Die for You

Chapter 52

It had taken me well into the following week before I'd come to terms with Becky's little present. It wasn't that those videos of my mum had affected me dramatically. It was just a gnawing sense of loss that had popped its head into my firing line; a gnawing sense of loss that had become dulled over the years but had never really gone away.

It had been an awkward few days as well, Becky and I dancing around each other; both of us unconsciously on tenterhooks. I think she was feeling a little bit guilty that she'd brought some of my bad old memories back, and I was desperate to show her that I was nothing but grateful for her thoughtfulness.

We'd sorted it out though, dinner at her favorite Italian restaurant on the Wednesday night proving the catalyst for us to actually talk about things. She'd asked me directly, over the starter, about how I was feeling, and to my surprise, I'd found it very easy to talk to her about it. It was good to talk, and it cleared the air between us and allowed us to move forward, the awkwardness disappearing over dessert and on our walk home.

I'd watched a few more of those tapes during that week, listening to my mum giving me advice on subjects as diverse as going on holiday and the things I should and shouldn't do at a job interview. It was funny to hear her talk of such mundane things, it was funnier still to realize that I'd ignored most of her advice without ever knowing it; some things never change I guess, I'd been ignoring her most of my life. It was also quite good that I was a lot older. I knew an eighteen year old Freen would have scorned the advice, whether it was on a tape or face to face; a twenty-six year old me saw something in my mother's words, something valuable, something to cherish.

There had been two sayings that I'd lived my life by up to this point, and they both came from my mother, it looks like they weren't going to be the last; I had hours and hours of stuff to listen to, when the time was right, hours and hours of her little suggestions and insights that she had loved me enough to want to share from beyond the grave. The trouble was, as fantastic as it was to 'see' my mother again, it had opened the floodgates for a lot of other issues, and it was on a warm but wet Thursday evening that poor old Joanna got drowned.

"So tell me, Freen, do you still see yourself as personally responsible for these deaths?"

"Sort of," I admitted nodding my head. 

We'd spent the last hour going through my jumbled thoughts, issues to do with the deaths of my mother, Whitey, Thomas, Laffiete, Adams and even Grouch. She'd helped me to shuffle the memories around and place them into some sort of structure to help me break them down; and break them down we did, each death analyzed in detail to determine exactly why I felt some associated form of guilt.

"Do you know why you still feel guilty?"

"Not really," I answered. 

This was a strange feeling. For years, I'd felt guilty about the deaths that occurred around me, blamed myself for everything that happened. We'd spent a while in our sessions discussing how I felt and why, Joanna seeing my mother's death as a larger trigger for all that came after. We'd established that I'd felt guilty because of mum's death mainly because I'd smoked around her at home and because I'd been a total bitch to her for so long. I felt guilty about Whitey because, well, I still had the feeling that I should have gone first, even though that illusion of mine had been burst. 

I felt guilty about the boys in Grishk because I should have done better, I should have advised the Captain to get us air cover. Even with our examinations of the events themselves, for some reason, the guilt was still lingering in the background of my mind, though my need to blame myself was beginning to fade away.

"When you say not really, what do you mean?" Joanna asked, her fingers twitching.

"I mean I don't really know..." I paused as she looked at me, taking a sip of the ever present herbal tea. "I think, at least, it's a bit easier to hang on to what I know, does that make sense?"