Mother Kept My Body on Ice

At my sisters wedding, my mother was guided onto the stage to give her speech.

As she spoke, the MC deftly steered the conversation. He asked her how she, as a single mother who had raised two girls on her own, managed to handle their romantic lives.

My mothers face was flushed with wine, her lips curling into a smug, unconscious smile.

"When Donna was in the middle of her Columbia University applications, this absolute piece of trashthe son of an ex-conwas hounding her. The boy actually climbed over the school's security fence in the dead of night just to see her, and broke his leg in the process!"

"To cut their little romance short once and for all, the next time they met, I called the police and reported that he was attempting to assault my daughter."

"The boy was expelled, and Donna got her acceptance letter from Columbia. I heard he eventually rode the tech boom, started a software company, and made quite a name for himself. He's even getting married this year. A happy ending for everyone, wouldn't you say?"

The MC offered a polite, strained smile. "With that kind of tough love, your daughter must be incredibly grateful to you now."

My mother shook her head, tears spilling over her lashes and hitting the microphone with a soft, hollow thud.

"The day she got her acceptance letter, she walked out onto the balcony and jumped right in front of my eyes."

"You tell me. Did I raise an ungrateful snake, or what?"

...

"Mom! Today is my wedding! And you promised we would never talk about Donna again!"

My sister, Luna, clutching her white gown, snatched the microphone away in sheer embarrassment.

I drifted near the high ceiling of the banquet hall, looking down at my mother.

Since my death, she had refused to hold a funeral, nor would she allow any of our relatives to speak my name. There was no memorial portrait, no shrine. Not a single photograph of me remained in the house.

My death was treated as a pillar of shame in her life. Untouchable. Unspeakable.

If Luna hadn't married a prestigious university professor today to give her something to brag about, my mother would probably still find the mere sound of my name curse-worthy.

After the reception ended, my mother ran into Wyatt Callahan in the lobby. She hadn't seen him in six years.

The old high school classmates surrounding him recognized her instantly. Their voices dripped with immediate, venomous sarcasm.

"Oh, look. Its Donna Becketts mother."

"I heard Donna was supposed to be getting married today too. I guess these days, you have to be completely shameless to survive."

"We should steer clear of them. Who knows? She might call the cops on us next."

I watched Wyatt silently.

The boyish warmth had long faded from his face, replaced by a cold, hardened indifference. But at the mention of my name, the disgust and raw hatred in his eyes flared, completely unshielded.

Six years ago, my mother's 911 call didn't just ruin his chances at college. It had caused his father, who spent days desperately begging people for help to clear his son's name, to lose control of his car and die in a horrific crash that summer.

And my false police statement had sealed Wyatt's fate, cementing the assault charge and ensuring the rest of his youth was spent under a cloud of cold stares and whispered humiliations.

He hated me. He loathed me. I understood why.

Only my mother reacted like a cornered animal, screaming at the top of her lungs.

"I was not wrong! Everything I did was for her own good!"

"If you hadn't kept clawing at my Donna, her relationship with me would never have turned so bitter!"

"In the end, she chose to jump rather than go to Columbia! Did you whisper something to her? Did you poison her mind?!"

Wyatt paused, his lighter frozen mid-air as he went to light a cigarette.

"Six years later, and you two are still putting on this miserable theatrical act?"

His face was partially obscured by a plume of grey smoke. His knuckles went white as he gripped the cigarette.

"Speaking of that phone call, it actually reminded me of something. She asked me what she had to do to earn my forgiveness."

"I told her, 'Jump. A life for a life. Maybe then I'll forgive you.'"

"What? Didn't have the courage? Decided life was too short to waste, so you went ahead and enjoyed yourself instead?"

"You and your daughter... you're both so sickeningly hypocritical."

Wyatt turned on his heel, leaving with his group of friends.

My mothers face drained of color, and she stumbled, falling hard onto the polished marble floor, her sleeves pulling back slightly to expose the jagged, raised scars on her forearms.

Six years ago, when I had desperately tried to go to the police station to testify for Wyatt, my mother had grabbed a kitchen knife, her eyes wild and bloodshot, and sliced into her own skin over and over.

"He's only going to be detained for a few days! If you just finish your exams, we can write a letter of leniency to the district attorney and hell walk free!"

"Donna, do you want me to bleed out right in front of you before you finally listen to me?!"

I will never forget the blinding heat of the sun that day, reflecting off the blood-slicked kitchen floor. The relatives who rushed over after hearing the commotion surrounded me, screaming that I was an ungrateful monster, a selfish brat. Their spiteful words felt like a physical weight, drowning me.

I didn't go to the police station. I couldn't bear to look at Wyatt. I just studied. I memorized vocabulary and solved calculus equations until my eyes bled, rarely sleeping more than two hours a night.

My mother wanted me to get into Columbia, so I forced myself to do it. I thought once I succeeded, Wyatt would be set free.

But before I could even wait for his release, I received the news of his fathers death.

My mother, as if struck by a sudden realization, scrambled to her feet and chased after Wyatt. She threw herself recklessly in front of his moving sedan.

A sharp, agonizing screech of brakes echoed through the parking lot. The bumper clipped her, sending her tumbling onto the asphalt, her knees scraping open and bleeding. But she didn't seem to feel the pain. She dragged herself up, throwing her body against the passenger window, her voice cracked and choked with tears.

"That phone call... did she really say nothing else to you?"

The day the acceptance letter arrived, my mother had wanted to call every single person in our contacts. I had looked at her thick, mummy-like bandages, and suddenly, everything felt entirely, profoundly pointless.

Without leaving a single word, I had stepped over the window frame and let go.

Wyatt rolled his window down halfway, looking at her with a lazy, mocking gaze.

"What did you want her to say?"

My mothers throat tightened. It took her a long moment to force the words out.

"Did you... did you know she had clinical depression?"

After my death, my mother had torn my room apart, turning every drawer inside out. She found that the last call I ever made was to Wyatt. She also unearthed the prescription bottles of antidepressants hidden deep beneath my mattress.

She acted as though if she could just find some external trigger, my death would have absolutely nothing to do with her.

In the heavy silence of the parking lot, Wyatt let out a sharp, bitter laugh.

"You two really are something else."

"Using clinical depression as a sob story, baiting me into scaling a security fence in the middle of the night just to check on her."

"And like a fucking idiot, I actually fell for it!"

My mother gasped, choked by his venom. For the first time in her life, I saw her try to defend me.

"Actually... that text message saying she wanted to end her life, I was the one who sent it from her phone. Donna didn't know anything about it."

"Before she died, she desperately wanted to see you to explain everything! I locked her in her room..."

Wyatt cut her off, his voice dripping with impatience.

"Are we done here?"

"Did she ask you to make up these pathetic lies so she could sleep better at night? Or does she think we're going to have some high school reunion romance?"

"Tell her this: women like her make me sick. Even as a side-piece, shed be too dirty."

My mother opened her mouth, wanting to clarify that the daughter getting married today was Luna, not me. But Wyatt had already rolled up the window.

"What time is the live interview?" he asked his assistant in the front seat.

"8:00 PM, sir. We have about an hour."

Outside the window, the neon lights of the city blurred into a stream of gold and red. Wyatt's eyes drifted down to the interview outline on his lap.

"Mr. Callahan, did you have a girl in your youth who made your heart race, someone you wanted to marry?"

Wyatt's face darkened as he threw the outline onto the dashboard.

"Remove all questions about high school or first loves."

He treated my memory like a contagious disease.

I tilted my ghostly head and let out a soft, hollow laugh.

Six years ago, on the day Wyatt was released from the detention center due to insufficient evidence, I had run away from home to see him. I brought my ID and two bus tickets.

He walked out of the precinct with his leg still encased in a heavy plaster cast. I told him I wanted to run away with him.

"Anywhere, Wyatt. Let's just leave this town and never look back."

Wyatt stood a few paces away, his laughter cutting through me like winter wind.

"So your mother can call the police again?"

"What charge are you two going to slap on me this time? Kidnapping? Rape?"

I fell silent. All I could do was press a small slip of paper with an address into his palm.

"I'll wait for you here," I whispered. "If you change your mind, come find me."

That was my one desperate, pathetic attempt at saving myself.

Wyatt's eyes were frozen over, looking at me like an enemy.

"Donna, falling for you was the biggest mistake of my life."

"But I regret it now. Can you just stay the hell away from me?"

Right in front of my eyes, he tore the paper into tiny, fluttering pieces.

I had no choice but to go to the bus station alone. Yet, the moment I approached the ticket gate, my mother, flanked by three police officers, blocked my path.

On the ride back, my mother held her phone up, showing me the text message she had received from Wyatt. Her voice was shrill, deliberately loud enough for the entire bus to hear.

"Donna, stop being so pathetic! He never wanted to run away with you. You're the only one making a fool of herself!"

"Do you have any shame? Abandoning your family, your mother, for some boy?"

"Do you know how hard I worked to raise you? If I knew you'd turn out like this, I would have aborted you!"

I kept my head down, fat, silent tears dripping onto my lap. I couldn't hear her screams. I just kept playing Wyatt's last voice message over and over, pressing the speaker close to my ear.

"3:20 PM. Union Station."

"Keep a tight leash on your daughter. I hope I never have to see her face again as long as I live!"

Wyatt, you got your wish. From that day on, we never saw each other again.

At 7:50 PM, Wyatt walked into the television studio, followed by the production crew. A minute later, my mother walked in.

The pre-recorded segment had been hastily changed to a live broadcast. Wyatt stood up immediately, intending to walk out, but my mother stopped him.

"I brought some of Donnas old things. They're connected to you. Don't you want to see them?"

Wyatt wanted to say he didn't care. But his legs felt as though they were filled with wet cement. He couldn't take a single step.

My mother handed a notebook and a worn paperback novel to the host. The book was the one Wyatt had given me six years ago.

"This is my daughter's diary," my mother explained. "To keep me from reading it, she wrote everything in code. That novel is the key."

I looked at Wyatt. He was the one who had taught me that code.

Under the hosts careful prompts, my secret teenage heart was dissected on live television. Our first meeting at his father's struggling fruit stand. The time I was cornered by older boys in an alley, and Wyatt had charged in, taking a blow that required five stitches in his abdomen. The quiet walks home from school.

We had never done anything inappropriate. Sometimes we didn't even speak five words to each other during the entire mile-long walk.

It was a simple, quiet story. So ordinary that the live stream only had about a dozen viewers at first.

Wyatts jaw tightened. He cut her off with a cold sneer.

"So, is this show about discussing your daughter's high school crush?"

My mother paused, ignoring his sarcasm. She handed a flash drive to the technical crew.

On the massive screen behind them, a directory with twenty gigabytes of data opened. Every folder contained video files of mestudying, reading, sleeping in my bedroom. Three camera angles. Complete surveillance.

Wyatt's breath caught in his throat. I had told him about those cameras once, in a whisper, but he had thought I was exaggerating.

My mother picked up her microphone, her voice flat.

"When she was preparing for her exams, it was the most critical year of her life."

"I didn't just install cameras in her bedroom; I put a GPS tracker on her phone."

"Every day, who she spoke to, where she walked, what she didit was all under my eye."

As the footage played, the viewership of the live stream began to climb rapidly. Within ten minutes, over a hundred thousand people had joined the stream.

My mother glanced at the chat, which was a blur of outrage and condemnation. A woman who had spent her entire life protecting her reputation now acted as if she couldn't feel the heat of the fire.

She looked at Wyatt, whose face had gone completely rigid.

"If you don't believe me, you can have these files analyzed. They're real."

"After I dragged her back from the bus station, I confiscated her ID, her money, her cards."

"Wyatt, Donna never lied to you. I was the one who thought you'd ruin her future. I was the one who felt she was slipping out of my control, so I did those things."

"You shouldn't hate her. It isn't fair to her."

Wyatt sat motionless in his chair, his eyes dark and hollow.

"Fair?"

"I spent fifteen days in juvenile detention. I missed my exams. My father died in a car crash trying to raise bail for me. Who talked to me about fairness then?"

"You say she was innocent? But she stood in front of the reporters and said I assaulted her!"

By the end, Wyatt was shaking, his voice laced with venom.

"Why don't you have Donna come out here and say it to my face?"

"She got into Columbia, married a professor, her life must be wonderful. What is this pathetic show for?"

The live chat flooded with similar sentiments:

"Exactly! Let the girl come out and speak!"

"She probably had a hard time too, maybe she was forced."

"Are you kidding? The victim here is the guy! His father died because of her!"

My mother swayed slightly as she stood up. She looked as if she had aged a decade in a matter of seconds.

"She can't come."

"She died six years ago."

Hearing this, Wyatt's face didn't register surprise. He stood up, his eyes briefly passing over the faded diary.

"Donna."

My chest pulled tight. Even knowing he couldn't see me, my spirit trembled at the sound of his voice.

"If you're really dead, then good."

I froze. His words were like a frozen blade, tearing through my phantom heart.

My mother walked right through me, reaching out to grab Wyatt's arm.

"I'm holding her funeral tomorrow. Can you please come see her one last time?"

The only answer was his silent, retreating figure.

I wanted to tell her: Wyatt hates me. Why would he ever come?

But to my surprise, he did.

The next day, he stood in my old bedroom. The splintered wood where the lock had been broken, the boarded-up windows, the heavy blackout curtains. It was a suffocating, claustrophobic box that the security cameras had never quite captured.

I stood in the hallway, refusing to cross the threshold. Even after six years of being dead, that room remained my personal hell.

Wyatt looked away, his voice dripping with disgust.

"You call this a funeral?"

"If you're going to put on a show, at least do it right. Do you want me to order a coffin and some wreaths?!"

My mother looked at him quietly. She placed my old, cracked phone on the desk in front of him.

"You've hated her all these years because of her statement."

"She tried to explain it to you later, but you wouldn't listen."

"Do you have any idea how you helped kill her?"

On the shattered screen, two call logs were displayed. One was to 911. The other was the last call I made to Wyatt on the day I died.

The calls were less than sixty seconds apart.

The heavy, locked gates of memory were violently torn open.

The day the acceptance letter arrived, my mother was thrilled. She made an exception and allowed me to go outside for three hours. It was the first time I had been allowed out of the house in a month.

I didn't know where to go or what to do. I had only heard that Wyatt was planning to leave the city, and I wanted to see him one last time.

But as soon as I reached his apartment building, I was dragged into a dark, trash-strewn alley. My clothes were torn. I tried to scream, but a heavy hand was pressed hard against my mouth.

Until, from the alley entrance, I heard Wyatt's voice talking to a classmate.

"I think I just saw Donna walking this way. Was she coming to say goodbye?"

His voice had been so clear, so sharp.

"Didn't see her, and I don't want to. From this day on, she could die and it wouldn't have anything to do with me."

The moment their footsteps faded, those dirty hands dug deeper into my skin. I don't know how long it lasted before they finally left. My body was covered in bruises; I couldn't even crawl.

After dialing 911, the silence of the alley felt terrifying. With trembling fingers, I dialed Wyatt's number.

During that twenty-second call, I couldn't find any words. I didn't know what to say. Wyatt must have realized it was me, and he hung up.

My mother paused, closing her eyes before she spoke again.

"Back then, she wanted to go to the police to clear your name. I used my own life to threaten and manipulate her."

"What happened to your father... I never wanted that. If you want to hate someone, hate me."

"But the one who dealt the final blow to Donna was you! Every piece of misery in her life started the day she met you!"

Wyatt stood frozen. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Then, my mother pulls open the large closet door nearby. A massive, chest-style freezer was revealed.

Mother looked at my preserved body with a strange, ecstatic expression, pulling the horrified Wyatt toward it.

"Donna, look. Didn't you always want to see him?"

"I brought him to you."

"Go on, tell him whatever you want."