Because of that Night (Book 2)

Chapter 28: Zooey

When Zooey's parents had officially separated and her mother had finally peeled herself off of the floor of their apartment, she had sprung into action ridding herself of any memories of Jack Cartwright. It had been her way of coping with this horrendous loss. If she packed everything away, threw out what she couldn't bear to keep around, all could be well again. Besides, the separation had been his choice. The separation had been his fault. Zooey's mother expected this same mentality from her daughters, so to have them see a therapist to deal with this adjustment not only seemed unnecessary to Bethany Cartwright, but ludicrous.

"Your father made a decision for this familiar that was selfish and unforgivable," Zooey remembered her mother saying as she scrubbed away at a dishpan one night not too long after resurrecting from her bathrobe filled with crumbled tissues "There is no therapy that can fix that. We don't need all that. We just need to move on, find a new normal, and rid the bad memories from our lives."

Zooey and Callie had stood in the living room as they watched their mother burn sage throughout the apartment after the divorce had been finalized. Nothing had been the same in their apartment since that first weekend where their mother had moved out all of the things that had reminded her of him, trying desperately to create that "new normal" she was searching for. She had said the sage burning was ceremonial, that this was their therapeutic "new beginning." He was gone from this place, and Bethany was happy about it. The problem was, Zooey and Callie were not.

Zooey had pushed Callie into her bedroom before turning back to her mother who continued to sway her arm back and forth with the sage. She breathed in the fumes deeply, and before Zooey knew what she was doing, she had snatched the burning sage out of her mother's hands. She went over to the sink, running it under water before beginning to open the windows around the apartment to let fresh air in.

"What do you think you're doing?" her mother had hissed at her.

Zooey had turned from the balcony slider she had just opened and grimaced at her. It didn't matter that her mother was no longer devasted and reeling over her father's abandonment. Now she was trying to replace him with shiny new objects and sage scents. Callie's face had been so flummoxed, this had to have been so confusing for her. Zooey just couldn't understand why her mother didn't see all of this and know it was a problem.

"You're going to set off the fire alarms," Zooey chided. "Everyone's going to think the entire complex is burning down."

"Stop being dramatic," her mother had nagged, reaching once again for the now soggy sage that rested in the kitchen sink. She fiddled with the pieces, working to create a burnable sage once again as she moved to close some of the windows Zooey had opened.

"Mom," Zooey had called to her, trying to get her attention. Her mother didn't answer as she searched around the room, probably looking for a lighter to get the sage up and running again. "Mom," she called out again.

"There's still so much negative energy in here," her mother had mumbled. "If you just let me burn it as long as I'm supposed to so I can rid the space of his energy" –

"Mom!" Zooey had shouted.

"Would you just let me do this for myself! Please!" her mother had shouted back.

They both stood in silence and stared at one another, the sage hanging tightly in Bethany's hand as Zooey barely moved a muscle. She and her mother had gotten into fights before, but this fight wasn't like the others. Sure, they had yelled at each other in the past, but usually Zooey's father had been there to calm the energy. It was frightening in a way to think that he never would be there as a referee of sorts to it all. Just a player reassigned to the bench who would never come back to be a part of the game again. Bethany could burn as much as sage as she wanted to, but Zooey knew. No amount of "ridding the space of negative energy" would ever get rid of the memory ingrained in her head of the day he finally left. It would be like that for the rest of their lives, for all of them.