When the Countdown Ended, I Became the Family Curse Chapter 07 (Continue)
I sighed. Maybe this was always how it was going to end.
In the days that followed, regret ate them alive.
Mom was cleaning when her hands froze. She was holding something – a piece of fabric, faded and soft.
My favorite dress. After I’d outlived the countdown, Mom had torn it apart in a rage and repurposed the
fabric for Sean.
She pressed it against her face and breathed in. Her shoulders started shaking, and the fabric darkened
where the tears soaked through.
Some nights, Dad drank until he couldn’t walk straight, then dragged himself to the storage room door and
pressed his face against it.
“Mia,” he whispered through the door. “I was wrong. Please come out.”
One night Mom went white. Something had surfaced – something she’d been pushing down.
“The night Mia was locked in there I heard her. She was crying, calling out. I heard her, and I didn’t go.”
“She must have been in so much pain… Mia, did it hurt? Did you hate us?”
The silence behind the door was the only answer. Mom sank to the floor and buried her face in her hands.
“I pretended I couldn’t hear. How did I pretend I couldn’t hear?”
“She was supposed to live, and we killed her. Eighteen years of being good to her – and all we were doing was managing a death. We’re the ones who should have died.”
One morning, Mom was dishing out breakfast. Sean reached for the biggest portion.
A sharp crack – Mom’s hand came down hard on his. The skin flushed red.
Sean froze. So did Mom.
She looked at her hand, then at the egg. Then she covered her face and ran into the kitchen.
Her whole body was shaking. She kept repeating the same thing over and over. I drifted closer.
“That one was Mia’s… that was Mia’s…” I closed my eyes.
Three months later, they were trying. The grief hadn’t lifted, but they were dragging themselves forward. And then things started falling apart.
It started with Dad. Twenty years at the factory, not a single incident on his record.
Then one day a machine caught his hand and took his right pinky. He was put on indefinite leave. The
meager workers’ comp check arrived weeks later.
The amount matched, almost to the dollar, what they’d spent burying Grandmother and me. Mom’s hands
shook as she stared at the check.
“This is it,” she murmured. “What Grandma said – God will never forgive us. It’s happening. It’s really happening.”
–
Then it was Mom. She’d been selling produce at the farmer’s market for years had her regulars, knew the
routine.
She went out that morning like any other day, but she was exhausted, her mind a thousand miles away.
She lost her grip while unloading her cart, and it tipped into the drainage ditch beside the lot.
The cart was wrecked. A week’s worth of produce – muddied, crushed, unsellable. Her ankle was swollen
twice its size where she’d twisted it going down.
She sat on the front step when she got home, staring at nothing. “When Mia was here, I sold out every single
day,” she said to no one.
“And when I didn’t sell out, I blamed her – called her a jinx. For produce. How could I do that?”
Dad’s voice came from inside, raw and hollow. “There’s no point anymore. This is what Grandma warned us
about. We earned this.”
Mom went quiet. The tears kept coming. I stood beside her with nothing to offer and no way to give it.
Six months in. Sean’s leg – the one he’d broken climbing that cabinet – had nearly healed. Then one morning
it swelled up again, worse than before.
The pain came back with a vengeance – he was limping again, wincing with every step. Kids at school started mocking his limp – imitating the way he dragged his leg.
Mom and Dad rushed him to the hospital. The doctor found a lesion on the bone – it would need surgery.