Trapped in Forever

19 ~ The Dead Girl's Friend

As I stared at them, watching as Kaleb, Roxanne’s step-father, reached over to the end of the table, grasping a bright red bottle of ketchup in his hands, lifting it up and gyrating it in his hands, as if he were inspecting it, making sure it was up to grade with the other ketchup bottles, and then he placed it down, back at the end of the booth/table, and his shoulders sagged with a sigh beneath the bright, blue denim of his shirt. He offered his wife across the table a brief smile, so fast it was like a reflex, and then he turned his gaze away, out the window, as flocks of seagulls swarmed the parking lot, searching for scraps of food dropped on the pavement. I could feel my heartbeat, whooshing in my ears, like the sound of a freight train coming closer and closer, or like what they say a tornado sounds like, and for what felt like minutes, that was all I could hear—the whoosh of my heartbeat. And then all of the other sounds—dishes clinking together, hissing, muffled and tingled chatter, and chair legs scraping against the floor—steadily began to seep back into my ears, drowning out the sound of my heart until it was as if it never existed.

Then, as everything else began to return, so I could see the door opening and closing, ringing the rusted bell over the rim of the door, and feel the burning of the pads of my fingertips beneath the scorning plate, anger inaugurated, bubbling deep within my chest until it spread, along with my pulse, through my body. I gritted my teeth together, a dull ache forming in my gums, and what was at first a shocked state morphed into a glare.

Roxanne, her daughter, was dead, buried six feet beneath the ground with the dirt, bugs, and other skeletons of people so much older than she ever was, in a dark, glazed, wooden coffin, with a reflective, gray tombstone with the words Loving Daughter chiseled into it, and instead of breaking into thousands of shattered pieces dispersed at her feet, like the rest of us, she was here, eating at a restaurant with her husband, as if her daughter never existed, as if she never mattered, as if nothing but getting her fried vegetables was important to her.

When Roxanne’s mother began to crane her neck, curled blond ringlets tumbling down her shoulder clad in a hot pink blouse—something so loud, so much like something ripped out of a magazine article, that it didn’t look like something a grieving mother should wear; she should be wearing an old hoodie, smelling of BO, and adorned with multicolored dots of stains—and her dark eyes, hidden behind thin, glass lenses, scanned the dining area, lingering briefly over to Earl as he stood up, grumbling, and took one last swig of his beer, a dribble of liquid crawling down his stubbly chin, and then she turned her head, again, this time over her shoulder, my breath caught in my throat.

Wisps of bleached blond air tumbled freely from her shoulder, slipping off of her skin and into the air, swaying over the surface of the table, and her lips, tinted peach and glossy, fell apart, gaping, and revealing straight, white as snow teeth, perfect for a Colgate commercial. I watched as she sucked in a breath, shoulders heaving, and she positioned her elbow on the edge of the table, touching her manicured fingertips to her ajar lips. Her gaze flickered to her husband, sitting across from her, who suddenly seemed engrossed with tearing off the corners of golden napkins, depositing the papery scraps off to the side, beside the ketchup bottle and desert menu, in a little pile.

Someone colliding their shoulder with mine, breaking my shared gaze with Roxanne’s mother as I stumbled, my eyes falling away from her dazed expression and bright, bleached, blond hair in a multicolored flash, tumbling together in a painful kaleidoscope, and they landed on one of the tables crosswise the room, where a couple sat, one clad in a cream colored, sleeveless dress and the other in a suit, sans the tie, and they smiled, lifting wineglasses to their lips just seconds after they clinked together, a little ting, lost in the atmosphere. As I regained my footing, I couldn’t help but return my gaze back to them, even if I felt a little part of myself, one that I still seemed to blind to, chip away and burn to crumbling, gray ashes.