Billie Girl

Chapter Thirty One

My initial response was to tug her out from under the light snow. I wrapped myself around her naked body to warm her.

But as I hopelessly snuggled against her, I also felt the cold of the snow and the equally cold chill of her frozen skin. I was not sure how long I was out there trying to revive her by shaking her and slapping lightly her across the face and asking, "Is this some kind of a joke?"

I remembered how years ago, when I was about ten and she was maybe nineteen she often played outrageous pranks on me. She once pretended that she had slashed her wrists. The blood of course was ketchup. One other time she told me she had been bitten by a rabid dog that was loose in a neighbor's yard. The bite marks were just the markings of a red ink pen. It was all coming back to me now, how she had once been such a tomboy growing up. She was always up to going for a swim in a lake or a run on the track. I guess when she realized what a beauty she had become, all that rough stuff was history and the most physical thing she would do was languorously do the backstroke in the gym pool with her pool cap and her goggles like she was swimming across the English Channel...all these thoughts were flashing back in my mind as I held her naked, lifeless body in the bone-chilling cold.

My mother stepped out the side door, probably wondering why I wasn't coming in with any bags of groceries. Mother saw me holding Leslie like the Madonna in Michelangelo's Pieta, and it seemed as like life had suddenly been drained from her face as well.

Mother fell to her knees next to Leslie and began to repeat the words,"Leslie, my Leslie, my, my, sweet Leslie, how could you go and die on me?"

And this was the same thing that Mother said when she heard that Dad had died after the accident. She used the same phrase: "How could you go and die on me....how could you do it?" as if dying was an act of betrayal. As if Dad or Leslie owed it to Mom to stay alive...

It angered me that she should just let herself fall apart when obviously there was so much more going on here.

"Mom, something happened to her. She didn't die on you. It doesn't make sense."

"Was she locked out of the house?"

"The last I heard, she was going out for a smoke."

"She was locked out. She froze to death."

"Come one, you're crazy. She went out to have a smoke, and I fell asleep and this morning. She wasn't in my bed."

"What was she doing in your bed?"

"We were sleeping together. We wanted to keep each other company."

"Nothing is making any sense."

"Mom, you have to call 911. Go, or I will."'

But my mother was incapable of doing anything. She began to shriek and yell. It wasn't long before the couple next door came out, and within minutes our driveway had turned into one of those crime scenes I had only seen on TV.

The police arrived within minutes, and they questioned us. A forensic team also showed up. But my mother was despondent and would hardly answer them at all. What could she say?

Then came the news teams. They knocked on the front door, wanting one of us to make a statement. My mother locked herself up in her room and would not come out. But I had to do something. I was so confused; there was nobody to talk to, so I stepped outside and spoke to a female newscaster. She put the mike to my face and asked me a question, but I could not follow her words. I was feeling so confused and rattled that it sounded to me like she was speaking a foreign language.

"I don't understand anything," I said. "my sister went outside to smoke. She doesn't even smoke anymore. She never came back inside. I didn't find her till morning."