Page 49 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“They are, but don’t put too much stock in it. They aren’t admissible in court.”

“Did you ever find her shoes?”

“Shoes? No. We’re not worried about the shoes. Probably dragged off by a coyote. The body is enough.”

I retch into the plastic bag, but nothing comes up. The alcohol has coalesced into a lump like a hairball. “Did you know my mother called me? Five times the day before she disappeared.”

“From your tone, I’m guessing you didn’t pick up.”

“Numbers I don’t recognize are usually creeps I tattoo. Some of them think you’re putting your hands on them for fun, not because they’re paying you.” I blink a few times, trying to holdon to the thread of conversation. “You have to make sure Josiah really looks into my father, Daniel. My mother—she wouldn’t have—the only reason I can think for her to reach out to me is if something was wrong. I mean, really wrong.”

“I haven’t forgotten what you said.”

“Did she feel it when the car hit her?”

“We shouldn’t talk about this.”

“Tell me,” I insist.

But when I see his eyes darken, I don’t want him to say the words. His forlorn expression tells me everything. “She didn’t die on impact, no.”

“What killed her then?”

“Respiratory injuries.”

“So she suffocated.”

“I would ask the medical examiner. She can—I’m probably getting some of the terminology wrong. The medical terms all get lost in translation.”

I wonder if she screamed. I wonder if her lungs allowed her to make any noise at all. I bite my knuckle, bearing down with just enough pressure to make it hurt. “I hope she was high,” I say after a long silence. “The oxy would have numbed the pain. Maybe—I know it’s a fucked-up way to look at it, but maybe I helped her in that way, you know? She only took the oxy because of what I did to her. Maybe that meant her last moments weren’t painful. I don’t like the thought of her dying scared.”

“One time, years and years ago, I went out on a call about a domestic disturbance. Asshole threatening his wife with a gun. He was quick on the draw, and he shot me in the chest.” Daniel brings his hand to the right side of his chest. “I finally understood what the phraseblinding painmeant. It was like someone ran a hot poker between my ribs. But when I was lying there on the ground, every time I tried to lift my head, I wanted to put it back down and close my eyes. The pain stopped eventually, and all I wanted to do was sleep.”

“But you lived.”

“In the end. They rushed me to the hospital, put a tube in my chest, and fished out the bullet. But for a while, lying there, I thought it was over. I would die in that asshole’s driveway. Most Lakota people don’t think of it as dying. Usually we call itwalking on, beginning the next part of your journey, and when you think of it that way, it makes death a hell of a lot less scary for most people. It still scared me though. At least it did back then. So when I was lying there with a bullet in my chest, I thought I would die scared. I was at first. But by the time it was really the end—or at least, I thought it was the end, started drifting in and out of consciousness—I wasn’t scared at all. Time was slow and the world was quiet. I just wanted to sleep.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“My daughter Scarlett’s birthday was that weekend,” he says. “She was five, finally old enough to have a real birthday party. She had begged me for an ice cream cake. I was hoping her mom would remember to pick it up if I wasn’t there to remind her.”

“You didn’t have your life flash before your eyes, like in the movies?”

“No.”

“I hope my mother didn’t either,” I say quietly. “I hope she drifted away. She was born with nothing and she died with nothing. Her father hit her and her mother, and she grew up to marry a man who hit her and her daughters. The only things she ever liked to do were drink and take pills. I don’t think anything in her life ever brought her joy or made her proud.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s little memories parents cherish most. Everyone has those.”

The chokecherry pie. I can see her smiling in the front seat of the car as she passes me the saran-wrapped slice, red berries and filling oozing everywhere, and it is then I can finally feel the absence her death leaves with me. The wordmotheris meaningless to me. Mother is someone I hated. I cannot grieve for mymother, but I can grieve for the woman who brought me pie. That woman, so rarely and ephemerally part of my life, gone just as quickly as she appeared, loved me, and I loved her too.

I do not realize I have tears until they streak down my cheeks. I cry silently until my chest aches from suppressing my sobs. Then I begin to wail.

CHAPTER

14

August 18th

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