The Waiting Game

The Seventh Letter

I wanted to smile, amused. My mother was definitely predictable.

A lot of people told me that I looked like her but I had trouble believing them. My mother was beautiful with tanned skin and dark wavy hair, her eyes hazel and probing. She had a loud mouth, tracing straight back to her Jersey roots, and even though sometimes her favorite thing to do was nag, she was always a great listener and would sit there and let me and my brother talk until we couldn’t talk anymore. She was a pillar in our life, the strongest one.

She could see through me. She knew that I was in pain.

She would have been a horrible parent if she didn’t notice. It wasn’t like I tried to hide his ghost, haunting me.

Constantly tormenting me.

“You’re going to be okay,” she repeated my words, weighing them on her tongue, letting out a huge breath. I watched her, sitting up, my hands sitting calmly and uselessly folded in my lap. I watched every move that she made, every small mannerism, reading the way that she had a million words to say but didn’t want to see the wrong reaction. I loved and appreciated that she wanted to talk to me, wanted to help me, but I hated that she was going to tiptoe around me.

I just wanted someone to say it as it was.

I just needed someone to hit me with a dose of reality.

Devon and his words flashed through my mind but I smothered him down, pushing him back to the vacant corners of my mind where he could not be seen or heard. I didn’t want to be thinking about Devon Mueller right now.

Not when a new letter was sitting in front of me on my bed, waiting for my mother to leave so I could open it. Not when I couldn’t deny the excitement bubbling in my stomach at the thought of reading the words of a dead man.

My mother was still watching me when I blinked, calling myself back into awareness.

“What?” I asked, hoping she hadn’t said a word. I didn’t want her to ask what I was thinking about. I hated lying to her, and I could never tell her that kind of harsh truth.

She didn’t ask but that didn’t mean that she didn’t notice.

“School starts in two weeks,” she said instead.

That hurt. It just managed to remind me that he wouldn’t be there to attend with me. That I would be on my own again.

I felt the hands that had been casually sitting in my lap form into tight fists. My right hand was clenched so tightly that my palm began to sting, my nails digging into the skin. But I couldn’t relax.

I nodded stonily, communicating with everything other than words that I didn’t want to discuss the topic. My mother sighed from the doorway before she nodded back, turning around and leaving the room, closing the door softly behind her. I listened to her say something to my brother, who must have been sprawled on the couch because I could hear one of his stupid action movies playing on the television in the family room outside of my door. I wondered what she had said because my brother had nothing to say.

I pulled my eyes to the letter on my bed. I reached out slowly and picked it up, weighing the nearly weightless object in my hand. I turned it over slowly, using shaking fingers to tear apart the paper.

I unfolded the letter.

I took a lot for granted when I was alive.

Family, for one. I have a big family—aunts and uncles and all four of my grandparents—but I never got to get to know any of them. They never really knew me. They probably couldn’t even tell someone about me if they asked what I was like. They would probably say that I was a smart kid, the kind of guy that knew a lot of interesting people, even if I had a sick sense of humor. They wouldn’t know what to say the same way I wouldn’t know how to explain them either.