Tuesday, February 1, 2011

last kiss

August 2042 - Peter Ottomas is 60, Samantha Ottomas is 59, Matt Ottomas is 20.

Matt is home for summer break, and things are tense in the Ottomas house. Samantha loves her youngest son, but she's secretly looking forward to his going back to college. He stays up late and comes home in the middle of the night, he borrows the car without asking, he eats all of the food in the refrigerator. He disrupts the quiet life she and Peter have made for themselves since all of their children left home.

Matt has been spending a lot of time with Meg. She's also stuck at home for the summer and sharing a bedroom with her angry thirteen-year-old sister. It's just the two of them spending the summer in Providence; their friends are on vacation or back in Bridgeport. So most nights she comes over to the Ottomas house to hang out with Matt.

It feels like old times, the two of them just hanging out. She's lonely after a summer with Christian an hour away in the city. And one night he pushes things further.

"Matt, no, what are you doing?"

"Come on, it's not like you weren't thinking about it."

"I have a boyfriend! I'm not going to hook up with you."

"So what, because I don't have a trust fund, you don't want anything to do with me?"

"Just because Christian has money doesn't make him a bad person. You cheated on me! You broke up with me! And now because you're lonely you think that I'll just fall back into your arms? Christian is a good guy, something you'll never be!"

*****

Samantha was never a worrying mother. David was born when she was only 14, and Peter's mother Dora did most of the mothering and worrying. And then there were six more children, and by the time Matt came along, Samantha had used up all of her worry. The six before Matt had turned out just fine. But any mother's mind immediately turns to disaster when the doorbell rings at three o'clock in the morning. Any mother's mind starts listing all of her children, bottom up, and where they're supposed to be. Matt is supposed to be asleep in his bed, but he isn't.

Peter gets to the door first; he told Samantha to go back to sleep. Instead she follows him downstairs and throws open the door. "Peter, who is it?"

It's Steffi Centowski and her daughter Phoebe, standing on their doorstep in their police uniforms. Something goes through Samantha's body, freezing her where she stands, but Peter is eerily nonchalent.

"It's raining. When did it start raining?"

"Peter, may we come in?" asks Steffi.

"Of course. Come in, get out of the rain."

Phoebe hangs back in the doorway, but Steffi jumps in. "It's Matt," she says. "There was an accident. We found him just outside of town on his way back from Bridgeport. He lost control of the car and skidded off the road into a tree. He's dead."

*****

Matt Ottomas rolled the first ROS of this round - death by car accident. Even though this update is pretty short, it took me a long time to write. I wasn't particularly attached to Matt, but I can't imagine what it must be like for his parents to lose their child. And Matt has six brothers and sisters, and lots of friends and ex-girlfriends. We'll see how these ripples affect the rest of the neighborhood.

5 comments:

  1. How sad! Poor Samantha; things were so tense between her and her son and now she's got to be feeling a lot of guilt on top of her grief.

    It's always hard to write deaths, especially for someone so young. It's going to be interesting to see how this affects everyone who knew Matt.

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  2. Thanks for the comment, Carla. This is the first time I've had to blog about the death of someone so young, and I'm still figuring out how this will affect everyone.

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  3. Oh my god! That's so sad, but so well written.

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  4. Poor Ottomas, that's not what a parent wants to hear. Especially when their child is home from college on a break.

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  5. Thanks for the comment, moniquevalley. This will be hard on all of the Ottomases, the youngest kid dying so young. That's why I had the accident happen during summer break - I wanted to put the focus on his parents rather than the other college kids.

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