My room was pitch black. At least it should have been. Completely devoid of all light because of the boards covering the window from a fall I’d taken out of it a few years before. But still, the light shining from the sun pierced through my door, outlining my mother’s frame as she shook my gently awake.
“Kami, wake up, it’s important.”
Those words, which had been aimed in my directions multiple times in the last year or two, caused my eyelids to shoot completely open and my upper body to haul itself from the worn in mattress. Kicking my plaid sheet off of my legs, I lifted myself from the bed and stood up, following my mother out of the room, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and blinking back the tears that had welled up there after the sun had shot straight into my retinas and temporarily fried them.
Concerns zoomed through my brain so rapidly that I couldn’t keep up with all of them. Had grandpa started drinking again? Did my cousin OD? Was my uncle in another motorcycle accident?
“Sit down.” My mom told me, pointing at the couch, and, without a single pause, I sat down on the couch. She sat next to me, one leg crossed underneath her other and she reached onto the table, grabbing a pack of cigarettes, half of a small, white pill, and a bottle of soda. “Light a cigarette, and take this.”
“What is it?” I asked, removing a cigarette from the pack and screwing the filter between my lips.
A small, tentative smile creased her lips and she said, “Just trust your mother.”
Exhaling a cloud of blue-gray smoke, I took the half of the pill and placed it on my tongue, chasing it down with a swig of Pepsi. There was a long silence between us, my mother sat quietly, letting my smoke my cigarette. Slowly, curiously, the anxiety that had been previously amping up my body was ebbing away. The house was too quiet, and I knew that something was terribly wrong. The house was never quiet. Ever.
“Sarah’s dead.”
I had been preparing myself for a lot of things since she’d told me that there was something important. I had been preparing myself for a sickness, or a beating, or a hospitalization. I hadn’t prepared myself for my mother telling me that my best friend since the age of five, one who had a one-year-old daughter and a family that was there for her, had died.
The silence in the house had transmuted from something thick and foreboding to an abrupt punch to the chest. I couldn’t do or say anything but bring the filter to my lips again and suck in a deep lungful of the corrosive smoke and carcinogens that inhabited the small, white cylinder.
To be honest, I half expected it to be a prank. It was never beyond Sarah to do something like this, and she had recently moved to Kansas to be with her boyfriend, who had moved down there to get work in order to support Sarah and their child. For a moment, I figured that it was some scheme she and my mom had cooked up to make me that much happier when she walked through the door moments later.
But moments later, the door didn’t open.
That’s when the tears came. They were small at first, and made me suck a little harder on the cigarette that was close to ripping between my fingers.
“There was a car accident yesterday…” my mom went on, her voice soft, treading carefully, knowing that I was a little too close to snapping. “It flipped twice and went into a tree. From what I’ve heard, she hit her head and died instantly.”
It felt like she was just adding salt onto the already wide, festering wound that had just ripped across my flesh. One of our cats hopped up onto my lap, rubbing against my arm, which sat, pillowed on my pajama pants clad thigh. I could feel all of my blood pooling around somewhere between my feet and knees. She kept talking, but I couldn’t hear it. It had turned into a faint buzzing noise inside my head; the cherry on my cigarette had burned down to the filter and singed the skin of my fingers. The sensation of my mom removing the butt from my hand and stubbing it out in the ashtray is what really snapped me out of it.
“Elaine called me this morning and told me… Amanda called also; she said she’s going to come over at some point today to be here for you. They’re all really worried about you… especially with finals starting tomorrow. They don’t want your education to be effected by Sarah’s death.” Her voice was strangely even for having to tell me all of this. Right then, I knew that she had been building herself up to tell me all morning.
“Was the baby in the car?” I managed to choke out tremulously.
My mom nodded, and the tight ball of nerves in my stomach grew larger. “Yes, Ellie was in the car. She broke her foot and has a cut on her forehead, but otherwise she’s okay.” The nerve ball seemed to shrink just a little bit. The baby was okay… this was good.
“Chris?”
Her teeth clamped down on her lower lip, “His spleen ruptured and he was burned quite badly… the car… it caught on fire. He was the one who got Sarah and the baby out of the car and broke his leg getting out. From what I’ve heard, he managed to get them out but realized that it was too late for Sarah…” A small choking noise cut her off on Sarah’s name and she went silent. I could see tears welling up in her deep brown eyes and she set her jaw tightly.
We were both determined not to cry.
And we were both failing miserably.
Reaching over to the cigarette pack still lying on the couch, I yanked another cancer stick from the box, shoved it into my mouth and ignited it, inhaling as deeply as I could, feeling a cough tickling at the back of my throat.
“That pill I gave you was half a Xanax. I figured you would need it… this is some pretty heavy news.”
I wanted to give some sort of witty retort. I wanted to express the anger at the words that had just juggernauted out of my mother’s mouth, but I just couldn’t. No words that could have possibly left me able to do that were running through my head. The only thing I could think of and imagine was that car flipping and nailing the tree. I could only picture Sarah’s head smacking off of the steering wheel so hard that the life was knocked straight out of her; no pain, no fear, no suffering. Just black. I could only picture her daughter’s foot being shattered, a piece of glass or other object in the car slicing open her forehead and Chris’s leg snapping in his attempt to get out of the car and save the child and girl that he loved so much.
Something from deep inside my chest forced its way up my throat and a loud sob erupted from my mouth, the tears finally coming full throttle, rolling from my cheeks, dripping off of my chin and into my clothes, wetting the cigarette clutched between my shaking fingers, strangled yelps of pain piercing the air. My body shook and curled into itself, hands fisting themselves into my hair and tugging at the roots. I could feel my heart tearing, an axe slicing clean through it and puncturing my vena cava, left and right ventricles, every valve of the muscle that was necessary to live obliterated with every other second.
Amanda showed up shortly after and immediately, I was on my feet, rushing over and wrapping my arms tightly around her tall frame, burying my face into her shoulder and sobbing roughly. She rubbed my back, softly telling me that it was all right, even though the both of us knew damn well that it wasn’t. We were both hurting. She was just better at keeping herself under control. I could feel her pulse hammering inside her ribcage, and, if it had been any other time, I would have broken the contact immediately, flinched away and scratched the back of my neck, averting my eyes. But right then, that contact felt good. I couldn’t pull myself away even if I wanted to.
When our embrace had finally broken, I pulled on a pair of jeans and my shoes and we went for a walk. Just around the block of my town, where I chain-smoked and we tried to keep each other laughing. Joking was strangely easy, but the laughter was way too false. Even if it helped, it still hurt to have to make that noise knowing that Sarah was dead. It hurt to be happy, even though that’s what she would have wanted.
We returned to my yard, which was really just my grandmother’s yard with a trailer in the back, also known as home sweet home. My grandparents were on the back porch, and, having heard the news, immediately rose, rushing over to give us each a hug. The Xanax had taken hold of my mind and I’d become strangely mellow, only half participating in what they were talking about, too tired and too stoned to really care.
So I just smoked.
I’m not sure how long it was before Sarah’s mother, sister, and grandmother arrived at the house to check on me. I can’t remember anymore and I wasn’t exactly keeping track at the time. Without a moment’s pause, I jumped to my feet and rushed over, capturing her mother into a hug.
She leaned her weight against me, chest and back heaving under the force of her tears. I rubbed her back softly; forcing myself to remain strong and to just let her cry. My tears could come later. Her pain was much more severe than mine and I knew that.
“I’m so sorry…” I whispered into her curly, straw colored hair, my voice trembling under the effort of holding back my tears.
She had no reply. I just held her there, in the middle of the yard, cars whizzing by, lucky enough not to know what was happening there, and probably not interested enough to wonder why such an event was occurring. Her weight seemed overwhelming, my nerves and the Xanax mixing together to give my body the consistency of melting wax. But I stuck my knees together to prevent them from buckling, letting my own tears fall when her mother gave me a soft, affectionate kiss on the forehead before resting her own against it.
“You’re still my oompa loompa.” She told me, and we both shared a brief, forced laugh before breaking the embrace, giving me the chance to move over to her grandmother, whom my own grandma had just been hugging.
She grabbed me and pulled me into a hug so tight that I feared for my ribs. She didn’t cry, instead, she just let me. Her hand patted my back, arms squeezing me comfortingly every once in a while to let me know that everything would be okay…
I want to say a week later, after finals had ended and her memorial service had come, I drove to Sarah’s grandma’s house, immediately rushing in to see her aunt, who had been taking Sarah’s death quite harshly, as had the rest of us. I gripped her into a hug, and we both began to shake.
“We were worried about you,” She choked out, voice thick with tears.
I forced a small, sad smile and shook my head, pressing my face into her hair, seeking comfort. “Nah…” I said softly. “I’m okay… I’m tough.”
“I know you are,” She told me.
-------
Sarah’s body was cremated; the damage to her head and the burning had done significant damage to her exterior. Her ashes were put in an urn, which her mother now takes everywhere with her. Chris healed up and is now taking care of Elizabeth, who now, from what I’ve heard, carries a picture of Sarah around and talks to it. She misses her mommy, but she also has a lot of people who have plenty of good stories about her, and the great, strong person that she was.
As for me, I did well on my finals and passed the tenth grade. I did as everyone told me and fought back the nervous breakdown until after the school year had ended, so as not to damage my academics. In those two weeks, I felt myself begin to age. It seems as though in that brief time, crows feet had engraved themselves into my eyes, every once in a while I would see wrinkles, and then look back to see nothing. I could feel my mind maturing as well, growing stronger through the pain. It was hard… probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I’m still here.
I still miss her and think about her every day. Certain smells or songs will bring me back to those summer days where we would sit on my grandmother’s porch and talk and smoke until the sun rose into the sky, painting it with all different hues of orange and purple and pink, finally fading into a light blue. Memories of sitting in the bathroom all night, sneaking cigarettes and having some of the best conversations I’ll ever have. Memories of boyfriends and tears and inside jokes, watching House of 1000 Corpses over and over again to the point of knowing every line in the film by heart, getting drunk and collapsing in front of the television to watch random TV shows and swimming in the creeks in just our bras and underwear.
They’re some of the best memories of my life, and I while my friend is gone, I hope that what pieces of her that I’ve clung to so tightly for going on thirteen years remain deep inside my head and heart until my heart, too, has stopped beating and the activity in my brain stops.
