She Calls You Back

CONTENT WARNING: this story includes substance abuse, a character who commits suicide, and characters who have experienced parental neglect.

People never truly change. Not really. You are cursed to be the same person throughout your life.

At least, this is what my mother told me. That people never change. That who we are is who we have always been.

And I refuse to believe this. Because if I believe it, then it means I’m a monster.

I never wanted to look back. It’s easier not to and I think most people would agree with me on that.

For ten years I have been living in a no name town in the middle of America and I have loved it. It’s small. It’s the kind of town people come to when they want to escape. No one asked me questions when I arrived. And no one has asked me questions since.

I’ve led a good life here. I’m a good person here. I help my older neighbors with their yards and their houses. I volunteer for after school programs and teach kids their ABCs. I’m good here. I’m really good.

And yesterday, out of the blue, rupturing the fabric of my goodness, a letter from my brother arrived saying that our sister was dead. That she had escaped from the hospital she was at and walked into traffic.

My first thought wasn’t sadness for my baby sister.

My first thought was full of rage at my brother for disturbing my peace. My first thought was wondering how he discovered my oasis.

My brother still lives in the house we grew up in. I don’t know how he does it.

The screen door is still off its hinges. The broken wicker chair still sits on the porch. The sign my sister and I made one hot summer Sunday still sits against the wall.

“Beware of Dog,” we wrote in red, threatening letters. We didn’t have a dog, but we hoped it would keep the bad people away.

Of course, the bad people were already inside. 

My brother opens the door before I can knock.

His resemblance to our father makes my breath stick in my throat.

After, what feels like a long, awkward moment, I say, “Hey.”

“You came,” he responds and then walks into the house.

I watch him go in and have a sudden urge to get in my car and go back to my home. My real home. My home of eight years where I’m a good person and focus only on the present. I don’t have to be here. What’s the point? She’s dead. My brother hates me. There’s no reason-

“You, coming?” he asks, turning around, his face cast in shadow.

It smells like her. My mother. Her scent is everywhere.

Or maybe it’s my imagination.

“Where’s your luggage?” he asks.

“I don’t need luggage,” I say, “I’m not staying.”

“Of course,” he says, smirking as if he knew all along this was a hit and run.

People never really change, she said. People are always who they’ve been.

“How did you find me?” I ask as we sit across from each other drinking tea in the kitchen where my mother spent most of her time.

“Detective,” he says not looking at me.

“Detective?” I ask.

“I didn’t have much choice, did I?” he asks, piercing me with a bold glare and a challenge in his eyes.

We are silent for a while.

“How’d she escape?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer at first, and I wonder if he heard me.

“The doctors got lax with her,” he finally says, “She had been doing really well the past year. She seemed to finally be making progress. They started giving her the perks, you know? Spending time in the community game room, going outside-

“Outside?” I interrupt.

“With a chaperone, of course,” he replies, “But the chaperone must have looked away for a moment. And she took advantage of it. And, well, there you go.”

I nod, understanding fully.

I know what it’s like to bide your time. To pretend everything is going great so that no one suspects, so that when the time is right you can finally break free.

“She asked for you. A lot,” he says.

I avoid his eyes.

“Why did you stay away? What did we do?” he asks, his voice cracking.

And I realize he’s waited for this moment. And instead of answering, I get up and go to my old room and close the door and am shocked that nothing has changed. Nothing is out of place.

This house is a time capsule that has remained to teach me a lesson.

Ten years ago, I killed my mother.

I can say it was an accident, but that wouldn’t be completely true.

My parents were completely and totally in love with each other.

That sounds ideal, but they forgot they had children.

They were so caught up in each other that we were ignored.

So, I made myself seen.

I got in trouble at school.

I broke my mother’s China plates; my father’s watch.

I teased my brother until he cried.

I forced my parents to see me, no matter the cost.

“She’s a nightmare,” I overheard my mother say one night.

“A nightmare,” she said.

“She’ll grow out of it,” my dad responded.

“We’ll see,” she said, “Sometimes I think she was put on this earth solely to torment me.”

My dad laughed and repeated his belief that I would get better.

And maybe I would have.

But shortly after that, the year my sister was born, my father died in a car accident, leaving me alone with a mother who hated me.

I decided to try and be better.

If not for my mother, then for my siblings.

And I did. I really did.

I took care of them. Clothed them. Fed them.

I did all of this while my mother disappeared into herself.

She drank herself to sleep almost every evening.

And one night, four years after my father died, I came home from work and found her sitting in the living room in darkness.

If she hadn’t been smoking a cigarette, I wouldn’t have known she was there.

“You shouldn’t smoke in the house,” I said, thinking of my brother and sister in the next room, inhaling her scent.

She stood and wobbled toward me. She put her face close to mine and I shrank back from the overwhelming smell of whiskey.

“You’re trash,” she whispered, “You were and will always be. You’ll never change.”

I watched as she made her way to her bedroom.

I watched as she grabbed a bottle of pills and swallowed them down.

I watched when she started puking and when my sister, Natalie, came up behind me, asking what was wrong with mommy, I shoved her away and closed the door, telling her mommy was sleeping.

My sister discovered our mother the next morning with her mouth and eyes open, her arm reaching toward the door.

My aunt Iris came to stay with us and, secure in the knowledge that my brother and sister had someone looking after them, I left town a week later.

And as you probably guessed, I never came back.

We sit in silence on my bedroom floor, because after ten years it’s hard to think of what to say.

“Was aunt Iris good to you?” I ask.

“She was,” he says.

“She died last year,” he says.

I nod. I had known this. I’d seen it online. I’d check in on them once a month via internet. Search their names. Make sure they were still alive. When I saw Aunt Iris had died there was a part of me that debated coming back.

Of course I didn’t.

He thankfully doesn’t ask me why I didn’t come to the funeral.

He knows why and he spares me this.

He was always a better person than I was.

“Did you do it on purpose?” he finally asks.

I want to lie.

I want to run.

I want to tell him of course I didn’t, I would never, I’m not a monster.

But that wouldn’t be the truth.

So, I nod.

“I was glad you did,” he says softly.

And I look at him in disbelief.

“She was a nightmare,” he says, “A nightmare. When you were at work she’d beat us constantly. If we were too loud. If we touched something that was dad’s. If we breathed in a way she didn’t like. I was glad you did it. And I hated myself for it.”

I reach across the table and take his hand, feeling like I’m about to crack. Like if I say anything, I’ll simply melt into a puddle of tears.

“It was hard on Natalie cause she was so little,” he says, “She wanted her mother. Aunt Iris was nice and loved us, but it didn’t matter to Natalie. She didn’t care that our mother was horrible. She wanted her back anyway.”

I nod.

“I just…I wish you hadn’t left,” he says, his hands on his head.

And I realize that we’ve been stuck.

We’re older. We’re adults. But we haven’t changed. We haven’t grown. Not really. I never gave us that chance. And maybe my brother never gave himself the chance either. He chose to live in this house. To keep things the same. To live inside his memories. Emotionally and mentally we’re still the same as we were ten years ago.

We’re stuck.

So, in the hopes of change. In the hope of proving my mother wrong, I take his face in my hands and make him look me in the eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”

I’ve decided to spend some time here. To get to know my brother again. To visit the hospital where my sister spent most of her life. To reconnect. To face those things that I fear most.

To face what I did.

I took away my mother’s chance to get better.

Maybe she wouldn’t have.

But I’ll never know, and I have to deal with that.

And maybe it’ll help me finally grow into the person I was always meant to be.

The person my brother sees. The person I was able to be once I was gone. The person who my mother said I never was.

That person exists somewhere inside me and she deserves to be set free.