Page 17 of Malaise
SIX
A shift tookplace last night. Not only in myself, but also in our family. Mum sits across from me at the dinner table, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. Her normally bright face is drained and pale, and her eyes have a permanent red puffiness underneath them.
Mum and Dad were good enough to let me shower this morning before we sat down to talk, only offering a grunt in response when I said I’d explain the bandage on my arm after. Neither one of them said a thing about the fact that they woke me up in Den’s bed after I’d called a timeout when I arrived home so I could crash for a bit.
Dad stands at the stove, a stack of pancakes beside him. He only cooks when he’s conflicted. The last time I saw him make us all breakfast he was trying to decide if he should accept a job offer or not.
I walk my fingertips along the handle of my fork and rest my face in the opposite hand. Mum sighs unnecessarily loud and twists her body away from me as she has a sip of her hot drink, ironically housed in her Little Miss Sunshine mug. I glance at her from under my lashes and scour the details of her face, her body language, and wonder if I’ll ever again know the woman she was when I left for school yesterday.
“I’m sorry we took our anger out on you, Megan,” Dad starts. He still faces the stove. “It was unfair and probably no wonder that you reacted the way you did.”
“But you should have called,” Mum snaps. “I was worried sick. You left in such a bad mood; there was no telling what you went off to do. And when I heard about the river party that got shut down—”
“They shut it down?”
“Focus on what’s important, Megan,” she shouts. Her eyes bore holes through me, and I sink down into my chair, spinning the fork under my hand.
“When I heard about that, and you still didn’t come home….” She trails off as tears well in her eyes, but unlike for Den, she doesn’t let them flow for me. “I feared the worst.”
“I needed time to process everything.”
“Who were the people who dropped you off?” Dad questions as he sets the pancakes down in the centre of the table.
“Friends.”
“How come we’ve never seen them before, then?” Mum grills.
I shrug. “I guess you’ve never taken interest.” If they did, they’d know that it wasn’t just a lie that Tanya and Carver are regular friends, but that I have any at all. If they did take notice of their only daughter, they’d know she was the school loner.
“They looked a little rough,” Dad states carefully. “I’m sure I’ve seen that car at the Carver property before.”
“So what if you have?” I don’t mean for it to come out bitchy, but what’s said is said.
“I’d appreciate if you could tone down your temper for this conversation, Megan.” He lances me with a warning stare before stabbing two pancakes on his fork and transferring them to his plate. “We all got off on the wrong foot last night, and we’re in new territory here. So how about we work as a team to get through this, not fight one another?”
He’s so right that it hurts. Here we are bickering about who it was that I came home with when the heart of the matter sits unanswered. “When do you confirm it’s him?” I ask.
“We did it last night,” Mom answers in monotone syllables. “That was why I tried to call you; to take you with us to see him.”
If it were possible for my chest to implode into a black hole for my soul, I think it might have just done so. My lungs hurt, and my head pounds from the pressure of regret rather than too much alcohol last night. I can’t redo this. There’s no winding back the clock to go say goodbye to Den privately.
“Do we get to see him at the funeral home before everyone comes?” I need to know this isn’t it—that my selfish behaviour hasn’t taken something so pivotal from me.
“We’ll have a private viewing before the main function, yes.” Dad hesitates, pushing his pancake around the plate with his fork. “It’ll be a closed casket for the service though.”
Jesus.How bad was he? “Was he… was he killed instantly? Do they know?” Visions of that afternoon on the sidewalk as kids—Den’s blood everywhere—return thick and fast. To think he suffered… how am I supposed to just sit here and eat if that’s true?
“They can’t be sure, but they’re relatively certain it was quick given the extent of his head injuries.” Dad’s gaze is fixed on his plate.
“They think he didn’t have his helmet on,” Mum whispers with a regretful look in her eye. She stares out the kitchen window at the branches of the Japanese Silk tree swaying in the morning breeze. “They can’t be sure, but given it wasn’t near him when the paramedics arrived, they assumed it mustn’t have been affixed.” She sighs, and voices what I’m sure we’re all thinking. “It’s so unlike him, though.”
Why the hell wouldn’t he have put it on? I stand the fork on end, and then lay it down, trying to come up with a reason why he would have left it off, but nothing eventuates. Just as Mum said, it’s so unlike Den—he was safety first, always, when it came to riding his dirt bike.
“It’s a freak accident,” Dad explains, fooling nobody. “We can’t get wrapped up in the why or how.”
Yet that’s the only place I want to be. Den wouldn’t have knowingly risked his safety by riding without a helmet, down the main street nonetheless. Just the chance of being pulled up by the cops would have been enough for him to strap up. Something doesn’t sit right; my gut says there’s more to this than we know, and since when has my gut ever put me wrong?
“The officer that attended the scene said the bus hit him on the left side,” Dad says, “and given they now know he was deaf in that ear, they think he didn’t hear it approach.”