I can’t sleep at all lying between Elliot and Cline on the beach under the same stars my mom once slept beneath. My mind races, and my chest is heavy with so many questions that I can’t calm myself down enough to even allow a minutes’ worth of rest. The moment I close my eyes, I’m assaulted with things I’ve done wrong or something I’ve said that I shouldn’t have. Year’s of anxiety plague me in the darkness. Miranda’s face flashes between childhood memories that I once held sacred, and they become marred with her presence even though she wasn’t there.
My thoughts turn to her and her increasing hatred of me throughout the years. I wonder exactly when she was told about Patrick not being my father. I wonder what the precise moment was when she stopped hating me for having his attention and started loathing me for being born at all. Her transition from cold step-mother to functioning alcoholic, pill-popping antagonizer didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual.
Her girls' nights out became more often, bleeding into weekdays. She’d find any excuse to take a pill. Burn her finger on the stove? Pop an OxyContin. Headache from the night before? Take a Vicodin. She had multiple doctors and multiple prescriptions, a mini pharmacy in her bathroom that Patrick overlooked for one reason or another. Lorcet, Percocet, Demerol, and I think one time I found a bottle of Adderall stashed away in there. When she was prescribed the Xanax on top of all of that is when things started to really get bad.
My incident had already occurred, and she knew I was in therapy. She’d been the one to find me, and some nights when I can’t sleep I wonder why she didn’t just leave me there. Her life would have been so much easier if she had. But a diagnosis of depression and anxiety at a young age will color a person’s perception of you. She didn’t side step me and treat me like I was fragile. No, she seemed to come at me harder, like maybe I was just a little cracked and she could fully break me.
Patrick tiptoed around me, ever watchful when he was in the room. But I didn’t say anything to him about what was happening behind his back in his own home. Would he even believe me? Or would he say I was crazy and take her side anyway? It wasn’t worth the risk.
The weight gain from the meds came on quickly and so did Miranda’s ridicule. I’d stopped speaking to everyone after what I’d done. Dr. Stark once asked me if I was embarrassed by it, but I stand firm that I’m not. No one knows except the three of us and the doctors. I stopped talking because everyone I ever knew in my entire life knew Byrdie and she technically didn’t exist. How do you talk to people who don’t even know the real you … when you don’t even know who you truly are?
The silence was first. Then the weight. Miranda put me on this really strict vegetarian diet that she would prepare. Then she went on Atkins and would sit across from me, eating a pound of bacon in the morning, laughing as she stuffed her face. Patrick never saw.
Holidays meant nothing to me anymore. The last few that happened while I lived in that house, they travelled on their own, saying they needed more time together. I pretended to understand. Acted like I didn’t care. I was a teenager and didn’t want to be around them anyway.
Miranda’s mother called often and would send gifts but had nothing to do with me. Once, right before Christmas, as Patrick was in the kitchen getting coffee, Miranda held up a pair of diamond earrings her mother had bought her and sighed. “When you see things like this, does it make you miss having a mom?” she asked, the lights from the tree reflected in her too small eyes, like she was innocently posing a question that wasn’t going to send me into an anxiety attack right there on the spot.
I spent the rest of the day wedged between my bed and my dresser grasping for a reason to live.
Panic rises in my chest as the memories begin to bombard me, so I slip out of the blanket and move toward the shoreline as the sky begins to grow a bit brighter. I’ve never seen a sunrise over the ocean before, so I set my eyes on that as I count my breaths and swallow down the swelling in my throat. Fingers pressed to my pulse point, I stretch my other hand out and tap out a rhythm of threes and fours until I’ve calmed myself enough to start taking in air. The tears that have collected in my eyes begin to spill down my cheeks and are instantly swept away by the breeze coming off the oncoming waves.
It’s moments like these that remind me that no matter how hard I try or how many things I do, my life will never be easy or what other people consider conventional. I may fight this thing until the day I die. But at least I’ll fight it.
The thing that’s beginning to worry me is that my mother’s journals show no sign of this being hereditary.