Homewrecker

18 - 𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓷𝓰𝓵𝓮𝓭

The sound of the gravel crunching underneath my shoes, even if they were high heels Amy purchased for me that my aching bare feet slid around inside, was familiar, the kind of familiar that was like yanking covers over your cold body, even when everything else I looked at was totally and completely unfamiliar to me.

The mobile homes I had grown used to seeing as I walked down the path of gravel stones poured into uneven roads that had snaked around trees and trailers, laden with potholes filling with murky rainwater, were either gone completely or crumbled into torn pieces of siding or metal, shattered window frames, screen doors with the screens peeling away.

The awnings were thrown against tree trunks or near the roads, like people were just waiting for someone else to come for them and their ripped fabric, metal bars exposed. There were still a few uprooted trees throughout the trailer park, the roots now soaked and mud clinging to them, and there were a couple that had been partially sawed down, harsh stumps left where there had been limbs. There were a few cars parked alongside the curb out of the park, and it seemed as if some of my neighbors were here too, searching through what the tornado had left them of their homes.

Someone was swearing under their breath as metal and clutter were shifted against each other, and it seemed so strange to me that all of us could have nothing and yet so much left to deal with.

I know how the tangerine walls of my home will look when I round the familiar corner, pine needles clinging to my wet shoes, but the sight of it still sucks my breath away to somewhere I can't reach. The cinderblock front steps are still there, leaves covering the concrete surfaces, and my planters are still shattered with their multicolored fragments embedded in the grass and gravel. The walls are still sunken in, slick with the spitting rain falling against the shoulders of Taylor-Elise's dress, and most of the lavender shudders are still missing.

I can still see the inside of my living room from feet away, the soaking wet futon my mother used to sleep on the ground outside, the cupboard cabinets through the cracks. Everything was pulling at the heart in my chest looking at it, but the part of me that hadn't breathed since the tornado took in the slightest breath.

I had left the funeral after numbly stumbling out of the bathroom, my hand slipping out of Amy's as she tried to reach out for my elbow, my forearm, then my hand but I kept walking. I walked past Indie and her family, past Andi and the girls from my high school that had proceeded onto complimenting her lipstick shade, and everyone else, whoever else was still there.

I just kept thinking of what she told me as I found myself leaving the church basement then the parking lot then the street. I started receiving texts on my phone a few minutes later, but I ignored each one without looking at the screen.

They thought my mom was murdered, like by a person who wanted her dead instead of just an act of nature that emotionlessly tore through, taking others with her.

"Why would you think she was murdered?" I had asked Clara after Amy uttered those words that didn't seem to make sense in my mind, like she was saying them out of order or maybe she was having a stroke like Natalie thought I was when I started whispering about Bill Paxton during the hymn earlier. I was staring at her, the hand dryer quieting behind me in the wake of my question, and I felt desperation clawing in my chest. "She died in the tornado. A lot of people did, that doesn't—are you sure you're not just, like, wrong?"

Clara hesitated, glancing at Amy out of the corner of her as she smoothed her hands over her elbows, her shoulders falling underneath the material of her dress as she let out a deep exhale. "Her injuries," she said, slowly and deliberately, "aren't consistent with the other victims from the tornado. At least not in the sense that she was alive when they were inflicted. They happened after she died."

I shook my head. "But you could be wrong about that. It could just look like that but not actually be that."

"Bronwyn," she said, in the same way it seemed as if everyone said my name now, like it was a sympathetic yet cautious warning, a leading front before bad news. "The preliminary autopsy results suggest that your mother was . . . the injuries she sustained prior to her death are typical with deaths caused by strangulation."

It felt like the words she was speaking to me were coming from underwater, in an entirely new and undiscovered language I couldn't understand. Amy was still standing beside me, her arms still wrapped around herself, and she was looking at me, like I was understandable to her as the words Clara said were to me.

"Maybe she hit her throat against a powerline or something," I whispered, and I knew by the glint that reflected in Clara's eyes that what I was suggesting was pathetic and unbelievable.

But it still somehow seemed more possible to me than someone actually wanting my mother dead, enough to wrap their hands around her throat and wait, feel her pulse stop underneath their palms.

"Sweetheart," Amy said then, her fingertips brushing against my elbow as I stepped away from her, from both of them and their absurdities, and reached for the bathroom door handle. The muffled conversations from around the fold-out tables in the basement filled my ears, heels against concrete floors, and I left.

The feeling was so hallowing in my head, to know something was true but not believe it, dizzying and nauseating, like the merry-go-round when it spun too fast and no one reached out to stop it, let you catch your breath, feel steady ground beneath your feet.

And somehow, I found myself somewhere that used to be home to me. The tangerine walls paired with the lavender shudders and mismatched planters like the Welcome doormat we never had. The furniture always smelled a little bit like cigarettes and the cheap scented candles my mom bought from the dollar store, the cupboards had mostly junk food, and my mom was there, on the futon, watching soap operas and getting invested in their overemotional storylines.

And now it smelled like nothing but wet earth, the food in the cupboards was soaked and destroyed, and the television my mom watched her soap operas from was screen-side down on the carpet, and she was gone. Not just gone, not just swept into the harsh winds of a natural disaster, but murdered. Strangled.

I heard once that takes minutes to be strangled, not just the fictional twenty seconds you saw on television. Minutes of struggling to breathe, minutes of panic, minutes of thinking there must be some way to save yourself, but you can't and you didn't because you were dead.

Because she was dead. Murdered. Strangled.

Then I was leaning forward, the constricting fabric of Taylor-Elise's dress tightening under my arms and around my neck like the hands that would've strangled my mother, and heaving the few bites of macaroni and cheese I had eaten earlier into the grass near the broken tangerine walls. I was sputtering, coughing, my sides involuntarily clenching and spasming. Tears leaked out of my closed eyes. My nose was burning as I finally opened my eyes, wet and hot, and I spat into the grass as something shifted out of the corner of my eye.

I tilted my head just slightly, still bent at the waist, and saw Kingston standing across the gravel over my shoulder.