Page 52 of Resist

It’s been twenty years since we lived in that house. The mansion on the hill that overlooked the valley where the train would go by at scheduled times during the night. The one where the conductor would pull the whistle, a secret warning that for those of us on the right side of its track, no one would believe us even if we told the truth.

We may have belonged in that world, but we never fit in.

And I never want to.

I sit in the silent turbulence of my room and try to remember what happened next. Try to fill in the missing pieces when the churning of my stomach already tells me.

But how is it possible that I can’t remember?

Was it that bad that my brain doesn’t want to remember? And if that’s the case, why is it deciding now to bring it back?

On shaky legs, I scoot out of bed. The shower is scalding but a necessity as my mind continues to search its dark recesses and fears them all at the same time. I scrub scents on my skin that are long gone but whose invisible stains still remain.

Sleep evades me.

Every creak of the house winding my imagination into a tailspin of thoughts.

Samantha’s journals call to me. Ask me to read them. To listen to her voice again when maybe I missed something the first time around.

So with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders—suddenly chilled in my house when the thermostat says I shouldn’t be—I sit on the couch and open one of her boxes at random. I stare at the journals stacked on end inside. My sister’s affinity for green is more than apparent in the array of bound notebooks in that hue. The sight of them makes me smile when right now I didn’t even know that I could.

Without discretion, I pick up the first one that calls to me. Its edges are broken, the kelly-green fabric frayed to reveal brown cardboard beneath. The dates on the cover showing when it was written make my breath catch. I was ten and Samantha was twelve.

Toot. Toooot.

The sight of her handwriting brings me back instantly. To the words she’d scrawled on the bottom of her headboard that were kept hidden by the tons of pillows placed there. Her favorites she called them. Words like endure, withstand, strength, persist, hope. All written in black Sharpie, thick letters with doodles around them to help her remember them.

Lost in time, I read through her writing. Most of it is rambling, complaints about things she wanted to do some day, silly things about the kids at school, aspirations she had for our futures . . . but every couple of entries her words make my heart hurt.

“I wish you were here, Mom. Vee and I miss you. I wonder if it’s different for her since she had less time with you than I did. I wonder if having more memories is better or worse? More means I miss you because I know what I’m missing out on since we had nine years together . . . but at least I knew you while Vaughn only gets to wonder what you were like. It’s just different now. So different. There’s no one who . . . never mind. Love you.”

I wipe the tears sliding down my cheeks, oddly comforted that we shared similar thoughts about who missed our mom more after her death.

Flipping the pages, being an adult now and seeing her life through her eyes as a teenager is bittersweet. But the entries become sparse for a time before they return with a melancholy edge to them. An edge that one could dismiss perhaps as hormones being in full swing, but that my mind internalizes and connects dots that have been randomly plotted.

“It happened again today. This can’t be okay. But if someone found out, what would they think of me? He’s him . . . no one would ever believe me.”

“Can you make damaged goods whole again? Or once you’re damaged, are you broken forever?”

“I told my teacher today. Finally. She laughed at me and told me there’s no need to tell lies to get attention. An upstanding citizen like him would never do that. Ever. But little girls who’ve lost their mom might lie because that’s the only way they feel they’ll be heard.”

“If I ran away, would anyone look for me? But if I left . . . who would take care of Vaughn? There’s no way I can leave her here. She’s all I have.”

That’s the last line scrawled on the ending page of the journal, and those words are like a punch to my solar plexus.

I’m unsure how long I sit on the couch, trying to think back, trying to remember the things that seem so foggy to me, as I stare at that line before finally succumbing to exhaustion.

“You look like hell.”

“Gee. Thank you for that lovely compliment, Joey. You look so refreshed yourself,” I say with a roll of my eyes, waving him into my house.

Of course, he’s right. I do look like hell: no makeup on, bags under my eyes, my hair a mess . . . but I got to hang out with Lucy, so my day was better just because of her.

“Everything okay?” he asks, tone lowered, expression softening.

“Yes. I’m fine. I, uh . . . just didn’t get much sleep last night.”

He eyes me for a second, almost as if he’s going to ask more, and I sigh with relief when the curiosity fades from his face before he glances over to where Lucy is engrossed in her daily exercises on her computer.