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She stares at me, taken aback by my inspection of her. I don’t mean for it to sound so cold, but when the words come out my mouth, I know that I’ve struck a nerve. “Why aren’t you dead?” I ask, my voice strangled. She grabs my hand and pulls me over to sit back on the hospital bed. When we are both seated, she pulls me in for another hug.
And she sobs.
And sobs.
And sobs.
That night I lay awake, still digesting the fact that the woman I thought had been dead for the past ten years is sleeping in the room just down the hall. Seeing her had not only sent me spiralling, reliving all of the grief that I felt over her death, but it also helped to reignite some of my memories about my dad.
He’s gone. He left me out of grief, unable to even look at me when all he saw in me was his dead wife.
His no-longer-dead wife.
For the past ten years, I have been left an orphan while my parents were off doing whatever they wanted. For ten years, I yearned for the love of a parent, constantly grieving over my mother’s death. For nine years, I struggled just trying to figure out how to survive on my own. I’ve spent all this time hating my father for leaving, but I’ve known that it was my fault. I haven’t been able to look at myself properly since her death either. I can’t even look into a mirror without seeing glimpses of my mother’s ghost staring back at me.
But the ghost doesn’t exist anymore. She is real.
I think back on the conversation that Mum and I had earlier today. Replaying her expressions, her words, savouring the first conversation I have had with her in ten years. Excluding the conversations by her makeshift gravestone that Dad and I made her, which seems pretty dumb now realising that she was never there. All those wasted words, now lost in the wind, like leaves being scattered throughout a forest.
* * *
“They took me,” my mother had said earlier that day. “I was getting our regular groceries from Beast Eye Corner Store when I saw the soldiers there.” This much I knew. I remember her sweet smile when she told me she’d be back soon.
I never realised that ‘soon’ meant ten years.
She heaved a long sigh and breathed in deeply like she was restraining herself from crying. “They were interrogating Mr. and Mrs. Bunford, and they… they-” I knew my mum’s voice was about to break and I put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
Looking back, I realise how unnatural the gesture is for me. The physical touch of sympathy. I have grown up in a world where ‘get over it,’ is our motto. You fall over, ‘get over it’. Someone dies, ‘get over it’. You’re hungry, starving, dying, ‘get over it’. Mum wouldn’t have known that, of course, because she was never there.
Nonetheless, I remember she smiled at me as if she appreciated the gesture and continued. “Jerry and Angela Bunford had risked their lives for all of us, I couldn’t just leave them. Jerry had blood stained all over his face. They had shot his ear, and Angela was weeping into her hands, rocking back and forth. It wasn’t something that I’d ever want to witness.” She paused and looked me up and down as if sizing me up, contemplating whether or not I would be able to handle the truth.
“And then what happened?” I pressed on.
“Well, I stepped forward to help them and it turns out the Bunford’s were trying to defend me. The soldiers were asking them where they could find me. You don’t know how bad I felt. I was guilty of Jerry being so close to death.”
I remember that day now. There were no survivors, I recall. Mum must not realise that they both died on the same day we thought she did. That was all because of my mum? What could possibly be so important that people had to die to find her?
“I’m sorry, Mum.” I told her, I didn’t want her to hurt, but I have always vowed to tell the truth. “Jerry is gone. He died the same day you were captured.” My mum’s face went slack, so I decided to ask, “why were they looking for you in the first place, Mum?” When she didn’t reply, I asked again, slightly harsher this time, “Why were they looking for you?”
Once again, my mum acted like she didn’t hear and continued her story in a bland tone, like someone had sucked the life out of her. “Once they saw me, they immediately forgot about Jerry and Angela and came over. I was scared out of my wits. They told me they needed to talk to me. They told me that it was urgent. It was about-” She stopped suddenly. I remember the feeling of frantic need. The burning curiosity to know what it was. I remember feeling like she wouldn’t tell me unless I forced her to.
“About what? What was it?” Still, my mother remained silent. “I am old enough to know these things. You may think that I am small and incapable, and you may just be trying to protect me, but I am stronger than you may think.” I remember desperately trying to keep my voice steady so that I wouldn’t scare her away. She doesn’t realise that the past ten years without her have twisted me into a monster who can’t control their emotions.
“Despite whatever you think. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m sixteen now and I’ve had to live by myself for the past nine years.” At that, my mother released a surprised gasp. I know that she wanted to ask questions about my dad, but I was so filled with anger that I gave her the answer before she even had the chance to ask.
“I stood there and watched Dad walk right out the door, knowing that there was nothing I could do to convince him to stay. Knowing that it was because of me that he was leaving, because I reminded him of you.” I say, giving her all the explanation over Dad’s absence that she needs. I wanted to make my answer final, to give her no reason to talk about him again. Partly because I still couldn’t remember anything else, but also because I was scared of what I would discover if I did.
“I have grieved a lost mother for ten years screaming at a homemade gravestone that I made for her by our tree; only to find that those tears were wasted because she, because you, were never even dead. I have had to pull myself up from the grave, I’ve had to scramble to try and be a leader when I had no idea what I was doing. I’ve had to look like I’ve had my act together at all times because heaven forbid Emerson shows weakness and lets her guard down. I’ve seen people lying dead in the streets of Beast Eye, watching them get beaten by the soldiers and not being able to do anything about it.”
At the time, I had no idea where any of my words were coming from, I was simply just letting the anger take over me. The words were flowing instinctively out of my mouth without me even knowing if they were true. But the moment I spoke them aloud, I knew that I was not making any of it up.
By this stage in the conversation, I was sweating relentlessly from the pressure of the ticking bomb wanting to explode inside of me. The sides of the bed that I had gripped to keep myself together started to shake.
How could she not trust ME after she was the one who lied about her death?
Looking back, I was probably too harsh on her. She probably assumed that she could just walk back into my life, and everything would be back to normal. It is a fair assumption, but she doesn’t realise how much time has changed me.
I don’t trust anyone anymore, blood-related or not.
