Over the Hills and Far Away (NOLA's Own #1) (8 page)

“I don’t know. We just got back from class when—”

“It was right after we had lunch,” said Connor. “She didn’t really eat anything. She wasn’t looking too good, and she…” He swallowed thickly. “She just collapsed. She fell off her chair and wasn’t moving. I did CPR while Grandma Betty called nine-one-one. I don’t think it helped.” He gasped, covering his mouth with his hand.

His shoulders started jerking, and Mama Sally pulled his shaking large frame into her arms, holding his head against her generous chest.

Oh, Connor. I wish you didn’t have to be the one to go through that.

My heart splintered apart as I watched my baby brother break down.
How was this experience going to affect him throughout his life?

Broody teen or not, Connor was an innocent, sweet young man.

“Oh…” I whispered, suddenly hit with a sickening realization. “Da.”

Mama Sally looked at me. “Don’t you worry about that, sweetheart, okay? I’ll let your Da know. I’ll give him a call as soon as we get back home.”

Looking into Connor’s dark green eyes,
my
eyes, I could see it all unfolding inside him—the pain and terror turning his soul just a smidgen darker, shadows lurking in secret corners of the mind to be recalled in times of bitterness.

What would it have done to me?

Suddenly, horribly, I was glad it was him. Justifiably, I absolutely hated myself for it.

Mama Sally drove us in her van. The whole ride to the hospital was a blank bit of canvas for me, not wanting to imprint the moment in my mind. Silently, I sat in between Alys and Connor.

Grandma met us at the emergency drop-off zone while Mama Sally parked the car.

Then, we waited.

The surgeon came out to greet us.

Mom never regained consciousness.

Taken in for emergency heart surgery, they’d used a technique with balloons to inflate and pump her failing swollen heart. A couple of hours later, she had been pronounced dead.

With her little old hand in mine, Grandma and I followed behind the white medical coat to a side room where they had laid out my mother’s body. Alys, Lili, Connor, and Mama Sally trailed behind us.

Mom looked as though she had simply fallen asleep. Propped up on pillows to make her appear comfortable, she even had a blanket draped over her breasts. The hospital gown had slipped slightly though, and I could see the red gash sewn together where they had opened her chest. Just the top of it was peeking over the neckline.

My mother had been beautiful, just a breathtaking woman. My whole life, I had wished I looked like her, exotic and rare. If I had, I would be able to look in the mirror from now on and see more of her rather than the hearty genes of Da.

“M-mom—” I choked, taking her hand. It was cool but not yet cold, soft and supple, and utterly without life.

She didn’t squeeze my hand to reassure me this time. My heart cracked, and my soul felt as though it had been hit with a damaging blow, one that would bleed beneath spiritual flesh and form a knot of scar tissue.

Beside me, Grandma sighed. Underneath the whispery sound, I heard the undeniable bloodcurdling scream of a mother who had lost her reason for living.

“She knew,” Lili stated quietly.

We were all hanging out in my bedroom, having returned from the hospital. Lili and I stretched out on my bed while Alys and Connor sat on the floor, their backs against the bedside.

“This morning…” continued Lili. “That’s why she was in the kitchen. She knew, and she was saying good-bye.”

Connor’s head dropped into his hands. Alys put her arm around his back and rested her head against his shoulder.

According to Connor, Da had left on a trucking haul and Mama Sally had said she and Gloria would track him down for us and then call us when they got in touch with him. After seeing the love between them on my birthday, I was scared of how Da would react.

I sparked up a spliff. I just needed to be numb—or asleep. Either one would do. My head was drowning, sifting through a sea of grief while guilt picked me apart for not getting my damn ass home when I knew I should have.

“Put on some music,” I said to anyone. “I want to listen to NOLA’s Junk. Someone push Play on the stereo.”

I didn’t know which one of them did so. It’d probably been Alys because Lili hadn’t moved from next to me. Phil’s voice melted out of the speakers, and I felt the knot in my chest ease a bit.

His voice would always have this power over me, to make me feel that I could pull through whatever challenge, that I had the strength to face anything standing in my way.

With the strong weed I was inhaling, the pleasant numbness I had been searching for swept me up before dumping me down the Rabbit Hole.

“You met him—The One!” Mom says, laughing.

“I don’t know about The One
,
but I met Phil fucking Deveraux. Why didn’t you tell me he was the Dark God of the Universe?”

She throws her hands up, beginning her sun salutations. “Why would I tell you that? Some things are sacred and should be discovered for yourself. Did you feel it—when he claimed your soul as his?”

Is that what he did? Claimed my soul?
I wonder.

I raise my hands, following her lead. As I lower my arms, the great big fence between Grandma’s property and the Plantation House sinks into the earth with a muffled groan. In the distance, through the jungle that has grown profusely over the last decade plus, I see lights twinkling in the windows of the ancient mansion.

It’s nighttime. Why are we saluting the sun at night?

“When did they move back?” I ask her.

“They never left,” she replies. “They’ve always been there. Don’t you remember, Baby Girl?”

“No.”

Mom transitions into an impressive handstand. I hate them. I really do. I attempt to do one, but I’m so big, so heavy, that I start to sink into the earth just like the fence. My hands penetrate into the damp cool soil, my fingers elongating into twisting roots. My arms go rigid, holding up my increasing weight as I solidify.

Mom shoves her laughing face inches away from mine. “He told you, ‘Don’t go anywhere!’ This will keep you right here, waiting for him, waiting and waiting. When you try to break free, he’ll come and get his Baby Girl.”

“This isn’t funny!” I yell at her. “Release me, you witch!”

She laughs madly. “Witch? There’s no such thing!”

My hair is tangling into the ground, turning into roots like a mangrove, weaving through the grass, burrowing as deep as they can.

“He told you not to go anywhere. Don’t you dare disobey the Dark God of the Universe. He wants his Baby Girl. He’s coming back for you.”

“You’re insane!” I cry. “You’ve gone mad!”

“Nope!” She laughs, laughs, laughs before pressing a cold kiss to my upside-down mouth. “I’ve gone dead.”

It didn’t look like her. It looked like a stiff wax replica.

Obviously, whoever had done her makeup had no clue who the hell she had been, and that person should be punched in the fucking throat for putting that hideous orange lipstick on her. Of all the shit I was upset about right at that moment, it was the orange fucking lipstick that really fucking burned me raw.

Mom hardly wore makeup. She never needed it! She was more than beautiful in her natural state, and this garbage makes a mockery of her! How can Grandma look at her daughter’s clowned-up dead face and not pitch a fucking fit?

While no one was watching, I took a tissue and wiped that shit off.

There. That’s better.

I hadn’t cried since the night she passed away. The burning in my eyes was more from the fact that I hadn’t slept for more than an hour or two a night since then. I hadn’t eaten much either.

Is it the same for all of us?

Ridiculously though, I felt like I was the only one
who was pissed off.

I mean, really, is no one else fucking raging on the inside here?

I wanted to scream and beat something half to death. I wanted to feel something break and bleed beneath my bare hands.

Instead, I sat quietly, listening and watching my surroundings without so much as two fucks to give. I was just a raging mute who could no longer shed tears.

I smelled the stench of embalming fluid coming off that wax replica the funeral director was trying to pull off as my mother.

I just want to feel normal again, human. I don’t want to be this busted-up thing adrift in an ocean of grief. It’s like I’m paralyzed inside with no way of releasing…anything.

My father would not stop crying.
He had no problem releasing. His problem was he couldn’t rein it the fuck in. That incessant noise was going to make me lose my shit. It had to be the most horrific sound I had ever heard, and I just needed it to fucking end already. He didn’t even look like my Da. His eyes and face so swollen from weeping, he looked like he’d shoved it in a grinder.

Grandma looked pretty dried up, but she still had the ability to act gracious to our fellow mourners. Maybe that was something that came with age and wisdom, both of which I sorely lacked.

Just at this moment, she was talking to a handsome man who looked to be around my Da’s age. He was tall, a little taller than Da, with thick black hair that had just started to go silver at the temples, and his eyes showed that he cared enough about my mother to have indulged in a bit of weeping himself.

His eyes briefly locked on mine, and I was startled to see that they were a stunning gem blue.

There was something extremely familiar about him even though I had never seen him before in my life. It was his smile, I thought. It was a sad smile, but he had some serious dimples. He was holding Grandma’s hands in his massive tanned ones, and I heard the depth of his voice but not his words. For a split moment, I was soothed and reminded of Phil.

“Don’t go anywhere.”

Turning my face forward toward the coffin, I stared at the enormous floral arrangement perched atop the lower closed half.

Grandma soon joined me, sitting next to me, and reached out to take my hand. I glanced down, noticing how frail and age-spotted hers was. Her hand was soft with her paper-thin, wrinkly skin and purple ropey veins.