Sometimes, I think it would be better if it were worse. In the newspaper there is a picture of a little girl with curly red hair. Her eyes are brown but in them I could see a sparkle of something else….some soft white innocence. There was something so forlorn about the way she was smiling. As if even though she was saved, the next part wouldn’t really wouldn’t be all that better. I skimmed over the tiny black words below the picture. Cassandra Ann Jones. She would receive a new name; a new future would be created for her. A father who locked her in a dark closet and killed her mother would go to jail. Perhaps forever. Perhaps he would escape and run after her. Maybe to him, the blood pouring out of her tiny blue veins wasn’t enough. Maybe he wanted to kill her, like he killed her mother. I hid my head under my dark brown locks. I close my eyes and wept for a little girl I would never know. In my dark basement I knew that I was so much better off than Cassandra Ann, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like if I was in her shoes. Gray thoughts wandered back and forth inside my head. Sometimes, it is easier when there are fingers to point. It is easier when there is someone who gets all the blame. It is easier when the bad man is completely evil and there is no question about it. It is easier when the scars are on the outside, and all it takes is the handy-work of a pediatrician or surgeon to repair the damage.
For me, the scars were on the inside, and there was no real way of telling who was who and what was what. The sadness lingered in the silence. I don’t really remember when it started. I don’t remember when I stopped being an innocent little girl and started being a skinny teenager who writes poetry and stares out of a blacked-out window. The story isn’t really about me. Perhaps it started the day I went around the neighborhood with my father to sell chocolates for my school’s fundraiser even though my mom was mad at my dad. The fighting started a little bit before that and lasted a whole lot longer and it got a lot worse when we moved to Maryland, but that isn’t really when it started.
I am staring at the old photographs and am trying to piece together the story. This is really the story of a young girl named Aurora who was trapped in a torn world of love. The following words are in no way the truth. There is no real way of piecing together what is real and what is just made up because in reality everything is just made up. We are all an illusion. She loved one man first but then she found out he was cheating on her, so she went out with another man. He was a man that at first she was afraid to talk to but then they became friends and eventually friendship became something more. She told me that from the first time he asked her to dance with him, they were already married. Not officially, of course, but figuratively speaking, he was everything to her, and even though he didn’t have all of the money in the world (they were college students), he was everything and everyone to her. She did not see any of his flaws because she was blinded by love. Love. Love is a strange thing. I do not think I would give up my dreams for love, but just a couple months ago I know I would have been willing to run away with the young man I thought I was in love with and give up everything to be with him. Aurora told me that it was wrong to love him. It was a disgusting thought. There was no way that he would love me back. He would hate me; he would never talk to me again. He kind of knows how I feel, but what he knows is a tiny sliver of a huge moon in comparison to the real feelings and the complete depth and severity of it all. I guess the lines are blurry now and it is hard to tell where Aurora’s story stops and where mine starts. But I guess that is just how it is.
There is one person who knows, I guess, where it all began. I close the old photo album and put it back where it belongs: under the dusty black piano bench that no one ever sits on anymore. I’m starting a new life now, so maybe it doesn’t even matter. Maybe I can just close my eyes to it and just become the person I was meant to be but I know that it is not that easy. I will not do that. I cannot do that.
It seems like this is a story that I am not really ready to write. All of the words are trapped inside of my mind and they can only find a way out when a pen or a keyboard is not in my hands. Then, the words flow out and I whisper the scary truth to the wind as I am walking around my house aimlessly. Outside my father is mowing the lawn and pretending to be a father and my brothers are sitting in the garage looking at each other. When I walked outside, Zach told me that I was lucky.
“You’re lucky, Zoë. You get to leave in a couple of months.”
“Hopefully.”
My mind was swimming with doubt. I knew that there was the possibility that there would not be enough money. Zach sat on the chair that the cats sometimes climbed on and his eyes were looking down at the floor. Mom had recently cut his hair. I liked it better when his hair was wild and all over the place. I looked at Zach for a second with a sense of longing that at that moment I did not have the words to explain. I walked out of the garage and went over to the swing set in the backyard. I sat on the dirty yellow swing and tried to remember what it was like before. I tried to take myself back to those days when we were all in elementary school and Lincoln wasn’t even born yet. A girl and a boy running through the sprinklers, holding hands. Two small fingers linked while pushing a smaller girl on a different swing set.
It was no use. That world was long gone. The days of sitting at the coloring table with Zach were gone and the days of making up stories with Zach and Macy were gone. I smiled remembering that time when the story we were in was about digimon. Macy and I were so close, but we had gotten into a fight (probably about something very trivial). A couple nights I was upset and I didn’t tell anyone but in the middle of the night Macy had sensed it and walked into my bedroom. If I remember correctly, I think I had been crying. Macy and I made up that night. That was one of the first of many times we would make up with each other. Each time the glue would be less strong, but nonetheless it would hold, at least for a time being. The real glue was blood. We didn’t know it at the time. I remember the night we made a pact about the secrets. We hid under the sheets of a hotel bed with our cousin Stephanie and pretended we were camping out. Each of the three of us wrote down our secrets and we put them in a small pouch, sealed it, and promised to never open it as long as any of us were alive. I don’t even remember what the secrets were now. Not that it really is what the secrets were that matters. Wait. I do remember Macy’s secret. It’s kind of like my secret now. Not quite, though. I can’t tell you, though. I can’t tell you Macy’s secret so I can’t tell you my secret either. But this story isn’t a story about the secrets. This isn’t about the silence and this isn’t about the words that can never be uttered as long as I am alive. This story is about the people and this story is about the pain and even though I know there are families out there that are much worse off, and even though there are girls, like Cassandra Ann Jones, who were hurt way worse than I was, this story is important. I do not know if I can tell Aurora’s story except for the tidbits that she gave Zach, Macy, Lincoln and I when she could. If Aurora hadn’t married Brandon, none of us would be alive to tell her story. But who knows. If she had married Michael, maybe she would have been better off. Maybe she would have been happy for longer. Maybe. There is no way to know for sure, though, is there?
I am scared to write this. In a little less than three weeks I leave for college and it will be even harder to write this. I won’t miss the chaotic fights. I won’t miss the tables that were thrown and the doors that were kicked in and I won’t miss dad’s ugly words but I definitely will miss Zach.
