“I’ve always had it, packed away in a box.” He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “Only I somehow forgot it was there. Can you imagine?”
“Not really.” I swallowed hard and did my best to keep my voice level. “But what do you need it for? You’re not… you’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
“Me?” He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Of course not, silly. That wouldn’t help at all.”
“Help what?” I shrank back as he took two steps across the room, but then he was past me, heading back into the kitchen. “Why do you need a knife?”
“It’s for Damian,” he called back over one shoulder, that same smile still on his face. “Our boy needs to die. You said he was over at the Smiths’?”
He was two feet from leaving the kitchen, ten feet from the front door, and at most a hundred from the Smiths’ house next door—Tom, Casey and little Mary—but somehow I got in front of him before he’d taken another step.
“What in God’s name are you talking about, David? Why would you want to hurt our son?”
He looked down at me in confusion. “It’s not about hurting him. Nobody wants that. It’s about ending him.”
I didn’t know what had happened at work, or what it was that had pushed my husband of nine years over the edge, but I felt my fists clench. “You listen to me, David Theodore Jameson. Put that knife down. Right. Now. We’re going to talk about this like adults or I’m calling the police and that will be the last you see of your son or me.”
He looked down at the knife in his hand and then back over at me, the confusion spreading. “You don’t understand, Elora. I’m doing this for you. I don’t know how I forgot, and I don’t know how she made me remember, but our son is meant for horrible things. If you knew what he was—”
“Put the knife down,” I said again, “and tell me.” I waved to the breakfast nook on the far side of the kitchen, conveniently close to the rolling pin I hadn’t gotten around to putting away. “If it’s as bad as you say, I’ll help. We can do it together. As husband and wife.”
“Together? I’d like that.” He started to lower the hand that held the knife when I heard it; a sound I’d heard thousands of times over the past few years; a young boy’s shoes flapping carelessly against the pavement as he ran up the driveway to our house.
“Mom! I’m hungry! Is that pie I smell?”
The light went out in David’s eyes. The knife came up and he took another step towards the door.
“Moooooooooom?”
“Damian, run!” I lunged for the hand that held the knife, and even though I was half the size of my husband, the impact staggered him. He turned from the open door, and something silver flashed between us.
I didn’t feel the blade the first time it entered, but as it slid back out from under my ribs, my legs turned to water. It was all I could do to hold on to that arm, trying to stay upright, trying to use my body weight to keep my husband from turning on our son, as the knife kept darting in and out.
“Dad? Mom?” Damian skidded to a halt on the red-splattered tile, eyes going wide as he took in the scene.
I tried to yell at him, tried to tell him again to run, but there was no breath left in me, just blood bubbling up past my lips even as it gushed down my stomach and legs.
My fingers went numb. I watched them slide free of David’s arm, watched the kitchen spin around me as I dropped helplessly to the floor.
In the doorway, little Damian opened his mouth to scream, but I couldn’t hear a thing. My head bounced off something hard, and blackness crept in from all sides until the only thing left was a blurred view of the man I’d loved, his grey eyes widening with the realization of what he’d done.
The world shrank even further. Pain. Confusion. Fear.
And finally, silence.
•—•—•
I came to on my hands and knees in the grass next to the bench. I hadn’t remembered Mom telling me to run. For thirteen years, all I’d remembered was the sight of her and the smell of blood and apple pie. Now, my own memory merged with Mom’s vision; the vacant look on my father’s face, the cold ice of the steel blade perforating her flesh, and the worst revelation of all… the thing I had never known:
Mom had died because of me.
I vomited up every bit of Christmas Eve dinner and Amos’ prized whisky, puking until there was nothing left in me and my body was wracked with dry heaves. I wiped my mouth with one hand, brushed my too-dry eyes with the other, and rose unsteadily to my feet.
Mom was still there, back to smiling like she didn’t have a care in the world.
I staggered away from her, bumped into the bench, and fell heavily to the concrete pathway, saved from another concussion only by my teachers’ many, many lessons in how to fall.
“That was real, wasn’t it? How did you do that?”
Mom’s ghost stayed silent.
•—•—•
I still don’t know if it was my power that kept Mom from leaving for all those years, that kept that one memory alive in her hollow shell for me to access when I was an adult… or if it was Mom herself that somehow held on; some tiny spark of left-over consciousness that allowed her to stick around to show me the truth of her final moments.
It’s one of the questions that troubles me on nights like this, when the dreams drive me from sleep, when there’s no one and
