First day back at work. Zombie effect still in full force.
My father was on a road trip with a friend. They were driving through Arizona and stopped to get gas. My father used the payphone to call my mother and say they'd be back late that night. She said that she had some big news for him, so hurry on up (said news being that she was pregnant with me).
Just after he returned to the car, a man with some sort of issue with the friend my dad was on the trip with shot them both. Their bodies were not found until four months later. All that time my mother was left wondering if he might still be alive, if maybe he'd just been kidnapped or roped into some sort of trouble (his parents were very rich). By the time the bodies were found, they were badly decomposed and it took another few months to confirm that it was my father's corpse.
One of my strongest memories from childhood was a night when I was five. We were living in a high rise apartment in downtown St. Louis. The light from the moon was strong and lit up my room almost like daytime. It made my silk nightgown glow. I was looking at the ceiling when my mother rushed into my room and clung to me. She said she'd woken up convinced that I'd gone missing. She told me that every time I spent the night with a friend she stayed up all night waiting for me to return, worried that I wouldn't come back. That was when I first began to suspect that something horrible must have happened to the mysterious person we all refered to as Duane.
I didn't know how he died until this past summer. All my childhood my sisters were warned not to tell me because my mother thought it was too terrible for me to know. That meant that I created my own theories: I thought for a time that he was Goose from Top Gun and had died in a plane accident, then I thought he'd drowned in Mexico, then I thought he'd been involved in a drug deal gone wrong. I finally confronted my mother with the last theory and she assured me it wasn't true and finally told me the truth.
I swear this is the last post of this nature. Back to cheerful references to snakes on planes and stories about my trip (I'm meeting Mar in THREE DAYS!)