And that’s when the shadows will come for me, as they always do.
After grabbing the flowers from beside me, I exit the truck, and while the drops of rain add a slight chill, the water feels good on my skin. Fuck it all. I tip my head back, kicking off the tight dress shoes I borrowed from Tammy’s daughter, and climb my butt onto the warm hood of the truck. The engine’s heat leaches into the back of my legs while the cold rain sprinkles my face, and I ease back against the windshield. An unrelenting pressure weighs down on my chest, suffocating and unbearable, until I finally crack, and the first tear slips down my temple, to be quickly washed away by the rain.
A sob breaks inside my chest, more tears escape, every one of them swept up by the shower pouring from the sky. It makes me cry even more, long, ugly sobs ripping from my throat, drowned by the sound of pelted metal. My dress grows saturated, my hair sticking to my shoulders in long, soaked plaits. The hood beneath me cools enough that I no longer feel the heat, and a shiver ripples beneath my skin in a rush of goosebumps.
Because it’s finally sank in.
I’m alone.
Completely and utterly alone.
Wrapped in a wool, native-print blanket, I sit in front of the dancing fire, half-heartedly eating the lasagna Tammy passed along the day before. On the floor in front of me is a notice from Marty, the owner of this cabin, that I have until the end of the month to vacate. The salutation is his condolences, with the obligatory ‘God bless’ that I can just imagine him saying in that patronizing, nasally northern tone.
“Fuck you, Marty.” I toss the paper into the fire, watching it ignite, and set the plate of lasagna on the floor beside me. Wiping my eyes, I reach into the mostly empty shoe box I’ve pulled out of Russ’s things, knocking away the small trinkets, like Russ’s lucky bottle opener, the lighter he always used for his cigars, the swiss army knife he carried religiously, and finally, the old wallet I found once before. I flip it open for the picture inside, of the little boy and what I’m guessing is his mom--a gorgeous woman, with long blonde hair and striking gray eyes.
“How the hell did you manage to snag this one, old man?” Not that Russ was an ugly guy, if a woman happened to be okay with a slight beer gut and a balding crown.
I glance around the cabin, where not one picture of Russ and me sits anywhere in the room. Neither one of us were particularly fond of the other side of the camera, but it’s strange that not a single memory was captured in the last nine years. As if they never existed. Only the pictures of things that I captured with my camera, in an attempt to get better at composition and angle. Simple objects, and nothing more.
These days, I try to document as many moments as I can, because I’ve come to learn that the mind is not a reliable enough storyteller of the past. Its memories are an ever-changing landscape that moves and slides with time. Like a viscous liquid that can be poured into any shape.
This old, outdated picture is the only physical evidence I have, aside from a couple of unsavory, candid snaps I took of Russ, of whatever life transpired, and it isn’t even mine. I wonder if his son ever knew him. If he ever pondered what kind of man brought him into the world.
If he ever even thought about him, at all.
Even if he didn’t know Russ existed, there’s a comfort in knowing a small piece of him remains in the world somewhere.
Cracking open my scrapbook, I flip through pages of things I’ve collected over the years--a newspaper clipping of the murder that I printed off from the library, and a drawing I made when I was thirteen that got me in trouble with my teacher, of a man wearing a goat mask with pointed horns and holding a bloody knife. None of it a trigger for me, as if I was reading about someone else. I know what happened, based on what I’ve read, and I see a masked face in my mind, but if asked to recall the events of that night, I wouldn’t know where to begin, or end. The first vivid memory