A cry for help and the only person listening got shoved away.
Inside the room, I open the windows, trying to air out the dreadful stuffiness, the heat and flat taste of the air combining to make me feel dizzy. I step inside her wardrobe, seeing the clothes and shoes still on their hangers and folded neatly into drawers. Neither me nor my dad have ever sorted it, deciding what to donate or throw away.
It's a shrine, except the girl who lived here couldn’t stand this place.
I take the shoebox from the top shelf, walking through to sit on the bed, placing the lid beside me. Then I remove the locked diary, dire warnings scrawled over the cover, every inch filled with doodles from felt-tip pens.
I tip the box onto the bedspread, shuffling through the contents until I find the key. A stab of guilt strikes as I unlock the pages and I resist the urge to peer over my shoulder and check no one’s watching.
Of course, no one’s watching. There’s no one left in the house who cares.
The diary starts on her twelfth birthday. The first few entries are short, far more doodles than words, but the longer she kept to the habit, the more detailed the daily or weekly logs became.
Friends and their petty arguments. Boys she liked. The name and signature she’d use if only so-and-so would marry her.
On and on and on with so many jottings that make me smile. The wonderful memories before everything turned bad.
I finally told on himone page begins and I stop, flipping back to the previous page while my heart picks up speed, my pulse thrums in my neck and wrist, my throat tightens until I can barely swallow.
My hands shake but not from shock or surprise, from the dread of knowing this would be in here, maybe not the details but the awareness that of all the things that went wrong when Addie started using, something had been very wrong for a long time before.
The words are so painful to read, my eyes keep flicking to the side, to the bedspread, even to the window to stare at the view I no longer register, as invisible as the patterns on the wallpaper, blinded by familiarity.
Each time my gaze tries to evade the writing, I force it back. I force myself to read each word while my nervous system twangs with warning signs. Page after page after page. Year after year after year.
I finally told on him. I never have to hear him squeal like a pig again.
And the next entry isn’t written in the lavish bedroom of her childhood home. The next entry is written from a shared dorm in a female boarding school half the country away.
A banishment.
A punishment.
And every entry that follows is full of self-hate.
Fifteen, she’s in shock, struggling with loneliness, filled with anger and fear. Sixteen, she’s using. Seventeen, and she’s trading sex for drugs. Eighteen and the entries are few and far between, probably because by then my father had started his tough-love campaign, an attempt that was always doomed to failure because the second half of that hyphenated phrase was missing.
Nineteen and I have to close the diary, the entries sparse, the handwriting barely recognisable.
I can’t read what she wrote because I can’t bear to relive any of it.
Nineteen and I was fourteen, going on fifteen, and I can’t stand to read and find out what she thought as she took the poison she’d been given, turned around, and spoon fed it to me.
Everything goes back into the shoebox, goes back onto the highest shelf, gets shut behind the wardrobe door, then the bedroom door, then the garage door, then I’m in my car again and driving anywhere as long as it’s far away, as far away as I can get from my physical house.
And while I drive, I think of my father and how calm he was as his henchman threw the photographs of my sister on theground. Not displaying a scrap of emotion at the sight of his daughter’s downfall.
With his money, he could have kept her safe even in her addiction. He could have paid for therapists and treatment; even in failure, he could have bribed a doctor to ensure an uncontaminated supply.
Instead, he locked her trust fund and threw her on the street to fend for herself, paying a man to tail her, to take photographs but never step in to help. His sick daughter. His broken daughter. Just another sacrifice on the altar of his ambition, shoved aside for being problematic, for the audacity of being abused when it was inconvenient for him. I doubt he would care that as he let her sickness fester, it infected me.
All the people I’ve blamed and punished, yet the chief perpetrator of my sister’s misery slipped past my attention, unscathed.
I think of Evie, asking why my sister was sent away to board when there was a better school at home. She’d seen something wrong, and I hadn’t been curious even with her prompting. Even after the revelation he’d used her—a disadvantaged young kid—for sex.
The traffic is low, but I still pull to the side of the road, gripping the wheel as hard as I can, letting the waves of grief and loss and utter frustration at my own actions wash over me.
I pushed Evie away because I don’t have the skills to deal with what’s inside me. While she fought her demons, I let mine gain the upper hand.
