My mother sniffs loudly and swipes away the last of her tears. She wraps both hands around the gun to hold it steady, out in front of her body.
I let go of the mattress and drop my arms to my sides. I refuse to close my eyes. I want her to suffer as she stares into mine, the exact same shade of emerald green as hers. I want her to watch the life she gave me vanish from my eyes, and I want it to kill everything inside of her, knowing that this is all her fault.
“I love you, Ravenna. I love you more than you could possibly imagine, and I’m so sorry. We’ll be together again soon. Wait for me.”
Faster than I can take my next breath, she bends her elbows back, sticks the end of the gun in her mouth, and pulls the trigger. My hands fly up to cover my ears but I’m not fast enough. The loud explosion in such a small space rings through my ears, and I wince in pain, pressing my palms as hard as I can against the side of my head to make the pain stop.
My eyes are glued to my mother’s lifeless body until she slumps to the ground and disappears from sight on the other side of my bed. My gaze slowly tracks up the wall where she was standing just moments ago, stopping at the hole at the top of my bedroom window where the bullet must have gone after it exited the back of her head.
The room suddenly fills with bright light, illuminating every corner of the room, the dark shadows no longer able to hide what happened in here. I drop my hands from my ears, and my father’s screams suddenly surround me. I feel his hands wrap around my arms as he jerks my body around to face him, but my eyes never leave the hole in the window. I stare in fascination at the dark, wet splatters of dripping blood and pieces of my mother’s brains as they slide down the glass and splat on the floor.
“My name is Ravenna Duskin. I’m eighteen years old, I live in a prison, and my mother is dead.”
Chapter 13
“You’re sure you’re okay that your dad didn’t want to have a funeral?”
With my legs dangling over the end of the dock, I kick them lazily back and forth, staring at my reflection in the water below.
“What would be the point, Nolan?” I ask with a shrug. “It’s not like we have any family that would attend. My parents were both only children and my grandparents have been dead for years. My father also didn’t really want to advertise the fact that my mother swallowed a bullet. Not very good for the perfect little reputation he’s built around here.”
I laugh at my own joke, but Nolan just sighs in sympathy.
It’s been a week since my mother shot herself in my bedroom and a week of being ignored by my father while he locked himself in his office and sucked down one bottle of whiskey after another. The only reason I know what he’s doing behind that closed door is because each time he’d finish a bottle, he’d open his office door just wide enough for the bottle to fit through, clunk it down roughly on the floor, and then slam the door closed.
When I walked by the door on my way out here to the lake, I counted six empty bottles all in a clump right outside the door. I’m assuming he’s shoving them out of his office because his drunken mind thinks I’ll pick up where my mother left off and clean up after him. He can just keep right on assuming that because it will be a cold day in hell before I do anything for that man.
“I’ve never noticed that birthmark before.”
Nolan’s finger gently traces over the crescent moon-shaped birthmark the size of a fifty-cent piece on my upper thigh and goose bumps pebble my skin at his soft touch.
Swatting his hand away, I shrug and turn my face toward the sun. “I’ve had it since birth, hence, the name birthmark.”
He chuckles, and I close my eyes, instead of rolling them in annoyance that he didn’t notice the sarcastic bite to my words.
“Has your dad spoken to you yet?” he asks as he leans back on his hands, tilts his head up toward the sun, and closes his eyes.
“Nope.”
Pulling my legs up onto the dock, I twist my body to face Nolan, crisscrossing my legs in front of me.
“He said plenty to me the night she shot herself. I would be perfectly fine if he never spoke to me again,” I tell him, thinking about how my father cradled my mother’s body in his arms, screaming accusations and hatred at me. Even though it was obvious I didn’t pull the trigger, and I didn’t force my mother to do what she did, according to my father, it was still my fault. He cried and screamed, he mumbled nonsense, and then he screamed some more. When I got tired of listening to him, I walked out of the room and left him alone with his anger and misery.
“I know I’ve already said this, but I’m sorry for what’s happening to you,” he tells me softly.
“It’s not your fault. Right now, the only thing I care about is remembering what happened that night in the woods because I feel like it all started that night. Why was I out there? Who was out there with me, and how did I get back up to the prison?”