Chapter IX - Missing Cassie and Losing Mom

A description of when the accident killed Sam and Cassie's Mother.

Since the emergence of Jenji, I think about my sister a lot.  My real sister, not the person she's masquerading as.  I miss Cassie.

I never thought I would long for the days when I was the screw-up and she was the one who needed to constantly straighten me out and set me to flying right.  It drove me crazy as a kid, especially after Mom died, but lately I'd give anything for one of Cassie's incredulous looks at my behavior and a good stern lecture.

Cassie was seventeen, and about to graduate high school when the accident that killed our mother occurred.  My parents had gone out for dinner with some of my Dad's brothers and their wives or girlfriends; not his real brothers but his Brothers, meaning guys in his riding club, Jokers Wild.  Cassie was pissed off because she was forced to stay and look after my brother and I, even though we were technically old enough to watch ourselves.  But Mom had a thing about there being someone "in charge", and since Cassie was the oldest it always fell to her to keep things together if my mother wasn't going to be there.  They had had an argument about it earlier, as my mother was getting her gear on to go riding.

Cassie was slamming stuff around at the stove, making mac n' cheese, when the doorbell rang.  I remember Ritchie looking out the front curtain, saying "Oh s**t, it's the cops!", and then running to his room to hide.  Not really believing him, I went and peeked out the same window myself and damn if there weren't actually two police officers, one old and one young, standing at our door.

"Cass!" I yelled.  "Something's going on!  The cops are here!"

Cassie came bustling in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.  I had lain back down on the couch to watch t.v., and she shot me the irritated look of a busy adult who was dealing with a lazy child.

"What now?" She asked herself out loud, before answering the door.

The rest is a bit of a blur.  After the murmur of voices, Cassie bent to let out a horrified scream.  The older police officer tried to grab and hold her up and got slapped at and cursed for his trouble.  Ritchie ran down from his room, saw the cop grabbing for Cassie and pushed him into our front door, cracking it down the middle.  I stayed stationary on the couch during the tussle, shocked into numbness.

The ride to the hospital in the police car was fast, the waiting at the hospital was not.  The three of us clung together on a bench, waiting to hear Dad's fate.  Most of the Jokers were there already, and after a couple of hours Cassie thought to call Mom's sister, Elise.  When our aunt showed up, half drunk, she gave us kisses wet with tears and promptly fell asleep on the next bench over.

The doctor came to us around two o'clock that morning to tell us that our father would live, but had lost his left leg from the knee down.  Cassie asked two questions.  Would our father still be able to ride his motorcycle?  (Probably not.)  Did he know about our mother?  (No, not yet.)

Once the doctor walked away, Cassie turned to me and said "It'd be better if he died, too."  I nodded in complete agreement.

It may seem like a cold thing for us to agree on so easily, but knowing my father it really wasn't.  My father truly and completely loved to things in life:  riding and our mother.  Sure, he loved us, but in kind of a peripheral way.  He provided for us, gave us silly nicknames and found us amusing at times, but he left the real child rearing up to our mother.  The worry, the late nights by a sick bed, the day to day functions of the house; those were her domain.

Nothing could light up Dad's eyes like Mom.  At  the end of each work day he would come home and brush past us to get to her, giving her a ridiculously long kiss hello and the usual a*s-grab during said kiss.  He may have drunk too much, drugged a lot, yelled, screamed and probably screwed around a bit, but his love for her was as evident as the nose on his face.

We weren't there, thankfully, when they delivered the news to him about Mom.  Except for a peek through a window the night of the accident, we weren't alowwed to see my father for several days after the accident.  Aunt Elise stayed with us at our house, drinking Dad's beer and pissing off Cassie with unsolicited advice and for ridiculous displays of overdone grief.

Details about the accident filtered down to my sister and I through overheard conversations and an article in the J.I.  Apparently, an older man driving a pickup truck had been struck with a heart attack at the wheel and lost control of his vehicle.  He hit my parents as they were entering an intersection that happened to be right down the block from Manchester Hospital.  Although this was lucky for my father, both the man and my mother were D.O.A.