Gray Days

Chapter 28: A Nightmare Unfolding

28

Rut.

A week after the funeral, I have this dream. It was after we buried my father and I was playing in our front yard with my sister's boyfriend whose face I can't remember now that I'm awake. Specifically we were playing in the snow, and Ella, who was watching us in the porch, goes inside the house and I think I followed her inside and I found her dazed and confused looking out to the backyard window. Then the sunlight blinded my eyes and my dream ended, and I never got to see what she was looking at.

"Get up, Tony, you're going to be late for school." I jolt up when I hear Betty's voice and see that she's changing the curtains, then I slump back in bed again. "How many times have I told you to clean your room?"

"Every single time you come home," I grunt and turn over so that my back is on her. She takes my blanket and my pillow so my head drops to the mattress and I groan because I feel like my body is still sleeping and doesn't want to get up just yet. "Why are you here anyway?"

"Is that how you greet your mother?"

I groan and finally get my body to sit up. "I'm sorry, Mom. Why are you here, Mom? Shouldn't you be in New York right now, Mom?"

She rolls her eyes and tells me again to get ready for school without answering any of my questions. I finish showering as fast as I can since I'm already running late and in the kitchen, I find Betty cooking up a quick breakfast and I walk up to her and give her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. She hands me my plate and I say, "I want to get used to this. I really do, Mom." Then halfway through my plate, I remember. "I'm sorry about your car."

Waving it off, she says, "We'll talk about that later, and about your suspension last week. You're late!"

She's not going to like it when I tell her I played and ran naked around the football field but I laugh it off and take my lunch off her hands. "I love you, Mom. And I miss your lunches. Thank you." I kiss her again before I go out.

Later in the afternoon, after school, I go to Zoey's and find her nowhere inside until Emily tells me she's visiting Sylvester in the memorial. I find her in front of both of her grandparents' graves with a bouquet of flowers. She watches me as I slip next to her, then she goes back to the newly-built tombstone. "I just miss them," she says.

She doesn't lay the flowers on the grave instead she runs over her eyes around the park and takes one single stem and places it below Sylvester's epitaph, and another for her grandmother. "Do you think these people's family still remembers them?"

"Probably, yes."

"But the entire place is empty except for us." Her eyebrows are meeting in the middle and she's talking with her lower lip pouted. "Every time we visit Grandma, I look at those empty spaces and I want to, at the least, give them some flowers. It's something I always wanted to do. I never got the chance."

"Let's do it," I say and she looks at me like she doesn't believe what I'm saying until I say it again. "Let's do it."

She beams and after she distributes what's left of the bouquet—one grave each— we drive to the local nursery to buy some more flowers. We lay a flower in every empty tomb in the park because it makes these dead people feel remembered and it's one step closer to Zoey's dream of making the world a bit fair to those treated harshly. It makes her happy and I like seeing her happy. It's like I've done something good with my life.

Zoey and I stand near the entrance of the memorial and watch over what we've done. It takes an hour but it's worth it because her smile has never left her lips since the start and she leans on my shoulder, channeling her body weight to me. Like she trusts me completely not to let her fall. "Thank you."

"A pleasure," I tell her.

She turns to me and kisses me in front of all these graves to witness and she doesn't feel ashamed when she pulls away. "I love you," she says.

There it is again. Fuck the stereotype that it's only girls who feel butterflies in their bellies.

She lets out a tiny laugh when she notices I'm frozen in place then looks back to the graves, now filled up with flowers, and say out in the open, "We should give your dad some flowers too."

And so we do. I take her to Nowhere and show her the place where the thing happened and I tell her everything I remember and I also show her where my dad is buried. She lays a flower by its root and tells me to also place some myself so I do. Afterwards, we stroll around the place, Zoey exploring and me following her and I notice some things I didn't notice last time. Like the rock in the crater that looks like a non-meteorite, common, igneous rock. Or the snowflake hanging from a branch. And the way Zoey gazes around the place like she's having the time of her life. Or simply the feeling that I've been here before, and given that I've spent my childhood in these woods, hunting with my father long ago would probably answer that.

She halts in front of a tree and her eyebrows furrow slightly and there's something in the way she looks at me that makes me stride to her. She points, "Isn't this your sister?"

ELLA RODGERS is engraved on the trunk and below it, is another name. JANET.

"Your mom?"

"Yeah," I nod, "Now that I think of it, I didn't actually remember her name." Now I do.

Zoey and I decide to hang in the hideout afterwards and the group is all hanging out there too—Isaac, Clair, Simone, even Neil O'Donnell and Derek Mason. Only Rigel is absent, at the exact day I need to talk to him most. That's just great.

When I get home, Mom is cooking in the kitchen and it smells really good so I just wait in the table and fill my nostrils with her delish dishes, waiting to be served and fed and something in the waiting itself kind of feels nostalgic. She serves one of my favorites and takes the seat across me and the moment is so good because having dinner with your mother who's rarely at home and tasting your favorite dish after long months of eating alone with bland fast foods and leftovers is a very rare thing in this household.

I help her with cleaning up and she is washing the dishes and I'm wiping the table when I ask her, "Is it true? David said my sister begged you guys to take me."

She stops on what she's doing and turns to me and I also stop because I notice something different on her face. She seems hesitant to tell me but then turns around and tries to continue with the dishes. "He told you that?"

I lean on the table, grasping the situation way too quickly. "He wasn't supposed to, was he?" She sighs and I shrug. "We kinda got into an argument and it slipped. Is it true?"

"Yes."

That was all I needed to know really, because the dream I had that night told almost everything.

It was nighttime. I was walking hand in hand with Ella and there's these blaring noises everywhere that it seemed like everyone else around us was either shouting or crying. I try to look back and see what's going on but she holds my head forward so I don't get to see and she keeps on telling me to just keep on walking so I do. And then, all of a sudden, everything becomes quiet and her grip on my hand tightens and I look up to her and she's constipated. Like the fact that she's walking with me makes her stiff.

In front of us, a pair of headlights blinds my eyes and a car pulls up then David who is twelve years younger comes up to us and asks if we need some help. Ella says yes and she crouches down to me and I notice her very worried face and she tries to smile when she tells me I have to go with them while she goes back to the town to get Mom. I don't know if it's her tired face or the fact that she was crying when she talked to David and Betty but they agreed to take me. I don't know what happened or what was happening but I keep my eyes on her as she walks back and Betty ushers me inside the car.

Something in my gut tells me she is going back for nothing. Then suddenly, I was in the kitchen and Ella was staring at something in the backyard and I have to tiptoe to see what she was looking at, and I see my mom hanging on a noose.