Bus

When I was thirteen and Carrie was nine, our dad kicked the bucket. He’d had pancreatic cancer that was diagnosed about a month before, a week after he’d started convulsing in the middle of the night and screamed about pain in his arms and legs and everywhere he could feel. Honestly, it was one of the scariest things I’d ever experienced, and the biggest reason was probably because it was the first time I think I’d ever actually lost someone I knew and cared about.

I actually cried when my mom came home from the hospital and told us that our dad didn’t make it. I can’t remember if or when I cried as hard as I did after that point, but I remember holding onto Carrie and my mom and just bawling my freakin’ eyes out. Maybe I’d cried so much that I killed my tear ducts and made it impossible for me to cry ever again. It would explain a lot.

When we drove back to the hospital, I didn’t go into my dad’s room to look at his corpse and neither did Carrie, who just followed me around helplessly. Mom went in alone and came back five minutes later to the waiting room with a dead look in her eyes. That same look continued for three years until she’d finally killed herself.

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming, as terrible as that sounds. And I can’t say I know all the answers as to why she did it, and I wasn’t even there when it happened. For all I know, it could’ve been an accident. But if it was an accident, then damn. Just…damn.

I will never forget that night. It was the night of some awards ceremony for Carrie, since she’d gotten some kind of recognition for being a band geek, and she was so excited. Carrie, I mean. She’d gotten the most dressed up I’d seen her to that point – she actually put on a dress out of her own free will – and I even put on a button-up shirt.

Carrie told Mom about it earlier that week and Mom, in her groggy state of foggy mind, hardly paid any attention. Sometimes, she had done that. She just wouldn’t talk at all for days at a time. And I feel awful about this now, but I just let her be. I didn’t wanna try to intervene because somehow things would always end up worse if I tried making them better. And I didn’t even know how to approach anything like that.

Sometimes she’d sit at the dinner table and just totally zone out, wearing nothing but a bathrobe; she didn’t comb her hair or wear any makeup, and for those last months, that final breaking point, I don’t even think she showered. She’d wake up and sit in the kitchen. Sometimes she’d shake things up and sit in the living room. And then, when the day was done, she’d turn in to her bed at nine and fall asleep, leaving her door wide open. Whenever I’d pass by her room on the way to mine, I’d sneak a peek just to make sure she was alright. But that was it. Just a little checkup.

It got worse for her. It was a steady fall that I never imagined would have the steep drop-down like it ended up becoming. There were no violent fluctuations or totally sudden changes in her manner; it was so gradual you could probably trace that shit on a graph and find that it was a perfect line, no parabolas, no curves or anything. Just steady.

It was a little weird that she was sitting on the edge of her bed when Carrie and I went to her ceremony. I remember looking for her in the kitchen and living room, and going to her room with a little bit of panic in my blood after not seeing her in her normal spot. And she was stationed right at the edge of her all-made-up bed, hardly making a wrinkle with her withered frame barely weighing down the mattress. She had the bathrobe on and her hair was a mess as usual, but I couldn’t see her face. She faced the wide window on the side of the house that held a perfect view of the reddening sky with the moon just barely popping through in the distance, the sun on the horizon.

I knocked on the frame of her door. “Mom?”

She didn’t move.

“I’m gonna take Carrie to her ceremony.”

She was so still she could’ve been a ghost.

“You alright?”

That was when she nodded. A tiny little nod, but still a nod nonetheless. And when she turned around, Jesus Christ, I’ll never forget how her eyes looked. I’d never seen them look so dark and sunken. It was kinda terrifying, honestly. She looked like she hadn’t slept in years and she was just some character about to die in a horror movie who’d already gotten stabbed in the head and had all the blood rush to their eyes.

I even stepped back when she turned around, and something in my chest tightened at the sight.

“Yeah,” she spoke, so softly, “I’ll be alright.”

I curled my lips in and sort of nodded at her again, doing some weird thing with my hand that was a bit like a wave, but not really. I don’t really know what I was trying to do. I think I’d just lost all consciousness when she looked me in the eye for the first time in three years, and it was such a shock that I can’t even fuckin’ remember my movements when it happened.

Kinda stumbling away into the living room where Carrie was waiting in her dress and curled hair, I grabbed the keys to the car and said, “Alright, let’s skedaddle.”

She smiled and jumped off the couch, asking me, “How do I look?”

“Great. Now let’s get going before it’s over,” I laughed.

It was 6:53 when we left the house and 8:59 when we got back. Carrie was recognized as a band scholar, being on the drumline with straight A’s in the first quarter of her seventh grade, taking all honors classes. When I was her age, I was in no clubs and I was getting by with A’s and B’s in honors classes. I couldn’t even imagine having to do all that crap at such a young age. And what’s funny is that now, there are so many kids who don’t even bat an eyelash at that kind of accomplishment, and neither do their parents. It’s just expected. It’s so weird to me. And then I remember how my sister graduated in North Carolina majoring in biology and went on to be a biology teacher for the same geniuses she was among back when she was in high school. There’s gotta be some kind of irony in there somewhere.

I clapped for a bunch of kids I didn’t know and I clapped the hardest and even shouted for Carrie, and when she walked onstage to get her little piece of paper that said she was a scholar, I stood up. She smiled right at me, too, even though I didn’t get the best seat and was stuck in the back.

There’s this word that I learned in my senior year of high school in English class, but I can’t really remember what it was. It had to do with the ups and downs of life. Like, if something awful happened right after something awesome did, you’d just be like, “Oh, that’s just the whatever-the-word-is of life.” And looking back, I’m kind of thinking that same thing nowadays. Except back then, I didn’t take it lightly – it was too fresh to be taken lightly. When something rocks your world, at first you’re clouded with all sorts of emotions that don’t let you take a step back and look at it as a whole, and you can’t predict the future and how you’ll end up because of whatever happened.

Vicissitudes. That’s the word.

So after the ceremony was over, I took Carrie to a local Chinese restaurant (it’s always been her favorite) and she hardly talked. She just smiled a lot, and it was so nice. You never get the amount of time you truly want with the people you love, and you don’t realize it until a lot later. I’m glad that last relatively normal night was amazing to a point. She hated eating in public and always got the smallest kinds of dishes and ate like everybody was watching her every move, but that night, she actually got two plates of food from the buffet, and she had some ice cream. I never saw her like that.

But at some point, it did have to end. So I paid the bill and we got into what was to become my car that night, and then we headed home, the sky already dark and the moon eerily shining off in the distance. Carrie still had that ghost of a smile on her face, only slightly wearing off after what seemed to her to be a perfect day. I never got to see her completely happy, it seemed. She always had something to be a smartass about. Almost that whole day was perfect for her and in a way it was perfect for me, too.

“Thanks for coming to the ceremony, Doug,” she said while elbowing me.

“No problem. It was great. Congrats,” I told her, but kept my eyes on the road.

Then we got to the house, and opened the door, and there was this disturbing silence everywhere that just kinda made us stop for a moment and think about where we were. Carrie went behind me and I stepped in, halfway expecting a booby trap or something to come down and knock me unconscious, but there was no such thing.

And so I turned back to her and I said, “You look like you just saw a ghost. What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “N-nothing. Wasn’t expecting the quiet. That’s all.”

I rolled my eyes and chuckled a little bit at her, but then she came in with a little huff and stomp, going back to the same Carrie I knew before that day. She went into the kitchen and pulled out a glass, filling it with water, telling me how she was thirsty, and feeling a little suspicion creep up my spine, I told her, “I’m gonna go check on Mom.”

That was a normal thing, me checking on Mom every night, so it wasn’t like some big change. I waltzed over to her room but the door was closed. It was never closed. But it wasn’t locked, so I slowly, quietly twisted the doorknob and pushed through.

I swear, the temperature dropped a good twenty degrees when I went in. I don’t know for sure if it was all in my head, but I got these insane goosebumps and my spine convulsed. All I know is that I definitely wasn’t ready to see my mom spread out on the bed, completely still, her eyes closed with the moonlight shining into the room and draping her figure in white light.

Right on her bedstand stood a bright orange bottle that was completely empty. I mean, I knew she took pills. I figured they always kept her from murdering everybody. I didn’t ever bother to check if she took them every day, or if she was ever running low, or anything like that. And that’s one out of a million reasons why I kick myself every single day.

I stopped dead in my tracks in the doorway, just staring for a few seconds.

No longer was she staring at me like that brief moment right before I left with Carrie; her eyes were long closed forever. I didn’t even have to walk up to her to know that she wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t moving at all, not even her chest to show she was breathing. Her already-pasty complexion had even less hints of blood flow throughout.

So I held my breath. I closed the door and stepped out. Then I leaned against that door and sighed real slow and heavy, making sure to push every last ounce of air out of my lungs that I’d accidentally breathed in that room.

Carrie was sitting on the couch, drinking water and flipping through a Fancy Cat magazine lying on the table (we never had cats but she’d always wanted one). Then I realized something.

How the fuck do you tell your only sister that you two are now orphans?

God damn it.

I quietly walked over to her and leaned against the side of the couch. She looked up at me and smiled a little bit, but it all just seemed a bit peculiar. “You okay?”

“Carrie, we’re orphans.”

And every little happy thing she’d ever experienced, every smile that appeared on her face that day, vanished. I could literally see her eyes sadden at those three words. I can’t say I didn’t feel the same, especially when I witnessed her change.

“…What?” she choked.

“Mom’s dead.” I said it in such a flat tone I couldn’t even recognize myself.

That was when she finally started crying. It was so weird. For somebody who was on top of the world five minutes ago, she sure did turn around quick. I guess that’s what happens when shit like that hits the fan, since it’s the exact same thing I did. I got on my knees to be on Carrie’s level and held her in my arms, something I haven’t done since then, and she cried into my shoulder, dampening the fabric there.

She was shaking so hard I thought she was gonna fall off the couch even though I was holding her still. Her arms were wrapped around my shoulders, almost strangling me even though I didn’t give half a shit at the time.

“I’m dreaming,” she kept saying, “I’m dreaming, this is a nightmare.”

All I could say back was, “Jesus Christ, I wish.”

It went on like that for a while. When I looked back up after she let go, it was around ten at night, and we both would go to bed normally at around nine-thirty, provided we didn’t have much homework. Well, that was the last thing on our minds – mine, primarily.

I was sixteen. I was two years shy of being able to take Carrie under my wing as my own and become her legal guardian. Two damn years, and I was already self-sufficient enough to consider myself an adult. That’s so asinine.

We had an aunt who lived in the same neighborhood – our freaky aunt Sandy I told you about earlier – so it wasn’t like we had to move a whole lot, but still. It shook our roots. It shook us. I hated change in most cases. I was perfectly content to live my life without a dad, seeing as how I’d done it for three years already. As long as Mom kept on keeping on like she was, hardly there but still breathing, I didn’t mind at all. I even sort of liked life at that point.

Then, there was so much uncertainty to go around, and we’d barely scraped the surface.

Carrie wiped her tearstained eyes and leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees.

“I’m gonna call the police,” I said kinda casually. “It’s gotta be reported at some point.”

She didn’t say anything, but she nodded. She was already lost in her own world from then on.

I called the cops and they said they’d be sending officers to the house alone with a paramedic to make sure that my mom was actually dead and couldn’t be salvaged. And I was calm the whole time, pausing every now and then to make sure my voice wasn’t shaking or cracking, in this tiny little foggy state of mind that zoned me out throughout the phone conversation. But when they hung up and I did too, what I said to Carrie earlier dawned on me at its full weight, and I felt the same crashing sensation that she did.

We were orphans.

And I started crying worse than I was when I was holding Carrie, almost as bad as I did when I found out Dad had kicked the bucket. Leaning against the wall that housed the home phone, I slid down to the floor and felt the ugly sadness kick its way into my skull. A distinct pain started shooting through my heart, and I don’t know if it was all in my head, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was some kind of mild heart attack that could’ve killed me too but decided to spare me for sanity’s sake.

Carrie must’ve heard me crying, since she walked over and crouched down next to me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder and resting her head on it.

Then I looked up at her through bloodshot eyes and told her, “We can get through this. I know we’re gonna.”

“Yeah,” she whispered.

~~~~~~

The police came in about ten minutes, followed by the ambulance with no sirens blaring. The paramedic strapped our mom onto the gurney and took her away, never for us to see again except at the viewing, where her dead body was shown to the remaining family she had left. No use rushing to a hospital that was too late to save her. They told me that because of her state of body, she’d probably died at sometime around eight.

And the cops asked us questions, one talking to me and the other talking to Carrie, but she was too caught up in tears to answer anything coherently, and I was looking over at her too often to completely focus on what the cop was asking me.

“Did you lock your doors and windows before leaving the house?” asked the cop, a scrawny guy my height with jet black hair and bones sticking out through his skin.

“Yeah, all of them,” I answered, “and none of them were broken when we got back.”

“Do you suspect anybody of murdering her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody hated her as far as I know…”

I kept making quick looks over at Carrie, who was sobbing on the couch and the cop was just writing notes on paper in his lap, and it even pissed me off a little bit to see nobody care.

“Well, that’s all we can really ask tonight,” the cop told me. “We’re gonna run some tests on her tonight, and we need you two to come to the police station tomorrow to answer some more questions. Are you okay with that?”

“Yeah, I know I am, at least. I don’t know about Carrie.” I nodded over at my sister, who still wasn’t getting any acknowledgement from the lazy ass who was sitting next to her. “What time do we gotta go there?”

The cop licked the inside of his lip in thought, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “Um…nine in the morning-ish? …Does that sound right, Chief?”

The other guy turned rapidly and said, “Yup.”

“Oh, and we need your names, ages, and phone number. And address again,” the decent cop instructed, pulling out a pad of paper from his pocket.

“I’m Douglas Tater, sixteen years old, and she’s Caroline Tater, twelve years old.”

He wrote rapidly, chicken scratch appearing on the lines. “…Alright…now address and phone number?”

While I told him all the crap he needed to know, I shuffled over to Carrie and put my hand between her shoulders on her back. She looked up for a second from her sobbing; there were black marks of eyeliner burned into her palms. I mussed her hair.

He hesitated, and then said, “You two might want to see about getting your makeup work in advance from school. You’re gonna be missing a few days, judging by the arrangements bound to happen…”

“We’ve got an aunt who lives a few streets over. We’ll still be going to the same school, no problem, it’s just…” I started quietly, kinda trailing off.

“Once we get it all sorted out, what with potential causes and investigations, we can elaborate more upon the subject,” the other cop said, standing up from his seat on the couch. “For now, you two can’t stay here in this house tonight. There are too many things that need to be looked at before that happens, but we guarantee you’ll be able to come back tomorrow to pack.”

“Wait…then were are we gonna stay?” I asked. If they were throwing us out on the streets, they had another thing coming.

“We’ll rent out a hotel for you guys,” the scrawny cop suggested. “Would you prefer to drive there yourself though?”

I waved my hand. “Yeah, I can drive.”

It’s funny how detached I was, remembering back on all of this. I didn’t even show a hint of emotion towards the cops, really. Kinda makes me hate myself even more.

The cops stayed with us as we packed up for a night at some random hotel relatively close to our schools. My sister didn’t say a single word for almost the whole night, but when I was shoving clothes into my backpack, every so often I’d hear a little sniffle that brought me back to reality, punching me in the gut.

I took her bag for her and threw our supplies in the backseat of Mom’s Taurus, waved goodbye to the cops (I’d end up seeing them a few more times over the course of the week) and we slammed our doors.

I slammed my head against the steering wheel, which kinda knocked some tears out of me. Carrie jumped a little bit, but wrapped her arms around my arm and leaned over. A dull ache started to spread throughout my body and just like that mini heart-attack before, for a second I thought I was gonna die too.

“I love you, Doug,” Carrie whispered. I just barely heard it and thought it was some kind of mirage at first, but when it dawned on me that it was all totally real, I lifted my head up from my pity party.

And I smiled. “I love you too.”

She started grinning a little bit, but then the tears came out of her eyes again and she just slapped my arm a few times and said, “Drive, damn it, we can cry when we get to the hotel…”

“I mean, it’s not like we’re not used to this shit,” I pointed out.

She nodded. Then she started crying harder again.

“We’ve been to shit tons of funerals. Everybody in our fucking family dies. It was only a matter of time, right?”

At this point, her gaze was fixated out the window, but I could still see her scrunched-up face.

“So we’ll get through this just like we always have. The only difference is that now, we don’t have any parents. So what. It’s like not having any cousins, or something. Or grandparents. We just gotta move a few streets over.”

She spoke up for her last words of the night just as I put the car into reverse and started backing out:

“Life sucks so hard. Jesus.”

“Tell me about it.”

~~~~~~

I called Duluth East High School and Ordean East Middle School the next day from the crappy hotel phone in hopes of excusing both me and Carrie from school for the upcoming week. Told ‘em all about our situation, being orphans now and all, and how we’d be faced with a bunch of shit like police interrogations and therapy and funeral arrangements, and having to move and assimilate into a new house.

Both of them offered their stupid condolences and crap like that and said we’d be excused for the week, they’d notify our teachers and everything, we wouldn’t have to do homework unless the teachers said so, yadda yadda yadda. At least one thing was off of our shoulders for a week, even if it was the least of our problems.

The cops came at nine in the morning to take us to the station for more questioning and information. It was there that we learned that our mother did actually commit suicide (my little hunch was right) and it was done by taking all nineteen pills of Zoloft she had in her medicine cabinet.

When they told us, Carrie looked like she was gonna puke.

Then they took us into different rooms and asked us about our lives, how we spent our days, how our mom was doing, if she had a job, and if she did, how hard she’d worked…it was so annoying. I hated every second if it even more than I hated it last night. If that was what the next week was gonna be like, I already couldn’t wait to die like the rest of this family.

From that moment on, things never really were the same ever again. That phrase is tossed around so much it’s lost all meaning, but I mean it completely honestly. It’s one thing that has rung true one hundred percent. Neither me nor Carrie were the same. There are only so many people you can watch die until it shakes you permanently. Dad was one of them, and Mom was too, I guess.

It’s probably a blessing that our aunt Sandy was able and willing to take us in after all that had happened, even though at first it didn’t really seem like it, knowing how freaking weird she was. But it did give a little bit of hope that in some corner of the world, there are people willing to help in some way. I didn’t get a lot of that before, and God knows I haven’t gotten hardly any of that out here in Yuma.

Yet I was still the one raising Carrie for the remaining two years I stayed in Duluth; even though Aunt Sandy worked, I picked her up and dropped her off at school, and I cooked dinner not only for me and Carrie but for our aunt too. Things were different. And with that little change, there were bound to be more, just like when I got outta high school.

There are always people who say they wouldn’t change a thing about their life because it’d make them a different person. That’s bullshit in my eyes.