Voiceless

Chapter Nineteen

I don't eat or sleep. Cloaking myself in complete darkness is the one thing that lessens the pain; I shut the curtains and burrow into blankets, trying to forget what I had worked so desperately to remember. Every time I try to close my heavy-lidded eyes, the faces of the dead come to me, haunting. 

Grandmother comes in sometimes, though I'm not so sure of how often. Time has begun to lose meaning. She sits next to my bed, sometimes begging me to get up, but mostly stares at me with pity in her eyes. 

Pity. I'd prefer anything, even hatred, over pity.

One day she just snaps. Storming in with as much power as she possesses, Grandmother throws open the curtains and tears the blankets off of me. Stop! What are you doing?! I sign angrily.

"Her memorial is today. I thought you'd want to go." She sounds doubly enraged. "You've been rotting away in this room for two months, Vera! Two months! I will not provide shelter to a living corpse. Your own brother didn't even get this level of...grief, if that's what you want to call it." 

I just stare. Slowly, I  sign out, But he is. I remember him now. They both...they both died, right there in front of me. I lost two of them. What kind of person am I? My hands begin moving more quickly, accelerating with each word. I could've stopped her. And Gavin...sometimes I wonder if he was the lucky one. He got to escape this horrible, horrible world. 

I feel the warmth of tears. I angrily wipe them away, knowing that I don't even deserve their comfort. What's the point of it all, Grandmother? We go and live in this glass world, not realizing how easily it shatters until we are in the ground. We eat and sleep and walk around like we are living. We're already dead; we just don't know it yet. We are DEAD, Grandmother! DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD- 

She grabs my hands and pulls me to her, shushing me. Trying to stop my body from shaking. I try to gasp for air, the sobs are coming so hard. "No, Vera, it's the opposite. None of us are truly dead. Somewhere, somehow, our memory is kept alive long after we breathe our last. Now, wipe those tears and get ready. Lydia needs you to keep her memory alive." She hobbles out of the room, but not before giving me one last scowl, an I-mean-it-young-lady look.

Being delivered such an ultimatum from the only person left in my life, I don't know how I could refuse. I don't want to be around all of those pretend mourners telling me that she's in a better place or that she wouldn't want me to be sad, but I don't want to disappoint Grandmother. So I take a shower for the first time in months, staring at the murky brown water swirling down the drain. Layers of encrusted dirt come off and reveal the pale skin underneath. When I finally scrub my skin pink and raw, I step in front of the mirror and drop the towel in surprise. A human skeleton gapes back at me; her cheekbones stick out unnaturally and her gray eyes look pained. Small veins weave around in her hands. The realization that this thing is me hits me like a slap to the face.

When I put on a black sweater and dark dress pants, they hang loosely off of my bony frame. I leave the house and squint at the bright sunlight. When I slam the car door closed, Grandmother frowns. "Why are you wearing a sweater in the middle of August?" I shrug. It was the first thing I found. 

She doesn't let the frown drop from her face, but she drives anyway. We stop at a floral shop first, and I get an assortment of flowers that smell like vanilla. When we get to the church, however, it is my turn to frown. Lydia wasn't religious. She felt that if a higher power existed, her dad wouldn't have been the way he was. Why, then, is her memorial being held in a church?

It is crowded inside. People Lydia never even spoke to are there tearfully, saying that she was a saint and making her out to be someone that she wasn't. She was far from perfect; she was spiteful, superficial, and angry. But that was what made her Lydia.