PART I: break away
°
Berks County, Pennsylvania
The car hits the tree going at least fifty miles an hour and I go through the windshield like I’ve been tossed gently by a hurricane. I land at least a hundred feet from the car on some bright soft grass, barely having missed a tree directly in my path.
Everything is black for a while.
When I open my eyes again all I can see are these vivid green leaves floating casually above me and I wonder for just a moment about their casual ways, trying to understand why certain parts of life just don’t care about other parts.
And then the smell hits me.
It isn’t serene like the leaves, but assaulting and violent. It fills my nostrils with the same metallic flavor you taste when you suck on your thumb after cutting it way too deep, when the blood is dark and black, not pinkish like a party. My head rolls back under me as my chest heaves up, toward the green in the sky. I turn my head to the side to throw up. Spitting into the grass and leaning up on my elbow a bit, I squeeze my eyes closed as tightly as I can, afraid of what I’m going to see when I finally have to open them again. Tears leak out, hot and wet on my cheeks. The smell of my parents’ blood makes me throw up again and again until there’s nothing left and I’m just coughing and breathing hard, my small ribcage ready to break from the pressure.
I stand up and look at the bodies still trapped in our new car. My mother’s skull is crushed as if she had fallen from hundreds of feet in the sky and hit the ground with only her head, her bright red hair somehow still shiny where it’s not matted with blood. They had both been thrown through most of the windshield, but the front of the car is so crumpled that their broken bodies are miraculously both in and out of the car at the same time. The car looks like an accordion, my mother’s pale twisted arm lying right where some glossy keys might have been, her silver I.D. bracelet and the broken headlight glistening in the summer sun.
I look from my mother’s no longer familiar body to my own. Some of my clothing is torn and there’s blood all over both skin and clothes, but no matter how I pull at my shirt and examine my limbs I can’t find any cuts in my skin. But my arm is twisted grotesquely. I try to face it forward and it obeys me. It makes a terrible snapping sound and I cry out a little bit, but it stays put when I let go of it. I look up as three big black birds walk around in the trees above. They stare down as if expecting me to speak to them. I don’t.
I start to walk away from the car, toward the road, but I turn back and reach for my mother’s arm, gently sliding the silver bracelet off her crushed hand. On her pale skin are some small black marks I’ve never seen before. Three tiny circles and a bird. The images pull on me strangely deep inside for a just a moment before I put the bracelet in the front pocket of my shorts and walk away. The road is dusty and dry and seems extra lonely to me now. I look the way we had been driving, the way home, and then turn the other direction and start running.
I always wake up at the part where I’m running. And I don’t remember where I am for whole minutes before it all comes rushing back.
I’m 17, not six. I’m in a home for girls. My parents are dead. My brother Jasper never came to get me. And my name is Bonnie Braverman.
I never scream when I remember these things because I haven’t spoken in eleven years.
•
Washoe County, Nevada
Dragging my mother’s body to the car is harder than I thought it would be. She’d never looked like much lying around in that threadbare robe on our worn-out couch all the time, so I’d imagined she’d be light, like husks of corn bound together into a person-shape. Of course she isn’t dead yet, so maybe that’s part of the problem.
The good news is that, although it takes me a at least half an hour to get her out the door of the trailer and into the passenger seat of the car, we live in the middle of freaking nowhere so there’s nobody to witness my first bumbling attempt at murder. I try to imagine as I stir up dust and leave obvious drag marks everywhere that if I could see the first murder for any serial killer, it wouldn’t look unlike my unskilled attempt today. The bad news is that the longer it takes, the better the chance that she’s going to wake up from the deadly cocktail I’ve fed her. I poured enough Botulinum into her daily bottle of Everclear to kill a person twice over, but Delia is not a normal person, and I can feel her struggling against me already underneath her paralysis.
Worrying that the drugs will wear off sooner than expected, I pull an old Dodgers baseball cap over her head, covering her eyes so that I don’t have to look them. She has a look that can almost kill, and even under the poison it might be enough to at least murder my resolve. But there’s no stopping now. If I stop now she’ll kill me herself, or worse, live forever and then I’d never fulfill my destiny. I’m not sure quite when I figured it all out – that Delia has power trapped inside her and that it really belongs to me – but I did. And really? Part of me has always known it. That’s how the power feels, like it belongs to me, that even if it once was hers, it’s mine now. Whatever. I don’t know how I know, I just know. It’s taken me a while to get up the guts to actually try to take it though.