Burning September by Melissa Simonson

monstrosity.  “Maybe not.  I pulled some of your family records.  Your mother committed suicide?  I was sorry to hear that.”
    “That’s what I’m told.”
    “You don’t remember it.”
    “I was only three.”
    “Seems like a blessing, given what’s happened with Caroline.”
    Nice as it was to hear things I already knew, he could have told me all this over the phone.  “My mother’s history doesn’t have much to do with the problem at hand.  Lots of people have shitty families.  They don’t up and kill their exes.  What are you planning to do about that? Aside from victim blaming .” My fingers etched quotation marks around the words.  “You’re wasting your time, talking to me.”
    “I think your family history has everything to do with it.  Your childhood shapes who you are.  It doesn’t excuse everything, but it explains it.”
    “So,” I pushed my menu off to the side, “just to be clear, you’re going to go with, she’s guilty, sorry, but her mom offed herself, and her dad croaked when she was barely an adult, so let’s give her a get out of jail free card .”
    “Maybe more along the lines of, the prosecution has no physical evidence so they’re using her tragic family history against her, and hey, the dead guy had a lot of enemies—look at his rap sheet .”  He took as dignified a sip of his beer as possible.  “Tell me about your mother.”
    “Caroline’s my mother.  I don’t remember my real one.”
    “You spend a lot of time dodging questions for someone so interested in her sister’s liberty.  I’m not trying to be a prying asshole, here.  I need your help, and I don’t want to have to twist your arm in the process. Can you maybe try to work with me?  What do you know about her?”
    “She liked tarot and the color purple.” I sighed as irritated wrinkles scored his forehead.  “Look, if it weren’t for some old pictures from the motherland, I wouldn’t even know what she looked like.  The only things I know about her, Caroline told me.”
     
    She had hair like yours and eyes like mine , I remember her saying while she got me ready for bed one night when I was eight.  She made her voice sing-songy to keep me from hearing our father’s drunken antics downstairs, brushing my hair until she claimed it shone like gold Rumpelstiltskin spun from straw. 
    When I asked where our mother had gone off to, Caroline’s mouth twitched from side to side as I watched her in the mirror of the secondhand Barbie vanity she’d bought me.  She didn’t smile like she usually did, didn’t make eye contact for a while.  Her teeth bit into her bottom lip as she worked the comb through a snarled clump of hair.
    Sometimes things don’t make sense , milaya, she finally said.  She felt like it was her time to go, so…she did what she felt like she had to do. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.  Her heart hurt, not her body.  Her heart was sick for a long time.  Caroline pulled tendrils of my hair through her fingers as she French braided it.  You might understand it better when you’re older.
     
    Not really.  I understood with an asterisk.  My understanding* had grown to be that she chose the easy way out of a hopeless marriage and a life she felt was lacking.  That some people just don’t have enough strength or courage to keep going, despite apparent futility or grief.  And then I’d see Caroline’s struggles with keeping a roof over her kid sister’s head; so young, with so much responsibility, and I’d wonder just how strong she must have been, not throwing in the towel. 
    Caroline didn’t drink very often, but one day she had too many mojitos after learning how to mix them, and she wound up telling me the whole sordid tale on our roof one night. She’d finally deemed me old enough to discuss the topic.  That, or the mojitos had convinced her. 
     
    I’ll never get that picture out of my mind.  I wonder how long she was up there dead