She doesn’t deserve you. Kill her you fucking pussy kill her now. Push her off the cliffs. Lick her bones. Lick her bones. Lick her bones.
I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white, trying to force the voices away.
Lick her bones, suck her marrow, show her show her show her.
Today, the voices sound real, even though I know they aren’t. They’re not my voice, they’re just masquerades, a scary mask, imposters. They’re not real.
My voice is real.
Those voices are not.
But it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.
4
QUATUOR
Calla
One thing about this mountain in the summertime, is that time seems to slow to almost a stand-still and days blend into each other. Before I know it, one day bleeds into two, then three, before somehow, I find myself on Group Therapy duty again.
This time, however, I’m quick enough to call driving rights. I ignore Finn’s indignant look as we get into the car, and I smile smugly at him (real, not fake) as I drive away from the house.
As I steer the car down the mountain curves, the tires squeak on the rain-soaked gravel. Finn stares out the window, lost in his thoughts as we pass ‘the spot’. The place where our mother crashed and died.
A near-by tree hosts brightly-colored ribbons and a small plain cross. It’s lonely here, reverent and quiet. It’s a place that I usually ignore, because otherwise, it makes my heart hurt too much.
Unexpectedly, though, Finn lifts his head.
“Can you stop?”
Startled, I brake, then pull over. “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. I just need to be here for a minute.”
He gets out, his car door creaking as he closes it. I’m uneasy as I follow, because we’ve never stopped here before, not since we hung the ribbons and staked the white cross into the ground. It’s sacred ground here, but it’s also emotional ground. And emotional ground is dangerous for Finn to tread on.
“Whatcha doin’?” I ask as casually as I can, following him to the side of the steep incline, to the place where mom plunged over the side as she was talking to me. Balancing here, with our toes poking over the side, we can still see where the trees are knocked down and damaged from mom’s car hitting them. I feel a wave of nausea.
“Do you think she was dead before she hi
t the bottom?” Finn asks, his voice emotionless. My heart squeezes in my chest.
“I don’t know.”
I’ve thought about it, of course, but I don’t know. Dad didn’t tell us and I can’t bring myself to ask.
“What do you think about the other car?” Finn asks, his gaze staring down into the ravine and definitely not looking at me. I inhale, then exhale, pushing the guilt away, far away from me, over the mountain, over the cliffs, into the water.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly.
It’s the truth, because afterward, Dad wouldn’t tell us what happened to the occupants of the other car. Who they were, how many. He thought I was feeling enough unwarranted guilt, enough pain and torment. He wouldn’t talk about any of it and we were banned from turning the television on for weeks, just in case the news carried coverage. You’d think it would be maddening, but at the time, I was so immersed in grieving that I almost didn’t notice.
The problem is, it didn’t stop the guilt.
Because I killed people.
Staring down the side of this mountain, looking at the gouges carved into the trees from the metal of the crashed cars, the destruction of the forest…it’s all evidence. Whoever mom hit is dead. That’s apparent.