My father.
There’s a picture in the file of him that matches the picture that I burned. I think I’d know who he was even then. The man who beat me, made me watch horrible things, told me I was bad, who gave me buttons to play with while I was locked up. And the man who I hallucinate about all the time whenever I hear the word whore, something my mom and Preston know about and are still trying to cure with hypnotherapy.
I’m about to read another page, but freeze when I hear a door open from inside the house, footsteps, then comes a knock on my door. “Maddie, are you in there?”
The alarm was off when I came back. I could hear the television on so I knew she was home. She didn’t even leave her room when I walked into the house earlier. I was kind of hoping she’d stay in there while I read over all these papers and got as much information as I can. “Go away,” I say.
I hear her try the doorknob, but I locked the door. “Listen, we really need to talk… I thought maybe we could go to Preston’s office and have sort of a group meeting.”
“Why? So he can drug me again?” I call back, reaching for another paper.
Silence.
I don’t think she’s left, though, but I ignore her, going back to the papers. Evidently, my mother knew of my alter ego even before she admitted me. In one of the papers she filled out, she stated that I had blackouts for a year where I would become someone else, who I referred to as Lily. That when I was her I was difficult to deal with and that I reminded her so much of my sister that it frightened her.
The longer I read, the angrier I get. Why would my mother let them do some of the stuff they did to me? Why not tell me now about my past? Why I’m not in a mental institution anymore if she clearly still thinks I need help?
Why?
Why?
Why?
“I’m going to make her tell me,” I say, getting to my feet. There are papers everywhere, some that are so professional and with medical terminology that I have no idea what they really say. “I’m not going to let her lie to me anymore.”
You really think she’s going to tell you? Lily laughs at the absurdity. Have you learned nothing?
“I’m going to make her.” I march toward the door, hearing the floorboards squeak on the other side, my mother retreating I’m sure. “Maybe I’ll just be you.” I pull open the door.
My mother is heading back to her room, but turns around as I exit my room. She starts to say something, but then sees something in my eyes and stops herself. Her eyes take a good look at my blond hair and dirty clothes. “What did you do to her?” she finally manages to ask, backing away from me toward the living room.
“With who?” I match her steps. Could I hurt my own mother if she pushes me that far? Could I hurt her like I did Sydney and the guy in the woods? All the evidence says yes, but the idea of actually doing it makes me feel sick to my stomach.
“With my daughter?” my mother stammers as she bumps into the chair. “With my Maddie.”
“Oh you think I’m Lily,” I say and her face whitens like she’s seen a ghost. I stop just short of her, arms folded, head tipped to the side. “Nope. No Lily here. Just your daughter Maddie. Although, technically Lily was your daughter once too, for quite a few years.” I lean the slightest bit forward to get in her face. “But who I’d really like to talk about right now is my father.”
She instantly shakes her head, hurrying around the chair so it’s between us. “No you don’t, Maddie. It’s for your own good that you never remember him.”
“How about Beleview Mental Institution? Should I remember that?” I ask. She’s silent, taking in raspy breaths as I continue. “No. Okay then. How about my traumatized childhood? Because Preston kept a lot of notes about that.” I cross my arms and watch her closely. “I’m guessing it has to do with my father and what he did to me.”
We stand there in the living room for what feels like an eternity but I’m guessing it’s only a few minutes. The clock on the wall ticks and ticks and ticks and finally she says, “How long have you been able to remember?” She sounds choked.
“A while,” I lie. If she thinks I know, then she’s less likely to lie herself. I hope.
The images of being forced to do things against my will by my father flood my head, how he believed the bad needed to punished, how he told me I was bad, how he told my sister and the boy in the basement the same thing. Then there’s the voice of the woman in the background and I can only pray that it wasn’t my mother—that she didn’t know what was going on… I feel like I’m going to throw up. “Why have you been keeping so much from me?”
“Because.” She shakes her head several times, growing frustrated. “You forgetting… it was like a clean slate for you. An opportunity to start over. You were such a wreck when you came out of the cabin. Even though you were alive, it was like you died… and then you took on the identity of Lily and it made things even worse. I thought with the amnesia that you could start over and be Maddie again… and I think part of you wanted to too—that maybe that’s why you got amnesia in the first place.”
“That’s not what happened.” But I’m not so sure about that. Part of me right now would love to forget that Lily exists inside me and where she came from.
I point my finger at myself. “Do you really think that losing some of my memories would heal me? That it’d make everything that happened not exist anymore?”
Tears dot the corners of her eyes as she stares out the window. “It seemed to be working for a while... you forgetting… and you were finally my Maddie again. The good daughter you were, before all this stuff happened… You were always the good one…” She sinks down on the arm of the chair, still not looking at me, and I wonder what the fuck she’s talking about. I was the good one? Then who was the bad one? My sister? “When Preston found you in the road that night… after you escaped the mental institution, he thought maybe we could look at it as a clean slate for you… thought if you forgot the timeframe when… when all the stuff happened and just remember the good parts, like when you were a little girl… like in those photos I put up all over your wall…” She twists a strand of her hair around her finger, dazing off. “That maybe you could just be the little girl who used to play and have fun and smile. Who didn’t talk to herself, who didn’t have to remember all that horrible stuff that happened in that place… who had violent outbursts like her… God, you acted so much like her toward the end… So we… we did things that were… questionable.” She can’t even look at me.
“Who’s her?” I step in her line of vision and make her look at me. “And what do you mean questionable?”
She swallows hard, still not looking at me. “Starting fires. Getting into fights.” She’s avoiding my first question and I want to press her about it but she keeps rambling. “You would get so violent every time anyone tried to make you do something you didn’t want to do… and then there was Evan.” She shakes her head and sighs with remorse. “You wouldn’t let him go either… and the hallucinations all the time…”
I absentmindedly touch the scar on my side and say softly, “Evan... Evan Ryan Wellings…” I’m starting to remember some more. The boy in the cabin, that I counted buttons with, buttons that belonged to the man upstairs who kept us trapped. The boy who told me to pretend to be someone else… the boy who made me feel safe when everything else felt so wrong…
“You refused to let him go, Maddie. It wasn’t healthy talking to a person who wasn’t there like that… who didn’t exist but you wanted to exist because you were afraid to accept what really happened.”
“I don’t understand?” I ask. “I thought I talked to Lily.”
“And Evan.” She pauses. “You don’t remember Evan at all?”
“Evan Ryan Wellings…” I say his name again. It sounds so familiar. “Tell me about him,” I demand, inching closer to her, feeling Lily scratch her way to the surface. I think she might remember him and she doesn’t like it.
“I don’t want to,” she w
hispers, her fingers going to the base of her neck. “It’s good you can’t remember him… I wish you couldn’t remember Lily either.”
“My sister?” I ask in horror and she nods, sobbing. “Why?”
She shakes her head. “Because she wasn’t good.”
Again I think of the woman upstairs and wonder if it was her.
I want to run, yet at the same time Lily forces me forward, making me stay strong and get answers. I get in my mother’s face, ready to do whatever it takes to get her to tell me. “Tell. Me. Who. Evan. Is.” I demand.
She flinches back and almost falls out of the chair. I see the fear in her eyes. She probably thinks I’m Lily at the moment and maybe I am. “Evan’s the little boy that was in the cabin with you and Lily,” she says.
“And where were we exactly, mother?” I pause. “Did my father… did he do something to me, Lily, and this boy?”
She touches the base of her neck, tears slipping down her cheeks. “Your father… he was such a nice man when I met him. A little wild, but he seemed nice… but sometimes people aren’t what they seem… And he… well, he ended up having all these crazy beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, and then he started hanging around these people who sort of pushed out these beliefs but to an extreme extent.” She chokes back a sob. “I should have never let it go on for as long as it did… I should have left him sooner… maybe then he wouldn’t have taken you and Lily and that boy…”
“Evan.”
“He was the next door neighbor’s son.” More tears pour out of her eyes. “Your father had something going on with his mother and they took off with all of you… hid out in the forest…” She starts to sob. “Hid out in a cabin in the woods for years. I thought I’d never see you two again, but then you burned it down… but Evan he didn’t make it out and you blamed yourself for that.”
Pitter-patter… I can hear the rain falling.
“Maddie, please wake up. You need to get out of here. Go get help.”
Fire. Blazing. Flames. Smoldering Smoke. Smothering. I’m going to die. He’s going to die. Watch him burn. Feel his pain. The pain you inflicted on him. I didn’t save him. I just ran and left Evan with him, trapped in the cabin to die.
We left him trapped in the cabin to die.
“No…” I trip back, slam my elbow against the wall. Hard. Tears well into my eyes, but not from the pain. “No. No. No. No. No.”
“Maddie, I’m sorry,” my mother stands up and reaches for me, but I step away from her. “See this is why we didn’t want you to remember. The pain in your eyes—it nearly killed me to look at every day.”
“I have to go,” I say, my voice sounding so hollow as I stare at the wall in front of me. All this time and I think I always knew. “I have to go,” I repeat, then go to my room to grab my jacket and wallet.
“Where are you going?” she asks demandingly as I pick up her car keys. “Maddie, you’re not going anywhere until we talk about this. We need to go see Preston.”
“You and Preston have done enough,” I snap, my voice so angry, so dark. But I know I’ll hurt her if she tries to take the keys from me, so hopefully the anger in my voice will scare her off.
She calls out to me, this time chasing me down the driveway, shouting for me to stop. The neighbors outside stand there, watching in horror, but I don’t stop, hopping in the car and locking the doors.
She bangs on the window. “Maddie Asherford, you will open this door. Now!” She wiggles the handle as I start up the engine. “I won’t let you drive off when you’re this upset.”
I buckle my seatbelt and put the car into reverse, feeling like I’m going to puke. The one thing in my life that made me feel whole wasn’t even real. It was more fake than Lily. And as soon as I drive down that road, I’m choosing to let all that go. What do I want? Fake peace? Or the painful truth?
I take a deep breath and give my mother one last look, thinking about how much she’s lied to me over the years, and how I hated every moment of it. Then I back away, heading to my secret spot, heading to Ryland.
To Evan.
Chapter 34
Maddie
I sit in the car for quite a while, knowing that the moment I get out is the moment that I’ll be admitting the truth. That Ryland is nothing but a ghost. A memory of Evan Ryan Wellings, the boy I lost a while ago and who I can’t let go. The boy I counted buttons with, who told me to be someone else, who I left to burn in this very cabin after he kept me sane all those years. I’m slowly remembering, yet forgetting at the same time, memories so distant, slipping away like pieces of sand in the wind.
It’s not raining yet it feels like it’s raining as I get out of the car. Hours feel like they pass as I walk through the field toward the cabin I burned down so many years ago. And when I approach it, it somehow looks faded, more nonexistent, as if it’s just a shadow of a memory sitting out in the middle of nowhere hidden by the grass and the trees.
I enter without saying a word and walk around the place that used to be my solitude. I can remember now, how he kept us here, chained up in the basement below, hidden beneath the floorboards. Lily, Evan, and I, the things they did to us for years until Lily got a hold of a match, struck it, and the whole place started to burn.
“I was so happy when I first saw the fire,” Ryland says from behind me, close but so far away. “All I could think was either I was going to get away or burn to death and I was happy with either way, because I knew I’d be free.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, staring at what was once the trap door that led to where he kept us hidden. “I let you burn… You told me to run and I did… I just left you.”
I don’t hear him step up, but I feel him right behind me, the coldness that brings me warmth. “There was no way for you to get me out.” I swear I feel him touch me, trace a finger up my back, but it might just be me remembering another place and another time that doesn’t exist anymore, even though I’m trying to hold onto it. “I was locked up with chains. All you could do was run and get help.”
“If I wouldn’t have tried to shoot him.” I struggle for air as I recollect pulling the trigger, missing the shot, the man coming at me, but Lily stepped in the way and took the gun from my hand. After that, there were only flames and the feeling of melting. “Then maybe I would have had enough time to get help before the place burnt down.”
“You know that’s not true,” he says. “You knew the moment the place started on fire, that I wasn’t going to make it out.”
I shut my eyes, remembering how he kept Evan chained up, wanting nothing to do with him, but wanted everything to do with me and Lily. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” he says quietly. “What’s done is done. You need to stop blaming yourself and let me go.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to… you’re the only person that makes me feel like everything is going to be okay when clearly it’s not.”
“Everything is going to be okay,” he promises as I open my eyes and face him. His hair is in his eyes that look brighter, not as sad as they usually do, like he can sense that he’s about to be free from the place. Free. “Once you admit the truth, it’ll all get better from there. You just need to accept what is.”
“I don’t even know what is or what was,” I say, reaching for him, wanting to touch him just one time. Just once.
“That’s life Maddie,” he says, my hand moves toward him, so close, just a little more and I finally feel him. Just once. “No one knows much of anything, whether they have amnesia or not. But they keep on living, just like you need to. It would be a tragedy if the fire ended up destroying all three of us.”
I stand on my tiptoes and lean in toward him, our lips so close. “And what about you?” My hand hovers right beside his cheek, a sliver of space between us, just another inch and I’ll touch him.