Making my way upstairs and into our bedroom, I tear open the closet door and remove all of the shit from the top closet shelf until I find the box that has been hidden. I place it down on the bed, grabbing as many crumpled balls of notes as I can and bringing them down to her. “Start with these. What is this?”
She grabs them from my hands, as half of them fall to the floor. Salvaging what she can, she squeezes them against her chest. “Where did you find these?” she asks, as her face drains of color.
“In the back of our closet. They weren’t hidden all that well if that was your intention,” I tell her.
“I don’t want to see these,” she cries. “Take them back. Put them away.”
“Why don’t you throw them away if you don’t want to see them?” I shouldn’t be pushing like this. I saw what happened last time I pushed.
“I can’t,” she continues, her voice now escalating into a higher pitch.
“Why, Tori?” I match her volume.
“Because then I’ll remember what it looked like when I found my mother hanging from the ceiling beam in her bedroom. I’ll remember what starvation looks like in a five-year-old. I’ll remember what the people I loved more than anything looked like the moment they died in front of me.” Tori’s words are quiet, firm, and shattering all at the same time. She falls to her knees, with the papers flying out of her hands, and curls up into a ball on the ground. The time it takes for me to process what she said feels like I’m trying to figure out a difficult math equation. Or as if someone were to tell me the sky is actually orange, and my brain receives the coloring in a malfunctioning sort of way. I don’t understand and I can’t comprehend. Yet, the words make perfect sense. I can’t think of one thing to say right now, and by the looks of her mentally shutting down, I should be saying a whole lot. Though, the things I want to say won’t help. It’s not going to be okay. It will never go away. She will never be okay. And then there’s “sorry”. That word does nothing for anyone.
“Have you told anyone else?”
“No,” she breathes out through heavy sobs.
Her father left. Her mother committed suicide, and her sister starved to death.
“Tori, I need you to take a deep breath, babe.” She’s going to hyperventilate herself into passing out. She doesn’t hear me. Or she chooses not to respond. The speed of her breaths increase, and I know this isn’t going to end well. I pull her heavy body up into my arms and bring her up to our bedroom where I lay her down on the bed, propping her up to help her breathe better. “Look at me.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “You’re going to pass out if you don’t calm down. Tori, look at me.”
“They blamed me,” she gets out. “They told me it was my fault.”
“Who?” I snap. “Who the hell would blame a child for that?”
“My grandparents,” she says between hiccupping breaths. “They told me I drove my mother insane. They told me it was my fault that my sister died.”
I climb up on the bed and I grip her shoulders within my hands. “You know that isn’t true.” The resentment against her grandparents and father is pouring through me, making my chest ache. “No one should have blamed you for what happened.”
“It was my fault,” she says. “I was awful. I should have called 9-1-1 when I found my mother hanging. Just an hour before, I had been mad at her for not letting me buy something so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was. She kept telling me we were running out of money, but I didn’t understand what she meant by that. We never had money problems, not until my Dad left us I guess. I pushed her too far that day.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes for a pause. “I stared at my dead mother for the longest time, watching as the blood drained from her face while trying to convince myself she was only sleeping. I was too scared to call 9-1-1. I knew my sister and I would be taken away or handed over to my grandparents who hated me—if they would even take me. Turns out they wouldn’t.”
The images breezing through my mind are hideous and scary. I don’t know this woman sitting in front of me, not that I haven’t said this to myself a million times in the past year. The truth is, I have only known her outer shell. Instantly, I realize why she has never told a soul the truth. She would be judged, labeled, and marked. The truth can’t be taken away or changed. It can only be accepted.