Straight On Til' Mourning

II.

For eighteen years she had twin sisters but now she has none.

Her coworkers ask her questions that she refuses to answer. Sometimes she thinks her manager is curious – a widening of grey eyes, an imploring trail of sentences – and she is relieved when her suspicions turn out to be, instead, paranoia.

She does not invite death but she wishes to die.

It seems monotonous, going through the motions of waking and sleeping and working and bleeding out, all over again, day after day. In the morning she drinks cold tea on her balcony. Instead of thinking about jumping she thinks about flying, how the wind would feel sharp on her mouth, how the cold would fill and cleanse her lungs. This sounds so beautiful: to be cleansed.

Before she left home her mother took her out for dinner. Grief distracted normal people, but her parents were The Great Exceptions. Her mother wore a black sleeveless turtleneck and a pair of white cigarette trousers. Powder-blue heels that struck and broke the pavement. The Brazilian Blowout treatment had been making its rounds of popularity and so that, too, was part of the ensemble: long, fine brown hair that dangled over an A-cup chest and size four waist.

Kirsten never felt intimidated by her mother's attempts to overshadow her. Dead flower crowns and daisy-dukes were not sophisticated but they had the desired effect of making her somewhat overlooked in the crush of tourists. Her mother, who harked from Los Angelos and balked at the sight of sneakers, did not understand the reverse psychology such a mindset had initiated.

And so she sat, smug-smiling, sipping water through a narrow straw. "Darling," she had said, "I miss you."

"If you miss me while I'm alive," Kirsten said, "maybe you won't if I was gone."

"No, no, but – we need to spend more time together." Gold-spangled wrists resting on her table, her mother cast a furtive look around. "In public, you know."

Then, looking at her daughter again: "Or perhaps not."

"Knightley would have wanted to be missed. Not Kolleen," Kirsten said, feeling the choking smother of grief ball in her lungs. "But definitely Knightley."

"Don't cry, darling. Don't scrunch up your face. Crying is rather ugly, in public."

Since her mother was so set on the ideals of public versus private life, and because she missed her sisters, and because the bitter, sinister parts of her – which had grown in size, lately – wanted to make a scene, she did.

Kirsten pretended that she was on the set of a sitcom – Knightley would have appreciated the gesture – and knocked a glass of water into her mother's lap. After yelling a few choice words, she left the restaurant and began striding down the sidewalk towards home.

Five minutes later, her mother idled up in the Range Rover.

"Kristen, dear, get in. Let's go! I'm going to be late for my facial."

"You would've been late anyway – you went out to lunch with me."

"Don't be ridiculous. Get in the car, please. Right now. Kristen – people are beginning to stare. Did you want that? The attention? You did, didn't you, because you always have to make such a scene."

"Don't talk to me," Kristen had said, in her pseudo-voice. And then, in her real one: "I'll call the cops again."

"For what? Parental harassment?"

"Parental abuse," she said, which she knew would piss her mother off.

It did.

A long and rather gruesome fight ensued, on the side of the road, floating into the gawking windows of passing cars. There was crying, on her mother's side, and dry laughter, on Kirsten's side. The whole thing seemed like such a joke: a scripted set-up in which she was left within and without and causeless.

In the end she had lost, and so she ran. Across highways and hills, through neighborhoods and shopping centers. She took her backpack, a credit card. Maxed out on plane tickets but not cab fare; treated herself to gourmet coffee but not a new pair of flip-flops, even though she needed shoes, because foam sandals were not conducive to mad dashes.

That is how she wound up here. Or so she tells herself. But the truth is much more complex.