Erase Me

IX

I ran to the woods. I ran to the only place where I thought I could be alone. But then Charlie showed up to make sure I was all right. Seeing his face made me realized how much I didn’t want to be alone.

He saw the tears in my eyes and apologized for following me out here.

“I have to tell you something,” I blurted out. He sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned towards him and set my head on his chest.

“Every single thing I said at the funeral was a complete lie,” I told him.

He laughed. “Of course! You don’t paint.”

I looked up at him and wiped my tears away to remind him that this was serious and I was in pain and my conscience was being torn apart. His smile fell and he held me tighter.

“She never supported my music . . . never. She told me I couldn’t sing. She did it to protect me but protecting me was all she could do. All we ever did was take care of each other but we weren’t close and I was all she had left but I was too selfish to consider how alone she was . . . alone with her regrets.”

“Aria, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. The mistakes you made with her don’t matter. She loved you.”

“I have to suffer her regret now,” I sobbed quietly.

“You have to learn to get rid of it.”

Then he thought of something. He held his fingers to my lips to keep from speaking and we waited in silence until a bird starting chirping.

He whistled its song. I giggled and playfully told him to stop but he kept whistling and he created a beat on the ground to compliment the bird’s song.

The next thing I knew, Charlie was hauled to his feet by a police officer. I shouted after him but they took him away.

I sprinted to the room where Idris, Devi, and some others were hanging out.

“They have Charlie!” I tried to piece together an account of what happened but I was too distraught to speak. “He whistled and . . . bird . . . execution!”

They leapt to their feet at that last word but I fell to my knees and fainted. When I regained my sense, Idris was gone to convince his father to not execute him. Devi half carried, half dragged me to town square.

Charlie’s hands were bound to a post, his shirt torn off. The executioner was whipping him. He groaned and cried out in pain with each whip. I felt every slash dig into my own flesh and I nearly collapsed into Devi’s arms.

She held me in her arms and tilted my chin up to face her. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “Better than execution,” she mouthed out.

This was Idris’s doing. Othmar trusted his son’s judgment. He wouldn’t execute Charlie because Idris told him not to. But he still had to be punished. Devi flinched with each crack of the whip. Idris blinked away the tears. Charlie was his friend and brother. We made up a family of outlaws because none of us would be sons living under the roof of a lying mother: the government. We were robbed of the food we wanted to share: the music. We could not live without either.

They unbound Charlie’s hands and he collapsed onto the hard cobblestone ground, bleeding and barely conscious. The only way I could tell he was alive was because of the little groans of pain that escaped him.

By then, all of our friends from the room had arrived and they carried him to my house while Devi helped me home. They tended to him the best they could while I sat there crying. I looked up to see Idris staring at me. Devi gestured for me to go to my room for a nap.