Experiment in Terror 09 Dust to Dust(82)

I was barely aware of what else was going on around me. I know the platform was growing crowded with people watching, some of them filming it on their phones. I knew that a voice was on the loudspeakers. I knew a train was approaching, not stopping at this station, not slowing down, shaking the walls and filling our ears.

All that mattered was that the demon had won.

It hasn’t, my mom’s voice came through loud and clear and for one brief instance I saw her eyes go back to normal and fill with tears.

Before I knew what was going on, my mother turned and ran for the edge of the platform, toward the tracks.

I remember screaming. I remember trying to run after her, my arms outstretched, trying to reach her. I remember Dex holding me back while my heart was ripped out of me.

My mother jumped down into the train tracks.

One second later a passing train came through.

The whole platform seemed to scream. The wail of brakes came a moment after but what was the point in stopping. She’d already been killed. She was already gone.

And the demon was gone with her.

She just gave her life for her family.

And I had just lost my mom.

While I remembered the moments leading up to it, I barely remembered a thing afterward, just flashes here and there. I guess I was in shock. Police, EMTs, the place was crawling with them as Dex and the bearded man tried to explain what had just happened. Dex let the bearded man do most of the talking, because he was the sane one here. We all knew what happened, but it wouldn’t make any sense coming from us.

Ada had cried and screamed, violently, and my father retreated into himself. He was acting almost normal, falling back on denial. It got him through it but I could see the pain. There was going to be so much pain. My poor fucking dad. He didn’t understand any of this and yet this was his reality. It was my reality. His wife had just died in a horrific way and in his eyes, her actions were one of madness.

But I knew the truth. So did Ada. So did Dex. My mother gave it all up so that it wouldn’t take us. So that it would finally be gone. But of all the sacrifices that I’d seen in the last few days, this was one I understood and because of that, it hurt the most.

My mother and I had never been close. She’d always been cool and closed-off to me. She always looked down on me but I later realized it was only because she feared me. She feared that I was like her mother and, she knew, that she was the same as us. She was just better at hiding it, at pretending it didn’t exist.

But it did exist. And there wasn’t anything more noble than embracing that fact and using it the way she did.

What the fuck did I know though, about nobility? About sacrifice. We could all appreciate what someone gives up, the lengths that someone will go to for another. It touches us, makes us feel loved. But in the end, the sacrifice hurts. Because they did it for us and we may not be so deserving.

I certainly wasn’t the best daughter. I never even came close. I was bossy and bitchy, I was weird and demented. I was fat and drank and colored my hair a million Technicolor shades. I stayed out late in high school and skipped classes, I burned shit down, I was sent to a shrink, medicated, I hated life, hated myself, hated her, hated everyone. I did drugs and distanced myself from my family as much as I could. I had no self-esteem and I blamed everyone for everything.

My mother tried to do right, I know she did. But she just didn’t know how. Like Dex’s parents were afraid of him, my mother was afraid of me and where there is fear you can’t feel love. It doesn’t mean they didn’t love us, because they did. It just wasn’t shown so easily. It was fought for and I appreciated every time my mother fought to show me just how she felt. They were few and far between, at least I thought so. But when I looked back, I could see them there. It was like watching a movie for the second time and picking up on things you missed. It was there – it just needed to be found.

Grief is this thing, a hand of water that reaches into your lungs, and drowns you.

I drowned in my grief, as did everyone around me. If it wasn’t for Dex, lifting me out of it, and in time, lifting everyone else out, I don’t know what I would have done.

He may have not given his life again, but he saved me all the same.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


Dex


“Stay with me.”

I must have said those words a million times. Just holding onto Perry, trying to bring her to me, into this world we shared but was so brutally shattered.

Some days she couldn’t even get out of her bed. So I let her be. Most of the time, I joined her, just holding on, feeling her skin, her warmth, her assurance that she was still alive even though her mind was a million miles away.

Other times, I had to get up. I had to be part of the world. There were more people hurting than just her, people she cared about. I had to make sure Ada was keeping up on her studies. She didn’t have to go back to school – it was June and her grade was graduating anyway. She was allowed to pass but her teachers thought it was best that she still learn what she missed, to prepare for the next year.