I squeezed my eyes shut. Pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets as if that might help. To remember. To forget?
I never knew. All these years later, I never knew.
My mother hurt me. I knew that. She was not well. So sick, in fact, that after that last incident, she was sent away permanently. A mental institute I guess, because that’s where sick people generally went, and jail would’ve involved a trial, and that I would’ve remembered.
My mother went away. That’s what Aunt Nancy told me the first day in the hospital, and I never brought it up again. Mentioning my mother’s name risked summoning the demon. So I never asked and Aunt Nancy never told.
Something bad had happened. Worse than usual. And I knew what it was. Deep down inside, I understood that I knew everything, that in fact I remembered everything. But I didn’t want to remember what I remembered. So I didn’t. By a conscious or subconscious act of will, I took the past, boxed it up, and put it away, never to be seen again.
Maybe not the best coping strategy. And not without consequences. Turns out, when you wall off pieces of your mind, you can’t control everything that disappears. To this day, I have haphazard recall at best. Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with best friends, the vital last lecture that happened right before the final exam.
Jackie and Randi used to tease me I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. I’d laugh with them, but often self-consciously. Jackie had really called me on the phone last night, we’d talked for two hours, and I’d forgotten all of it? Randi had told me all about her first date with local heartthrob Tom Eastman, and I couldn’t recall a single detail?
Small glitches in the operating system, I’d tell myself. I mean, given the amount of resources I’d dedicated to wiping eight entire years from my general consciousness, some errors were bound to occur. Besides, no matter how much I screwed up, forgot, genuinely overlooked, those occasions were still better than the few times I started to remember.
Recall was most likely to happen when my anxiety spiked. Then the past would leak out in my dreams, snippets from an old movie reel, where once upon a time, a thin crazy mother lived in a tiny dirty house with her thin lonely daughter. And the mother fed her daughter shattered glass and slammed her fingers in kitchen drawers and pushed her down steep flights of stairs because little girls needed to be brave and tough.
Until one day, the little girl grew to be so brave, so tough, that she won the war.
That, I felt in my bones. My mother did something. But I won the war.
And I didn’t ask about my mother anymore, because in my heart of all hearts, I understood that answer might tell me everything I still wasn’t prepared to know.
Baby’s crying.
Girl. Stuffed bear. White ruffles, pink polka dots. Sugar and spice and everything nice…
Don’t remember. Block it out. Shove it away. Nothing good can come from the past, especially a past like mine. Not to mention, at this stage of the game, what would be the point?
A hunted woman doesn’t need closure. A hunted woman needs battle skills.
I stood abruptly, glanced at the clock in my shadowed room, and calculated the time remaining until 8 P.M., January 21. Zero hour. When my own killer would finally come calling.
Seventy-eight hours to go.
I put on my workout clothes, grabbed Tulip’s leash, and prepared to run.