Bygones
Moonchild
"AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND"
Edith finally took a long drag of her cigarette after it sat, dwindling in her fingers, ash falling onto the pavement. She picked up the nasty habit not too long after the incident, it was a way to cope with all the turmoil, she supposed, her parents knew nothing of the sort and it would stay that way. She sat, knees to her chest, on the steps of her porch, it was midday, around the time she usually got up due to the graveyard shift. She looked out aimlessly in front of her, at cars passing, people walking, trees swaying. A sudden buzz in her pocket had her reaching in to pull out her phone to see there was an incoming call. She stubs out the cigarette and tosses it into a makeshift ashtray beside her, a clay bowl made by her eight-year-old self for a grade school project.
“Hey, mom.” She answers the phone, speaking softly.
“Hi Edie. Have you thought about what me and your father talked about? You haven’t been answering our calls, hun.” Her mother replies, easy with her words.
“Yeah I--” Edith glances at bills and eviction notices stacked in a disheveled pile next to her door, “I did, mom. I thought about it. I’m going back to school, i’ll pick up where I left off, I'll get that internship and, everything….will be normal again.” It had been a rough couple months, she didn’t even feel like the same girl from last spring.
“I’m glad to hear it, Edie. It sounds like Dr. Ingram has you in better spirits? Have you been taking the medication he prescribed you?”
“Yeah, he’s great...yeah, the pills are making me feel a lot better…” Edith didn’t know when she got so good at lying through her teeth, she hadn’t been to a single session with her therapist in weeks and flushed those pills down her toilet the day she got them.
“You have no idea how happy that makes me to hear that. I know it’s been hard, but it’s time to move on, you can’t be stuck on this one little accident... I love you, talk to me later, okay?” It wasn’t just a ‘little’ accident, and for her mother to call it as such, just added salt to her wound.
Edith had already put in her letter of resignation and quit her gas station job a few days ago, and was on day twenty-eight of her thirty day notice to be evicted from her apartment-- it was time to go. But she couldn’t help but think about what her and Dr. Ingram talked about the last time they met.
“You haven’t seen him since?”
“No...last time I saw him was in the hospital, his parents couldn’t even look me in the eye…”
“But you know he’s doing well, now, right?”
“What is well? Because...from what I've heard, he woke up not even the same person anymore...they said he opened his eyes and just started screaming, like he was still in the middle of the crash.” Edie recalled the night; the sound of screeching tires and broken glass is all she could really remember, everything else was a blur. She always played it so safe, and the one time she stepped out of line, she’d regret it forever.
“I know you don’t like to hear it, but you are taking way too much fault for this. If you don’t forgive yourself, it will continue to eat you whole. Why not try to reach out to him now? You really think that he thinks you did this on purpose?”
“No…I don’t know.. He could think anything! His brain is probably in shambles, what if he remembers it differently?”
“Well, I think you need to ask him and find out for yourself.”
Edie missed school and home and Damien, and everyone she shut out during this state of dejection, she missed how everything used to be. She wanted to go home.
It didn’t take long for her to move out all of her things, she didn’t have much to begin with. She rented a truck for the bigger appliances that her parents had bought for her dorm and the rest fit into the back of her car. Her plan was to stay with her parents for a bit until the fall semester began and she’d move back into a dorm. She knew it was going to feel weird walking back onto campus after all of this, Damien’s tragedy was on all local broadcast networks and word spread rather quickly in a smaller town. And that wasn’t even the worst of it, her biggest hurdle was going to be reaching out to Damien, she felt like such a coward for retreating into a shell because of her own ‘burdens’ that were nothing compared to his.
She could feel her teeth clenching and palms tightening against the steering wheel as she neared the neighborhood of his parents’ home, she assumed that maybe he was staying there since he was discharged from the hospital, if not, maybe they would be kind enough to direct him to where he was. Edie almost passed their street until she made a sharp turn into it at the last second, taking a deep breath, she parked outside of the home. She sat in her car for a while, hand on the keys in the ignition, debating whether she should turn the key and hightail it out of there or man up and walk up those steps to the door. She chose the latter, ripping the key away and jumping out of the car before she could reconsider. Up the steps she went and found herself faced with the tall, wooden front doors. And she knocked.