Page 4 of Property of Quake

“He’s no longer with us.”

I hear the words, but they don’t fully register. “I know that,” I blurt. “He’s been gone for three years.”

“No, child,” Sister Beatrice says as she moves toward me. “Ryan was found dead last night. His cause of death isn’t official yet, but the police believe he overdosed. He listed you as his next of kin at his job, and there’s a detective here who would like to speak to you.”

My knees threaten to buckle, but I manage to remain standing. The air around me thins, and breathing becomes difficult.

“Are you up for speaking to the detective?” Father James asks.

I nod, unable to speak. The three of us walk to the room reserved for what should be the best day in an orphan’s life, the room I’ve spent years lingering outside of, watching happy moments that happen to everyone else but me… and Ryan.

“Miss Crane?”

I smile weakly at the man addressing me. He’s wearing a suit that’s too big for his frame, and his face is weathered by too much exposure to the sun.

“Yes, that’s me.”

He stretches his arm to shake my hand, and I do the same.

“I’m Detective Marsh. I’m sorry to be meeting under these circumstances, but I wanted to make sure you got this,” he says, handing me a thick envelope. “There wasn’t much in Mr. Sands apartment to indicate he had many friends or any family, which made this stand out.”

On the front of the white envelope is my name, scrawled in Ryan’s sloppy writing. Under that are the words ‘my person’. Tears roll down my cheeks as I take that in. The boy who tore down my defenses with his cynical gloom and doom thought of me, the girl who was never wanted, as his person.

I don’t open the envelope until I’m back in the shared girls’ room, but when I do, the tears fall faster.

Whitney-

If you’re reading this, I’m dead. I’m sure my death comes as a surprise to you, but for me, it was just a matter of time (see, it’s not all magical rainbows and bright colors). Maybe on some level I was trying to take myself out, but I guess we’ll never know.

You might not care that I’m gone. Shit, this might be the one good thing that came from time. But something tells me that you do care, so there are a few things I need to say.

First, I never once thought you weren’t lovable. I know, I know… I really made it seem that way, but it was never true. All those fucking people that came through Sacred Haven looking for a kid to call their own… they were stupid for passing over you. I mean, not taking me made sense, but you?

I laugh at his words, but it’s a broken sound fueled by heartbreak and regret.

Second, you deserve more than the world has to offer you, and surprisingly (I hope you’re sitting down because this will knock you on your ass if you’re not), everything you need and more can be found right there in that place you already call home.

Please tell me you were sitting down!

Again, laughter breaks free, and this time, it’s a bit more genuine. As infuriating as Ryan could be, he did always have the ability to make me laugh when nothing else seemed to.

I’m sure you want an explanation, but before I do that, I’m going to tell you a few things that only the nuns know about me. I was left at the home when I was 7. You see, I had parents, had a family with siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents. The problem with ‘family’ is that the only give a damn they possess is what they think society requires them to feel.

In reality, my parents, my fucking ‘family’, couldn’t have cared less about me. I think they tried, or at least that’s what I tell myself when what’s real tries to swallow me whole. At the end of the day, they deemed my one and only sin too much to handle.

And you know what that sin was? The sin that made my ‘family’ throw me away like trash?

“Yes,” I whisper, wiping my cheeks. “Yes, Ryan, I want to know.”

My one and only fucking sin was… drum roll please… wetting the bed.

That’s it. I slept so soundly, so deeply that I sometimes didn’t wake up if I had to take a piss. That’s why my parents got rid of me.

Now, quit clutching your pearls, Whitney, because coming to Sacred Haven was a blessing I didn’t fully appreciate until recently. If my parents had kept me, I would’ve faced a childhood full of abuse because the punishments for wetting the bed were cruel (I know you heard me screaming at bath time in the evenings so you can use your imagination to figure out that particular trauma).

My mind races with all the possible ways Ryan was punished by the people who were supposed to love him unconditionally, and my stomach clenches at what I’m able to imagine.

I spend the next ten minutes reading my friend’s words, the ones he left only for me. He goes into detail about the day he was brought to the home, about how his brother and sister cried when his parents dragged him out of their house. He writes about how the nuns would sit with him at night when he had nightmares or how they would spend hours with him when he cried because he missed the people who abandoned him. He describes the quiet moments with Father James in the home’s chapel, how he was prayed with and for, or how he was never judged by strangers.