“The cops said it happens sometimes,” she explains, giving my hand a squeeze. “That even the slightest bump against a window can set it off.”
I’m not buying it at all. I’ve hallucinated before and what happened last night was too real to be one. “But I saw someone… I know I did.” I sift through my memories, through the haziness, to what I think I saw. “It was a man. He was tall and he… He called me a whore.”
My mother winces at the word. “Maddie, you passed out. How long has it been since you’ve gotten a good night’s rest?”
I tilt my head away from her hand. “I already said I’ve been sleeping fine... And I know what I saw. There was someone in the house and he did something to me... made me black out somehow.”
“I’m tired of arguing with you about this stuff.” She pulls her hand away from mine and touches the base of her neck. “Get some rest.” She gets to her feet. “I’ll come check on you in a while.”
“I know what I saw, mom. And you just need to tell me—”
She walks out of the room and shuts the door behind her. She’s lying, but the question is why? What is she hiding from me that’s so terrible she can’t even speak of it? Is it about me being in the hospital? My insanity? Or is it something else. How much does she know about me?
I get up out of bed and go over to the closet. She didn’t say a word about the box of buttons either, which I find odd. Unless I put them in my closet, but I’m pretty sure I left them out on my bed. When I get to the shelf, I know they’re gone before I even check. It’s like I can feel their absence. I check anyway and discover I’m right. I rummage through the rest of the shelves, under my bed, through my drawers. I start to panic and not because of the fact that I had Sydney’s button in there and the oval ones as well. I panic because they’re gone. They’re gone and I realize just how much I needed them. How much counting them has soothed me.
“Count the buttons,” he whispers. “Count the buttons and focus on that. Not the screaming.”
But they’re gone and now I can hear the screaming, echoing inside my head. Over and over again. The pain. The blood. He tells me to do things I don’t want to do. Lily does them so much better. She seems like a natural at this. Like nothing bothers her. She tells me I’m weak for not being able to do it.
“But I can’t turn it off,” I whisper. “The pain.”
“Then you’ll never make it,” she replies with a tired smile. “That’s life. Only the strong survive.”
“I want to be strong,” I say over the screams, the blood, the begging. “Just like you.”
Her smile broadens as she tucks a strand of her blond hair behind her ear, then sticks out her arm. “Then be strong like me.” Her other hand moves toward me and she hands me a knife. “Make me bleed,” she says. “And don’t feel bad about it.”
I shake my head in horror. “I can’t.”
She gives me this all-knowing smile. “I knew it.” She starts to put the knife behind her. “And he knows it too. That’s why he always picks you to go up there. Because you never fight back.”
“Don’t listen to her,” the boy says from behind me. He’s sitting in the corner in the shadows, tied up as usual. “You don’t want to be like her.”
I want to listen to him, but hearing Lily doubt me so much makes me want to hurt her, bleed the doubt right out of her. So even though it makes me feel sick to my stomach, I take the knife from her and with a trembling hand, I cut and for the briefest moment, if feels right, just like he always told me it would.
“Wow,” Lily says, cupping her wrist with wonder on her face. “I really didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Me neither,” I whisper, my voice faint as I watch the blood drip from her wrist to the floor and paint the concrete with dots. I wish I could erase them somehow, erase how easy it was to hurt her.
The memory fades and I look down at my wrist for a scar, knowing that if I slit Lily’s I had to have done it to myself. But my skin is smooth and flawless, the only thing on it is a powerful vein carrying blood, the beat of it matching the screaming still streaming through my head over and over again.
“Mom,” I shout as I sink onto my bed, trying to breathe through the noise. “Mom, get in here.”
Moments later the door flies open and she rushes in. Her eyes grow big as she takes in the sight of me, cupping my wrist, my skin damp, my eyelids wanting to close and shut out the noise. “Jesus, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” she asks, examining me over.
I shake my head, my fingernails digging into my own skin. “No, I just need my buttons.”
There’s a pause. It’s only the beat of my heart, but it seems like a lifetime passes by. I’ve said my secret aloud, admitted how much I need those buttons. But the real shocking part is, she doesn’t look the least bit shocked.
“I threw them away,” she says in a firm voice, then she turns away without a second glance back, leaving me to drown in the screams.
Chapter 20
Maddie
The screaming never leaves my head, but starts to wear on me. Like a song you hate when you first hear it, but then after listening to it several times, you start to understand the meaning. The screams have a meaning. They’re my past. They represent a torturous time in my life¸ where I was hurt, where I hurt people.
But eventually I become restless at the lack of movement in my life and fake conversations my mother tries to have with me. She pretends as if nothing happened, as if I didn’t see a man in our house, as if the alarm never went off, as if her daughter doesn’t need a box of buttons to make her feel better. To her, everything is perfect.
She’s fucking delusional. Always has been.
The longer it goes on, the more Lily gets restless and starts whispering to me more and more. She tells me not to hide from the world. That hiding is for the weak and that I need to get the hell out of the house and away from my mother. She sounds an awful lot like the girl in the memory and even though there’s no scar, I’m coming to the conclusion that it was her. That I talked to her then in front of a boy who seemed to know about us both. So who was the boy? I want to find out. I want to find out everything. Lily tells me to do so then. That if I want to remember things, then find a way to remember, instead of running away from the truth. And if I really want to remember who I used to be, the girl the detective was talking about, the girl in my repressed memories, then figure out a way—do something about it. Like it’s that easy.
And what about the man I saw. I’m not sure, but I know it had to be real. I even found bruise marks while I was taking a shower the next day and there was a bump on the back of my head, like I’d been hit hard by something.
One day, during one of my mother’s rare trips out of the house to restock the cupboards, Lily gives me an idea to attempt to get some answers. I start searching the house, for what I’m not sure. Photos and items that will show me what I already think I know. That behind the perfect daughter my mother has tried to convince me I am, I’m really a wild, confused girl who has no set identity.
I begin in the basement where my mother stores a lot of boxes. I don’t find much there, other than old papers, her yearbooks, old clothes. So I work my way to the upper floor and search my mother’s bedroom. I don’t come across anything, until I’m snooping around on the top shelf of the closet. There’s nothing there, but what I do notice is the entrance to the crawl space. It takes me a moment to get up onto the shelf, the wood creaking beneath my weight. So I hurry and push open the entrance and peek my head in quickly before the shelf gives out. I end up tumbling ungracefully onto the floor. It’s dusty and dark, full of insulation that makes my skin itch as I feel around blindly for… something. I’m not even sure what I expect to find, but I do find something. And envelope that’s sort of heavy. I knew that fucking woman was hiding something.
Clutching it in my hand, I duck out of the crawl space, shut it, and carefully climb down off the shelf. Then I go back into my room, lock the door and shut the c
urtains as paranoia sets in. I have something in my hand I’m not supposed to. I can feel it under my skin, deep inside my bones, and behind the veil that hides my memories.
Why are you hesitating?
“Because I’m afraid.”
Why, though? What exactly do you think is in there? She knows just like I know. I don’t even know how I know, but I do.
I stare down at my hand, clenched up, knuckles white as I grasp onto the bulky envelope. “Answers to my past.”
Don’t be afraid. Open it and find out.
I swallow the lump in my throat and then open up the envelope, dumping the contents out onto my unmade bed. It’s stuffed with papers and photos and a few larger, heavier objects at the bottom—a hospital band, a few buttons, and a key. The papers are, my social security card, passport, a small stack of photos and two birth certificates. The first one is for Maddie Asherford. My parents’ names are listed: Madison May Asherford and Markels Wellfordton. I never knew my mother took her maiden name back. I move to the next one, figuring it’s my mother’s, but it’s not. Lily Asherford, born the same day only a year earlier by the same parents as my own, which would make her my sister.
“What the hell?” I pick up my birth certificate and examine it closely. Lily is extremely quiet, as if she senses something bad is about to happen. “What is this?” I turn both of them over and compare them from front to back. They both look exactly the same, but one of them has to be a fake. It has to be. Either that or I had a sister who no one ever bothered to tell me about.
Keep going.
I set the birth certificate down and pick up the hospital band, which has the name Maddie Asherford and the date of when I was in the hospital six years ago. Shaking my head, I set that down and pick up the buttons. They’re all different sizes, shapes, colors. There’s three total and I wonder if they’re mine, wonder if my mom knows about my weird button obsession. I drop the buttons down on the bed, one by one they hit the mattress like little raindrops.
One by one the buttons fall and each one makes me feel safe as I count them. They distract me, even though they belong to him. They’re all I have in this world. “I have no one.”
“That’s not true,” the boy says, his voice so familiar, yet so far away. Distant. I can smell the scent of flowers flowing from outside. Something so beautiful, yet I hate the smell, because every time I smell them it means I’m really with him, not matter how much I block it out. “You have me. As long as you think of me, we can be whoever we want to be.”
“I don’t want to be me anymore.” I can smell the scent of cigarettes, the boy fading from my view.
Hold onto him.
“Let him go.” Sitting in the shadows of the small room, so confident, so content with all the screaming that seems to be echoing around us is a girl who looks so much like me. Long blond hair and able to smile through all of this. I wish I was her. “Don’t be weak Maddie. Let him go and get through this yourself, otherwise you’re going to turn into that weak girl again.”
I hesitate, deciding what I want. Good. Bad. Who am I? When I’m with Lily, I’m bad but it feels okay. But when I’m with the boy, I’m myself, I’m Maddie, and it feels right but in the most painful way.
Finally I reach for him, refusing to let him fade away from me. I won’t focus on the screaming, on the scent of the man, his voice, what he tells me to do, what he does to those girls, to me, to the boy. But it’s so hard to keep reaching for him. ”I’m too tired… too broken.”
But he manages to get a hold of my hand and the warm contact of his skin makes me feel at peace with myself, not so cold and hollow. So dirty. So wrong. So Lily. “You’re going to be okay.”
I glance over at the girl in the corner, so confident, so strong. She doesn’t fear the man as much as I do and I know she’d help me if she could. “But I want to become her and that makes me crazy.”
He shakes his head with a sad smile on his lips and I wish the sunlight would hit his face so I could see his eyes. “You’re only crazy if you think you’re crazy.”
I blink from the memory, the scent of lilies still lingering in the air. For a moment, I swear they surround me, white flowers growing from the grass, and I’m back in the place with the girl and the boy, fighting not to hold onto reality.
But soon it fades and I’m back in the moment. Taking a deep breath, I move to the photos and instantly discover why my mother hid them from me. They’re of me when I was younger, early teens, and I look very similar to the girl in the photo I found in Bella’s. Long blond hair just like the detective said, just like in some of the memories, just like my Lily. Piercing’s in my nose and lips, eyebrows, and my ears are studded heavily. I’m dressed in black, a short skirt, boots, and a crop top that shows my ribcage. Right where my scar is now, there used to be a tattoo, cursive font that traced the name Evan.
I touch my side and whisper, “Evan.” It rolls off my tongue, thick like honey and makes my stomach feel like it’s igniting in flames. “I don’t understand this.” I want to cry, but Lily won’t allow me to let tears fall. She’s just like the girl in the memory, making me be stronger than I want to be.
“Who’s Evan?” I wonder. “And why is there a scar where his name is now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he the boy in my memories? Did I have his name tattooed on my side, but when I got in the accident it was ruined?”
Go to the last item.
I stare at the key sitting on the bed, engraved with the number fourteen, and I touch the scar on my palm absentmindedly.
What are you waiting for? Pick it up.
“I’m afraid.” My voice is unsteady.
Of what.
“Of what it is… what it means… about me,” I say. Taking a deep breath, I slowly move my fingers for the key. The metal stings against my skin, icy cold. The sensation shoots up my arm and brands my mind. Scorching hot images brand my mind. I’ve held the object in my hand before and it’s not just the recollection that proves it. I know because it matches the shape of the scar on the palm of my hand. I clutched this very key that night in the road. That night six years ago when the rain poured down on me and the stranger who tried to take it from my hand. But it’s more than that.
With my hand open, I hold the key in my hand. It’s long and slender, silver with lines and diamonds fitting perfect on top of the scar, the numbers matching up perfectly. It makes my skin tingle—makes my mind tingle... makes my whole body tingle… Room 14…
Pitter-patter…. Pitter-patter… Pitter-patter… the rain crashes against the earth… through it, there’s a spark. I’ve seen it before. Heard the voice that follows me, calls out my name, shouts at me to stop! As I look back, I see bright orange flames, scorching through the trees and toward the sky, so wild that even the rain can’t even drown it out.
Don’t be afraid… just run. We need to run! Now! Before they catch us and lock us back up again.
I pause in the trees, coming to a stop. “Us? But I wasn’t locked up,” I say to Lily, standing beside me, her long blond hair wild, her eyes reckless as she scans the trees for a way out. “Just you.”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “That’s always been your problem.” She ducks under the trees and shouts out. “You listen to what everyone else tells you instead of seeing it for yourself.”
“What does it mean… why was I running with it that night… and who was I running from?” I ask, tracing my finger across the jagged edge of the key. A solid steel door appears in my head with the number fourteen painted on it. “Does this go to the hospital room I was in?” As soon as I say it, I pause. In the memory, Lily told me that I was locked up, but I said I wasn’t. She said I believed what everyone told me and never saw things for myself. “But how can I ever see things for myself when I’m so blind… I can’t even remember anything.”
Because you repressed it yourself. Not because it was stolen from you.
She’s right, but still, at this point I th
ink if I could actually remember, I would. Just to have some answers.
“Do you know what I did that night when I got hit by the car?” I ask, enfolding my fingers tightly around the key. “Do you know what happened before all of that? How I escaped the hospital… why I was there?”
I know as much as you. You’re mind is my mind. If you don’t want to remember then neither do I.
I feel my legs carrying me to the mirror on their own accord. “But I don’t know anything.” I study myself in the mirror, imagining myself as blond like the detective said, imagining myself as someone else. “Other than these pieces that don’t make any sense.”
You don’t know anything because you chose to forget. Everything you do, you chose to do.