When she jumps down from the counter‌—‌her universal sign for I’m leaving now‌—‌I say the one thing that I’ve been thinking all night.

“You’re not what I expected you to be like.” I catch her eye and she actually looks a little surprised and a lot curious which I think she tries to hide.

“How did you expect me to be?”

“Quiet.”

CHAPTER 18

Nastya

My mother’s voice. It’s the first thing I remember after I opened my eyes.

My beautiful girl. You came back to us.

But she was wrong.

If Edna St. Vincent Millay was right and childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, then my childhood ended when I was fifteen. Which I guess is more than Josh got, because according to what I’ve picked up on from Drew, his ended at eight. I don’t know more than that, because I don’t ask Josh questions I’m not prepared to answer myself.

I have to go home this weekend. My mom expected me to visit a month ago. I’m surprised she hasn’t shown up here. It isn’t like Charlotte Ward to wait for anything she wants.

I don’t really have much I need to pack. I left most of my old clothes there. I won’t see anyone except my family, so I’m leaving my Hollywood Boulevard attire at Margot’s, which means my feet will be happy for a couple days at least. I have to miss school on Friday so I can get to Brighton early enough to make the appointment my mom made with my therapist. I thought about telling Josh I was going, but I didn’t end up mentioning it for a lot of reasons, mostly because I’m not responsible to him. I could probably make it back by six o’clock on Sunday to get to dinner, but it might be for the best if I skip it this week.

When I walk through the front door of the very out of place Victorian-style house I grew up in, I feel home. The feeling only lasts a moment. It’s not real. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction; an echo of a feeling that used to exist. Just once, I’d like to go home and have home be what it used to be. Then again, maybe I’m just imagining some sort of halcyon days that exist more in my memory than they ever did in real life.

My mother is at the dining room table we have never used except for holidays. She has proofs spread all over the surface. My mother is a photographer, which is kind of funny, because she’s drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s never actually in any pictures because she’s always the one taking them. She works freelance but she’s never without an assignment because she’s really good, which means she can make her own rules, take the jobs she wants, come and go as she pleases. My bedroom upstairs used to be covered with her photographs. All of my favorite ones. I’d sit at the table and look at her proofs with her and pick the ones that jumped out at me. There was always one photo that resonated above the others and I’d point it out and she’d make me a copy. It was our ritual. I don’t even remember the last picture I picked. I didn’t know it was going to be the last one. I could walk over to her, sit down at the table and point one out right now, but I don’t. My walls are covered with new wallpaper now.

As soon as she sees me, she’s out of her chair. I don’t think it takes her more than three steps to reach me and wrap her arms around me. I hug her back because she needs it, even if I don’t. It’s different from hugging Mrs. Leighton but not in the way that you would think. Hugging my mother is far more awkward. She pulls back and I see the expression in her eyes; the one I have gotten so used to; the one I have seen a thousand times in the last three years. The look of person staring out a window, waiting for someone they know is never coming home.

I’m not the only one who isn’t the same person anymore. None of us are. I wish I could have made that different for them, given them everything they believed they had gotten back that day when they found me alive and not dead. Who knows what we would be like now, if my mother had been allowed to watch me fade away from her? She would have lost the little girl anyway; just later and gradually. Not the way it happened‌—‌in one big ass fell swoop. Even if everything hadn’t happened the way it did, that child part of me would still have disappeared. Imperceptibly over time. I just got too old, too fast. All at once.

And she wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

I’m saved by the appearance of my brother, Asher, who comes bounding down the stairs. He’s a year younger than me and what seems like two feet taller. He grabs me in a bear hug and lifts me off the ground. He’s gotten the memo that I don’t like being touched about fifty times but he hasn’t bothered to read it yet or he just doesn’t care. He refuses to adhere to any rules or suggested boundaries where I’m involved. It upsets my parents and pisses the crap out of me in a way that only a brother can. Asher calls bullshit on me and I let him. He’s the only one. He’s not afraid of losing me or pushing me away, because he knows that right now is about as far away as I can get, and he figures he has nothing to lose.

I have an hour before I have to be at therapy. Asher says he’ll drive me. I shrug. I can drive myself, but my appointment is at three-thirty which is the witching hour as far as I’m concerned, so I’ll take the company, and besides, I miss him. Asher might be my younger brother, but I don’t think he realizes it. He would beat the world down for me if it would make things better, and I think he feels like a failure because it won’t.

On the drive, he regales me with stories from school. He’s a junior and a popular one. Playing baseball as opposed to the piano will do that for you. He’s dating a girl named Addison. I’d like to tell him that her name has the misfortune of meaning Adam’s son. He wouldn’t care anyway, because according to him, she’s smokin’ hot, though I have a feeling that’s not the whole story. He can say what he wants, to save face, but I know Asher well enough to know that smokin’ hot will only get a girl so far and then she’ll have to have some substance. He doesn’t have to worry. I won’t call him out for failure to be a douche. There are enough douches in the world. I’m glad my brother isn’t one of them. He’s got two AP classes this year, which is two more than I have, and he’s taking the SATs in a few weeks, so he’s been cramming like hell and I’m invited to help him this weekend if I want to. I don’t know what helping would entail, but I have a feeling it would be hindered by my silence, so he’s on his own. During the fifteen minute ride, I get caught up on the last seven weeks in the uncomplicated world of Asher Ward. No wonder his name means blessed.

I sit through my therapy appointment, even though I don’t say anything, because everyone cuts me more slack when I go. I’m not sure what good inconsistent therapy sessions even do, but showing up apparently demonstrates that I’m making an effort. I’m not. The only effort I’m making is to do just enough to be left alone.

I am an expert in all manners of therapy. The only thing I’m not an expert in is getting them to work. My parents had me in therapy before I even left the hospital, which is the recommended course of action when the devil finds your fifteen year-old and the afterlife spits her back out.

I stayed in therapy long enough to know that nothing that happened to me was my fault. I didn’t do anything to invite it or deserve it. But that just makes it worse. Maybe I don’t blame myself for what happened, but when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they’re also telling you something else. That nothing you do matters. It doesn’t matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway. Evil’s resourceful that way.

The day evil found me, I was wearing a pink silk blouse with pearl buttons and a white eyelet skirt that came all the way down to my knees and walking to school to record a Haydn sonata for my conservatory audition. The sad thing is that I didn’t even need it. I’d already recorded it once, along with a Chopin etude and a Bach prelude and fugue, but I wasn’t happy with the sonata and I wanted to record it again. Maybe if I could have lived with that slight imperfection, I wouldn’t be living with such a huge one now.

Either way, I still wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was out in the sunlight in the middle of the day, not lurking in the dark. I wasn’t skipping school or sneaking out. I was going exactly where I was supposed to be going, exactly when I was supposed to be going there. He wasn’t after me. He didn’t even know who I was.

They tell you it was random to make you feel blameless. But all I hear them telling me is that I have no control; and if I have no control, then I’m powerless. I would have preferred being blamed.

I’ve done the support group thing, too, but I hated it even before I stopped talking. I never understood how hearing everyone else’s shit stories was supposed to make me feel better about mine. Everyone sits around and laments the crap hands they’ve been dealt. Maybe I’m just not a sadist. It doesn’t comfort me to see other people as annihilated as I am. There isn’t any safety in these numbers. Just more misery and I have enough of my own.

Plus, support groups get a little antagonistic when you don’t talk. It’s like you’re pilfering everyone else’s pain, taking, but not offering anything in return. They regard me like I’m some sort of thief. One time, a blonde girl named Esta‌—‌which I couldn’t find a meaning for unless you count the fact that it’s the Spanish word for this‌—‌told me I needed to “put up or shut up” and I wasn’t sure how to react to that, but it kind of would have been worth talking just to ask her what the hell she was smoking. Then I found out that she had been stabbed by her mom and making fun of her wasn’t quite so funny anymore.

I got to hear about rapes and gunshot wounds and hate crimes, people who knew their attackers, people who didn’t, people whose assailants were punished and those who weren’t. There isn’t any comfort in it. If eavesdropping on someone else’s nightmares is supposed to make me feel better, I’d rather stay feeling like shit. I don’t think telling them about my horror story would do me any good. And besides, I’m not even supposed to have a story to tell.

So that’s what it was like every week. I’d sit in a circle and a bunch of people who’d been through as much shit as I had would look at me like I snuck into the club without paying the cover. And I’d feel like screaming and telling them that I had paid it the same as everyone else in the room, I just didn’t feel like waving around my receipt.

Today my therapist doesn’t talk to me about blame. She talks to me about talking. I wish I could say that I listen, but I spend most of the time thinking about how to tweak my angel food cake recipe and proper kickboxing techniques.

On the way home, I get what I knew was coming.

“Mom still thinks you might come back.” Asher won’t look at me when he says it. I don’t even know if he’s talking about back home or just back. “You’re not going to.” He doesn’t even bother to make it sound like a question. Then it gets even better.

“They want you to talk to Detective Martin again.” Of course Ash would be the designated bomb dropper. I know he hates being put in this position, but somehow Asher has become the path of least resistance to me. “She’ll come to the house if you want, so you don’t have to go to the station, but they want to show you some pictures. They know you don’t remember anything, but they want you to look anyway, in case something jogs your memory.”

I stare out the window so I don’t have to look at his face when I lie to him with my silence. I don’t need my memory jogged. My memory jogs me. I remember everything.

Every detail.

Every night.

For the past 473 days.

On Saturday, I meet with Detective Martin. I look at the pictures. Check out the drawings. Shake my head. He isn’t there. He never is. They have no idea what they’re looking for. She gives us another business card. I’m not sure how many we have now.