The second October

This will be the second October since the rainy day. The day the skies opened, and the smell of wet leaves almost dulled the acrid stench of smoke that I couldn’t actually smell, due to the distance. But the vision of it permeated my brain.

She used to get them out of the cars, all the children. She was the carpool lady, but she made it look much hipper than a lunchlady. Young and stylish, with heeled boots and a wide, mischievous smile. No one would ever have known. That she was scared, and filing papers, and making plans. That she had left. That he didn’t want her to.

Her daughters are preschool carbon copies of each other, the same genetic code detailing their wide set eyes, steady gaze, and straight blond hair. I remember seeing her walk across the school parking lot, holding each one of them by the hands. They flanked her, perfectly symmetrical. I’m unable to differentiate them, and mull over how the other children say their name as if it’s one. They run the syllables all together, one womb, two people, one name. Their sturdy shoulders upheld their backpacks as they trudged.

But she held their hands so delicately, as if they were glass.

I didn’t know her well, just saw her in the carpool line. But now, when October looms, I have a visceral reaction to the darkness that followed the rain. The soot that smeared everything. How it colored the lens I view the world through, after the smoke cleared and they began to pull the bodies from their house.

She was not alive when he started the fire, they say. He made sure he couldn’t get out, either, before he set the blaze. I wonder if he meant for the dog to die, or if that was an accident. I catch myself thinking it seems unnecessarily cruel, then realize how it pales in comparison. He couldn’t leave them ANYTHING, I think, then I realize he left them alive. And that is something.

I see the girls every now and again, navigating the school driveway alone, or with their aunty. Sometimes I see them laughing, and playing. Then my daughter will say something like, “Siobhan* got a haircut, but her mommy will never see it, because her mommy is dead.”

And it hits me in the gut, all that they have lost before they were conscious it could be taken. I think of how the soot will cloud their eyes for years to come, no matter how their family tries to cushion the blow when they eventually learn the whole tangled and sickening truth.

Sometimes I go to Maggie’s site, Violence Unsilenced. I pretend I’ll find her story, and it will be different. She will have moved, changed her name. Cut the girls’ hair. He will have gone to therapy, begun dating again. They would have lived separately, but they would have lived.

It will never be her. And I pray that her daughters will live all the days of their lives safe and cherished by the men that they love. They deserve that, after having been so heinously betrayed by the first one.

House the next day.

*not her real name.