The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Author:Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-698-40503-5
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2015-08-18T07:00:00+00:00

11

When I get home, my mother is sitting in the dark in the kitchen (Bea is not the only person in my life with a penchant for the dramatic). I flick the light on and she looks surprised to see me back. She tries to act normal, but I can see that she’s added an extra rug to the kitchen floor, and when I go to boil some water for tea, I see that the kettle’s gone. I also notice the date on the calendar that hangs on the back of the garden door.

Between the weirdness of last night, and finding out that Sam kissed Bea this summer, and Alice’s accident, and what Bea told me about Alice and Nick, I had completely forgotten what day it is. I stop in the middle of the kitchen and turn to face my mother.

“Are you okay?” I ask. It’s a stupid question; I know she’s not okay.

My mother tries to smile, but it looks like a grimace. “I just have a headache,” she says. “I’m going to go to bed. Don’t forget to unplug everything before you go upstairs, okay? And be careful opening that cupboard—I think its hinges are loose. And don’t go near the window in the bathroom.”

I just nod my head sadly and let her go upstairs, and I wonder where the person who was so excited about a walk in the mountains this morning has gone, but I suppose I know the answer. She’s gone back in time, in her mind, to another unseasonably warm October four years ago, and to the last of the tragedies.

My eyes fill with tears suddenly, and my heart tries to jump at my teeth and my throat closes before it can leap from my chest. I take a few deep breaths like my mother always tells me helps when you’re in crisis—in through the nose, all the way from the diaphragm, as if you’re about to sing opera. Not that I’ve ever sung opera. I wonder who is telling my mother to breathe deep tonight.

I call Gracie. She is eating when she answers, and the chewing sounds are loud and distorted. Her earrings clack against the side of the phone.

“It’s the thirtieth,” I tell her. She doesn’t say Cara? because she already knows it’s me, and she doesn’t say What? because she knows what I mean.

“Oh God,” she says instead. “I completely forgot. She was acting so normal earlier. She seemed happy.”

“Maybe she forgot too, for a while.” Maybe she feels like forgetting makes it worse. I know I do.

My father died in the first week of the accident season when I was eight years old. Like us, my mother broke down and slowly got back up and mourned, and many years later she stopped hiding from the world that one day in early October, and instead every year she takes us to our father’s grave and tells us stories about him so we’ll never forget. My uncle Seth died four years ago today and my mother still hides from the world on that day.

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