The sob broke free from my throat, but I still couldn’t breathe.
All I could do was cry.
Cry.
Cry.
And cry some more.
Just like Janis had cried all those years ago.
Except I was crying for those little girls whose spirits had turned into ghosts in the shapes of lonely birds with tired wings, because instead of being caged, they had never found a safe place to land after they were violently kicked out of the nest.
THIRTY-ONE
AVA
No matterhow many doctors might disagree with me, I know the truth: the emotional flu is a real illness.
I ached on the inside and the outside. I was so tired I could barely open my eyes, but it didn’t all feel physical. My body convulsed every so often, my head felt like it was being demolished with a sledgehammer, and my chest felt tight.
After last night, it was like my mind was running free of memories I had suppressed for so long. Maybe my body was, too, because the emotional flu and withdrawals felt eerily the same. I remembered feeling the same sickness from time to time when I was young, probably when Janis would quit giving us whatever the hell she’d been giving us.
It explained a lot, though. Why whenever I took drugs or drank, I had a higher tolerance to them.
Janis had started us early.
That line of thought started me on another.
What would have happened if Molly or the school wouldn’t have gotten involved? Sonny worked so much, he didn’t have a clue what was going on. And the more Janis gave us, the more we probably became tolerant to it. She would have had to keep increasing the doses until she went to stronger meds.
Maybe she had.
Then maybe she would have pulled something like the mom did inSixth Senseand started giving us poison, making us sicker and sicker every day, until we just died from it.
There was a distinction between sleeping meds and house-hold cleaners, but…it made me think. A drug addict will keep pushing the limits to get high. Maybe she would have too. We were nothing but a hindrance to her.
Her cries came back to me, and I shuddered.
From a child’s mind, she was crying over a death of someone she loved and couldn’t live without. And she was. But from an adult’s mind, she was sobbing over her freedom dying a little more every day.
Our home had been the cage, and she had been shackled to us inside of it.
It had been so much easier to blame Sonny, to set it all on his back and stone him for it. Because this…
This was eating me alive from the inside.
Our own mother didn’t love us.
She actually…hated us.
We made her sick.
We were cancerous spots on her freedom that were starting to spread.
I sighed, thinking about Sonny Girardi.
That was why he did what he did—hold in this secret after she left. A poisonous secret that probably started to eat him from the inside.
