Page 74 of Tell Me Softly
“Thiago, Taylor!” she shouted to the boys. They ran over, Taylor crying, Thiago looking very grave.
I noticed Katia’s hands were shaking like mad and her tears were falling one after the other, leaving dark marks on the white asphalt.
Her car roared off, and with it departed life as we had known it up until then.
After that party, everything went to hell.
Everything.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thiago
It wasn’t going to be a nice day. I’d known it wouldn’t be… Not a nice day, and not a nice week, either. Everything had been an uphill struggle for me ever since we’d returned from Falls Church. Practice, detention, the PE classes they’d asked me to oversee at the primary school next door… My work was taking over my life.
And even worse than the approach of the day I hated most in the world, I was starting to have real feelings for Kam, and I didn’t know what to do with them. With every passing week, I was getting angrier and angrier, but it wasn’t about what had happened eight years ago anymore; it was because I couldn’t stand to see her with my brother.
Since we’d come back from our trip, they’d been inseparable. I’d threatened her, I’d told her I’d make her life at school hell…but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to separate them. Not yet, anyway.
Seeing her in her room through my window, lips swollen after my brother had kissed her, was something that chased me in my dreams. Taylor having lunch with her, laughing as he hung out with her, fawning over her…her smiling back. Why couldn’t shehave been smiling at me instead?
But the answer was obvious.
Every room in our house was throbbing with pain. Every corner was dense with memories—memories that burned my soul and that I couldn’t escape from.
My mother was in the bedroom we never went into, the door locked. I couldn’t even go in to see how she was. But she was hurting. She always hurt when this day approached. The memories were just too much for her.
My brother was in the living room playing Xbox, in his parallel world where none of this had happened. I wasn’t like him. Even the sound of cars made me remember it all. Everything reminded me of what had happened that day, and I was getting stir-crazy, so I decided to get the hell out of there. Get the hell away from that house and my memories. Get the hell away from the feeling of guilt. But above all, get the hell away from the pain that was so thick in the air I was afraid I would choke on it.
It was raining. Hard. My windshield wipers couldn’t even break through the wall of water on the windshield. I cursed. I didn’t want to go back home. I wanted to stay on the road. I wanted to disappear for a while. But the weather wouldn’t let up.
Why was I going there?I wondered. Was I sick in the head? A masochist? Was it necessary? There it was: the yellow bridge. All the memories started coming back. They seemed to enjoy it. As if my memories were alive and wanted to torture me, make me feel guilty, fuck my life up the way they had fucked up my mother’s.
I stomped on the accelerator. The same way she had that day.
“Mom, you’re going too fast,” I remember saying. I had been scared. I didn’t even know where we were going. Mom was crying, and she kept saying, “Why? Why? Why?” Why had my father done this to her?
My sister Lucy was in the back seat crying. Her birthday hadbeen horrible: her cake shaped like a castle had been destroyed, thrown to the ground.
I hated my father… I didn’t think it was possible to hate a person any more than I hated him. But I didn’t know what was about to happen.
“Lucy, honey, calm down, OK?” my mother said, looking at her in the rearview mirror and trying to smile. But of course she couldn’t calm down. Mom was shouting and crying and driving too fast.
My sister screeched, and even Taylor, who was always so calm, started crying, telling Mom to stop the car, that he was scared, that he wanted to go back to see Dad.
“Your father’s cheating on me, Taylor,” she said. I watched her face transform. “My husband is cheating on me with my best friend.”
In that moment, I had the impression that my mother was no longer there. The car was on autopilot, and she had gone away to be alone with her suffering. Her foot, though—her foot was alive, and it wouldn’t stop pressing down harder on the gas.
I saw the bridge at the end of the road.
“Mom, slow down!” I shouted, trying to drown out my brother and sister.
Mom seemed to return from wherever she’d gone off to. And then it happened.
I wonder sometimes if it was destiny. If God or whatever it was had willed that deer to jump out in the road just then, right as my mother was crossing a bridge at ninety despite the sign warning drivers to slow down to thirty-five… Had we done something wrong, that something as stupid as an animal crossing a road had to change our fate?
I remember her screaming. I remember the tire striking the bridge’s edge. I remember the car spinning, flipping, falling.
