Page 7 of The Souls We Claim

Instead of coming up with an answer, I do what I’ve always done. Fix up my face, style my strawberry-blonde hair so it helps hide the bruises. Distract with a bright lipstick and a heavy dose of contour to shape my cheekbones.

Gah…who am I kidding. I look exactly like what I am. A beaten wife.

The slam of the front door releases the tension in my shoulders and the knot in my stomach. The roar of his truck, the one he took out financing for in my name using my bank details, fades down the road.

By my reckoning, I have at least ten hours before he realizes I’m gone.

I don’t hang around to change into my funeral outfit. I can do that on the road. But I quickly pack two more bags of clothes and grab what few sentimental things I want to keep. There is nothing of real value here for me.

When the front door shuts behind me, I realize it’s more than a piece of wood. It’s a symbol for closing this chapter of my life at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I get paid the day after tomorrow, and as soon as the money hits the account, I’m going to withdraw it all. Hopefully that will be enough to find a room to rent somewhere.

I’ll find my feet.

I have to.

Maybe learning that my sister won’t have any kind of life of her own was the reality check I needed.

Only once there are sixty miles between me and Patrick do I stop at a gas station. I change into my funeral outfit, fix my hair, touch up my lipstick. It’s liberating, even as I feel grief that I’ll never see my sister again.

I toss my diner uniform in the trash.

Life is wild the way it sometimes gives you polar opposite experiences. Loss and gain. Joy and grief.

About a mile from the crematorium, a large puff of steam emits from beneath the hood of my car.

“No, no, no,” I mutter, pulling over to the side of the road. “Not now.”

I’m no mechanic, but I know a blown radiator when I see one. There’s no way I can afford to fix it. Fuck my luck. I placemy head down on the steering wheel and wince, before sitting back up. The clock on my phone tells me it’s forty minutes to the service; the walk will take at least twenty.

Quickly, I switch out my dress shoes for the sneakers I packed, putting the dress shoes in my purse. I’ll change when I get there. There’s no way I can carry my luggage, so I take the money, lock everything else up in the trunk, and send myself a reminder of my car’s location.

Then I walk.

Sure, I’ll be sweaty. But at least I’ll be there for my sister.

Perhaps I should have told my parents. But I doubt they would have come. They’d have told me to stay home with Patrick. And my sister, for all her faults, deserves to be remembered by someone who loved her.

I try to straighten out the creases in my black dress from driving, but it’s no use. The way my luck is running, it’s gonna rain and ruin it anyway. If it did, I think I might just lie down in the dirt and let the water carry me away, but there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

As I approach the small crematorium building Penny told me the service would be at, I’m a little overwhelmed. While I work at a diner, I don’t generally like big groups of people.

It’s probably appropriate that the service isn’t being held in a church because my sister was not the slightest bit religious. At least, as I remember her, she wasn’t. But my decade-old memories remain focused on the cool and rebellious older sister. The thrill seeker, the life liver.

My life could have been so different if I had been more like her. A little more rebellious. A little less good. Following all the rules has gotten me nowhere.

There’s something liberating in knowing I won’t have to follow anyone else’s rules ever again.

I step into the cool of the building where people are milling about. There are probably about twenty people here. And they are all women, but most of them ignore me. Not in a cruel way, but the careless way that happens when everyone is there with their friends, and you aren’t. An usher of sorts leads us into a part of the crematorium that looks like a cross between a cheap hotel lobby and a chapel.

There is a photograph on the coffin, and it’s my sister, but it isn’t. She looks nothing like I remember, and yet exactly the same. Tattoos snake up the once blemish-free tan skin. And she looks old. Much older than her years should allow.

My heart aches that life has not been easy for either of us. It’s hard to find blessings when you’re surrounded by dirt.

I dream of an escape from the grind of life. I wonder if Mercy had a place I can stay at. I wonder if she had a husband, if he’ll let me stay a couple of days to find my feet.

Then I allow myself to do the thing I’ve been avoiding. I look at her coffin. Like, really look at it. My sister is in there.

The only one I have.