What He Took

Mac knows she's smart, but it takes her two months to start to accept what keeps playing on the news. What her parents keep whispering in the kitchen. What Veronica's voice keeps echoing in her head, and when she does, she spends the day locked in her room, dry heaving over the trash can next to her bed.

She's smart; she should be able to find some kind of metaphor for the way the knowledge just sat on the top of her brain, never really touching anything. She didn't think about him jumping. She didn't think about a plane exploding, or a bus falling. All she did was stare at Dick over his brother's casket and think about nothing at all.

(She cried later, in the shower, and even later her mother found her asleep in the corner of her room, damp hair clinging to her neck and shoulders, a towel wrapped around her body.)

Veronica had held her briefly while she cried over her naked skin, and when Veronica had tried to tell her, Mac had found she wasn't really ready to listen. She'd stared at Logan over Veronica's shoulder and thought about getting dressed. Veronica didn't stop talking. Mac thought she hadn't listened, but two months later, it was Veronica's voice in her head still explaining it all to her:

Cassidy killed a bus full of people.
Cassidy killed a plane full of people.
Cassidy killed himself.

The day after she understands, Mac walks into her bathroom and stares at the shower curtain. She vomits into the sink, and the acrid taste of bile and toothpaste stings the back of her throat as she pulls the curtain rod down. Her parents say nothing when she passes through the living room, shower curtain balled in her arms, rod dragging on the ground, but when she comes back into the house empty handed her mother asks her what she wants for dinner.

Dick says absolutely nothing to her. Mac knows this is the only thing to say.

Mac's smart for all that she has trouble with metaphors, and two months later this is what she knows:

Cassidy killed a bus full of people.
Cassidy killed a plane full of people.
Cassidy killed a boy full of pain.

Cassidy took everything with him.

And nothing is left.

END