Dying Light

Chapter 3

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Photo by A. L. on Unsplash

1

Bill died just before his thirty second birthday. He left behind his wife and three kids. It was written about in the papers. Mama didn’t go out for weeks to avoid coming across the story by accident, so Skye did all the shopping for her after the funeral. It was during one of those trips that he found out what really happened.

Front page news. That was his first thought when he saw the words written there. His second, was that Billy would have liked that. His football picture from junior year was splashed across the front, next to huge black letters reading, Bill Ulna Killed In Deadly Crash. In smaller letters beneath the headline was the indictment. Alcohol Suspected. He bought it along with the milk and bread that mama had sent him for, and rolled it beneath his arm on the way out to avoid being seen with it.

When he got to his car he opened it and stared at Billy’s picture. In it he was young, his face round and shiny. Dark straight hair hung in front of one eye. His arms bulged, muscular beneath the orange jersey with his number on it in white lettering. 41. 

It would be his forever now. The high school would frame it, hang it up next to the trophies they won that year when Bill was quarterback and the Jackson Cougars were on fire. Skye closed his eyes and could still hear the roar of the crowd on Friday nights. The lights white and blaring against dusk. Him and his parents nestled up on the seats to watch Bill work magic. 

A sharp knock pulled his eyes back open. A man stood, a button-down blue shirt tucked into jeans. He was close, leaning on the car like he owned it. Skye put the key in the ignition and turned it to power down the window. 

“You doin’ okay?” He looked past Skye when he said it, staring at the open newspaper spread across the steering wheel. Bill’s pixelated dark eyes stared up at him. 

He stared at the man, watched him take in the grocery bag on the passenger seat, the empty vacuumed upholstery in the back. Finally the guy got back around to looking at his face. 

“I’m doing fine.”

He was hoping that would be enough of a signal to get the guy to leave. 

“You’re James, right?”

The sound of his old name coming out of this guy’s mouth confused him. He searched his face, looking for some semblance of recognition. 

“Yeah, but I don’t go by that anymore.”

The man pushed ahead, didn’t signal that he had heard anything.

“I remember you. When you were little you used to be—“

He puffed his cheeks out and held his hands in a semi circle in front of his stomach, showing Skye the universal signs for pregnant and bloated and fat. When he didn’t react, the man dropped his arms and laughed nervously.

“Well anyway, you look good now!”

Skye didn’t say anything. Just stared like he was waiting for the man to get on with it. The man’s smile disappeared. His eyes dropped to the ground and he stepped back a little, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

“We were all real sorry to hear about Bill.”

He kicked a rock, and Skye listened to it ping beneath the car. He imagined it hitting the gas tank just right, a cigarette butt being tossed out the window by some lazy passerby, the both of them blowing sky high. 

“He wasn’t doing too well these last few years,” the man said, raising his eyes to meet Skye’s.

“What do you mean?”

The man suddenly looked uncomfortable. He had come to give condolences, not air secrets to the grieving family. He took two more steps back, and Skye leaned, his arm out the window hugging the driver’s door, willing the man to say it. 

“Well, you know he always drank a little too much.”

There was an odd half smile in the man’s face, the kind that usually preceded a wink. It was like they were in a bar, the man leaned and talking about a woman’s ass as she bent over a pool table. Skye did know about Bill’s drinking. It was something his family didn’t talk about much. They didn’t talk about anything much when it came down to it. But at Christmas, Bill’s eyes had been glassy and black, and even mama had looked scared of him at dinner. 

Skye didn’t answer the man, just nodded a little to admit that yes, he did know. The man took that as his signal to leave, then turned with a sad smile on his face, and walked away. His truck was parked on the other side of the road, and Skye wondered how he had recognized him from all that way. 

The thought that the man had been following him didn’t occur to him then. He was too preoccupied with the swirl of the news story, and the reality that Bill may have been responsible for the accident that had killed him and the other driver. But later he wished he had paid more attention. Taken note of the man’s strange smile and knowing eyes. If he had, it might have saved mama.

2 

“Did you find what you need?” Mama asked him as he came through the door. 

The paper was rolled again, stuck into the side of his jeans. He pulled his shirt down over it with one hand. 

“Yup,” he said and carried the bag of groceries into the kitchen. 

She was sitting at the table, eyes fixed on the window. The curtains were drawn, and light came in filtered through bright white cloth, sheer enough to make out the shadows of two little girls playing in the street. 

He watched her watching. She looked tired. Older. Before the funeral, she was buzzing. Busy making preparations. Searching through family photo albums for pictures of Bill, ordering flowers for the memorial service, picking out music, and Bill’s suit, his tie. 

His wife, Kelsey, sat nearly catatonic through all of it, her eyes empty and unseeing. 

“He left me,” she kept uttering at the reception, her youngest boy tugging on the corner of her shirt. 

Mama had gently steered him to the buffet table and whispered something in her ear. She had nodded and quieted, but when Skye watched her lips they were still moving, her impassable mantra repeating. 

Now in her own house, without the weight of Bill’s family on her shoulders, she sunk beneath sadness. It clothed her like a blanket in the mornings as she came down the stairs, frail and thin now, cheeks sallow and pale. 

She picked at her food and pretended to listen to Skye and Hank at meal times. She lost weight, and even daddy was pulled from his book from time to time to mumble that she should eat something. Anything. She would nod and pick at the food in front of her, place the smallest bit on her tongue and try to swallow. 

He knew he shouldn’t ask her, but as he sat staring at her, her eyes fixed on the curtains turned funeral shroud, the paper burned against his leg. He pulled it from his pants and walked over to her. When he put it on the table her eyes flickered at the sound, the muscles on her face tensed and ready. He unrolled it and held the corners with both hands. Bill’s face appeared and startled her. She jumped back, her hand over her heart and her eyes pained. 

“Oh,” was all she said, breathless. 

“Oh? Mama, what is this?” 

He pointed at the headline, his finger stopping beneath “Alcohol Suspected.” 

“How should I know? I’m not in charge of what these crazy reporters write.”

Her voice was hard, but it cracked at the end, a weakness in her lie.

“Mama, did he kill that other driver? Was he drinking?”

“Oh stop it now will you! Just stop!” She screamed at him. 

Surprised, he felt tears well up in his eyes. She had never talked to him like that before. And he had never pressed her. Not ever. Certainly not about Bill.

“It’s not right,” was all he could manage in the face of her eyes, hard and black and, now that he thought of it, like Bill’s. Shark eyes. A lion hunting.

“My son is dead,” she whispered through clenched teeth. Her gums were receding. Her mouth was nearly all bone, the flesh dark at the edges. 

“Yeah. He is. And who’s fault is that?”

She stared up at him, her mouth turned down, her lips pursed. He realized then that she hated him. Had always hated him, the surprise third child, the one who was supposed to be a girl, but came out in this boy body. And in that moment, he hated her too. She lunged suddenly, was up and out of the chair in an instant. Her hands flew to his neck, pressing as hard as she could. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her arms back hard. 

 “It should have been you,” she snarled. 

Daddy appeared then, coming slowly around the corner, eyes wide and blinking away whatever story he had been swept up in. 

“What’s going on here?” 

Neither of them said a word. They looked at each other. Skye’s eyes filled with hot angry tears that did not fall. His mother’s pulsed with a dull hatred that was giving way to grief. Skye knew this was the last time he would stand in this house. The last time he would see his family. 

He looked around the kitchen, once his only safe place in this house. Close to his mother. Close to her warm food and easy presence. Away from Billy and the kids at school and his father who never talked or looked at him or moved. And now, as his eyes fell on that seething face, the reality of its cold hardness overwhelmed him. It felt alien and dark. A place that had never really been his home, filled with people who had never really loved or protected him. It was Bill’s place. His house. His mother and father who stood in front of him now.

“You never made him pay,” said Skye, his voice shaking.

“Made who pay?” Daddy asked.

Skye’s finger pointed to the paper. The photo of Bill. The headline. 

“And now look what he’s done.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Did you know that the girl he killed was in high school mama?”

“I said stop!”

“She burned to death. Couldn’t get the seat belt unbuckled. Skin stuck right to the metal. Can you imagine?”

“Shut up!”

He stepped toward her.

“No, you can’t imagine can you?”

“Get out James, I mean it.”

“Well I can.”

“Get the hell out of my house!”

Skye turned to leave, then looked back at the table. 

“I’ll leave that for you to read.”

Mama was crying now, shaking with anger. Daddy’s eyes were wide, still not understanding as he stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. Always divided between two worlds, and never apart of either.  

Skye walked out of his childhood home for the last time. The sky was an ugly gray. The two little girls that had been playing were gone. The street stood empty and quiet. He walked through the grassy lawn, the flowerbeds empty and overgrown with weeds and ivy. 

He knelt next to one. It stood a little ways from the road. A circle of stones surrounded the faded mulch there. When he was little, it had been a butterfly garden filled with wild flowers. He liked to sit by it and watch the bugs crawl. 

Laying half covered in dirt was something white. He brushed the earth away to see what it was. It was wooden, a cross tied with wire in the center, a tiny marker forgotten in the little bed. The wild had not overtaken it, and you could still see a name etched there. 

The dark ink had faded, but the carved letters were still visible. Black mud had filled in the indentations. Skye ran his fingers along the letters, rough hewn in little kid writing. He had done it with his own pocketknife. A gift for Bill.

R.I.P. Harvey

He stood up and put the grave marker in his pocket. When he got in his car he looked back to the kitchen window. His mother wasn’t seated at the table. His father had gone too. The house stood ghostlike, the white curtains devoid of color and life. Trees towered above the house, uncut and wild, threatening to topple in the slightest wind. 

His engine started easy as anything. As he drove away, he pulled the rearview mirror down, bringing the black of the upholstered seats into view. Even as he turned the corner, he kept his eyes on the road. Even when the house was out of sight, he never looked back.