Scattered Colors (2 page)

It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be. I was having a nightmare; that was the only explanation that made any sense. I was asleep. I’d wake up any moment and my mother would be there, alive and happy, just like any other day. She hadn’t really been hit head-on by a drunk driver on her way to pick me up. It was all just a bad dream that my imagination had somehow conjured up.

Just a dream, just a dream, I kept repeating in my head, refusing to look at my mother’s lifeless body lying in the hospital bed just feet away.

She was going to open her eyes at any moment and everything would be all right. I knew if I could just see those bright blue eyes, so similar to my own, that the world would un-pause and start moving again, just as it was meant to.

But her eyes never opened. And with the loss of her shiny, happy blue eyes, the rest of the color in the world began to dim.

Colorless.

That had been my world the day we put my mother in the ground. There was no vibrancy, no bold, vivid colors; just black, white, and gray. Everything from the angry storm clouds that filled the sky to the umbrellas held over our heads at the graveside service to the suits and dresses the mourners around me wore as they paid their respects were cloaked in those cold, desolate tones. I could remember spending the entire day on autopilot, my body moving robotically from one place to another, too overwhelmed to process what was going on around me. I still couldn’t bring myself to believe it was all really happening. Every morning, I woke up and expected to find my mother in the kitchen preparing breakfast and every morning, my heart wrenched and broke all over again as remembrance took hold, leaving a hole inside my world that couldn’t be filled.

My father and I spent that day side by side in silence, coping with our loss together yet still separately. He seemed to be turning into himself, holding his emotions at bay until he was in the privacy of my parents’ bedroom. I guessed he didn’t realize I could hear his cries of agony through the walls every night. Neither of us had spoken much in the days leading up to the funeral. It was as if we didn’t know what to say to each other to lessen the hurt.

In the days that followed Mom’s funeral, the colors of life remained missing. The happiness, which had once filled my household as I grew up, had dwindled. As that first month ticked by, my father eventually pulled himself from the comforts of his room in order to go to work. I went through the motions of going to school but couldn’t bring myself to feel any of the excitement my fellow classmates exhibited at the thought of the school year soon coming to a close. While my friends all tried their hardest to show their support, I just couldn’t seem to pull myself out of the constant state of numbing disbelief I was living in. One question ran through my mind constantly:
Is this really my life
?

In the second month following her death, it grew apparent that my father appeared to have found solace in burying himself in his work. He’d always been a workaholic to an extent, but Mom always had a way of reining him in. She insisted that weekends were to be spent together. We’d been the kind of family that had taken vacations together or lazed around the house Saturday and Sunday, doing nothing but enjoying each other’s company. With her gone, Dad slowly began spending less and less time at home. When he
was
around, I noticed that he struggled to look at me. On the occasions where we actually managed to make eye contact, I saw flashes of pain fill his eyes before he quickly turned away. For me, month two brought an unwelcomed sense of constant pain. The numbness had eventually faded, and the sporadic forgetfulness that she was actually gone was no more. When I woke up in the mornings, it was with the knowledge that I was more than likely going to be spending the day alone while Dad was at the clinic.

By month three, things had grown even more dismal. I didn’t have the energy or desire to hang out with friends, leaving each one of their phone calls unanswered. The school year rolled to a close without me so much as noticing. Summertime only meant hours upon hours of sitting alone in my quiet house by myself. Dad had taken throwing himself into his work to an extreme. I began making dinners each night in the hopes of coaxing him home at a reasonable hour, but most nights I ate alone at our dining room table before packing up the leftovers and storing them in the fridge. The only reason I knew he was aware of my cooking was because the leftovers would be missing the following morning when I woke up. He knew the lengths I was going to and still couldn’t pull himself from his grief long enough to sit down for a meal with his daughter. To make matters worse, he’d gone from looking at me every once in a while with a pained expression to stopping almost completely.

I managed to find the courage to ask him why that was one rare night when he got home before I’d fallen asleep.

“Why won’t you look at me, Daddy?” I’d asked in a tearful voice as I tried my hardest to get his eyes to meet mine.

When he spoke, his voice was weak and broken, something I was so unused to. Growing up, I’d always believed my father to be strong and courageous. With four softly spoken words, he shattered that image. “It hurts too much.”

An involuntary sob burst free from my chest as warm tears made tracks down my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Freya. I’m so sorry.” He walked from the living room and shut himself in his bedroom for the remainder of the night. I knew my father was crushed by the loss of Mom. They’d been together since college and, while I had friends who came from families of divorce, I’d been raised in a household where my parents never hid their affection from me. They were constantly hugging or kissing to the point of embarrassment. I understood his pain, but that didn’t take away from the stinging slap his words left me feeling. As month three progressed, my pain grew more intense, almost unbearable. The fact that my father couldn’t even look at me—because I was a constant reminder of his beloved wife—compounded my pain with loneliness at what felt like the loss of my father, as well. I could see that soul-deep hurt one could only feel when they looked at the carbon copy of the person they’d loved and lost too early in life.

I was the spitting image of my mother. That thought used to bring me joy. But ever since losing her, just looking in the mirror stabbed at my heart. We had the same light brown hair that would shine with natural red highlights when the light hit it just right. Our eyes were the same wide-set, expressive, cerulean blue that tended to turn different shades depending on our mood. Mom used to say there was no hiding what we were feeling, that our emotions reflected in our eyes, showing everything no matter how hard we tried to hide it. But since that awful day, the light that used to reflect in my eyes was gone. There was no happiness, no sadness, just stark emptiness looking back at me. Everything about my face—eyes, ears, nose, chin, lips, cheekbones—were all exactly like hers. It was a blessing and a curse all at the same time.

I began to doubt that things were ever going to go back to the way they used to be. I started to question if the colors would ever come back to my world. I lay in bed at night, silently crying, thinking that things couldn’t get any worse. Sadly, I was mistaken. Month three had been the hardest yet, but it was in month four that I would discover my life could, in fact, get worse. Month four was when I lost what was left of the life I’d grown to know. Month four was when what little I had was stripped away completely.

Month four was when my pain grew tenfold and I began to truly resent my father.

“You’ll love it here, Freya. Just wait and see.”

I tuned my father’s voice out as I looked through the passenger window. Even the beautiful view whipping past me wasn’t enough to pull me from my morose mood. If the serenity of the white-capped waves crashing along the pebbled shoreline or the tree-lined cliffs overlooking the ocean weren’t enough to cheer me up, then my father’s pathetic attempt at reassurance certainly wasn’t going to do it.

It had been a long, three-day drive from Chicago to the tiny, Pacific Northwest town of Sommerspoint, Washington. Three days filled with,
it’s such a lovely town, Freya; wait until you see the beach, Freya;
and my absolute favorite,
this is a chance for us to start over, Freya.

I didn’t
want
to start over. I wanted to go home.

Home to the beautiful house I’d grown up in just outside of Chicago. The house where my mother had played with me, cooked meals, read me bedtime stories before tucking me in snuggly every night, where my family would cuddle close on the couch watching movies on the weekends. Home was that house filled with the memories of my mom, memories of a happier time, memories I cherished.

But the house was gone.

Only four months after burying her, my father decided he could no longer handle living in that house surrounded by the memory of my mother. Where they gave me comfort, those same memories haunted my dad. He sold the family clinic he’d opened in the city two years before I’d been born to move us all the way across the country to some town where the population was just barely out of the triple digits. Sommerspoint. Even the name was serene.

I hated it.

Everything had been done without my input. He never once asked how I felt about the move. He didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to him was running away from the memories he was unable to handle. Without so much as talking to me, he put our house on the market and sold it and his clinic. He’d contacted a colleague of his from medical school who ran a family practice in Sommerspoint and agreed to come on as a partner. The first I heard of our plans to start a new life thousands of miles away had been the week before.

The quick knock on my bedroom door had drawn my gaze from the book I’d been reading to see my father standing in the doorway. “We’re moving to Washington. You need to pack; we’ll be leaving first thing Monday morning.” That was it. That was all he said before turning and walking away, leaving me reeling from the bomb he’d just dropped.

“So, you’re not talking to me at all?” my father asked after several minutes passed without a response to his last comment.

“What’s there to talk about?” I asked sullenly, never taking my eyes off the landscape as it passed by.

His heavy sigh echoed through the car. “You’ll get used to this place. You just need to get settled in.”

I didn’t bother arguing. There was no use. If he wanted to believe moving away from everything and everyone we’d ever known and loved would be an easy adjustment, then I’d let him. He could use that thought to keep himself comfortable. I was a realist. I knew exactly what was going to happen. We’d get settled, Dad would go back to working long hours, and I’d go back to being alone. That was what my life had become. Despite the fact that we’d moved, I knew things weren’t going to change. He wasn’t staying away from me because he wanted to grieve privately. No, he kept his distance because it hurt too much to look at me.

Part of me couldn’t fault my father for not being able to look at me, but the other part resented the hell out of him. I resented him for the distance he’d put between us, for the way he left me to handle my mother’s death all on my own, without a shoulder to cry on. I couldn’t help but think a stronger man would have been able to suck it up and find a way to help his daughter heal, but he wasn’t strong. He’d proven that in his actions over the past four months. Our move was just another red flag showing me I was on my own. No one was going to take care of me but me. It was a sad, sad lesson for a seventeen-year-old to have to learn.