With shaking hands, she placed the gun in Mother's hand. She sat back in the chair and started to cry. She cried very real tears, but she cried them for the show she was about to put on. She was so overwhelmed, and she didn't know if she was sad, angry, or just plain broken. She pulled her Pay-as-You-Go phone out of her pocket and called 911.
"Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?"
"My my mo-om... she. A gun and she's..." her breath was so tight that only breathing out felt right, and only with force. Breathing in came in shudders, and trying to talk made her choke and snort and slobber and hurt.
"Where are you?"
"I'm at home. It's uh," and she yelped pathetically again, "150 N. Carnation Avenue." She said this part really fast so she wouldn't have to stop again.
"What is your name?"
"Rachel. I'm Rachel Glover." Everything sounded a mess. It was a miracle the operator could make out her words--but they're trained for that, one would think.
"Don't hang up, help is on the way."
"Okay."
"Are you okay? Were you hurt?"
"I. I think I'm fine. I'm not hurt."
"How old are you?"
"I'm 13."
"Is the person still around?"
"Huh?"
"With the gun?"
"It was her. She had the gun." And then she hung up on the operator. She heard the door open and the voices of Belmont men--it was a distinct kind of mid-western drawl. She started to cry harder. And again. She was only dealing with the consequences of letting that girl out of the box inside her. As for the other box--she had no regrets. She was not just crying for the policemen. She would have cried alone in that wretched, imposing room. It was simply convenient they witnessed her heartbreak, because they would of course misinterpret it.
She was in the chair, holding her scrawny knees to her chest and scratching what bit of leg she could reach. Mother's blood and brain was on her too--it was pretty close range. The police entered the room. "What da hell?" one said "Whoa," said another, and "Oh my God," said the third. They were more concerned with the pictures than the dead woman. The first used the radio to call off the firetruck that hadn't made it, and to inform the ambulance they would be picking up a cold one.
The third walked over to a sobbing, shaking Rachel. "Come 'ere Missy. Less get you outta here." He reached toward her to pick her up. But she stood up suddenly. She couldn't control herself now. She didn't want to anymore. She wanted to fuck shit up. She didn't want the order. She wanted to go to her room and throw her clothes all over the room, letting them fall where she had never let them before. She wanted to smear toothpaste all over her mirror, and unmake her perfect bed, and throw her school books down the stairs, and punch the walls again. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over over over over over again. Until she felt nothing.
Nothingness is only for the dead.
But she couldn't do it all at once. So she started with the pictures. She tore them off the walls, ripping as many as she could to the ground in long, forceful sweeps. She ran her hands across the walls taking off rows at a time. The third officer tried to grab her, but she smacked him away and continued to rip the pictures off the wall. She was screaming, screaming. But the men couldn't understand her words or comprehend the pain behind them. It was the gibberish of a crazy girl--a crazy girl they could not blame. This room was fucked up.
Finally she tripped over her own shoe, which she'd run out of a short while before, and fell to the ground. Her sobs sounded like song. A beautiful, heartbreaking song. She picked up one picture. September 20, 2008. That was Mother's birthday. Rachel was nine, then. He mother turned 33. Rachel's face in the picture was dark. She could tell that below her breast bone, she was pulling on her long, blonde hair. She would keep this picture for a long, long time.
The three men just looked at each other for a while, unsure of what to do. No one had trained them for this. There are no rules for madness. There would never be an investigation.
Finally. The third officer made his way carefully, slowly, over to the pathetic creature. He scooped her up, and this time there was no argument. She wanted to be carried away. She sobbed into his shoulder. "I hate it here. I want to leave. I want to go anywhere but here. I just want out." And she kissed his cheek. It was an impulsive kind of action. She wanted to kiss his mouth, but managed to control herself enough to veer from his mouth. "You don' look too happy in dat dare pitcher." he said. She looked him very squarely in the eye in a way she would have never looked at Mother. "I've never been happy on a day that I've woken up." She said it very seriously and with no trace of coyness or sarcasm. He thought about that for years to come. He would soon work out the logic in the words, but the truth behind them would forever lie beyond his comprehension.
She was soon placed with her nearest relative, Aunt Tracy. She was her mother's cousin. They hadn't spoken since they were in preschool, and she hadn't been fond of her then. She thought she was weird. But when Tracy heard the story (namely that her cousin had killed herself in front of her daughter) she was quick to volunteer. She was a Christian woman. She was sure God had called her to this girl. It wasn't until she was ready to pick Rachel up that she heard about the pictures. Those pictures of every morning she woke up unhappy. Every day she looked tortured, broken. That's the way Mother liked it. Tracy was overwhelmed. Maybe I've taken on too much, she thought. But she lifted her chest a little. God wanted her to do this.
Tracy brought Rachel home. Rachel hadn't spoken since the word out. They had dinner as a family. Since Rachel was silent, so was everyone else. No one wanted to say a word just in case they missed something, anything Rachel might say. She slumped in her chair, looking tired and weak. Uncle David smiled at her every now and then, but she didn't raise her eyes enough to notice. Millie touched her leg under the table. She squeezed, then patted her knee. When Aunt Tracy and Uncle David started to move around to clean up, Millie held Rachel's face in her hand. "I know you're smart. You'll talk when you're ready and you'll have plenty to say. Until then, my room is right next door. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, I'll be in there, okay? I'll put my number in your phone. When you go back to school, if you need me, just text me. I'll take care of you." Rachel put her elbows on the table and grabbed her hair by the roots and just held on tight. But still she felt nothing.
That night Millie fell asleep early. It was a big day for everyone. Rachel was quick to sleep, too. All the energy she'd had the day before had been exhausted by the day's events. She felt complete numbness; even when she pulled her hair there was no physical recognition of pain, just a kind of phantom knowledge that she should feel pain. She woke up, though, in a panicked gasp, and it took her nearly a full minute to realize she where she was and why she'd gotten there. Still breathing heavily, she crept into Millie's room.
She stood there a minute, unsure what was appropriate to do next. She wasn't sure if it was okay for her to be in there, but she knew she didn't want to sleep alone. She considered going back to her bed, but she couldn't do that to herself; not right now. She looked around a little bit and noticed that Millie, in her sports bra and underwear had tattoos! Surely Aunt Tracy didn't know about them. She liked them. Somehow this emboldened Rachel to approach her. She was still scared, but she willed herself to crawl into bed with Millie. She didn't think Millie would be mad, but she didn't want to do something wrong. Finally, she made herself count to ten, then nearly leaped into the bed.
Millie was a little startled, but recovered remarkably well. She let one arm cradle Rachel's head and the other brush her hair from her face, then finally settle on her shoulder. She sang to her, because that was what her mother had done for her. Millie had a good mother. She knew that. No one had ever sung to Rachel before. She never wanted it to stop. She took the hand resting on her shoulder, and held it like a doll to her flat chest.
Du bist wie eine Blume
so hold und schoen und rein...
And then Rachel reluctantly fell asleep again. It was perhaps her best sleep ever. And she dreamed of owls swooping to collect pure, white carnations, whisking them away to their nests to take care of them. She would never dream of killing Mother. She would never quite recall that day, and would later be unsure of whether she'd done it at all. You can convince yourself of anything, really, if you keep saying it to everyone else. When she looked back on the morning she killed Mother, she would struggle to remember the events perfectly. Because that day...
She saw nothing behind her. Past. Nothing around her. Present. And nothing before her. Future.
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