The Old Apartment

If you want to be a writer, it’s helpful to have an unhappy childhood.

That’s something my sister Mallory and I joke about. We’re both writers - me a journalist and ghost writer, Mallory a screenwriter with Golden Globes, an Emmy, and even an Oscar. Neither of us writes specifically about what happened to us when we were young - the physical abuse from our father, the emotional abandonment by our mother, and what happened to Jeremiah. We write about other things, but you can see where the pain of what we’ve experienced comes out - especially in Mal’s work. The one that won her an Oscar was a family psychodrama - not about our mom and dad specifically, but about cruel parents and the havoc they wreak.

Our parallel careers as writers was something I valued. I went to Mallory for advice often. Without a parent to turn to, it was Mallory I went to with any concern - medical, legal, financial.

That was why it felt weird to be keeping something a secret from her. I’d gotten great news the week before, and now I was here, together with my sister, driving through Brooklyn in a rental car, and bursting to tell her what I’d achieved. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it; I wasn’t sure if today was the day.

We had a job to do today. Our mother had died six months ago, and it was time for us to clean out our childhood home.

It felt like we were revisiting the scene of a crime.

Which, in a way, we were.

*****

We grew up in an apartment building in Brooklyn. I was eight when Dad died; I hardly remember it, but Mallory does. He’d been screaming at our mother about dinner, and then suddenly the apartment was full of smoke and flames. It was Mallory, ten years old, who pulled me and my mother from the apartment to the safety of the street.

“We have to go back,” my mother sobbed. “For Philip.”

“No, we fucking don’t,” my older sister said.

*****

“You’re shaking,” Mallory said, taking my hand. We were in a car I’d rented for this week in New York. Mallory lived in L.A., and I’d lived in DC for the past twenty years. That day I’d taken a train to Jersey, grabbed a rental, and driven out to meet Mallory’s flight at JFK.

We both avoided New York. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, especially in our lines of work, and it wasn’t something we ever discussed.

“You never discuss it?” Anna asked me. Anna was my therapist, an older woman with a soothing voice that I’d been working with for ten years. “But it seems like you’re so close with your sister.”

Was I close with Mallory? I didn’t know. There were many things we never discussed.

I looked down at my hands in my lap. Mallory was right; they were shaking. She’d found a parking spot that she said was just down the street from our old apartment building.

“I’m nervous,” I said.

Mal placed her hand on top of mine. “Me, too,” she said. “But we can do this. Together.”

It should have been over when Dad died, but it wasn’t. Mom attracted numerous boyfriends with abusive tendencies. After an intervention by a school counselor a few years after Dad died, Mallory and I were pulled out of the apartment and placed in a foster home; we never spoke to my mother again after that. When we received letters six months ago, indicating that Mom had died and left us everything, we didn’t realize that this included the responsibility of cleaning out the old apartment.

Mallory handled all the logistics involved with Mom’s death. She was well-suited for the task; my sister has always been thorough when completing a task, checking every box and accounting for every possibility. It was why I turned to her for support with my own finances and paperwork.

“Just send me your login info so I can read the Google doc,” she told me the last time I called her with a question about one of my ghost writing contracts. That was five months ago, and it was right around the time I got my big news - the biggest writing opportunity of my career. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about it yet, convincing myself that it should be done in person.

“You’re already doing so much with Mom’s estate,” I said, already e-mailing her a Google doc with my various e-mail logins and passwords in it. “You shouldn’t be looking at my contracts, too.”

“What else are sisters for?” she said.

*****

We sat there in the parked car, neither of us making any effort to move. I had no idea how it was going to feel to enter the apartment. I had few memories of the time we spent living there, which troubled me and was often a discussion in my therapy sessions with Anna.

“I was nine when I last lived there,” I said. “I should have memories.”

“The impact of trauma like what you experienced is complex,” Anna explained to me gently. “It’s possible there are things your brain is not allowing you to remember.”

Anna was glad that we were returning to clean out the apartment.

“I’m surprised neither of you has ever attempted to return there previously,” she said.

“I have no interest,” I said. I didn’t - especially when Mom was alive, since I had no interest in having a relationship with her. I didn’t want to remember any more than I did. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, due to a nightmare from my early childhood. I’d be screaming Jeremiah’s name, or Mallory’s. There had been complaints from my neighbors in my apartment building in D.C., which was mortifying.

It was one of the reasons I was so excited about my upcoming venture in writing. I’d always made my living as a magazine writer and a ghost writer, which I loved. I didn’t have Mal’s ambition - she’d won many awards and was proud of her stellar reputation as a writer and creator. But my next project, I was told, might be a real money-maker - the kind that would help me to upgrade from my D.C. apartment to a house in the suburbs, the kind of house with enough distance from a neighbor to keep my middle-of-the-night screams private.

*****

We got out of the car, and I peered down the street. We were in Park Slope, a neighborhood that I knew had changed a lot over the years. I suppose that was why nothing seemed quite familiar to me. There were two posh coffee shops at the end of the block, and I was sure they wouldn’t have been there when we were young. But down the street, I noticed a playground that didn’t look brand-new.

“Do you remember that?” I asked Mallory. “That playground? I don’t remember there being a playground we could walk to.”

I didn’t trust my own memory, really. Anna says I need to let my brain know that it’s safe to pull out a memory. Like if I tried to remember that playground, maybe I’d also remember how it felt when Dad would find me in the closet and drag me out for a beating.

Mallory was gazing at the playground, too. “No,” she said. “I don’t remember it.” She reached out her hand and held mine. I was thirty-six years old, and there was still no comfort in the world like my sister’s hand holding mine.

“Mal -” I started to speak, but stopped myself.

Mallory looked at me, her eyes curious. “Yeah?”

I wanted so badly, to tell her about the writing project - but I just couldn’t summon the words. “Never mind,” I said quickly. “I’ll tell you later.”

We began to walk down the street. I followed my sister’s lead as she guided me to the door of a five-story brownstone.

“Are you ready?” she asked. I nodded.

I wasn’t, really. But I could do it with Mallory.

*****

We entered the building. It was quiet. The front lobby was large, with several tables holding what looked like business cards, brochures, possibly residents’ mail.

None of it felt familiar at all.

There were stairs leading to the second level, and I stepped toward them.

Mallory pulled me back. I looked at her. “What?”

“I just - the apartment is on the first floor,” she said. “We don’t need to go upstairs.”

We heard footsteps on the stairs, and Mallory stiffened. A man appeared, glancing around the lobby. When he spotted us, it looked as if he were about to speak, and then he stopped himself. I glanced at my sister; she was giving him an icy glare. The man smiled, a little awkwardly, and exited the building.

I laughed. “You have the whole unapproachable New Yorker thing down,” I said to Mallory. She grinned. “You know which apartment it is?”

“1C,” she said. We approached the apartment door.

“You have the -”

“Yeah,” Mal said, pulling out a key. She unlocked the door to our childhood home, and we stepped inside together.

*****

It was Anna’s idea for me to write the short story, as a therapeutic exercise. I had trouble accessing memories from my childhood, the only exception being the day Jeremiah died. That I remembered in excruciating detail. Anna thought it would help me to unlock everything else if I wrote out what I remembered.

Once I sat down to write, the words poured out.

Dad was screaming at Mom. We were listening from Mallory’s bedroom closet, the screams interrupted every other second by the sounds of punches and Mom’s cries of pain.

It was always the same. We knew when he was heading our way when Mom started to cry out words instead of just grunts of pain - begging for him to spare us. I don’t know why he’d tire of hitting her, and I’ve never asked Mallory. The only thing I knew was that he would come for us when her cries started to get quieter.

“Some people feed on the terror of others,” Anna had told me gently. “It could be that when your mother stopped feeding that for him, he went looking for someone else he could scare.”

When the closet door opened that day, there was a nearly imperceptible shift beside me. Mal had been clutching me and Jeremiah to her chest, one arm wrapped around each of us. But when the door opened, I saw that she had released Jeremiah. He was sitting there, five years old, his eyes wide and watery, when my father opened the door and seized him by the arm. Mal clutched me tightly to her and we both sobbed as our father dragged our little brother away and beat him for the last time.

*****

I had been imagining this moment for months - stepping inside our childhood home. I imagined that I’d feel overwhelmed with emotion.

Instead I felt nothing.

This room - the apartment door opened into the main living space - brought back no memories whatsoever.

I looked over at Mallory. There was no glint of recognition in her eyes.

I scanned the room. There were two large armchairs. There was a small kitchen and dining area just beyond the living room.

Shouldn’t my memories be flooding back to me right now? It was what Anna had thought would happen. But nothing was familiar. I had no memory of this space.

“Mal -” I said. “Do you feel like something strange is going on?”

She was already nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I can -”

“Is this PTSD?” I asked, interrupting her. “How could we just not remember anything?”

Mallory paused. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “But whatever you're feeling, I'm feeling it, too.”

This shared experience, whether it was a memory lapse or some sort of hallucination, made me feel closer to Mallory, and calmer.

“That was your bedroom, right?” I said, pointing to a door down the hallway. She nodded, and I stepped toward the door, ready to look inside the room.

*****

“This is heartbreaking,” Anna said after she read my short story.

“Have you and Mallory never talked about it?”

“Never.”

“It must haunt her.”

I frowned. The ghost of my little brother - of sweet, silly Jeremiah, forever five years old - was always with me. “I think it haunts both of us,” I said.

“Eloise, do you not see why Mallory might find it hard to recall that story?” Anna asked me gently.

She handed the paper back to me and I scanned my story. “No,” I said.

*****

Nothing was familiar in Mallory’s old bedroom. More than that, there was something missing; I noticed it right away. The one thing that I remembered being there.

The room had no closet.

I stepped out of the bedroom, back toward the kitchen and my sister.

*****

It was an accident; I accidentally e-mailed the short story to my agent, Christine, among other documents she was reviewing. She called me immediately.

“Eloise,” she said, “this is incredible. Is it fiction?”

It took ten minutes for us to get on the same page about what had happened.

“That was just for my therapist,” I said, mortified.

“I understand,” Christine said, “and if you tell me to, I’ll pretend I never saw it. But you should think about publishing a book.”

When I discussed it with Anna, she was all for it, too. “You've been wanting for years to publish something of your own,” she said.

“Not this,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Anna said, “if you’ll ever be able to write anything else until you write this.”

“Everything feels wrong -” I stopped myself. I’d been speaking to Mallory, but the man we’d seen earlier - the one who’d come down the stairs - was now seated at the kitchen table, smiling at me.

“Ms. Monroe,” he said. “Welcome to Sunnyside. I’m Dr. Lee, but you can call me Brian.”

My sister was across the room by the window, not looking at either of us. I frowned at the man. “What is Sunnyside?”

“It's your new home,” he said kindly. He held out a brochure that I recognized from a table in the lobby.

Sunnyside Group Homes, it read. A place for the mentally unwell to thrive.

I looked over at my sister in horror.

*****

When Anna told me what she understood to be true from my short story, I dismissed her.

“Mallory didn’t push Jeremiah toward Dad,” I said. “She wouldn’t have done that.”

“Eloise,” Anna said. “Some people will do anything to survive.”

*****

“Mallory, what is happening?” I said, my eyes on my sister.

“It's for your own good, Eloise,” Mallory said, her voice strange. “It’s to keep you safe.”

“Mal -”

“Ms. Monroe, it’s going to be okay,” the man called Brian said, standing.

Everything was wrong. That was what I’d been about to tell Mallory.

This clearly wasn’t the apartment we’d grown up in; that was why we didn’t remember it.

But then, I thought, looking at my older sister, it seemed as if Mallory had already known that.

I ran for the apartment door, immediately bumping into two tall men who grabbed my arms.

“Ms. Monroe, please calm down,” Brian said. “We’re here to help you.”

“Mallory!” I shrieked. “Mallory!” She wouldn’t look at me.

“You have a long history of hospitalizations, Ms. Monroe,” Brian said.

“This wasn’t an easy choice for your sister to make.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Mallory, tell them it’s not true.”

When my sister finally turned away from the window, she looked not at me but at Brian. “Is it better if I leave?” she asked quietly. “I know, you said it might make it easier -”

“Yes,” Brian said, nodding encouragingly.

My older sister left the apartment. She did not look back.

*****

After Mal’s exit, Brian outlined everything for me. He showed me dozens of pages, documenting hospitalizations and threats of self-harm over the past six months. I saw private communications with my primary care doctor indicating that I was making suicidal threats.

Threats I’d never made; messages I’d never sent. All must have been sent by Mallory, who had access to every login name and password I’d ever created.

What my sister had done was clear; the question of why she’d done it was screaming inside my head. I sat quietly, trying to think.

“I have a therapist,” I said. “Her name is Anna Walker. You can reach out to her, she knows this is all made up.”

Dr. Lee nodded. “We can call her,” he said. “But, Eloise, you e-mailed Anna, too, with these threats of self-harm.”

I almost nodded - not because I’d sent such messages, but because of course, Mallory had done that, too. My big sister was diligent and thorough, something I’d previously been grateful for.

“May I?” I asked Dr. Lee, indicating the pile of papers. He nodded, pushing them toward me. I could tell he was still trying to keep me calm.

I rifled through the pages. There had to be a way to prove what Mallory had done.

Then I found it. Not the proof.

The why.

A letter with the words CEASE AND DESIST in bold along the top, addressed to my publisher. The letter was signed by an attorney representing Mallory.

I remembered what Anna had said.

Some people will do anything to survive.

My sister had pushed my little brother in the way of a beating that killed him, and now she was willing to have me locked up to protect her own reputation.

I looked at Dr. Lee. “I’ll need an attorney,” I said quietly.

My sister was a formidable opponent.

But I wasn’t going down without a fight.