Filed to story: Brace Face Betty Drama Story
“BETTY!”
In the living room, I gently lay the woman down on the sofa, and she curls up into a ball again, sobbing in a gut-wrenching, horrible way that makes me want to rip my own ears off.
Momma, why are you crying? It’s all right. Everything’s going to be okay. Momma. Momma!
Footsteps thunder down the stairs. Betty arrives in a whirlwind panic, her hair all over the place, wearing nothing but a vest and a tiny pair of shorts. We pose a pretty fucking damning picture, but it doesn’t look like her mom’s paying any attention. Her eyes are screwed tightly shut, her mouth drawn down in a mask of misery. Betty shoots me a bewildered, scared look, and I just stand there, numb, not knowing what the fuck to say.
She rushes to her mom, dropping to her knees with a loud thud, eyes still on me. “What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. She was doing seventy when she pulled up. When she got out, she was like this.”
“Fuck, Mom. Mom, what’s going on?” Betty tries to take the woman’s hands in hers, but she’s too hysterical to allow it.
“She’s…gone…” she pants. “She’s fucking…gone. She’s dead, Betty. She’s fucking dead.”
A brief flash of confusion pulls at Betty’s features, then her mom’s statement must make sense all of a sudden, because I watch as realization dawns on her. “Gail?
Gail died?”
“Yes!” Her mom sounds like she’s dying when she pushes the word out. “It’s…
it’s my fault.”
“No.” Betty shakes her head, running her hands over her mom’s hair, trying to soothe her. “No. Mom, it’s not your fault. How can it be your fault?”
“She was angry with me,” she keens. “I was chasing after her. I needed to explain. I just needed to make her stop, but…” She chokes. Barely even gives herself time to recover before she continues. “She drove straight out. Straight into the intersection. She didn’t even look.”
“Mom. Mom, it’s okay. You’re not making any sense. Tell me what happened.”
“She saw me, Betty. She saw me with Dan, in his office. She wouldn’t wait for me to get dressed. She…just left, and I went after her. It is my fault. I killed her.”
BETTY POV
Mom has been acting weird.
Mom has been crying in the shower.
Mom’s been having an affair with her boss.
This is the reason why she’s bailed every time Dr. Coombes came to drop the boys off for their lesson. This is the reason why she hasn’t been to visit her best fucking friend in the hospital. She’s been riddled with guilt, it’s been eating her alive, and now Gail is dead.
Marcus wanted to take us back into town, but I told him I would drive the van back. He mentioned something about coming back up here later with a friend to get my car. I vaguely remember giving him the keys to the Nova. More vividly, I remember him holding me, hugging me, whispering into my hair, but after that everything’s kind of a blur.
I’m numb down to my bones as I make the journey home, Mom still crying in the passenger seat. I don’t even know how I made it most of the way; I’m on autopilot, shifting, stopping at lights, taking turns without really paying attention to what I’m doing. When I pull into the driveway and kill the engine, we both just sit there, neither of us moving, staring dumbly out of the window at the garage door.
“Why?” I ask. “Why did you come up to the cabin?”
She has calmed down a bit now. Enough so she can talk, at least. “I don’t know. I knew you were there, and I just wanted to get away, and it just…
happened.”
“Does Dad know?”
She blinks, shifting in the seat. Her pajama pants are destroyed, and there’s mud all over the passenger door. “About Dan? No,” she says quietly. “I haven’t told him yet.”
Great. A fucking bomb’s about to go off in our house, and there will be nothing left of our happiness but a smoking crater and the remnants of my father’s happiness. I can’t stitch my thoughts together. Nothing’s making sense inside my head. I just sit there, hands still on the steering wheel, staring into space.
I feel like I’m going to puke as an option presents itself to me-an option I do not like one little bit. I take a deep breath, swallowing down my own self-loathing as I say, “You’re not going to.”