Patsy’s Audi winds along among the dead. I watch until they are out of sight. Then I turn and walk slowly up the rise. Back to my mother.
When I reach her, I kneel down in the grass. My hand reaches out and I slowly trace a finger along the engraving of her name.
“Mom,” I whisper to her cold gray stone. “I should have stopped him.”
My hand reaches down. It is shaking as I touch the ground under which she is buried.
“I was a kid . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
I kneel there, clutching the grass like I might be hurled away at any second.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I whisper.
“I think about you every day. I think I remember it right. That you loved me. And I loved you. That we would never hurt each other. I tell myself that over and over and over again.”
My hair hangs in my face, sweat dripping off the ends. My chest is so tight. Every breath hurts. I find it so hard to take air into my body. It’s like my energy simply melts into the ground. Pulling at my most basic instincts.
“They did this. I know they did.” My voice rises in anger. I pull a handful of grass out at the roots. “They hurt you.”
I throw the clump of grass and dirt over my mother’s headstone. Soil rains down on the cold granite. My hands are shaking but I gulp air like I did that night in the ocean. Like my pain had tried to drown me once again.
As I catch my breath, a strange calm falls over me. My eyes focus, back onto the path forward. When I reach down to the ground again, my fingers caress the blades, running along the tops like I am running free through a field.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “Either way, I’ll know the truth. Either way, it will be over.”
I push up to my feet. Then bend and touch my lips to my mother’s stone.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”