WHAT SHE STARTED...CHAPTER FIVE - by Khadijah Mohammed

I stood there with my hand still buried in the drawer for a long time after I said it out loud. Scared came first, cold and immediate, the same fear that had moved through me at the gate — someone had been in this house, in my room, close enough to touch my things while I slept or showered or sat downstairs with my mother, and I hadn't felt a thing. Then the anger came up right behind it, hot where the fear was cold, because whoever had done this hadn't just taken something from me, they'd taken her, they'd walked into the one room in the world I was supposed to be able to keep her safe in and they'd done it anyway. And underneath both of those, quieter and worse, was the confusion that wouldn't resolve no matter how many times I turned it over. Why my mother. She hadn't seen anything. She couldn't have told anyone anything even if she'd wanted to. She was the last person on earth who deserved to be part of whatever this was. I don't remember deciding to destroy the room. I remember the drawer coming out of the dresser entirely and hitting the floor. I remember my desk chair against the wall, my books swept off the shelf, the photo frame from my nightstand — not the one I'd been holding for three days, a different one — cracking against the closet door. I put my fist through nothing in particular, just air and noise, until there was nothing left in the room that hadn't been knocked over or thrown, and then I was on the floor myself, in the middle of all of it, and I was crying in a way I hadn't let myself cry since the night Eni died. Three days later, I buried my mother. The funeral home had done what they could with the church hall, flowers I didn't remember ordering, a photo of her from before, from when she still looked like herself. People came. More than I expected. A few of my teammates from football, awkward in ill-fitting black. Mrs. Adele, standing near the back like she wasn't sure she was allowed closer. Nurse Lucy, dressed in dark green instead of black, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue she kept folding smaller and smaller. Even a couple of Tessa's friends showed up, which I hadn't expected at all, standing together near the door like they weren't sure whether they belonged there either. And then my father. I hadn't seen him since he left, not once since the year after Eni died, when my mother stopped being able to hold a full sentence together and he stopped being able to stay in a house that held her grief and his both. He stood at the back of the church hall in a coat too heavy for the weather, and when our eyes met across the room, I looked away first. It rained at the burial. Not hard, just steady, the kind of rain that soaks through a coat without announcing itself, and I stood at the edge of the grave with an umbrella nobody offered to hold for me and watched them lower her down. My father came around the side of the crowd afterward, his shoes sinking slightly into the wet ground, and opened his mouth to say something. I walked away before he could get the first word out. He came to the house that evening. I heard the knock, heard him say my name through the door, low, careful, the way you'd talk to something you were afraid of startling. I didn't answer. I went upstairs and locked my bedroom door and sat on the floor with my back against it, and after a while I heard him climb the stairs too, and then I heard him sit down on the other side of the same door, his weight settling against the wood like he intended to stay there. "I used to sit like this outside your sister's door," he said, "when she was small and thought closing it meant she'd won some kind of argument." A pause. "You used to bang on the wall from your room and tell her to keep it down." I didn't answer. I could hear the rain still going outside, tapping the window at the end of the hall. "Your mother used to say I spoiled you both. Maybe she was right." Another pause, longer. "I keep thinking about the four of us in the kitchen. Your mum burning the rice because she was too busy laughing at something Eni said. You, seven years old, refusing to eat anything that wasn't shaped like a dinosaur." He laughed, short and broken, more air than sound. "I had a good life in that house, Chris. I want you to know that. Whatever you think of me right now — I had a good life in there, once." I felt something crack open in my chest, slow, like ice giving way underneath weight it had been holding a long time. "Then why did you leave," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to, muffled through the door. "You knew what losing her would do to Mum. You knew she couldn't handle it. Why did you leave both of us to handle it alone?" He didn't answer right away. I heard him shift against the door, heard him take a breath that sounded like it cost him something. "Because every time I looked at her," he said finally, "I saw Eni. I couldn't stop seeing her. Every meal, every room in that house, every time your mother turned her head a certain way — I saw our daughter, and I couldn't breathe through it, and I hated myself for not being strong enough to stay and love your mother through it instead of running from my own reflection of our loss." His voice broke properly then, no more trying to hold it together. "I told myself I'd come back when I could look at her without falling apart. I told myself that for two years. And then it was too late, and now she's gone, and I never got the chance to be strong enough for either of you." He was crying on the other side of the door. I could hear it, unmistakable, a grown man's crying that didn't try to disguise itself as anything else, and something about hearing it undid the last of whatever had been holding me together on my side of the wood. I opened the door. He was sitting right there, exactly where his voice had told me he'd be, and he looked up at me with a face that had aged more than the two years should have accounted for. "I want you to come live with me," he said, before I could say anything at all. "We'll sell this house. We'll leave this town — it's taken enough from us, Chris, it's taken your sister and your mother and I won't let it take you too. We start over somewhere else. Together, this time." I stood in the doorway and looked at him for a long moment, this man who had built me and then abandoned me, who had just told me the truest thing he'd probably ever said to me, and I felt too many things at once to answer him honestly. "I'll think about it," I said. I went back into my room and closed the door, and this time I locked it.

What She Started

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