Bitter End Read Free

at the photos.
    The Mom in the photos looked so gentle. The Mom who left us must have been a whole different person.
    When I was little, I’d ask Dad about it. Why was she going to Colorado? We didn’t know anyone out there. We’dnever even been there. But Dad would just mumble that Mom “wasn’t in her right mind and didn’t know where she was going.”
     Once he said something about Mom being “too trusting for her own damn good.” But something in his eyes when he said it told
     me he wasn’t telling the whole story. There was something more to Colorado for Mom. There was something important there. I
     wanted to shout at him,
You heard about her brains on the road, Dad, and you said you couldn’t forget it, but you have! You
have
forgotten it!
    Eventually Shannin told me to stop asking about it because it upset Dad too much to think about Mom. So I did. But I couldn’t
     forget the story. It haunted me. Literally.
    That year, I had nightmares. Always, they were the same. Dad screaming into a pillow, Mom standing at the top of a mountain
     cackling, her face soft and sweet, her hair billowing out behind her. In the dream, she dangled me over the jagged mountain
     edge.
    “This mountain is mine,” she said, puffs of smoke billowing out of her mouth. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you at
     all, Alexandra.”
    She laughed as I kicked and thrashed and begged to be let go.
    “Oh, Alexandra,” she jeered. “Stop making such a fuss. Just think, they’ll have to shut down traffic while they find a hose
     to wash your brains off the street. Isn’t that exciting?”
    And always, just as she opened her hand and let me fall, I woke up.
    It got so bad I refused to go to bed at night. Dad eventually took me to a therapist, who said some stuff I didn’t understand
     about “closure” and “healing” and suggested that Dad give me something of my mother’s to help me feel closer to her.
    Dad came into my room that night clutching a folded yellow envelope.
    He cleared his throat. “Alex, honey, I know you’re having a hard time being without your, um…” His eyes filled up and he swallowed.
     Then he pushed the envelope into my hands. “This was your mother’s. I bought it for her on our honeymoon…. It was in her purse
     the day she, um…”
    I held the envelope in both hands, looking up at him as he swallowed and swallowed, unable to finish any sentence, it seemed,
     that had anything to do with my mother. He nodded at me, and I opened the envelope. Inside was a necklace—a thin leather strap
     with a small hoop on the end of it, a web of flossy clear thread strung inside the circle. Tiny beads dotted the delicate
     web; two white feathers, so small they might have come from a hummingbird’s tail, dangled from the bottom of it. I gently
     prodded the beads with my finger.
    “That’s called a dream catcher,” he said. “It’s supposed to keep nightmares away.”
    He pulled the necklace out of the envelope, held it in midair to straighten it, and then carefully slipped it around my neck.
     It smelled oddly familiar to me—perfumey and alive, almost like a memory—and instinctively my fingers drifted to it.
    Right then, at eight years old, I knew. Just as I knew I’d never take the dream catcher necklace off, I knew that someday
     I’d get to Colorado, where Mom had been going.
    The therapist was wrong. The necklace didn’t give me closure. Instead, not knowing anything more than this about my mom made
     me feel like a piece of me was missing, and I almost felt as though, just like Dad, I could break if I didn’t fill in that
     piece. That there would always be a hole in my heart where Mom should have been, and if I didn’t fill it in, I could end up
     empty and dull, like him. That I might forget hearing about her brains on the street, just as he had.
    The next day as Zack and Bethany and I played on the woodpile behind Bethany’s house, I showed them the necklace and told
     them the