40

I’m not sure that it’s actually possible for two people to both strangle the other to death. With the knowledge I now have a decade later, I’m pretty sure it’s biologically impossible… I suppose one or both of them had suffered a fatal traumatic injury, maybe from hitting their head on the headboard, or something else that had occurred before being on the bed.

The man and the woman were… Well, I don’t want to go into too much detail in case laws surrounding the description of corpses pop up in the unknown future. Suffice it to say that while it would have been difficult to see U‘s face in what was left of them, I intuitively knew they were her parents. They were her mother and father, her mommy and daddy. No doubt about it.

Mommy and Daddy are gone.

They were gone, all right… by killing each other.

With all my experience in traffic accidents, it wasn’t my first time seeing a dead body. Even recently, there had been U‘s friend, torn to pieces right before my eyes. Compared to the bodies of people that had been killed with a car as the murder weapon, U‘s parents were rather clean, so I didn’t let out some horrified scream like I was in a soap opera.

But I was about ready to cry. I had been imprisoned for six days, and there were two dead people right above me the whole time. Yeah, that whole “unique scent that each house has”?

It was just the stench of death.

Those bodies had been dead for over ten days, and they were decomposing. The smell hadn’t gotten far with the door closed, but now that I had opened the door, I couldn’t escape the rancid odor.

My mental exhaustion from being imprisoned had been rising right along with the decomposition of the bodies, so I hadn’t noticed the buildup. Or maybe it was just a smell I got used to, like my own body odor.

But none of that mattered. All that mattered was that I was a moron.

Things had all come undone to the point that there wasn’t even a reason to search the rooms and investigate the identities of U‘s parents. Why bother learning more about dead people? It wasn’t like I’d get the chance to rage at them over the physical and emotional abuse they’d enacted upon their own daughter. I couldn’t even argue with them in the most literal sense of the word, or make any accusations. I couldn’t do anything to a dead person.

Why they had killed each other didn’t matter to me. Maybe it was marital strain, arguing over how they were raising their daughter, or work stress. I didn’t know, and it wasn’t important.

Maybe I couldn’t get mad at them any more, and maybe it didn’t matter how much I blamed them, but I wanted to file a complaint, at least. For having been kidnapped and held captive due to their failure to raise their daughter right? No. That wasn’t my complaint. After seeing that notebook and their daughter, I wanted to ask those two a completely different question.

Where did they get off just dying like that?

That was what I wanted to complain about.

I’m not about to say that having any parents is better than having none at all… There are definitely some parents the world is better off without. But what, they’re just gonna die, just gonna kill each other, and then what? What about their daughter? What did they think was gonna happen to U?

Her biological parents raise her with a nonsensical and abusive “education”, she grows up with an insane value system to the point of committing a crime, and then loses her parents in quite possibly the worst way, a double homicide. What was gonna happen to her?

I had read enough books at that point to wager a guess… She was probably gonna be taken in by some kind of institution. But even within a specialized institution, she would be a rather unique case.

U’s life had veered far from the straight and narrow. Probably beyond recourse. And the people at fault, her mother and father, were just dead. Maybe if they were alive, they could be held accountable… but now there was no point in blaming or resenting them.

I started laughing unintentionally… I don’t care what kind of emotion brought it on, laughing at a time like that was just wrong. But I laughed. It was all I could do.

That was actually my first laugh since the beginning of my confinement. In the world of entertainment, the scene with “the first laugh” is supposed to be powerful and emotionally resonant. But I was just sitting in a room with two cadavers, a place devoid of any emotion. And I spoke to the place where the cadavers lay, as if to add something to the scene.

“It must have been a lot of fun… asking a kid to do the impossible.”