Gone For Good
I try not to think of her now. It does no good. The memories come unbidden anyway, the bad ones unwanted like the smell from an unemptied bin and the good infrequent, too rare to be comforting and often too detailed to be true.
But it is accurate to say her face was heart-shaped, accentuated by brows plucked in thin, high arches with their outlines razor-sharp. I remember her mother describing her face just that way to a policeman after one of the many times she had run away. So that must be right.
By then the delicate perfume of her scalp, a good and true memory of her as a baby had been replaced with sour sweat and dirt. Her skin was doughy, perforated in places and her blood must have been thick like old engine oil. All goodness was gone.
The day she finally left for good was not cold and grey with drizzle and yet that is how I see it in my mind. But deep down I know it was summer and the sun was hot on my skin as I stood on our lawn talking to the policewoman, her silhouette framed by the morning’s golden glow.
I went to the morgue, leaving her mother with the neighbours, whose faces were an ugly mixture of sympathy and relief that the nightmare was ours, not theirs. The traffic was heavy, and at an intersection frustrated drivers blew their horns at other drivers who had blocked the roundabout. I thought about her in the polite silence of the police car as we waited for our turn to move forward. I thought how as a child she was always moving, and then at some point, she stopped and started sinking.
In the end, when she was silent and still, ours again and not the drug’s, when the screaming and the crying and the self pity had slipped away and our nightmare was over, all we had left of her was the least, her body, a shell with no need for description.
