I am thinking, what if Billy's mom left him in another way?
(Trigger warnings for suicide and child death)
Maybe she was depressed, or sick, or just plain volatile. Maybe she wasn't the most stable. Maybe she was trying to hide that fact but had troubles doing it, while living with a strict and controlling, violent man. Maybe she was desperate, or had finally had enough.
And maybe ... Maybe Billy had a little sister.
Imagine him coming home from school one day, like he always did, expecting to find his mom and his sister in the kitchen or in the living room or out in the backyard, like always, because Billy's sister is still too young to go to school.
But he doesn't find them anywhere.
That's okay, though. Maybe they went to the store, or are visiting neighbors, or ...
Only, the radio is still on in the kitchen. It's always on when mom is home, except for when Neil is also there. But she always turns it off when leaving the house, and it's not off now. There's a tinny tune playing from the kitchen, which is the only thing he can hear in the otherwise silent house.
"Mom?" Billy calls out, dropping his backpack inside the door to his room. "Jules?"
No answer. He walks out into the kitchen and turns the radio off - mom must have forgotten. The sudden quiet of the house is ... uncomfortable.
The kitchen usually has some signs of dinner preparations when Billy gets home from school, or a leftover mess from lunch. But not today. The counters are empty. There is no container defrosting from the freezer. No vegetables waiting to be chopped.
"Mom?" he tries again. No answer.
He shrugs. Goes into his room to unpack his backpack and bring out his books to get a head start on his homework. He works for maybe twenty minutes before he has to use the bathroom.
That's where he finds them.
Later, he won't remember screaming. Won't remember slipping in the blood on the floor (from his mother's slit wrists) to get to the bathtub. Won't remember pulling his lifeless little sister out of the water and pulling her into his lap, hands shaking, throat closing in panic, eyes blurry with tears.
He will remember curling up in the corner of the bathroom, though, holding Jules' body close to him, shielding her from their mother's unseeing eyes from the other side of the bathroom.
Their mother's skin is pale, mouth slack, eyes empty. She looks scary; wrong. Like a shell. Billy doesn't want Jules to see her like this, so he holds his little sister - his baby sister! - close to him and strokes her hair and shushes her, even though she isn't making a sound. Isn't moving.
Dad finds them, later. Billy doesn't know how much time has passed. His legs have fallen asleep, and Jules' hair has dried under his fingers. He's still holding her, looking down at the top of her head rather than at his mom or the bathtub or the blood on the floor that has seeped into his clothes too, and gotten sticky. Everything is quiet - even Billy himself, except for the occasional hickup.
His father's anguished yell is what shocks him out of it.
Everything happens in flashes, after that.
Screaming. Dad crouching in front of mom, his hands on her face. Someone ripping Jules' out of Billy's hands, and Billy's stiff fingers trying to grip empty air. Hands on his shoulders, shaking him. Faces of people he doesn't recognize. An ambulance parked halfway into his mother's flowerbed. (She's not going to like that, he thinks, and then; It doesn't matter anymore.)
Hospital. Bright lights. His father sitting on a bench, his face buried in his hands, sobbing.
Billy doesn't cry more that night. He has run out of tears.
Later - days or weeks or even months - Billy will learn that his mother was probably sick. That she had drowned Julia first, and then taken her own life. They don't get an explanation. There was no letter, no note.
Billy doesn't remember who tells him this, but he learns that his mother might have been alive, still, when he got home from school that day, and he keeps thinking, Could he have stopped it? Would she be alive today - would Jules be alive today - if he had gone to the bathroom right away when he got home? If he hadn't stopped to chat with his friends for a bit after school.
His father thinks so, he is pretty sure. Months later, Neil still barely looks at him, and when he does ... Well. There is something in his eyes that Billy can't - and doesn't want to - place.
It's just the two of them now. The house is too big for two people, but too small at the same time - too small for Billy to be able to draw proper breath, at least.
The radio in the kitchen stays silent.
(Neil starts to demand that Billy does, too.)
Billy cries himself to sleep without making a sound every night, his face buried in his pillow. He misses his mom. He misses Jules. But death, he learns, is definitive, and they aren't coming back.
Some time later, when Neil brings home a mousy woman named Susan (who is so unlike Billy's mom) and tells him that he suddenly has a new sister that he's responsible for, Billy bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. He knows better than to speak up against his father by now, but he looks at the fierce little redhead (red like the blood on the bathroom floor, not golden like Jules' hair at all) and he thinks,
You can never replace her.
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