***
We were packed and ready to make our mad dash for Elijah's school and then, the launch site. Not one of us, not even Penny or Violet, spoke of my parents again. My sisters did not, because they knew we had no time. They assumed that our mother and father would be meeting us there. I did not speak of them because there were no words to explain the complex emotions I felt upon picturing their faces. After allowing the violent to-and-fro of that complication to continue for as long as I could stand, I forced myself to picture one word. I allowed just one simple word to determine my actions: Overrule. My sole objective was to ensure the survival of my siblings, Maura, and myself. That survival would overrule whatever semblance of love I felt towards the two people I was meant to call my parents.
My eyes traveled slowly around the room in which I was standing; it was the spacious formal living room where my mother and father would entertain their high-powered guests. A memory I had long suppressed bloomed inside my head like a dehydrated flower that had suddenly become drunk on rainwater. I closed my eyes and shook my head back and forth.
Bitterness, Brynna. I reminded myself, Nothing can touch bitterness.
The parties my parents used to hold in that room were the stage on which our family put on our greatest performances. Unity, love, and normalcy were the key points of our act, and we succeeded in conveying all three. They expected award-worthy performances from all of us by the time we were old enough to talk. For a while, I went along with the dubious charade. My siblings were still towing the proverbial line long after I had marched far from it.
“I wish I could understand you, Brynna.” My mother had said to me once after a performance of mine fell short of her high expectations, “I will never understand you.”
A gasp resulting from the sight of her face appearing in my mind drew an unwelcome and pinpoint-sharp entry of air into my chest. She had spat those words at me as though they were the most vitriolic she could think of, and at the time, they stung like the barbs she had intended them to be.
“Brynna, we have to go.” James told me softly from the doorway. Upon seeing the look on my face or the tension in the way I was standing, though, he stepped into the room further. “I tried to convince them to let your parents come for your sake. They wouldn't budge on it.”
“No. They caused this, in their own way. Do you want to know something that I find rather odd?”
He nodded, gazing at me intently.
“I never knew I had affection for them until this moment. It is not enough to convince me even to call. It is not enough to make me want to say goodbye. But James, it exists.”
He reached out and grasped my hand before saying softly and so gently, it would have brought tears to my eyes if I was capable of crying, “I know it does, sweetheart.”
“And there's someone genuinely good that I have known for a long time. I hate to leave him behind.” I looked at the pad of paper with the expensive fountain pen sitting on top that was adoring the coffee table. On that pad, my mother would scribble notes in the morning, telling us what chores to complete when we got home from school.
I picked up the pen and wrote three words on the clean piece of paper. They were the last three words my parents would see before they were consumed by the flames. In their last moments, I doubted they would care about my final message. But just in case it meant something to them, just in case it would bring them some infinitesimal amount of solace at the end of their lives, I wrote them.
James watched me write and then raised his eyes to look at me.
“That is the best I can do.” I stood to leave the room, avoiding his eyes now. As I passed him, he reached out and grasped my wrist. Then, he turned me towards him and wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me for a moment of comfort I did not realize I needed. My own arms, by their own will, threw themselves around his neck and grasped him desperately for every last moment of life I had left on that world and the one to which we were escaping. I turned my face to his, burrowed it in his neck, and allowed myself to feel whatever I had to in order to keep moving. The complex storm of emotions raged in a valiant last effort to stay alive, but I swiped them all away like God erasing evil from the world in a fabled great flood. I pulled away from James and nodded.
We turned without a word, hearing the car horn blaring as Maura grew impatient waiting for us. Once we were inside the car, she eyed us both suspiciously, and I gave her an almost imperceptible shake of my head to assure her that nothing she had so unwillingly imagined had occurred between James and I while we were in the house for a minute and a half longer than she and my sisters had been. I wanted to add that if something had occurred in that short space of time, something was physically wrong with either one or both of us, but I thought better of it. It was not exactly the time for plucking her nerves, as they were frazzled and dangerously high voltage as result. I knew all too well not to jest with her when she was in such a state.
Maura kept her arms around Violet and Penny in the backseat, but they still jumped up to watch our house shrink further and further away until it was out of sight.
I kept my eyes trained forward. In those three words, I had said all that I needed to say. I had my closure. I had left behind something for them to see, in which they could take comfort. I took care of things and said that which my sisters could not say, as I had done since the day I understood that my role as their old sister meant that I had to be their most indestructible force of protection.
My last words to my parents were different from what theirs would have been. They surely would have said, “I love you” as they had not been so embittered by the two as I had been. But my choice of words was more important than any proclamation of love, in both meaning and significance.
They were the first, last, and only favor I would ever grant my parents.