“I’m taking him with me. I carried him for nine months. And you’re a terrible parent.”
“I’ve paid the bills since day one, made sure we are comfortable, have a roof over our head. Don’t try to act like you’ve done more than me.”
With my ear against my bedroom door, I listened to my parents trash each other over responsibilities. Only a child, I knew nothing of the word divorce, but we were past that point. During that fateful argument, it was just a matter of who I would be living with, my alcoholic dad or my lonely mom.
“No, don’t—”
I closed my eyes and covered my ears when I heard mom tumbling down the stairs. Once silence filled the air, I ran out to check on her, as dad—sweaty and shaking—stared down at her deceased body. Her head—impaled on the corner of the wooden radiator cover—looked up at us.
Gripping my dad’s legs, I screamed out, “Dad, what did you do to mommy? Is she okay?”
“She fell. It was an accident.”
Her death was ruled an accident, but I felt conflicted, torn on what to believe. I loved my dad, but not when he was an inebriated mess that ignored me and kept me in my room while he watched his sports games. When I figured out my parents hated each other, part of me believed he may have pushed her down the stairs, but he stayed firm with his poker face.
We buried mom in the cemetery next to our house. A town graveyard with hundreds of bodies was not exactly the bedroom view I wanted as a child, but knowing mom was still close by, put me at ease just a little. I’d look out the window at night and wave to her, talk to her, even though I knew she wouldn’t respond. But then she did.
In the purple nightgown she wore the night of her death, I squinted and gasped when I realized she was walking towards me from the cemetery. With the right side of her face still smashed in, she looked like she only had half of a head. Her arms extended outwards in my direction, and I shuddered, hiding behind the curtain.
I heard a ruckus downstairs and then the slamming of the front door. I looked back out the window and saw my dad headed to the cemetery gate holding a bucket. He went inside and approached my mom, who kept her focus on me. One by one, my dad threw rocks at my mom. He must have had a few dozen of them. She finally retreated and disappeared back into her grave.
Too afraid to confront my dad, I said nothing about the incident that night, and he did the same. But then it started happening every night, right around ten at night, the time she had passed. I watched her from the window get closer and closer to the house, but dad always ran out in time to stone her.
After a few weeks of this, I couldn’t stay silent any longer. I chased after my dad quietly. When mom sensed my presence behind a headstone, her body pivoted in my direction.
“Son, are you out here?” my dad yelled.
“He’s coming with me,” mom said in a raspy voice. “I’m bringing him with me.”
“Mom!” I cried out, jumping up into view.
“Cody, stay back,” my dad yelled.
“You killed me, Paul. Why did you push me? Cody was my only friend.”
I looked at my dad’s deer in the headlights expression. He said nothing, and then proceeded to throw the rocks at mom. Whether my presence played a role in her decision that night, I do not know, but mom shifted in the direction of my dad and wrapped her bony arms around him, smothering him.
As she dragged him back to her grave, I made a run for it, out the gates and to a neighbor’s house. Pounding on the door, someone finally opened and took me in to call for help. Dad’s body was found in the same grave as moms. Ruled a suicide. But I know what I witnessed that night. And I haven’t been able to move on for the past twenty years. Because no matter where I’ve lived, I see them each night when I look through a window. Mom and dad standing outside, calling out to me, asking me to join them.