Episode 40: Dawn and Mina

Mina found herself driving more pointedly than she really meant to. She was surprised by this at first, but then remembered who was in her passenger seat. She shivered and accepted the pointed driving as something she had to do.
Dawn was busy staring at her. If Mina had been able to gather the courage to look at the eyes that she could feel staring at her, she would have been even more surprised. Dawn, though her stare was piercing and curious, was not entirely in the present. This shone through in her eyes, giving them an eerie sort of faded intensity. She found herself drifting through the past, trying to remember a day that to her was less than a year ago. But… She couldn’t remember it. It kept fading in and out. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of anything from that year before the coma.
Finally she broke the silence. “You saved us.”
Mina let out a breath, and lessened her grip on the steering wheel ever so slightly. She didn’t respond.
“You saved us,” Dawn repeated.
“I wonder if I can say the same to you,” Mina wanted to say. Instead, she said nothing.
Dawn thought for a moment. She considered repeating herself again, but thought better of it. “How did you get through the house without being killed?”
“Not sure,” Mina said.
“You weren’t even hurt.”
“I was killed,” Mina said quickly and quietly.
“What?”
“I was killed. It was the seventh time.” Mina couldn’t staunch the tears. The tears always came when she talked about her condition.
“Oh. Why?” Dawn was calm. She snapped back into the present, deciding that she wouldn’t be able to remember what she needed to remember.
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” Mina screamed, letting go of the steering wheel and slamming her hands against it.
They sat in silence for a minute, the only sound was the sound of the engine, the sound of rain on the body of the car, and the occasional sound of Mina sobbing.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Dawn didn’t look away, and now her voice was soft, but not quiet. Mina glared at the road.
“I don’t know.”
“I think it is.”
“If you hadn’t…”
“What happened on that night?” Dawn asked suddenly. “All I can remember is a lot of light.”
Mina moved her hands around the steering wheel, trying to wring it nervously. The nervousness was incidental. She hesitated, but Dawn didn’t look away. She opened her mouth a few times, but couldn’t seem to put it together.
“What happened, Mina? What happened to you, and Jennifer, and to me? I can’t remember, Mina. I can’t remember what happened.” Mina turned away from the road, a look of worried horror slapped across her face. She stared at Dawn, filled with terror.
“You can’t remember? You can’t remember the night that…” Mina made a sound somewhere between a scoff, a chuckle, and a groan. She turned back to the road, and paused.
“You jumped in.” Mina said it very simply, but she was saying a lot with it. She was saying that she didn’t understand why Dawn had jumped in, she was saying that she didn’t understand what had happened when Dawn had jumped in, she was saying that there was something for Dawn to have jumped into.
“Into the... Into the darkness?” Dawn asked. Her voice was getting nervous, confused. She clearly didn’t know why she had jumped in, had no idea what had happened after she had jumped in, and didn’t know what she could have jumped into. Mina grimaced.
“Best way to put it. It was… A spinning… A hovering… It was a thing. A thing made of darkness.”
“What was it?”
“It was the reason.” Mina jumped at her own words. She suddenly understood most of what had happened that year, or at least understood how it related to her. She looked at the road.
“The reason…” Dawn whispered. She looked out towards the road. “Something else happened,” she said after a moment. “What else happened? Something happened with you and me…”
“You kissed me before you jumped.” Mina stared ahead. “It was a passionate kiss. It was… desperate.”
“Oh.” The memory came back to Dawn. But… It wasn’t quite…
“It would have been nice,” Mina said kindly but sharply, “If I thought kissing girls was nice.” Here was a mundane problem. Here was something that Mina knew how to handle. Here was the sort of problem that, 11 years ago, she had expected to deal with on a day to day basis.
“Oh. I’m… sorry.” Dawn sounded cold.
“It’s alright,” Mina said brightly, grabbing the normality of the situation, holding on for dear life. “I’ll let it go this time, because you’re so cute.”
Dawn slid the pieces of her memory into their positions in her mental jigsaw.
“I wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“That whole year, I wasn’t really me. I, on my own, I wouldn’t ever jump into a… thing. I would never have kissed you for my last kiss.” Mina turned and stared at Dawn with bemusement. “I did want to kiss you. Don’t get me wrong. I was deeply attracted to you. But I never was or wanted to be in love with you. The other thing in me was.”
Mina blinked. Dawn smiled faintly, as if what she said had made perfect sense. Mina turned to watch the road.
“I wonder what it was?” Dawn asked rhetorically, looking forward out the windshield.
“It was normal,” Mina said bitterly.
“Pardon?”
“It was normal, and you made it stop being normal! Why couldn’t it just be that you kissed me? That was simple. That was just me rejecting you. But now there was something else inside of you? Something that made you kiss me? That’s not normal! IT SHOULD BE NORMAL!” Mina was screaming.
Dawn looked nervously out of the passenger’s side window. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
Mina stopped screaming. Now tears rolled down her face. Steaming, angry, lonely tears.