I had gotten called to the office during ninth period. I knew I must be in trouble, although I couldn’t recall committing any major offenses. I couldn’t have an early dismissal, though. My dad never left the office early. Even though he was new in town, he already brought with him a solid reputation and, thus, a ceaseless rotation of clients. My mom was in no shape to schedule a doctor’s appointment or dentist appointment for me or anyone else in the family, so I knew that was out of the realm of possibility as well. It was more likely that someone got struck by lightning. Thus, I clutched my books from my desk as Mrs. Dahlia continued yammering about mysterious formulas I had yet to decode. As I turned the corner by the water fountain to head to the office, I was greeted by a counselor. I had no idea what her name was, but she met me with those familiar, despairing eyes that I knew were a bad sign.
“Corbin?” she implored, her fraudulent air of confidence giving away her desperation to make everything okay.
“Yeah…am I in trouble or something?” I quizzed, stomach dropping.
“No, Corbin. But something serious has happened. You need to come with me.” She led me toward the office as my heart plummeted into the depths of my chest. My feet suddenly morphed into sludge, not wanting to lose contact with the floor to carry my body forward. Devastated already by what I might hear, I traipsed beside the blonde-haired, haggard lady through the office. I was led to a back conference room and offered a seat. Our principal, Mrs. Sanders, was already there.
“What’s going on,” I spewed as I tossed my books loosely onto the table. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to wait for your dad to get here,” Mrs. Sanders offered gently. So it wasn’t my dad, he was okay. But then…
I jumped to my feet. “It’s Mom, isn’t it? Did something happen? Is she okay?” I scrambled out questions and jerky motions faster than the adults in the room could react. Things were about to get hairy as anger started to build up in me. How could they stay silent? My agitation was broken by my father coasting through the door. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he was in shock.
“Dad?” I pleaded, voice quavering.
“Son, sit down,” he commanded. He glanced at the adults in the room with a gentle nod, as if to thank them.
I lowered myself into the chair beside the guidance counselor. My dad sat silent for a moment, sending my mind and stomach into another endless tailspin. He finally got up the courage to spit out those few words that would pitch my life into a familiar blackness once again.
“She’s dead, son. She’s gone.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about, but the words hit me like a freight train blasting through a cement tunnel, and I realized I had been holding my breath. I waited for tears to start rolling down my cheeks, to drown me in their despair, but they didn’t. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t cry. I could barely breathe. I suddenly felt self-conscious as I noticed everyone was staring at me, waiting for some kind of reaction. But I couldn’t even muster one up.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother or that I wasn’t wrecked by the news. I guess a deep, inner part of me just wasn’t completely shocked. The news had slammed me to the ground, but I had anticipated this pothole in the road. If he were being honest, so did my dad. My mom had been on a devastatingly fast spiral toward a cliff we couldn’t bring her back from. No matter how many therapists and kind words we offered to her, time simply couldn’t patch up the crater that Chloe’s death had left in her soul. Or at least Mom didn’t have the strength to wait around for the answer. As much as I had tried to avoid it over the past few months, I knew something had to break. I just didn’t think it would be my mother, not so soon.
After a few difficult moments, all I managed to say was, “I need to find Emma. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
“We’ll take care of that,” the guidance counselor offered, reaching out to touch my hand. “You need to go home and be with your family.”
“What family?” I sneered, shoving my chair back from the table and away from her touch. “Don’t you get it? They’re gone now. They’re all gone.”
“Son…” my dad consoled, rising from his chair to follow me.
I didn’t respond. I just haphazardly gathered my books, headed toward the door, and then stopped. “Can you please make sure that Emma Groves knows what happened?” I asked, directing my inquiry to Mrs. Sanders.
“Yes, Corbin. And if you need anything, anything at all, you just let us know,” she offered, a subdued smile backing up her weak words. This was clearly uncomfortable for her, and I felt a tinge of regret at being so harsh.
“We’ll be fine,” I mumbled as I opened the door and stormed toward the car, not saying a word as my dad patiently followed behind.
* * * *
When we had returned home, I refused to say anything to my dad. It wasn’t that I was mad at him, I just couldn’t find words that seemed appropriate or meaningful. Nor did I want to hear any hollow promises of “It’s going to be okay.” I had heard that before, not that long ago. Things clearly weren’t okay, and they never would be. With that in mind, I just wanted to sleep.
I climbed our stairs two at a time, heading toward my bedroom. On the way, I passed my parents’ room. Turmoil and angst washed over me, bathing me in their irrefutable clutch. This morning, my mother had been lying in that room, breathing, dreaming, and thinking. Only an hour after we all left for the morning, she had ended it, right there.
I felt like there should be a dark cloud of fog sweeping over the room. A strange aura should be creeping through the small walkway around the bed. A voice, a whisper, should be reaching out to me. But this was no movie, and Hollywood couldn’t give me the closure I needed. Strangely, there were no longer remnants of the “scene,” so to speak. The police and other authorities had assessed and investigated the area, and cleaned everything up. To look into the room now would be to look into a blank canvas; it looked like nothing had happened in there at all. I think that this was what bothered me the most. It was symbolic of how life keeps going. A single death doesn’t equate to much in the scheme of the vast universe. Yet to me, that single death had now detonated a newfound hole in my heart, a hole that I didn’t even think there was room for. Chloe’s death had left an empty shell. My mother’s death now left me as a heaping pile of ash, ready to blow away with the first solid wind.
Something had happened in the room, despite its mundane appearance. Something life-changing, something devastating. Something potentially life-ending. My mother was gone. Glowering at the prospect, I finally passed by the room and hung a left toward my own. Shutting the door, tears finally started to fall. She was gone, gone like my sister. Both gone.
Even amidst the blunt force of my grief, I began to realize she had been gone for a long time. The mother I knew, the mother with the sparkling white teeth and a love for soap operas, was gone the day of that party. The mother who had studied ceaselessly to become one of the best emergency room doctors in the state of Arizona, yet still managed to pack my lunch every day for school, had disintegrated with the death of her only daughter. I knew it pained her that she couldn’t be the mother I needed her to be, but the fact was, she just couldn’t. That death—the guilt, the remorse, the regrets—swamped her entire being until all that was left was a skeleton of the woman she once was. Some days it seemed like even the skeleton was disintegrating right before our eyes, leaving nothing but a floppy pile of human flesh. When I looked into her eyes following the death, all I saw was a pile of blank slates, one after the other, lining the back of a masterpiece that had been destroyed. I no longer saw the joy or the drive that were so essential to my mother’s person. Her life’s painting had been wiped clean, leaving a gloomy backdrop where a once stunning portrait had rested.
Now, though, that blank slate had been emptied from my mother’s soul and placed into mine. Now my mother was less than a slate. She was nothing. Despite my mother’s lack of enthusiasm for life, she had still been
there. I could see her face each day, tell her things even if she didn’t seem to be listening. There had still been hope for recovery, that one day she would move past the death gently, carefully, back to her old self. Now that hope was banished, usurped yet again by the power of death.
I crashed into my pillow, not even bothering to take off my shoes. I just wanted to sleep, to fall into black oblivion where the realities of my life did not have to be faced. I just wanted to melt into my bed, a shiftless, formless shape of nothingness.
If I was being honest, I just wanted to be dead, too.
I had stayed in bed, shifting in and out of sleep, for several hours until the echoing doorbell roused me. I knew who it was even before that face appeared at my door. Despite the desire to fade into a state of nonexistence, I realized that in the depths of my being I was relieved to hear the doorbell, to know that her face would soon be in my hands.
She had eased into the room, watering eyes fearful of what she might find.
“Hey,” she quavered.
I sat up, my back resting against the headboard of my bed. “Hey,” I managed.
She sat beside me on the bed, facing me, shifting uneasily.
“I didn’t want to intrude, but I had to see you, to see if you were okay,” she apologized. I reached for her, took her in my arms.
“I’m okay now,” I decided, willing the tears and emotion to go away.
She wrapped her arms around me, laying her head on my chest. She started to cry for a woman she had barely known yet genuinely felt grief for. She felt anguish, I knew, because I did.
“We’re going to get through this,” she whispered into my hair.
We held each other in silence for a long time until suddenly I believed what she said.
* * * *
That entire week was a hellish, wobbly blur. There were the viewings, the funeral, flowers, seas of black clothes, gloppy casseroles sent from friends and family. Tears, apologies, strange moments of not knowing what to say, cards, kisses, hugs from practical strangers. Most of all, there were awkward avoidances of the how surrounding my mother’s death. The whole time, though, Emma stood right beside me, hand in hand, leading me through the darkness. There were plenty of days that my bed beckoned me to stay put, to not even bother facing the day, but Emma commandeered its power. She willed me on, willed me to breathe, to carry on. She became almost a permanent fixture in our household, helping with dinner and cleaning. Jill also became a frequent visitor at our home, helping in any way she could. There were many times that she would just stop what she was doing, hug me, not saying a word, then keep on with her task. She didn’t try to make things better with kind, promising words; she seemed to know this wasn’t what I needed. What I needed most right now was a hug from my mother, but since this wasn’t possible, Jill figured she could offer me the next best thing—a hug from her. Together, those two women pulled my dad and me out of the black hole that had encircled our family. They helped throw us back into the orbit of everyday life, finding a new sense of rhyme and reason to the days. They helped us heal from two deaths that had scarred us, not only as individuals, but as a family. Even in the depths of despair, in the depths of loss and sorrow I thought I couldn’t pull myself out of, the Groves proved to me that there was hope. There was hope for my life, even if the lives of my mom and sister were over. My life wasn’t over, they seemed to say without saying a single word.
* * * *
Little did I know it then, but this wasn’t the biggest test I would endure in my young life. Bigger, more arduous rocks lurked down the road, rocks that would fastidiously and unwaveringly overturn my life. Emma would be there for those rocks, too. She would again try to stand beside me, her hand in mine. This time, though, instead of letting her be my light in the darkness, I would snuff out her flame and flail her into an untouchable pit.
Chapter Eleven: The Plan
Emma
The phone’s piercing ring echoes through the room, snatching me away from the memories. Hank grunts as I methodically roll him off my lap and stumble across the living room to the phone.
“Hello?” My voice has a distant, questioning tone to it that even I can detect. I probably sound hungover.
“Hey, honnie! How’re you doing?” The overly chipper voice resonates through the phone cord, pounding against my brooding mood. I try to fake some enthusiasm.
“Hey, Mom. I’m fine. How are you?”
“Pretty good. Your dad and I just got home from our trip. I’m just unpacking.” I quickly try to recall where my parents had traveled to. These days, they rarely stayed on the same continent, let alone in their hometown. Mom was always dragging them off to new lands, new experiences. Sometimes I envied her appetite for life and how she always threw caution to the wind.
“How was it?”
“It was un-be-lievable! India is fantastic! I think the best part was the elephant ride. You should have seen your father! It was hilarious! He climbs up on the thing…” My mother’s voice becomes a buzzing mosquito in my ear. For the next few minutes, I tune out her mile-a-minute words about elephant poop and sand. Glancing out the window, I realize that the sun has almost completely sunk. The hour hand on the clock above the kitchen window is approaching the eight. Had I spent that much time reminiscing? What was wrong with me?
“He-llo? Emma? You there?” My mom screeches, snapping me back to the conversation.
“Sorry, Mom. I’m just tired. What did you just say?”
“I said…” she overexaggerates her words, “that I didn’t call to talk about me. I called to see how you’re doing.”
“I said I was fine, Mom. Why wouldn’t I be?” I offer a weak laugh, feebly attempting to convince her that my statement is valid.
“Oh, please, Emma. Who are you trying to fool? For God’s sake, this is the woman that popped you out of her own body.” That was my mother, so eloquent with her words.
“Mom, can we not do this? I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Well, what are we supposed to do? Pretend it’s just another normal day?” she asks sarcastically.
“It is just another day. For us, anyway.”
“Emma, come on. You can talk to me about his. I know you’re going through hell. I know how you feel. You’re not the only one who…” she trails off, not having to finish her sentence. We both know what we did.
“Mom, it’s ancient history, okay? We can’t change it. I’m fine. Honestly.”
“It’s just so unbelievable, isn’t it? All this time, I thought you had done the right thing, that we had done the right thing. The evidence, logic, it all pointed toward the obvious. And now...it just doesn’t seem fair, does it? I mean, why would God let this happen? It doesn’t make sense.” Her tone is serious now. I realize for the first time that this has hurt her badly, too. I had spent so much time wallowing in self-pity that I had forgotten how it had hit her.
After all, Corbin had become a big part of her life, too. It went beyond just you-could-be-my-future-son-in-law-so-I’ll-be-nice-to you. No, their relationship had been forged out of tragedy and fostered by a true connection. After Liz Jones took her own life, Corbin sunk into himself. Losing a sister was hard. Losing a sister and a mother in a little over a year was unbearable.
I had tried my best to help him through it. I held his hand the whole way through the funeral and the weeks that followed. It was my mom, however, that gave Corbin what he truly needed. She had known the perfect words to say, the best casseroles to send over, and when to give Corbin his space. Over the next few years, she would walk a difficult balance beam. She played a motherly role to him without trying to be his mother. She offered him advice and nurturing without overstepping the jagged boundaries a teenage boy naturally puts up. She had grown to love him and care for him, and he had grown to need her.
And so, the tragedy had been felt by her, too. It hadn’t been an easy decision for either of us to put him out of our lives. At the time, though, it seemed like a necessity.
It seemed rational. Life had dealt all of us an unforgiving hand. It was now, with the cards on the table, that my mother and I could truly sense the guilt and regrets that we harbored within us.
I spoke now with a deep sadness in my voice. “I know, Mom, I know. It isn’t fair. We both made mistakes. We did what we thought was right at the time. We didn’t know what else to do. But it doesn’t make it go away, does it? It doesn’t make it right. I just can’t help but think what he must have gone through. He was already falling apart and losing hope. And then, for us to walk out on him, both of us…” A tear lightly streams down my face. I hadn’t meant for this to happen. I didn’t want to admit how deep my wounds were, especially not to my mother. She had enough to worry about.
“Emma, do you want me to come over? Maybe it would help.”
“No!” I yell more forcefully than I intended. This would be the worst thing. Seeing my mom’s sadness would only foster a greater hurt within me. I soften my words this time, knowing I have to seem calm if I’m going to reassure her. “Its fine, Mom. I’m fine. John will be home soon.”
“Emma…you’re not just saying that, are you?” she asks, a hint of suspicion in her words.
“No, Mom, really, he’ll be home soon.” The second lie. I was certainly going to hell now, fingers crossed or not.
“Did you talk to John about this?”
“A little,” I admit.
“Well, that’s good. It’s no good to keep it bottled up inside. Did you watch the news?”
“God, no,” I bellow. “I’m not a masochist.”
“Well, I guess I am then,” she replies with a hint of slyness. “It was all over the news, naturally. It’s funny. Despite all of this time and tragedy, he still is as gorgeous as…”
“Mom! Enough! I don’t want to hear it, all right?”
“All right, all right. I’m done.” She pauses for a half-second. Before she even speaks, I know there is more to come. “Okay, not really. One more thought. Where do you think he went today? You know, on his first day of freedom? Back to his parents’ house?”
Voice of Innocence: A Coming-Of-Age Sweet Romance Page 7
