Page 64 of The Sound in Silence

Weighted.

Grey clouds creep up, despite the hot sun beaming through the windows, flashing onto the black sundress I found in our closet. Almost like Erico had it purchased for this day specifically, like he somehow knew.

Erico’s face appears in the car’s opening, his hand stretching toward me. He says nothing. Doesn’t ask me to exit the vehicle. Doesn’t reassure me in anyway. But he’shere, and that’s what I need.

He knows it too.

Somehow. Reading me. All my walls being more and more fragile with every passing moment with this man.

I lay my palm in his and allow him to take me from the vehicle’s safety and toward facing the pain buried within the pretty cemetery. The rocky ground of the surrounding patch of grass digs into the foam of my Toms shoes, the pain echoing the one in my heart.

He drops my hand but not before whispering in my ear, “Sometimes even the strongest of us need a little help now and again.”

Della steps between us in a not-so-subtle way to loop her arm through mine then leads me down the cement path. Erico mentioned Nico sourcing the exact gravesite where Mom’s buried and must have provided Della the directions because she walks us right toward it without hesitation.

Right down the stone path with gravestones on either side of us. All those dead people, with families still out there. Or maybe not, as we pass one with a 1762 date on it. Perhaps their family line died off, perhaps not. So many stories within this property and Mom’s become yet another one.

Della stops and pulls me down a particular row, passing stones of every size until reaching the final one. Small, grey, newer than some of the others. Only a couple years old. The inscription drops me to the ground, my bare knees slamming into the cool, trimmed grass.

Valerie Lambert

1978—2020

Beloved wife & mother

Memories immediately bombard me.

I scream.

The same kind of scream from that day. The warning, the fear, the anger of not being listened to. The same scream I later released when I awoke in the hospital, confused, frazzled, with the final word I’d spoken to her echoing in my head, taunting me with its evil sorrow.

She didn’t listen to me then, so what was the point in talking at all? People only pay attention to what they want to. If Mom had, then she’d be alive.

I fall forward, onto my hands, gripping the grass at the base of the stone—herstone. It’s not right she even has a stone. That this is what her life became. Her two orphaned daughters—because our birth father may as well have died, for all we know—sobbing at her fucking gravesite because she married the wrong man.

Della’s arms come around me as I scream and sob and let it all go into the grass. As I release the torturing pain, the endless rage, and the shattered grief into the ground. The grass, the dirt, and the roots beneath me carry my silent message toward the urn of Mom’s ashes.

Am I even still screaming? I have no idea anymore. Nothing makes a difference.

It didn’t then.

Mom getting a call to head to the library, where she occasionally volunteers, is strange, since they typically work around her schedule and not the other way around. Mom being Mom agreed regardless since she had no other plans.

Then her driver wasn’t available. Her driver isalwaysavailable. He was hired by Stefanofor her. It makes no sense he’d be elsewhere.

Which is how I find myself seated inside the passenger seat of one of Stefano’s smaller, spare cars. How many does one person need? This is number three, I think.

“Something about today feels off, Mom,” I tell her, eyes cutting to the side where she’s driving.

My mother shrugs and smiles, too caught up in bliss to look deeper beneath the surface. Since the moment Stefano came into our lives, the dark clouds that often consume me have been more present. Less ignorable. Everything good comes to an end and I’m waiting for this to as well.

I’ve been living with depression for years at this point, but every side-eye Stefano shoots my way, or bitchy comment from Yasmine or Rozelyn, his two daughters, makes the black hole a few feet deeper, demanding I jump in and hide myself from them.

“You worry too much, honey.” Reaching over and effectively ending this conversation, she twists the knob and turns up the volume of the 80s music blasting through the speakers. It makes my head hurt.

After another block, the feeling doesn’t go away. Above us, a grey cloud covers the sun—like a warning. Mom slows the vehicle down at a red light before stopping it altogether and she drags her fingers along the wheel, awaiting the green. Since marrying Stefano, she hasn’t driven herself anywhere, so maybe she’s simply missed the freedom. That’s what I try to convince myself of anyway.

Glancing away from her, I rest my head on the backrest and I stare out the side window as a car is coming to a stop behind us.

---