next to his son. He tries to console him, but Brooks doesn’t answer. He doesn’t move.
“This is just fucking great, isn’t it?” Dad slurs.
I get a sympathetic smile from Brooks’ dad. Cause I’m the one who’s gonna need to handle this. Pretty sure this is the first time in the last decade Ma has been in the same room as him.
I try to make them sit down. Embarrassment running through me, people are looking at me like I’m responsible to keep them quiet. My body is thirsting for a fix. I’d take anything if I had something to take cause I don’t have the patience for this, but I’m trying to be respectful to River and those here to mourn her.
“Okay. Sit the hell down,” I whisper-shout, ushering them into a row.
“There’s no need to be an asshole, Lake! My baby is dead!” Ma screams. She looks to see how much attention she’s getting, and forces more tears out of her eyes.
“Hell—” Dad rumbles. “Stop, fucking, stop. Don’t speak to your mother. That way.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Nevermind a fix. I’m about to kill myself.
My aunt Cynthia, who I’ve only met twice in my life, is a kind enough woman to rush to my aid. She pats the back of my shoulder. The same smile on her face that Brooks’ dad gave me, but she takes the problem out of my control.
“Come here.” She holds out her arms, dropping next to my mother and pulling her into a hug, giving her the attention she needs to shut up.
I take a deep breath and swing myself around. On my way to my seat, Brooks’ step mother barrels by me. She profusely apologizes for being late and brings Brooks into a tight squeeze. He still doesn’t move.
“Is he okay?” she asks her husband. “Why isn’t he talking?”
I go invisible when I walk by the three of them and sit in the corner of my row. The only person who would’ve comforted me is dead in front of me. So I let myself blend in with the sorrow saturating the room. I cover my mouth with my hand, and I stay silent as I cry my heart out. With each tear, I lose everything River tried to teach me.
Sometimes I feel like there’s a part of me still there. Hiding my misery from everyone in that room.
I pop another cherry tomato in my mouth, looking at my ma’s message. I stupidly click on her profile, and make my way to the sofa as it loads, moving Serenity’s creamy-cozy blanket, as she calls it, from under me.
My eyes narrow at the new photo ma posted. She’s on the same dingy couch, coated in stains and holes from cigarettes. Her wrinkled hand cups my father’s face as she kisses his cheek.
How in the absolute fuck are they unbothered? Never growing. Never changing. Raised three kids in a straight hell, yet they go about life like their dead daughter doesn’t haunt them. They never bother to ask how their addict son is doing. Then there’s Brooks. I’m not sure if Ma talks to Brooks anymore, especially after he refused to give them any money.
But that’s the thing. They don’t care about the three of us. Ma popped out three kids by accident and we were nothing but little burdens to them. They only ever treated us good when they needed something from someone else. The few times CPS showed up, we had to pretend all was well. Cause those government checks sure kept their addictions flowing.
I examine the photo more closely. Ma is covered in scab marks around her elbows. My father has a new tattoo on his face. He’s got a joint in one hand and binds his other arm around Ma. He’s flicking his ashes onto a photo laying on the chipped, wooden coffee table.
The sudden lump in my throat grows three times larger and suffocates me. Every angel in heaven can band together to try to hold me, but nothing will prevent me from this. Serenity’s beaming smile couldn’t even stop me.
Dad is dumping his ashes onto a photo of River, one of her school pictures. From the looks of it, they’ve been using the photo to smudge out their cigarettes. Flicking their ashes onto her face.
They’re using my sister as an ashtray.
They are using a picture of my dead sister as an ashtray.
***
My truck slides on some mud as I roar it to a halt. I chuck my keys in the passenger’s seat and hop out. There’s a high chance someone will steal my truck if they find it unlocked and loaded with the keys, but I can’t find it in me to care.
I charge to my childhood home with one intention in mind; get everything I can of my sister and tell my parents to screw off. For good. I’m done with it. I’m tired of wishing for something horrible to happen to them and feeling shitty for wanting that. My ruined childhood—what happened to my siblings makes me sick, and I’m also exhausted of feeling damn sick.
Yeah. I came from my mother, and I am my father’s son. I’m an addict, but in no light would I ever use my sister as a fucking ashtray. Her smiles, captured by a camera, are few and far between. There is no replacing them. There are no new photos. There is no more River.
I pound my fist on the ratchet door. “Ma?”
“Ma,” I yell. “Open the door!” I hear some scurrying from the other side. I bang both of my fists on the metal repeatedly. There’s no doubt she’s hiding inside. “I’ll kick the door down!”
The door flies open, and my mother meets me. “Lake!”
I briefly look at the strap stretched around her arm. It’s not safe for me here. Shouldn’t be here according to my rehab program, but I’m doing this for my sister. I’m too furious to drop on the couch and get stoned, anyway.
I push past her into the trailer. The familiar scent of filth, skunk, and rotten eggs fills my nose, but it’s stronger than I remember. Brooks mentioned something about them turning mine and River’s room into a meth lab. Wouldn’t surprise me.
“What—” My mother dwindles as I pick up the picture from the coffee table.
It’s covered in dark smudges and burn holes. The only part of River still intact is her uneven bangs, and her two eyes, crinkling at the ends as she beams, but I can’t see her smile. It’s covered in tarnished ashes.
“What the hell is this?” I shout.
She flinches and takes a step back. She has no fucking right to act scared. This is her crime over her daughter. She burned her dead daughter.
“Ma! What the fuck is this?” My chest is pushing out and collapsing at a fast rate, but this is only the beginning. I have yet to burst.
“I—Lake.” Tears swell up in her eyes, and her shoulders go straight to her ears. She runs a brittle hand through her unkempt hair.
I hold the picture in the air. “What is wrong with you?”
She doesn’t answer me. Just stares at me in disbelief.
I keep the picture, or what’s left of it, between my two fingers. Then I speed around the coffee table, throwing open the double-doors to the side table, between the couch and the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she shouts.
My hands sift through random discarded items, piles of old bills, and eviction notices. “Where are her pictures?” I throw everything I grab at all across the floor.
She takes wide steps towards me. “No!” she collapses on the ground and screams.
Ma should’ve been a damn actress.
I ignore her and pry open a drawer in the kitchen, chucking everything that isn’t River, or never belonged to her, in any and whatever direction. I find nothing, so I move to the next drawer and repeat the same process.
“What the fuck are you doing?” His voice is furious and hungry.
The fear that explodes and coils through my entire body is almost unbearable. I haven’t heard my father shout in years—not outside of my head—but somehow I gain the courage to move.
I turn to face him, staring into the eyes of this cold, terrible human. All of my fear turns to anger. Then pure, blissful rage. “You wanna use my sister as a damn ashtray!?” I shout back at him, stabbing my hand in the air, into his direction.
His face twists his first shade of red, and he huffs through his nostrils.
I step back, returning to firing shit all over the place. I know Ma keeps things in different places, but there’s one little box I remember. There’s old photos of River, me and Brooks stashed inside. Ma and I both keep things in boxes.
She breaks the sound barrier. “My baby!”
From the corner, I see her on her knees, clutching onto her bony chest and hollering like she gives a shit. “Don’t let him take my baby!”
Dad steps into the trailer, slamming the door so hard the whole damn place shakes, but I couldn’t give a single shit. The top hinge lets loose on a cabinet. I tear the entire thing off the wall and chuck it somewhere behind me.
Dad’s whispering to Ma, tryna calm her. I keep smashing anything that’s in my way, searching for my sister. Maybe part of me never left this trailer because these two keep us captive here. These are our memories, not my Ma’s. These are smiles we gave each other. Dad and Ma never made us smile.
“Lake!” If Dad says my name, he’s mad. If Dad says my name like that, I’m dead. Just don’t care right now. "You useless brat.” He stomps after me.
I spin around. “Where the hell—”
He socks me right in the face. My head ticks, but not fully sideways. I roll my tongue on the inside of my cheek, recalling a memory from when I was fourteen. It was just before they kicked me out, and I still feared my dad. He always had the upper hand.
The tables have spun.
I’m about four inches taller than him now. My body is fuller. I’ve fought more than he has. I fed my veins trash, but I built my body well. The worst part for him, my mentality hasn’t changed since I was a ten-year-old boy.
I will protect my sister. The same way she protected me.
“Look at what you’re doing to your poor—” He’s met with my curled, determined fist.
His head jerks right to the side, and Ma gasps from behind him.
He turns the second shade of red, then the third. When he looks at me again, he skyrockets to shade eight. I don’t imagine he’s happy with the smirk on my face.
I hover over him, gratifying in my newfound power. “Give me her pictures.”
Ma cries out, “no!”
Dad grabs a fist-full of my t-shirt with both his hands and throws me onto the old and tiny dining table. The legs of the table sway back and forth, and a second later, before dad can reach me, there’s a loud crack. The table collapses from my weight and I slam against the ground.
He squats down and instantly begins tossing his hands. He should have the advantage, but I’m hitting him more than he’s hitting me.
I’m fighting my dad. There’s no immediate concussion. I’m not stuck against this ground, bleeding and begging. I’m winning.
I pull back my fist and clock him with enough force to send an entire shockwave through my arm. Time slows right down as I watch blood splatter out of his mouth, but even in the slow motion, my arm draws back a second time, and I slam my knuckles into his cheek.
He manages a single punch to my ribs, but all it does is thrill me.
A few months ago, my ribs were stiff before an angel gave it her all to watch them rise again. I still don’t understand why she saved me or why I came back to life. Maybe it was for this; to teach these idiots a lesson.
My knuckles are cracking and dripping red, but it’s the only fist I can use. The other one is clutching onto the ruined picture of River. I’m refusing to let her go. I need an opening to secure her photo. It takes a minute, but I manage to use all the weight in my core and lower body to spin dad and me around.
“You’re a worthless—”
I lay my fist into his ribs. His jaw. His eyes. I pound my throbbing knuckles right into the stupid nose he gave me. All with River’s picture raised in the air, where he can’t even fathom reaching for it.
“You think you can strut in here,” he shoves me off of him into the kitchen cabinets, and my head snaps like a whip before he continues, “and win against me?”
I cower to protect her photo. Every action I take is another piece of this childhood agony erupting in front of my eyes. Memories I’ve pent up in my brain stem are fleeing and leaving through my fist. My sister’s precious life is safe in my palm, and I shield her how I always should’ve.
“Huh Lake?” He heaves. “You think you’re a man?”
Dad stumbles to his feet and kicks me in the stomach, making me cough. His foot swings back to knock me in the face, but I roll like I’m in a damn spy movie and fly back onto my toes.
Tuck her photo into my pocket. Then I somehow avoid his next throw, and I swing my unused hand as hard as I can. The punch makes every finger throb. My wrist and elbow snap from the amount of force I use. Another snap comes from dad’s head as it almost twists all the way around. If it was possible, I’d hear his ears ringing.
“More of a man,” I pause, and shove him back. He crashes against the fridge. “Then you will ever be.”
He hollers out from the depth of his lungs and charges for me. We lay more punches into each other, slamming our backs into counters and throwing more shit around. At some point, over the blood and insults, Ma gets up and fires a jar at my head. I stoop just in time and it shatters beside dad and me. Chunks of it land in the rusted sink.
Then, finally. Finally, I beat my father until he’s laying on the floor, half of him on the broken dining table, struggling to support himself on his elbows, bleeding from everywhere I struck, and breathing like a damn dog.
My hand smooths over my pocket. I stand over dad, smiling through my bleeding lip, because I fucking won.
I did it, River. Now I just gotta take you home. You can meet my wife.
“Where. The fuck.” I spit out blood. “Are. Her. Pictures?”
Ma shrieks, “no! You can’t take my baby!”
I roll back my neck and slump my shoulders. “Shut the hell up, Ma!”
She does, snapping her mouth shut and scratching at her arm from the shock of me actually telling her to shut it.
“You going to rehab again?” He puffs. “Brooks paying for it?”
“Pictures,” I order. “Not having a conversation with you.”
He doesn’t answer me, so I scan around the space. After that fight, I got no energy to bother arguing with him or listening to his harsh words. Just gotta think about where River might be. If there is a meth lab in my old bedroom, our pictures might be in there. Clearly, these two don’t care enough to preserve them.
“That girl is paying for some of it too, isn’t she?”
My eyes snap back to his. “Huh?”
He smiles. Every crack between his teeth is filling with blood. “I didn’t tell you dear, Lake got with a pretty girl!”
Ma goes back to viciously crying. I give her a weird look. Then I hold back on hitting dad again before I get information. “Who told you about her?”
“One of your rehab buddies.” He tilts his head, cracking his neck. “Told me she could do whatever she wanted to you, as long as you got your fix.”
Sally. Of course, it was Sally. Damn, my life is messed up, and everybody in the family seems to know all the details of it. But that was in the past.
My jaw ticks and I hold in seething over the pain. It’s in the past.
“She said you married the little blondie too.” He nudges his head at the ring on my finger that I gashed his cheek with earlier. “Guess that’s true.”
He’s trying to make me mad. He’s either searching for another fight or plotting to get under my skin, because he wouldn’t go near Serenity. I proved I’ll win any fight, and going after her doesn’t give him any advantage.
“Alright, Dad, pictures.” I motion with my palm.
His eyelids are swelling and turning purple. He’s still glued to the floor, panting and coughing. I take a step, ready to find them myself, because I’m not playing this damn game. I’ve been part of it for far too long.
“Let me ask a question first,” he says.
I shut my eyes. “Just give me—”
He cuts me off. “How does it feel being a charity case?”
“What?” My shoulders fall.
His grin grows wider, getting more creepy by the second. “That girl, what’s her name? Madden isn’t it?”
I shrug. If we’re gonna get technical, it’s Phoenix-Madden now. As much as I want to announce that fact, my body is pulsing, and I want to hurry home to Mrs. Phoenix-Madden instead.
“Heard her sister died.” He giggles. “She was at the Luna often, loved her meth.”
My body goes stiff. I swallow. “Knew that,” I lie. “Who cares?”
My dad makes a slow rise to his feet. It looks painful as hell. He peers over at my mother. She’s still throwing a tantrum on the floor, but without using her voice. All that yelling seized up her voice box.
“Lake, that girl doesn’t give a fuck about you. Don’t you get that? She saved your life because she couldn’t get over her dead sister.” He swipes his thumb across his lip. “I told you, your entire life, son, you’re just a waste of space.”
He snaps his fingers at my mother, and she nods her head in agreement.
“Say what you want about me, but my wife didn’t save me to mend herself.” My rise in power and adrenaline declines. “She saved me cause she’s a good person.”
“Well, alright. Let’s talk about you then.” My dad shrugs. “You will never amount to anything in your life, because you were never meant to be here.”
I tuck in my lower lip. The string of words makes his insult burn like salt in an open wound. It’s pretty obvious we’re all accidents, and hearing it from his mouth shouldn’t make me upset, but it does. It’s like he knows the pathways of my head, and he’s magnifying what already taunts me.
He goes toward the messed up counters, sighing at the mess we’ve made. “Just like your sister was.”
I snap my head in his direction. All he does is smile a wicked, cruel grin. “Don’t waste your energy on another fight, Lake. Look at those tears in your eyes. You’re the same pussy you used to be.”
I use the rest of whatever power I have to keep the flood in my waterline contained. “Like father, like son,” I retaliate.
“Yeah,” he laughs. “Maybe not fully, but you’re becoming just like me, aren’t you?”
He points to his beat up face. That I caused. Exactly like he used to do to me.
My stomach sinks.
Not just me. The same way he used to crimp his hands and hurt his daughter. And the same sort of power trip that gave him the boldness to put his hands on his stepson. Not even his own flesh and blood.
I won a fight against my father, and I don’t feel any better.
My whole life, I prayed and waited for this moment. I could finally embrace the rage I’d sunk into his skin, but instead, I feel like I’m staring at my own reflection.
I’m sent over my limit. I’m becoming like my father.
“You’re not getting those pictures,” he tells me. “You’re a waste of my time.”
I stand completely still. My body feels too stiff to move. I don’t know how, but those tears tremble down my cheeks.
I won. I won, but it wasn’t worth it.
His head shakes. “You have ten seconds to get the fuck out of my house before I burn what’s left of your sister.”
I choke. “Dad—”
“Get the fuck out of my house. Go ruin your wife’s life,” he demands and waves me off. “The same way you ruined ours. Poor girl has no idea what kind of mess she got herself into.”