Searching For A Rainbow

ELEVEN-Carson

My father sat on the concrete step of our porch, covering his face with his hands.

Time slowed down as I stepped over the crime scene tape and I froze as a body bag on a stretcher was rolled past me, the paramedics casual as if there wasn't a distraught teenaged girl looking on in horror.

My episode of shock passed , the horror and confusion taking over, and I found my voice.

"What's happening?" I walked past paramedics and police officers and began to wonder if I had somehow turned invisible.

"Excuse me, what the hell is going on?" Tears began to form in my eyes and the tips of my ears burned. My stomach had probably dropped to my feet at that point.

"Oh, baby girl," my father shouted in my direction as he stood from his perch on the porch step and rushed over to me. He immediately wrapped me in a tight hug, tears streaming down his face.

"It's your mother. She killed herself," he told me, loud enough for the police officers bustling around to hear.

I imagined myself shoving him off of me, telling him things like, "Don't fucking touch me."

"You probably don't even care. You cared more about alcohol than your own wife."

"It's your fault, you selfish coward."

But I knew what the repercussions of those actions would be. I would be beaten, or burned with cigarette butts, or hit in the head with a flying beer bottle, or sliced by the shards sailing through the air after the bottle hit the wall behind my head. Perhaps he would even be feeling nostalgic and whip me with a belt or maybe he would just smack me in the face, punch me in the stomach so I doubled over in pain, grabbing my wrist hard enough to leave bruises in the shapes of his fingers to throw me on the ground so he could kick me in the ribs until I was halfway between life and death, like last time.

So I pushed aside my anger towards my father and switched my focus to my mother.

"She killed herself."

The words ran through my head like a broken record and I crumbled to the ground as I realized what they meant.

She's gone forever.

The only person who really loves me.

Why would she do this?

Why would she leave me with him?

There were no warning signs. She was happy- at least as happy as one can be with an abusive alcoholic as a husband. She had always told me that one day we would pack our things and leave together, somewhere he could never find us. Somewhere we would be safe. I often dreamed of the day she would sneak into my room in the early hours of the morning before the birds were even awake and tell me that it was time.

But now that day would never come.

My father crouched down beside me, rubbing my back in what was supposed to be a soothing manner but instead of comfort I just felt anguish.