Page 4 of Into the Woods

Her only response is a small shake of her head, one that if I’d not been fully focused on her, I would have missed with the way she’s quivering. The outline of her is almost a blur.

“I have to call them, Tru. We need them to come in and take Mom and Dad away.” Jesus, what are they going to do? What are they going to say? “Do you want to be here or?—”

“I w-w-want to d-d-disappear,” she whispers, anxiety causing her stutter to rack her body. Tears run down her cheeks like rivers overflowing their banks.

I stand, pulling her with me toward the back of the house. I hold her close, shielding her from the macabre scene in the living room.

Tru reaches for the door leading to her perceived safety, completely oblivious to the fact that she’s barefoot and not at all dressed for the woods.

“Boots, Tru.” I dig into the closet and grab a worn sweater in deep, dusky pink, wrapping her up in it. I frame her face between my palms. “I’ll come get you when it’s done, okay? When it’s safe and they’re all gone and…” My voice catches for the first time since walking through the front door after working a doubleshift at the diner. “And it’s just us. Then we’ll figure out what’s next, okay? It’s just us now, Tru, you hear me? We’re free,” I say, hoping the words are getting through her fog. Hoping she understands.

Darkness swallows her as she silently steals away from the end of our nightmare. We’re finally free.

I turn back after closing and locking the door to get the first, unfiltered look at how my parents chose to leave this world. And the simple answer is they did it in the only way that fit their lives. Expensively. Selfishly. And leaving behind a huge mess for me to clean up.

Disgust washes over me as I approach the room that for other families is the center of their home. Where they watch TV together, read books, share the happenings of their lives. Just not my fractured family.

As with my mother, a hypodermic needle hangs from my father’s arm, the plunger depressed completely. Their faces are slack in death, lips tinged blue. Drool pools on his chest, staining his worn, dingey t-shirt. His wallet lays open on the coffee table in front of him, credit cards askew and completely devoid of cash.

Even in death, they left me with nothing.

I stare hard at their lifeless forms, digging deep, desperate for a tender moment that we shared, for a single happy, carefree memory as a family, but there’s nothing. Not a damn thing. I lean against the fireplace mantle and catalog the waste laid out before me, and the only thing swirling through my mind is the massive pain in the ass it’s going to be to plan their funerals. My gut tells me that the budget for their sendoff will be about what I have hidden away from waiting tables, and my escape from this town will happen a little later than I had hoped.

I turn my thoughts to Tru and pray she can hang on for a little longer. Just a little bit longer until I can save enough in tipsto replace what it’s going to cost me to plant my parents. That thought is almost enough to bring a tear to my eye, but I needmore.

Never had a pet whose loss I can reach for to find the emotion necessary for this phone call, because relief is not what the world expects from me as I stare at my dead parents.

My only true friend is still with me, at least in the only way she can manage after all that she went through. The fact that Tru survived…

Distracted from my lack of emotive childhood memories, my fingers drift to my lips and though the charm bracelet broke a long, long time ago, the heavy silver honeybee remains, lashed to my wrist with a worn black leather lace, exactly where it was first placed.

A laugh erupts from me first, cold and hard. I was a foolish, love-struck child all those years ago, but the inkling of emotion, the hint of feeling is real. I close my eyes and let my heart drift back to the hope I felt then. The excitement, the way my pulse raced with that first kiss, with all the hopes and dreams and wants that filled me in that precious, naive, golden moment. The way it settled in me as I carved a rough heart into the bark of that tree, to stamp such a big emotion on the world in a physical way. One I could see and touch, visit as I waited for him to come back to me. One that ended up serving as a permanent reminder of what a fool I’d been. That I was discarded and left behind. That my childhood dreams would never come true. That as it turned out, the one person I’d thought I meant something to, who I’d thought saw me as something more than the rest of the world did, in fact did not.

A simple kiss, from a childhood crush, then I was cast aside and forgotten.

That’s the thought that finally brings me to tears. I allow those innocent emotions past the armor around my heart and letthem take me on a ride. I close my eyes and feel them, really feel them with everything I have, and everything I am. I allow the pain and heartache to amplify and grow and fully take control because I need them. I need the desperation of a first love, crushed and lost, to masque the relief I feel of finally being free.

Tears gather in my eyes, stinging and burning, until they fall down my cheeks in rivulets of remembered misery.

I cry.

I sob.

I mourn the boy I thought was different.

I mourn the fact that he wasn’t. That I was just a game. A plaything to help him pass time sequestered out in the woods, away from his real life. The life I wasn’t, and would never be, a part of.

When my throat is thick with it and my speech is sure to be muffled and broken, I place the call that sets the final chapter of this part of life in motion.

Hours pass before the commotion dies down and the house is clear, purples and pinks of the dawn of a new beginning leach into the dark night sky. Tru steals back in before the transition is complete.

“A-are you o-o-okay?” Her words barely register above a whisper, but the stuttering has eased. The stillness of the house and knowledge that, for now, all threats are gone seem to have settled her.

I lean in to where she’s perched beside me on the creaky old porch swing and lay my head on her shoulder. For the moment, I allow her the illusion that she’s taking care of me.

“I’m better than I have a right to be,” I say, pulling a light throw blanket around both of us. “What about you?”

Her cheek gently shifts against the top of my head. “I’m…I’m okay.” Just a pause, not a single stutter.

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