The women of the town took over our home with almost round-the-clock care as my father grieved and tried to process his new role in life. The older I’ve gotten, the more I wonder why he didn’t just give me up. I wouldn’t have blamed him. Especially knowing what I do now. But perhaps when your front door is overrun with local news cameras and filled with the good intentions of local church women, cooking home baked meals, you can’t reveal the truth.
You can’t admit that you don’t want this baby that has ruined your entire life.
He did a really good job of faking it. I’ll give him that.
Whenever I think about my childhood, my home, I always remember it being busy and my house being full. There was never a quiet moment unless it was at night, and even then I was usually trying to sneak out of my window and across the lawn to get to Cline’s and engage him in some kind of trouble.
We’d camp in the backyard or swim out at the lake house on the weekends when our parents would agree to it. He was my very best friend—my partner in crime—from the moment I could steal his toys in the sandbox. I knew everything about him, and the same could be said the other way around. We had no secrets.
There was even a time when we’d planned a sort of Parent Trap type of thing where we were going to try and get his mom and Patrick together so we could be brother and sister. But it didn’t work.
I never used to believe in fairytales or evil stepmothers until Patrick met my step-Mom, Miranda. I would tell Cline how weird it was for me when they started dating. He knew exactly how uncomfortable it became in my house when Miranda moved in. Our little bubble, this world I had known where everyone in town was welcomed with open arms inside our home, suddenly became a place where no one was allowed to enter.
I was eleven when she first appeared, all tight skirts and high buns that pulled her already small eyes even smaller. Her features, tiny as they were, were severe, and her eyes seemed to always be judging me. She never looked at me with anything other than disdain, as if I were a stain on her really expensive cardigan that she just couldn’t get out.
Patrick’s face, though long and thin, had once held an openness to it beneath his light blond hair and thin framed glasses. If eyes could be kind, his were. At least, for a while. It’s truly amazing how stress can change the entire landscape of a face. How concern can bury itself into the corners of a person’s mouth or eyes and etch its way into their skin until their soft lines become hard and they stop looking approachable.
Maybe I assumed that’s where the changes started to come from in myself. Once they got married, it was hard to even get close to the man I once called my dad. Miranda and her couple’s retreats. Miranda and her yoga for two. Dinners with clients and cruises that did not include me.
That’s when everything started, I think. My therapist once asked me to pinpoint the first time I could remember doing something that I would consider “weird.” I’d always had a thing for numbers. Counting steps. Counting the letters in words. I never even gave it a second thought.
When you’re younger, you kind of think it’s badass that you know exactly how many steps there are from your door to your best friend’s lawn. Almost like you’re a spy. Or some kind of math genius. At least it was like that for me. It was just who I was.
Who I am.
But after Patrick married Miranda, something shifted and everything became so intense. I think everyone blamed it on hormones. Like, how messed up is it that a girl gets her period and suddenly people are looking at her like it’s perfectly okay for her to be exhibiting these behaviors that anyone else would be concerned about? But instead, Miranda was all, “Nah. She just needs some Midol.”
Midol does not treat sadness of the magnitude that I began to experience. It does not take away the types of thoughts that began to surface in my mind as I was pushed farther and farther out of Patrick’s orbit. I know what she told him. She would say that I was a teenager and that I was alienating myself, but it wasn’t true.
I tried. I really did. I wondered if the things I was feeling were the same my mom had felt. And I wished that she had been there to talk to. I knew nothing about her. My grandmother had little to nothing to do with us. She made no small secret that she blamed me for her daughter’s death. I blamed myself, too, eventually. Why wouldn’t I? What else could have caused a perfectly healthy woman to just … coma out and die like that?
I was poison.
Miranda didn’t even have to say anything after a while. I just knew. I was the reason for every bad thing in my family’s life. Hell, for all I knew, I was the reason for every bad thing, ever. It wriggled its way into my brain, and I tried to fight it. The deepening darkness that started to surround me. Like I owed it to the entire town that had tried so hard to keep me alive for so many years.