Carcass

When Piper was twelve years old, her mother died of ovarian cancer. Her parents had been trying to conceive again for years after Piper was born, and on a gelid day in 1998 they were finally told what the problem was. There was a tumour the size of an Easter egg resting against her uterine wall; large enough that the removal of her ovaries was an option but small enough that there was a chance that chemotherapy and steroidal injections could shrink it and allow her to live with it. When Piper and I came home from school that afternoon, Penelope Oakley was sitting on our couch with her head resting against her husband’s chest and sobs racking her frail body. Her husband’s grey eyes were dark and solemn, wrinkles crossing his brow as he held her tightly, not looking far from tears himself. On the couch opposite my parents were sitting there, their faces taut and anguished, tears rolling down my mother’s cheeks and as she clasped her hand tightly over her mouth.

Piper immediately ran to her mother and wrapped her arms around her legs, trying to figure out why her mother was crying. I just stood in the doorway, my school bag hanging loosely from my shoulders and my eyes wide and fearful.

When I look back, I don’t really remember that day. I don’t remember realising as we walked home from school that that would be the last time I ever saw Piper smile in such a lively way, and that it would be the last time she’d step foot inside our house. I guess I didn’t know at the time that her mother was going to die four years later; I was too young to even consider what death meant. But I knew, and I remember clearer than anything, the saddened look in my mother’s eyes that said things were going to change.

Years later, after the funeral, my mother sat down and told me why Piper no longer had a mother. Even though I was fourteen; arguably old enough to realise that something had been wrong, I’d ignored all the signs that she was sick until the day I saw the ambulance arrive outside the house next door and heard Mr Oakley’s screams of anguish. She had refused to have the surgery. Even though it was more than likely that the outcome would be positive, and even though it was her highest chance of survival, she refused it. And there was nothing Mr Oakley or her eight year old daughter could do but watch their wife and mother kill herself over something that never was.

She still wanted to baby. She kept her ovaries because she wanted the baby. Instead she left one without a mother and fell into death’s arms herself.

Mum told me at the time that Piper would never be the same. I don’t think it made sense; we were still friends up until the funeral, though she had begun to drift away. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something, and as I look back, I think that’s what estranged me from her. In her eyes I still had everything, while she’d lost the only thing that made her a child.

We didn’t talk for a year. I’d constantly look out my bedroom window, because our houses were lined up, but her curtains were always closed. At school she would walk the hallways alone, with her head down and her hair a mess and a forlorn look about her that killed me inside. And god, I remember missing her so much; missing climbing trees with her and diving into lakes holding her hand and racing through the park together. But the Piper I knew was dead. And the ghost of her wouldn’t even look me in the eyes.

About eleven months after the Penelope Oakley’s funeral, Mr Oakley shot himself. He didn’t leave a note. Piper and I were at school at the time, but when my mother heard the shot she ran across into his house and called the ambulance. Both Piper and I were called out of class and told to go home, because my mother was at the hospital being treated for shock and sitting at Mr Oakley’s bedside, begging for him to stay alive.

And he did. He survived. He didn’t want to, but he somehow managed to. And sitting in his hospital room and listening to the beeping of the life support machine was the first time I spoke to Piper in almost a year.

“Are you okay?”

Blue eyes blinked at me; dead, almost. She didn’t seem to remember how to cry. “I will be,” she had replied croakily.

But she never was. Because when her dad opened his eyes for the first time and saw her sitting at his bedside he had sobbed so loudly that my mother woke up from her seat beside him. And I remember the look on her face when she came home and told us that Brian Oakley hated her for saving his life. But more than that, I remember the way she described the look on Piper’s face when her dad made it clear that he didn’t want to be alive, and that being her father was not enough to change that.

But again… this was then. Before things changed; before Piper disappeared. Before I fell in love with a carcass of a person and attempted to bring her back to life. So I guess I could say that it started when Piper Penelope Oakley was twenty-one… almost ten years after her mother’s death, and nine years after we’d last spoken.

And it started, as clichés go, with a kiss.