the side of the mountain. Death was instantaneous.
Nothing much worked for Tom after that. He took to drinking and lying in bed for the whole of the day. In the late hours of the night Wash would waken and hear his father crying behind the closed door of his bedroom. When he knocked on the door and asked his father what was wrong, the man did not answer. He did not yell for the child to go back to bed. He did not try to hide his tears. He only continued wailing and calling his wife’s name while his son sat on the other side of the door, small and powerless.
Wash began spending the weekends at his grandmother’s after that. And then the weekends spilled over into weekdays until, finally, Tom arrived one day and sat on the couch beside his son and said, in a flat and hollow tone, “I’m leaving for a little while.” The gash Tom sustained during the car crash had healed over, leaving the scar that would remain for the rest of his days. It was long and garish and impossible to ignore, like the emptiness death leaves in its wake.
That was nearly six years ago. Now Wash was alone in the mountains with a man that looked very much like the father he used to know, but who was not that man. And neither was Wash the boy he once was. They were both strangers living in the bodies of people who used to love each other.
* * *
“Five more minutes,” Carmen called through the house.
“I heard you five minutes ago,” Ava replied.
The two of them were on opposite ends of the house—Carmen in her bathroom, using it for the third time in the past fifteen minutes. Meanwhile Ava was on the other end of the house in the other bathroom, wrestling with her hair so that the two of them could leave for Dr. Arnold’s.
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