When She Was Me

by Marlee Bush

He’d have to look closer to find our thumbprints. On that night fifteen years ago, Lenora and I walked down a hallway together. But when the door opened, the scene unfolded like a sick feature film.

“The dog,” I say, louder this time, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I have to ruin things. “I killed him.” Her back tenses. “You didn’t know he couldn’t have grapes, Lenora. It was an accident.”

He always lingered, talking about some government conspiracy or another. An election. An outbreak. The good old days before his campsite turned into a ghost town. Yet another thing he blames the government for and not his own loosening grip on reality and his reliance on alcohol. But Cassie and I know the truth. As Wayne ventured deeper into the idiosyncrasies of his mind, the campsite went downhill. His own fault.

Regardless of what would happen, Mom and Dad truly loved each other once. We grew up watching them show affection: the kisses, the dancing, the touching. It was all there, until one day it wasn’t.

She doesn’t know that coming here wasn’t a choice. It was the only way we could save ourselves.

She’s wearing Dad’s shirt, and I want to say something about it. Ask her if it was proper for a good Christian woman to do what she just did with a man she’d claimed to be done with. I can’t say it, though, because it wouldn’t matter. When my mother was baptized, she was reborn a hypocrite.

“She’s so fake. Being so hard on him, then spreading her legs like none of it matters. Going to church every Sunday like she’s better than him when all it takes is one apology for her to forget every single one of her morals.”

Dad will take care of himself. You will do something you shouldn’t. And then I’ll do something even worse.

But no one ever warned me about the dangers of my own thoughts. No one ever told me that there could come a time when trusting myself would be difficult and hating myself would be easy. What to do when the monster is you.

I know Lenora. She wouldn’t hurt anyone. But the words are hollow even in my head, where the sound of that boy’s head slamming against the lunch table still reverberates. I guess Lenora isn’t the only one who lies.

We’re in the middle near the back. Behind all the perfect families. Women in wrinkle-free dresses singing about bathing in His blood, men in khakis pretending their wives didn’t drag them out of bed this morning, and children avoiding eye contact with the pastor so they don’t get asked to come to the front to worship. These perfect Christians, ignorant to their own fallacies, have never accepted us. Not my father’s drug problem. Not my mother’s willingness to be a single mother or her decision to always take him back.

His words bust me right open, and all my anger is exposed like organs in a slit-open chest. “I thought only sinners are supposed to sweat in church, Pastor Smith.”

For the first time in my life, I feel like I can honestly kill someone.