Bound for Nirvana by Kendra Leigh

Author:Kendra Leigh [Leigh, Kendra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910713075
Publisher: Evoke Publications
Published: 2015-09-28T23:00:00+00:00

Veronica and Richard listened attentively as I relayed my story, their expressions a constant varying cycle of sadness and anger and understanding. I told them about my battle with guilt over my mom’s death, and how my father’s determination to blame me had turned into a life-enduring punishment. The form that retribution took—the seclusion, the rejection, the silence, the closet—I left to Ethan. He conveyed those details with the contempt I knew he felt. Finally, I told them that with no photos and no one to talk about her with, I’d had very little chance of keeping any memories of my mom alive.

“What about the accident?” Richard asked when I finished. “What do you remember about that day?”

I glanced at Ethan, recalling the one and only time he’d asked me this question, and the hurt and confusion in his eyes when I’d been unable to answer. Instead, I’d simply handed him the newspaper cutting that had reported my mom’s accident.

“Nothing.” Suddenly a fragment of a memory flashed before my eyes, but it was gone before it could take any real form. I shook my head in exasperation. “Well, nothing solid, anyway.” I paused, watching Ethan’s brow furrow in question. “Obviously, I know what happened—the accident was reported in the newspaper. But… I don’t know if what I recall is a memory or something gleaned from what I’ve read.”

Now all three pairs of eyes were filled with confusion, the same unspoken question lingering on their lips.

Veronica spoke first. “Are you saying that you don’t remember anything about what happened that day?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think so. Everything about the time of the accident is so flimsy, so vague; I can’t decipher what’s real or what I’ve imagined.”

“And your father didn’t explain it to you?”

“No. I remember knowing something bad had happened, but I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t there anymore. I just knew she was gone and that I was to blame. Whenever I asked him—my dad—he just replied with the same answer. ‘You killed her.’ Eventually, he just gave me the clipping from the newspaper report. I remember him reading it to me and saying, ‘Maybe now you’ll stop asking stupid questions.’”

Ethan closed his eyes against his anger while Richard muttered some expletive under his breath. Veronica simply blinked, a solitary tear trickling on to her cheek.

“After that, I quit trying to remember, it seemed easier just to shut it out altogether—or so I thought.” I looked at Ethan. “And then you asked me about it that day, and I felt so ashamed. The last day of my mom’s life and I can’t remember it.”

“You can’t beat yourself up about that, honey.” Veronica smiled kindly. “You were so incredibly young, and you clearly had no one to talk it through with. Sometimes the mind has a way of blocking out traumatic, painful memories. Storing them away in the sub-conscious where you don’t have to deal with them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t affect your conscious mind. Suppressed memories can be life crippling.

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