Windward Review Vol. 20 (2022): Beginnings and Endings

But she seemed so terribly tired, with
her perpetually vibrant eyes dim, dark
and sunken in. Impossibly older looking,
much like my mother, as if I had been
asleep for an eternity instead of a month.
“Morgan,” She begun again, and I
remember how she drew herself up
straighter, stronger, like she always did
on those occasions when your dad got
mad; but not mad like yelling, those
few times it happened, but like those
stern, unbearable, disappointed lectures
that came every other day. You always
took them with an irreverent grace, but
your mother made like she had to make
herself sturdy, to bear the weight of
what was coming. It was a posture I had
never seen directed at me before. “You’ve
already spoken with the police, right?”
I had. It had been one of the first things to
happen after the nurses deemed me safe
for non-familial visitors. That frustration
was all the more painful when they would
tell me nothing about where my dad was,
or where you were. “It’d be better to have
his mom break the news.” I remember
one officer saying in an uncomfortably
loud voice, as if I couldn’t hear them
rather than couldn’t speak.
So I nodded.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and,
as if in response, the whole rest of her
body began to shake too—fine, minute
tremors that I can only see in my mind’s
eye in hindsight. (Crystalline memories,
and I still wish them gone). She walked
– too slow – and sat, carefully, on the
chair next to my hospital bed, as if to
draw out the experience as long as
possible. She shucked her purse from her
shoulder, settled it on her lap, crossed
and uncrossed her legs. My eyes were on
her the whole time.
Finally, she spoke again. “They told
me you still don’t remember anything.
Your mom wanted me to tell you, since…
well, we’ve known each other longer.” She
said this without any of her usual hemming
and hawing. And for a glimpse: at the
mention of my mother, her lips pursed
in a disapproving line. Her expression
smoothed out again shortly after – though
I think more from tiredness than a lack of
disapproval.
She cleared her throat, and gently
attempted to tell me. And her facetious
gentleness meant nothing, then, just as
it means nothing to me now. She told me
about how you got your father’s Glock, and
took it to the grocery store. She told me
how you shot everyone there. My father.
Your father. Monica, the single mother.
And Monica’s daughter, Charlie, who could
have done nothing wrong other than being
there.
And me. I was there.
It was said so plainly, I couldn’t help but
believe it. Even if the last thing I could
remember before the hospital was
playing some video game with you in my
room back in November, right after a big
Thanksgiving meal – it made sense. It
made sense, even though you shooting
up a grocery store was nothing I had
even had a passing thought of, before.
And yet your mother still sat there,
watching. Waiting. Her eyes were tearful,
and expectant. I still don’t know exactly
what she was expecting from me, then.
Denial? Anger? Hysteria? More halfformed
and misspoken words? Nothing
would come, and nothing could. My mind
was plain and clear with the acceptance
that you were gone, and that my father
was gone, and that my life then may as
well be gone.
“Morgan? Do you understand?” She asked.
I nodded. Her words rang unholy and true,
just as they do now, recalling them for you.
51 Windward Review Volume 20