Chapter Ten
Imani
I was at home with a glass of red wine, reviewing some casework. Ever since I left Potomac Falls, I buried my thoughts of Bleu under my work to try and keep my unresolved feelings at bay. When I got the call from Isa, my initial reaction was annoyance. Her voice was calm but terrified. I could tell there was something she wasn’t telling me.
“You need to come home. It’s…it’s Mom.”
Those were the only words that kept replaying in my head as I packed my suitcase. I was so worked up that I became irritated with my zipper for getting off track and not closing correctly.
“Fuck!” I screamed, hands shaking.
I clasped them together to calm myself before leaning against my dresser for a few seconds. A million and one of the worst possible outcomes started to play out in my head one by one, feeding my anxiety all the way to the airport. By the time my plane landed in Seven Pines, I was a nervous wreck. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I had to get to Isa and figure out what the hell was going on. When inside my Uber, I whipped out my phone to tell her I was on my way to her.
∞∞∞
A few seconds after my knuckles collided with Isa’s door; she swung it open. One look at her, and my body froze up. Whatever it was, it was bad. I was sure of it.
“What’s going on, Isa? Where is Mom? Is she okay?”
“Come in and sit down.”
I wheeled my suitcase inside and placed it by the door while she walked over to the couch. “Sit down? I just got off a flight. Isa, I don’t want to sit down! I want to know what’s going on. You told me I needed to get here, so just tell me! My mind has been thinking about the craziest shit, and I’m tired of thinking, wondering, and stressing! I just want to know! Just tell me what happened, Isa, please!” I begged her.
“Sit down, Imani,” she demanded.
I walked around her coffee table and sat on the opposite end of the couch. “I’m sitting.”
Isa cleared her throat, unable to even make eye contact with me. “Um, so I don’t know if you saw any construction or first responders still around the uh, the bridge when you came over from Seven Pines, but there was a real um…there was an accident last night. On the bridge. And um, it was um, it was Mom,” she trembled.
The more I listened, the more my eyes slowly became bloodshot. “It was Mom? What do you mean? Is she hurt? Is she in the hospital? Is she in surgery?!”
Isa sniffled before shaking her head. “No. She’s gone, Imani. She died at the scene. It was raining hard, and there was construction on the bridge. She swerved and hit another car, and she–she didn’t make it.”
My heart sunk to my feet before I leaned against the couch for support. A tear dropped from my left eye first, then the right, before the floodgates opened. My head instantly began to spin in circles, and suddenly, nothing in the world made sense. We sat silently while Isa pulled out her phone and started playing one voicemail after the other.
“She sent these to me before–before she–” Isa’s voice cracked, making her unable to finish her sentence.
By the time they were done, so many tears had collected in my eyelashes that I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.
“I’m so sorry, Imani,” Isa cried, pulling me into a hug.
“It’s just us now,” I cried.
She rubbed my back. “It’s just us.”
“I can’t believe we’re here again.”
“Y’know, for a while after Izzy died, I would still see his face all over the city. And there would be this tiny part of me that felt like maybe he was still alive. Like, somehow, he survived and was off living his life somewhere.”
I nodded avidly. “I used to be like that with Daddy,” I admitted, “sometimes I still am. It’s like, I’ll be out, and I’ll see an older man that I feel might have similar features to him. It always seems to make me happy and sad at the same time. Like, I’ll be smiling with tears in my eyes.”
The right corner of Isa’s mouth lifted into a smile. “We’re going to be okay, Imani.”
I dipped my chin in concession. “I know.”
“But there is something else I need to tell you,” Isa confessed.
I held up my hand to stop her before dabbing my eyes dry with tissue from the box on her coffee table. “I don’t think I can take anymore.”