Page 45 of Tell Me Softly

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Thiago

It wasn’t going to be a nice day. I’d known it wouldn’t be…

Not a nice day, and not a nice week, either.

Everything had been an uphill struggle for me ever since we’d returned from Falls Church.

Practice, detention, the PE classes they’d asked me to oversee at the primary school next door… My work was taking over my life.

And even worse than the approach of the day I hated most in the world, I was starting to have real feelings for Kam, and I didn’t know what to do with them.

With every passing week, I was getting angrier and angrier, but it wasn’t about what had happened eight years ago anymore; it was because I couldn’t stand to see her with my brother.

Since we’d come back from our trip, they’d been inseparable. I’d threatened her, I’d told her I’d make her life at school hell…but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to separate them. Not yet, anyway.

Seeing her in her room through my window, lips swollen after my brother had kissed her, was something that chased me in my dreams. Taylor having lunch with her, laughing as he hung out with her, fawning over her…her smiling back. Why couldn’t she have been smiling at me instead?

But the answer was obvious.

Every room in our house was throbbing with pain. Every corner was dense with memories—memories that burned my soul and that I couldn’t escape from.

My mother was in the bedroom we never went into, the door locked. I couldn’t even go in to see how she was. But she was hurting. She always hurt when this day approached. The memories were just too much for her.

My brother was in the living room playing Xbox, in his parallel world where none of this had happened.

I wasn’t like him. Even the sound of cars made me remember it all.

Everything reminded me of what had happened that day, and I was getting stir-crazy, so I decided to get the hell out of there.

Get the hell away from that house and my memories.

Get the hell away from the feeling of guilt.

But above all, get the hell away from the pain that was so thick in the air I was afraid I would choke on it.

It was raining. Hard. My windshield wipers couldn’t even break through the wall of water on the windshield. I cursed. I didn’t want to go back home. I wanted to stay on the road. I wanted to disappear for a while. But the weather wouldn’t let up.

Why was I going there? I wondered. Was I sick in the head?

A masochist? Was it necessary? There it was: the yellow bridge.

All the memories started coming back. They seemed to enjoy it.

As if my memories were alive and wanted to torture me, make me feel guilty, fuck my life up the way they had fucked up my mother’s.

I stomped on the accelerator. The same way she had that day.

“Mom, you’re going too fast,” I remember saying. I had been scared. I didn’t even know where we were going. Mom was crying, and she kept saying, “Why? Why? Why?” Why had my father done this to her?

My sister Lucy was in the back seat crying. Her birthday had been horrible: her cake shaped like a castle had been destroyed, thrown to the ground.

I hated my father… I didn’t think it was possible to hate a person any more than I hated him. But I didn’t know what was about to happen.

“Lucy, honey, calm down, OK?” my mother said, looking at her in the rearview mirror and trying to smile. But of course she couldn’t calm down. Mom was shouting and crying and driving too fast.

My sister screeched, and even Taylor, who was always so calm, started crying, telling Mom to stop the car, that he was scared, that he wanted to go back to see Dad.

“Your father’s cheating on me, Taylor,” she said. I watched her face transform. “My husband is cheating on me with my best friend.”

In that moment, I had the impression that my mother was no longer there. The car was on autopilot, and she had gone away to be alone with her suffering. Her foot, though—her foot was alive, and it wouldn’t stop pressing down harder on the gas.

I saw the bridge at the end of the road.

“Mom, slow down!” I shouted, trying to drown out my brother and sister.

Mom seemed to return from wherever she’d gone off to. And then it happened.

I wonder sometimes if it was destiny. If God or whatever it was had willed that deer to jump out in the road just then, right as my mother was crossing a bridge at ninety despite the sign warning drivers to slow down to thirty-five…

Had we done something wrong, that something as stupid as an animal crossing a road had to change our fate?

I remember her screaming. I remember the tire striking the bridge’s edge. I remember the car spinning, flipping, falling.

I remember my brother and sister shouting.

I remember the fear, the glance out the window, the realization that we were falling straight into the ice-cold water of the lake.

When the car hit the surface, I struck the dashboard. We’d plunged more than thirty feet. For a moment there was silence. Life holding its breath, preparing for what was to come next.

I looked over.

My mother was unconscious.

I looked back, gripped by terror.

My sister was crying hysterically, but I couldn’t hear her. It was as if someone had hit the mute button on life. My brother’s eyes were opening and closing quickly. Then he screamed, “Thiago, we’re gonna drown!”

That was all my brain needed to finally register what was happening. My sister’s wails reached my ears, my brother’s terror, the fear that we were going to drown. All of it. Even my mother’s silence.

“Mom! Mom!” Taylor kept shouting.

I looked out. The water was surrounding us.

It was pouring in through the air-conditioner vents and the cracks in the door, dragging us to the bottom of the lake.

I looked around frantically, trying to find something that would break the glass.

Mom still wasn’t moving. I pounded the glass, tried the door handle, and––nothing. We were trapped.

“Tay!” I screamed. “Push down the seat! See if you can get the tire iron.”

He was hysterical, and I had to stay calm, even as the water had reached our waists.

“Tay, listen to me. We have to break the windows or we’re going to die. I need you to try to reach through to the trunk and get the tire iron.”

He did, I struck the glass, and the water rushed in like an avalanche.

I opened my eyes and did the thing I should have done before: unbuckling my mom’s seat belt.

Unable to talk, I tapped my brother’s shoulder and pointed to Lucy.

Then I grabbed my mother by the shoulders and pulled her out of the sinking car.

I remember taking one last look at it as it descended and I swam to the surface.

Only then did my mother regain consciousness.

“Where’s Taylor? Where’s Lucy?” she screamed.

I didn’t even respond before diving and swimming downward with the most powerful strokes I could muster.

I reached the floor of the lake and saw there was no air left in the car.

My brother was trying to get Lucy out, but her seat belt was stuck.

I looked at her and saw her tiny mouth opening and closing, her innocent face stricken with a terror that will chase me to the end of my days.

I pulled Taylor away. He was paralyzed. It took every ounce of strength I had to drag him out.

There was barely any air left in my lungs, but I knew if I went all the way back up before descending again, she’d die.

So once I saw my brother was all right and swimming away, I dove again.

Her curls were floating; there was desperate hope in her tiny eyes.

My big brother will save me. That must have been what she was thinking.

I tugged and tugged at the belt, but it wouldn’t budge.

I was crying. I could feel it, even as my salty tears mingled with the fresh water of the lake.

Sorrow gripped me, despair as I let go of my four-year-old sister’s hand, leaving her all alone…

But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t breathe.

My head broke through the water, and I heard my mother screaming. The next time, she went down with me. We swam together to the car. We reached it, and I looked for one last time into Lucy’s lifeless eyes.

Mom tugged at the belt, I helped her, and we finally managed to disentangle it. She grabbed Lucy and swam back up with her. When I came up again, I saw a group of people on the bridge gathered and watching. Two men had jumped in and were swimming toward us.

“Call an ambulance!” my mother screamed. Taylor was already on the shore––someone had jumped in to save him. I watched my mom swim toward the men. Looked at my sister. Lifeless. Unable to take a breath.

We reached the other end of the lake. Bystanders were there to take our hands and pull us out. I remember one of them, a big man with a kind face. I begged him to do something. “Please,” I said. “Please save my little sister.”

He took her from my mother’s arms, laid her carefully on the grass of the shore, and did CPR.

I’ll never forget the image of it. That little girl I loved so much.

More than anything. Just four years before, she had come into our lives to fill them with joy.

Her with her pigtails, her stories about princesses and unicorns, the little hearts she liked to draw all over everything.

She used to follow me everywhere. If I did something, you knew she’d be imitating it soon afterward. She always told me she couldn’t wait till she was big so she could climb the tall trees in the woods with me.

I remember those giant hands pressing down on her tiny body— Stop, you’re going to hurt her!

I wanted to shout, but the man was doing everything he could to get her heart, her lungs to work again.

It had been too long, though. Her lungs were full of water.

She’d never shout, cry, shriek––she’d never say I love you again.