by A. M. Hudson
“And…what about now? Do you still hunt here?”
“Only if the foxes stray onto the land—disregarding the warnings around the border.”
“What!” I laughed aloud, rolling my head backward. “Last I checked, foxes couldn’t read.”
“Well, then they die,” he stated factually, then plonked down on the blue-and-red chequered blanket, with his back against the rock. “Don’t be shy.” He patted the spot next to him. “I won’t bite.”
I folded my arms, remembering suddenly why he really brought me out here.
“Come on, Ara. You know you wanna talk to me.” The arrogant smile on his lips filtered through his voice. “You also know I’m not going to let you go until you do—and no kitten-force kung-foo is going to help you. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m a lot bigger than you, petite fille.”
My shoulders twisted until I faced him, my mouth gaping in reproach. “What does petite fille mean?”
He smiled to himself, looking down at his outstretched legs. “Little girl.”
I huffed loudly. “I am not a little girl!”
“Good. Then stop acting like one. Sit down.”
I want to sit there, so badly, but I’m afraid I might never talk to him if I do, and I know they’re right—all of them…I…I do need to talk. I have needed to for long time. But does it have to be with him? All the reasoning with apprehension in the world can’t convince me that he won’t hate me after he finds out what I truly am.
David shrugged, then rested his hands behind his head—keeping his smiling eyes on me. “I’ve got all day.”
With a low huff, I sat down, cross-legged, about a metre in front of David. There’s no way I can sit next to him—he’s just too gorgeous. In fact, all I want now is to forget the reason I came here and just enjoy the beauty of the lake while I rest my face against his chest.
As I distracted myself with my shoelaces—using the tips to trace the white rubber sole of my Skecher—David waited, saying nothing. Is it possible he has the patience of a saint, or is he falling asleep waiting for me to talk? One thing I know is that time’s passing around us, but I’m happy to let it go, because this is my last moment of being just a girl to David. “I’m sorry, David.”
“Why would you need to be sorry?”
“I think I might’ve given you the wrong impression about myself.” I lowered my gaze. I don’t want to see his face when I tell him this—the way any compassion will dissolve from his eyes, and that look, the smile that seems to be reserved only for me, will vanish into repulsion.
“Ara?” He knelt up and held out his hand. “Don’t talk like that. You are a very sweet and very kind girl.” He exhaled and dropped his rejected hand. “I know something happened to your mum. What does that have to do with the sort of person you are?”
I pressed my palms to my now cool cheeks and wiped downward as I swallowed the tight lump in the back of my throat. The dark-haired boy of my dreams shuffled forward, tracing my face with his emerald eyes. I don’t want him to sit near me—not until he knows what I did. My body took over for my voice, and he sat back against the rock when I shook my head. “I just can’t, David. I’ve—” A jagged breath supressed my tears. “I’ve lived with this for so long now. I don’t know if I can tell someone.”
“Ara, mon amour—” he said softly. “There’s an old legend among my people that the tears one cries for loss, are the tears of the broken. We call them the Devil’s Liquid because, for each one you shed alone, you sacrifice a piece of your soul.”
“What?” I sniffed and looked up at him. “I’ve never heard of that before.”
“Like I said, it’s an old legend.” He reached for me then thought better of it. “They also say that for each tear shared, you give a piece of yourself for someone else to safeguard until you’re ready to see the sun rise again.”
“And you…”Hot tears doubled my vision. I blinked rapidly. “You want to be that someone?”
He stared at me, his round eyes unmoving. “Ara, I am that someone.”
Only a short sniffle passed before it all fell to pieces. “She shouldn’t have been there, David.” I burst into tears, covering my face as inaudible gusts of explanation dribbled through my lips. “She should’ve been in her bed, sleeping.”
“Your mum?”
I nodded into my hands, hiding my shame. “It was my fault. I killed her.”
“How?” he asked with the deep, insistent tone of an adult.
“It was late.” I swallowed. “I called her to come get me. I could’ve walked home, but—I was crying, and—” I folded my shaking hands into my lap and squeezed them tight. “It was so stupid. I’m seventeen. I’m not a child. But, I wanted my mum, so I made her get out of bed in the middle of the night and come pick me up.”
For a moment, I stopped and looked at the lake. It’s just too pretty here to ruin the tranquillity with my wretchedness.
“Keep talking,” David ordered softly from across the rug.
My shoulders lifted as I inhaled. “I was playing peek-a-boo over the seatback, with my little brother. He’d been sick for about a week, and Mum had finally gotten him to sleep when I called. But she woke him, put him in his seat and came to get me.”
David edged slightly closer, but stopped.
“Harry was so happy going for a drive when it was dark. It made me feel lighter just to see him smile. He only had two teeth and the cheekiest grin you ever saw.
“It was so cold that night and our car heater was on the fritz, so Mum had Harry all rugged up, with his little blue beanie on—the one she knitted when we found out he was a boy. We were the only people crazy enough to be out on a night like that.
“As we pulled up at the stop sign just around the corner from home, Mum started fussing with the heater. Then Harry started crying. Again. We were both so sick of that sound.” I shook my head once. “God knows I’d give anything to hear him cry again. It’s silly really, how unimportant something like that seems when you can’t see them anymore.” David and I smiled weakly at each other for a second. “So, I was playing boo with Harry again, and he started cackling. Mum smiled at me—to say thanks, and I turned back to smile at Harry as we started to pull away from the stop sign, only—I felt the car shake, before I heard any sound. The headlights, they came from the wrong direction, lit up Harry’s face from the front. I tried to scream. Tried to tell Mum something was wrong, and then—the shaking—the car shook so violently. I held on to the back of the chair—stuck that way with the force of the movement as we rolled, endlessly…just rolling for what felt like forever.” I hugged my arms across my chest. “Harry’s car seat shook, and came loose from the buckle—I reached out to him, tried to grab him, but glass shattered across my face. I closed my eyes for one second, David, just one second as the car rolled to a stop—and Harry was gone.
“I laid there, upside down, my face meshed into glass and broken scraps of metal—awake, and alone, for the longest time—screaming out for them. No one heard me. The glass in my face and hands was stinging so bad, like, if I could just wash it off with water it would stop hurting, but I couldn’t get up. My hips were still tied into the seatbelt and I was pinned by my shoulder—by something cold and hard—almost like a metal arm. It wouldn’t let me go, and all the blood was rushing into my head, making it hard to breathe.”
My hands shook as I looked down and saw the darkness of that night in my memory, how nothing made sense except the fact that I was upside down, and Harry was missing. “I listened for a while, holding my breath—desperate to hear a baby’s cry. But there was nothing. When I realised what that meant, I started screaming again. I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t stop because each breath I took only brought more of the most deafening silence I’ve ever heard in my life. So, I just screamed.”
I took a deep breath and wiped at my face, brushing away the memory of the blood trickling into my eyes. “After a while, I gave up screaming. No one was coming for us. No one knew what happened, an
d the road we were on only had one house.
“I was caged in on two sides by metal. All I could see was the lifeless pools of streetlight on the pavement through what was my window, and the absence of Harry in the small space where the backseat had been.”
I closed my eyes and pictured the eerie dimness of the streetlights, how in the cold, the glow seemed to settle on the footpath like fog, and remembered how the endless silence was broken only by the hollow ticking of indicator lamp, distant and lonely in the dead of night.
“I know it hurts to remember this, Ara,” David said. “But you need to keep talking.”
David smiled softly when I looked at him; I nodded, but didn’t smile back. “I laid there for so long, unable to turn my head enough see if my mum was under all that metal next to me—unable to stop picturing her with her eyes glazed over. But the scent of oil and burned rubber made me start wriggling again—terrified we’d all burn alive if the car caught fire.
“All I wanted was to get up and find Harry. I was so afraid he might be hurt somewhere, that he might need me—but worse, if he was alive after the crash, the chances of that were decreasing for every second that passed. I had no control, no power.
“I’m told it was only ten minutes after impact, but it seemed like forever until I saw blue and red lights flashing. Sounds came flooding back to my ears in waves. I know I heard a siren at one point, and someone calling my mum’s name, and then, after a while longer—I saw a face. The man looked at me for a long time before his eyes widened and he screamed out “This one’s alive.”
“That’s when I knew.” I touched my chest. “I felt in my heart. I’d lost them.
“I was conscious when they pulled me out. I felt every movement. I tried not to scream. I tried so hard not to scream.” I closed my eyes in emphasis of the words. “I wanted my mum. I needed my mum. But she was already gone.
“I dared to look back as they wheeled me away. They tried to pin me down, so I ripped the oxygen mask from my face and sat up, but I couldn’t make sense of all the metal. A car or a truck or maybe more than that. It was nothing but distorted jumbles of red and grey and white. I closed my eyes and fell back when I saw that my mum’s side of the car was completely flattened by the other vehicle, and worse, one of the cops was throwing up on the side of the road. They wouldn’t tell me where Mum was. I asked, but they kept deferring my questions.”
I stared ahead, feeling completely numb. “When I asked the man where the baby was—he stiffened and looked at his partner.”
“They didn’t know?” David asked.
I shook my head. “They knew. They just didn’t want to tell me.” I dropped my face into my hands. “It all just happened so fast, but when I play it back in my mind it’s all so much more painfully slow.”
David stole my hand and gently wiped the tears from my palm. “For what it’s worth, Ara, I do understand.”
I nodded and sniffed back the tears and snot. “They told me later that Harry had died on impact—before his seat had been thrown from the car. But I saw him, David—” I drew strength from his compassionate gaze. “I watched—his eyes met mine as the seat detached from the buckle, and he was so scared. He was so scared. But I knew,” I looked down, “we both knew, in that moment, he was going to die. And I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t help him.” With a stiff-set jaw, I wiped my face with my forearm. “I wondered what their definition of impact was. They never even let me see Harry—to say goodbye. And then, when I was in the hospital I heard a nurse outside my door telling someone else that the cop, who found Harry’s seat, was admitted into psychiatric care.” My voice rose with incredulity. “Do you have any idea how horrible it was to hear that? Do you know what went through my mind?” My lip quivered, and David closed his eyes for a second when I looked at him.
“To make things worse, my dad couldn’t get a flight. I was left in that hospital, by myself, terrified—trying to understand what had happened. They waited…” I swallowed a rise of despair. “They actually waited until my dad arrived before they told me the truth about my mum—before they told me she was dead. But I already knew. I could feel it in my heart.” I touched my chest again. “I never needed any confirmation.” David squeezed my hand. “No one knew I was there—in the hospital,” I continued. “Not even my best friend. He would’ve come, he would’ve sat with me, he would’ve been there, but I was in and out of consciousness the whole time. I couldn’t tell them to call him. I have never felt so alone in my entire life.”
“It’s okay.” Warm breath touched my hair as David knelt before me and encircled me in a protective embrace. “You’re safe now.” As I nodded, my cheek brushed against the tear stains I left on his shirt. David kissed the crown of my head and a wave of exhaustion swept over me. “Did you get injured—in the accident—aside from the glass?”
I nodded again, running my fingertips carefully over my jaw. “Dad fell apart when he looked at me. His eyes, I saw something in them that I’ve never, ever seen before. He told me that the rooftop had been torn away and my face had meshed into the ground when the car flipped. I don’t remember it—at all—” I shook my head staring into nothing. “I only remember the pain when I realised what happened, and how I couldn’t see through the blood pooling around my eyelids. I begged Dad for a mirror, but he wouldn’t get me one. No one would tell me how bad my face was.” My voice came back low, muffled against David’s chest. “I was lucky, was all they said. Apparently I should’ve been killed when the metal pole smashed right through the headrest where my face would’ve been. That’s what was pinning me down. It…it would’ve gone through Harry if his seat had stayed in place. I would’ve had to see that.”
“Then, maybe it’s a blessing he didn’t die that way, Ara,” David reasoned.
“Don’t give me that rubbish, David—they spoon fed me that crap in the hospital until I nearly choked on it.”
“So you don’t believe that maybe there’s a reason you lived—that you were spared.”
“But, I wasn’t spared. Don’t you see?” I looked up him, my eyes filling with liquid grief. “It was because I was reaching for Harry, David—that’s why the pole missed me. It wasn’t fate.” A loud, jagged sob escaped my lips. “Harry saved my life with his own, and he deserved better than that. I should never’ve called Mum. I should be the one that died—it should’ve been me they buried in the ground.”
“Ara? Don’t say things like that.” David pressed his hands against my cheeks and held tight as he looked deep into my eyes. “You can not blame yourself for this—”
“You weren’t there!” I pulled my face away. “Please, don’t try to make me see your point. I know what happened. I know what I feel.”
“Ara—sweetheart.” David stroked his elegant fingers over my hairline.
I shook my head as I stared at him in disbelief. How can he be so nice? I just told him I murdered my family.
His eyes scanned every inch of my face carefully. “Did you need plastic surgery after the accident?”
The sharp, sugary scent of his cologne sent a dizzying whirl through my head as I rested my face against his chest again and breathed him in, reminding me of the days that followed the accident; the way everyone who leaned over to examine me had a different smell. I shook my head. “They had to remove all the glass and stuff, but that was all. Then they only kept me in hospital for three more days after my dad came. But my face was so bruised I couldn’t really talk, and every time I cried, the tears would sting all the cuts in my skin. But other than external nicks and scrapes and a case of whiplash, I was practically unharmed.”
“Did you get a chance to…to…” he closed his eyes for a second, “I’m sorry, this is a horrible question—to bury your family—to say goodbye?”
“Not in the way I’d have liked to.” I looked down at the picnic rug. “Dad took me to the funeral the day they released me from hospital. It was raining—pouring, actually, and the wind stung my face. But I held my head high—fo
r them—to show them I could be strong.
“Then, only ten minutes into the burial, the storm hit so hard that I could only see a grey blur in front of me where their coffins should be—side by side. Most of the people left, but I refused to go. I had to say goodbye. But Dad didn’t give me long.
“The mud soaked into my stockings as I knelt on the ground between their coffins—touching my hand over the tiny blue and white box, and the cherry-wood one beside it. Dad told me they put Harry’s blanky and his teddy in the box with him. I kinda wish they’d let me choose his toy. He would’ve wanted Pappy, his monkey. He loved that damn monkey,” I cried, wiping the tears away with my hands. “He would’ve felt safe with that monkey.”
As I craned my neck to look at David, he gazed down at me, then kissed my forehead, and the feel his breath on my nose and lips calmed me with the reality of his existence. Mum’s gone and so is Harry, but David is real. My heart hurts for what I’ve lost, but I feel like I belong here—with him. Like I’ve always belonged here.
But I don’t deserve his kindness; he has to know—I have to make him see me for what I am. Can he not understand that there was life, and now, because of me—there’s not? How can he hold me like I matter—like he’s here for me? What about them? Who’s going to be there to make it all okay for Mum and Harry?
With a sigh, I opened my mouth to ruin my own life—again.
“When did your dad tell you that you had to move back here with him?” David cut me off.
My heart dropped into my stomach—dragging another carefully buried memory from my closet of horrors and slapping me in the face with it. I let out a breath. “On the ride home from the funeral. He said my bags were all packed, and I demanded, if he was going to steal me from the only home I’ve ever known that he take me back there—just once, to get my own things.” I pictured the grey day, the cold wind and the rain making waterfalls over the windscreen as we pulled up outside my house. The lights were all out and the remainder of the daylight was fighting against the thunderclouds for right of existence in my world. I took each shaky step up to the porch with a kind of stillness that had my dad lingering closely behind me. “It hadn’t really hit me that they were gone—” I said. “Not until I touched the cold, brass doorknob and pushed the door open. For a second, I waited, expecting, truly believing I’d see Harry crawl up to me at full speed with his little train in his hand.