Page 15 of Reckless At Raleigh High
“Oh, my goodness, little sparrow. I had no idea!”
“You did, you did!” I insist.
Her smile makes me light up on the inside. “All right then. I suppose, in that case, then there might be a little something sweet in the fridge for you after dinner. But first, mi amore, I need your help with something, okay? Do you think you can help your mama with one small job really quickly?”
I never feel more special, more needed, than when she asks me to help her. Excitement blooms in my six-year-old eyes. My seventeen-year-old heart beats a little faster. “Of course, Mama! I can do anything!”
“I know you can, my precious boy. You can slay dragons, and save the princess, and make the whole world right again. That’s why I love you so much. You’re the strongest little sparrow in the whole entire world. Come on. Come upstairs with me. This won’t take a second.” She holds out her hand to the small boy, and he accepts it happily without a second thought. The woman in the wraparound dress with the wild brown curls avoids looking at the older version of me as she takes her young son and begins to lead him up the stairs.
“Don’t go up there, Alex.” My voice is so cracked, so broken. Excruciatingly quiet. I feel like I’m screaming the words, but the little boy doesn’t hear me over my mother’s soft humming.
I follow them because I have to. I’m pulled up the stairs behind them, the smell of lilies and fresh summer fields flooding my head, intoxicating and terrifying. My legs are heavy as lead weights, resisting the pull of time and what has already come to pass, but cannot be avoided.
This isn’t how it happened…
This isn’t how it happened…
None of this is right.
The kitchen was a sun pocket, warm and bathed in the happy memories of my childhood. When I step onto the landing, completing the climb up the tight, carpeted stairway, I walk right into winter. There are no happy memories up here. Only fractured shards of grief that bite sharp teeth into my skin, twisting in the pit of my stomach, a cold sense of trepidation filling me from head to toe. Blue and grey, black and heavy.
My mother guides me into her bedroom, the room where she used to swaddle herself up in her depression, only tossing back the covers on her bed when she wanted to scream and curse at me—hate-filled words that never sounded right spewing from her mouth
I enter behind her, and fog forms on my breath. The place is as icy and frigid as a meat locker. As a morgue. My mother is no longer holding my hand. She’s lying on the floor, legs contorted and splayed at odd angles, the hem of her beautiful dress soaked red.
In her hands: a shining, silver gun.
Her eyes find mine, swiveling in her head. “What are you waiting for, baby? You know what you have to do. It’s okay. Quick and simple. Let’s just get it done.”
“N—no, Mama. No.”
Her eyes roll, too much white showing, like a terrified horse rearing before a snake. “Everything’s going to be okay, baby. It’ll all right. Pull the trigger and you’ll see. We can go back downstairs and have dessert afterward. That’s what you want, isn’t it? We can celebrate your birthday.”
Hot, metallic fear climbs up the back of my throat—the taste of death. The small boy reaches out for the gun, wanting to make his mother happy. To stop her from hurting. His small hand shakes with uncertainty.
The older version of myself steps over my mother, crouching down between the little boy’s slender frame and my mother’s prone body, but it’s too late. He’s already touching the heavy steel. He’s a second away from taking the gun from her. I clasp my older, wiser hands around his, holding them fast in place, preventing the moment from happening.
“Don’t listen to her,” I whisper. “This isn’t the help she needs. This…this never should have happened.”
I’m invisible to the little boy now, though. I’m a future he cannot foresee. Only I can look back on what was and see him, trembling, afraid, wanting to give the brightest light in his world the only thing she has ever begged him for.
His small hands cut through mine like my grasp is so much smoke, the irreversible action already pressing forward, appeasing the gods of time.
What has already passed cannot be undone…
“Don’t,” I plead. “For fuck’s sake, listen to me. Hear me. Don’t do this. We can still make it right. We can change everything. We can set it all right! If we save her, then we can save Ben!”
I’m lying to myself. There’s no fixing this. There was never a way to fix any of it. When I look down at my mother again, her face is a bloody ruin, half her jaw ripped away. A pool of blood soaks into the threadbare carpet, thick and viscous, so dark it looks black.
No longer capable of asking me with her words, she begs me with wide, panicked, fearful eyes. Do it. End it. Make it stop. Pull the trigger,passarotto.
What happens next was written in stone eleven years ago, but I can’t stop myself from hoping for a different outcome. I wait for the little boy to drop the gun. I hold my breath, lungs seizing in my chest, hope soaring as I pray for him to drop the terrible weapon in his grasp and call out for help.
He whimpers, tears chasing down his cheeks, catching on his dark eyelashes. My vision blurs. I can barely see…
The recoil nearly takes my arm off.
I stagger back, the kick of the gun everywhere all at once. I feel the impact of the bullet in my chest, and suddenly I’m lying on my back in a library, the sound of screaming in my ears.
