The house seemed empty when his mother died. The rooms no longer held any appeal, exact, the opposite. They felt trapping. The objects he saw reminded him of the inevitability of everything. He couldn't focus, they all kept bringing back flashbulb memories of the same event. Of the boat sinking, the terrible waves crashing over, the darkness of the skies, the fluidness of her hair in the water. The flush she had, her body's attempt of keeping her warm in the ice-cool water. His reentrance to the house that day made him feel calm, that was, until he saw her room. The one with the daisies on the wall. With the guns hanging by them, juxtaposed for irony, strapped only by the nails so hastily slammed into the dry wall. He saw the desk, now empty, which had been filled with a bright warmth, take on a sinister taunting effect. The clouds of paperwork and the cup of-now cold- coffee sitting on the desk, reminding him of what would never be again. The finality of things. He would've cried had he been more aware of it. But, as it was now, it just made him feel defeated. He slept for one hundred hours that week. The only thing he seemed capable of doing when he was awake was to go, silently, and enter her room, to hear the taunting. He didn't deserve a mother like her. Not since he let her die. He would lie there, motionless, on his back, staring back at the rain-stained ceiling, as if waiting for her to walk in any moment and console him. Sometimes he saw her. Flashes of her hair, brown and deep like the sea, he reminded himself, flashes of her eyes and her pale hands, stricken with death. He knew they were hallucinations. A stronger man would have willed them away, but he couldn't bring himself to do that. They were the only memory of her left. If he could just make the hallucinations do what he wanted, he might gain some closure. Stop. No, he reminded himself, as he has to often, it wouldn't really be her. You'd be disgracing her memory.
There seemed to be no way out. He observed the grieving of his family members, to see if he could use some of their coping tactics, but all he saw was pale and dull and those blue eyes- and Kara. She had her eyes. His father's jaw structure, but never mind that, she had her eyes. His mother adored Kara. Showered her with gifts of knowledge and weaponry, which by the time she was four had taken a distinct liking to, as a form of thoughtful affection. His mother was constantly expressing worry over her, she knew how hunting people had taken a toll on her husband (his father, he had to remind himself), and she was afraid that hunting would take the same hold onto her flesh-and-blood. The knowledge and the weaponry were to protect her from the crimes of war, the crime of emotion. And so, he decided in that, he would follow through with what she wanted him to. His mother would want him to protect Kara. He would fulfil that unspoken promise. Cross his heart and hope to die, Kara would never be tainted by the pain of hunting. His mother would be proud.
