500: An Anthology of Short Stories

“Lizzie, how could I not have seen the signs?” Arnell asks me, her face contorted in anguish, her hands clenching her skirt.

It’s nearly seven months since the event occurred, but Arnell asks me the same question every single time I visit her. Sometimes the words vary slightly, but the query is inevitably the same.

I look at my friend’s forlorn face, her emaciated frame, her sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks. She’s barely recognizable as the ebullient, vibrant colleague who used to volunteer for every extra task at the Early Childhood Development Centre I run in our neighborhood. My heart feels anchored by the grief Arnell is carrying around like a cross of atonement; her sorrow-filled, haunted eyes leave me feeling desolate and impotent.

She hasn’t been back at work after the incident; in fact, she resigned without any prior notice. Despite my numerous attempts at coaxing her back to work, she adamantly refuses to budge. It’s another form of self-inflicted castigation.

“How could I’ve been so completely oblivious, so stone blind to it?” she now asks me. I know she doesn’t really expect an answer, so I simply reach out, unclench her hands and hold them gently in mine.

“Arnell, there were no signs! If there had been, you would have been the very first to notice,” I tell her yet again in another futile effort to help assuage the guilt that is suffocating my kind, sweet friend like a mountain steadily crushing the earth beneath it.

“No, there must have been,” Arnell insists. She suddenly jerks her hands out of mine and shoots upright. She starts to pace the tiny lounge where we are sitting, walking from the couch to the window, bypassing his recliner as if it were anathema to touch it.

His favorite track suit pants still drapes the chair back where he had last left it. Arnell is incapable of touching the clothing item, and she won’t allow anybody else to remove it from the recliner.

“I should’ve read something in his routine, his body language, his speech,” she continues, thrashing herself like a penitent monk engaged in self-flagellation.

Abruptly, she slumps to the floor in a heap. I rush over to her and embrace her sobbing form.

“Arnell,” I say, “when somebody reaches that final step, that beckoning void from which there’s no return, they make absolutely sure that nobody and nothing can stop them. They go out of their way to ensure that everybody thinks they are happy, that there’s nothing eating them up alive, that their pain has brought them to the pit of despair.

“Owen wanted to spare you anguish, but in his own personal torment, he was incapable of reasoning that what he planned to do would grant you indescribable agony. Ending his life was the only solution your son could see, my friend. Nobody could have stopped him.”

My words are pitiful comfort to Arnell, but miraculously, she responds.

“God have mercy on his soul. Please forgive him, Lord.”