What Edward Remembered
 

Edward remembered, but he didn’t remember.  He remembered that day, sitting in the church, staring at the charcoal gray box in front of him and listening to an unusually fat lady sing “Amazing Grace.”   The la
dy’s head flung back as she hit the high notes and her inflated belly poked out further and further until it looked like it was going to pop a button on her tight blue dress.  Edward’s eyes kept coming back to the box.  His mother would have liked it.  It had silver doves on the hinges and was covered with white roses – her favorite.  He got up and looked at her pale lifeless face.  He touched her hand, but it felt like cold, heavy rubber, not like the soft hand he remembered rubbing his forehead at bedtime.  He was only twelve years old that day, but he had acquired a sad, adult un
ing of the mutability of life.  They tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he knew that it was.  After Christ
mas he had told her that he wanted to move in with his father.
 “Don’t leave me, you’re all I have,” she cried, the tears rolling down her plump pink cheeks.  But all Edward could think about at the time was living at the beach; it didn’t really have anything to do with want
ing to live with his Dad.
“I’ll still visit, chill out,” he told her with the cold sensitivity of a twelve-year-old boy.  How could he have been so selfish?   He left her there with no idea that he would never be able to see her shining, blue eyes and rosy cheeks again.  He wouldn’t even get to see her scowling face when he did something that she didn’t approve of.  As he stood over her body, he saw the line around her neck, softened and made barely noticeable by the make-up, not like the bright red line he remembered seeing when they found her.  The plump of her cheeks was sagging, drained of the familiar pink, and they had faded to a pasty white.  Edward held the note in his pocket, crumpled and stained with tears.  It was Good Friday.  The death of Christ, the death of his mother.  “What’s so good about it?” Edward won
dered.  The funeral had to be held in the morning so that the church could prepare for the dinner that had been sched
uled for that afternoon.  This was his first encounter with the reality of life and death.  Life goes on, as the saying goes.  He cried when he read his mother’s last words, but that was the last time he cried.  He did not cry sitting in that church.  Relatives insisted on hug
ging him and sobbing on his new coat, which by the end of the day smelled like his aunt Addie’s musk per
fume and his grandpa’s muscle rub cream.  He could remember every detail of that day; it was the days and emotions following that day that made the blur.  One big gray blur.
 Edward moved to his Dad’s house, where he shared a room with his younger stepbrother and fought over who got the shower first with his stepsister.  Ed
ward was reserved and quiet since his mother left him, but he didn’t remember feeling anything except the empty nothingness.  Those who knew what really hap
pened didn’t know what to say to him, they just looked at him with sad eyes and treated him like a lost puppy.  As time went on, he made friends and began to live a seemingly normal life, as normal as could be through puberty.  He learned to lie about his mother when peo
ple asked how she died.  He told them that she choked to death while at home alone.  He didn’t tell them that it was he who left her alone, he who caused her choking.  Everyone was sympathetic, but they didn’t know the truth.  Only Edward remembered.
 “What’s your problem?” His Dad asked him earlier this Friday morning, six years after Edward’s mother’s death.  His father didn’t remember the an
ry of the event, the death of that sweet lamb of God, only Edward remembered.  Though Edward tried, he couldn’t remember the emotions, the pain and the sorrow.  He wanted to feel the pain again to remind him of the death he caused.  He took the note out of an old cigar box in his closet.  He read the words over and over again, knowing what he had to do.  His mother, in her last words, apologized for not being able to stay around to see him graduate from high school and go to college.  She just couldn’t take the loneliness.  Edward had since become familiar with the feelings of lone
ness, the constant empty nothingness.  He couldn’t bear the thought that he had caused his mother to feel that way.
 “Father, forgive me,” he uttered, standing on the cold, charcoal gray chair.  He tightened the prickly rope around his neck.  “It is finished,” he said as he kicked the chair out from under his feet, making a loud clang as it hit the cold, gray, cement floor of his fa
ther’s basement.  His feet dangled as he experienced the burn
ing tightness of the rope.  That was the last thing that Edward remembered.

Heather Shirley