(i'm gonna try and make this into a series. each girl gets a story.. that is if i can make up different stories for all of them :P)
At first, I didn’t know what she meant when she said that she doesn’t like the name Steve. The four of us were in the living room, catching up while tuning in to MTV when Sheryl Crow’s Steve McQueen video came on. After she said it, we all stayed quiet in case she’s going to talk about it more. But no. She reached for the popcorn and didn’t say anything else. So we went back to watching the TV.
//
“Mom used to have a lot of boyfriends,” she said out of nowhere, as always. I frowned and told her, “mom doesn’t have boyfriends.” But then she told me that she wasn’t talking about mom, mom. She was talking about her real mom. “I was 5 when she started bringing Steve home,” she said. “I didn’t like him.”
Then she shifted her gaze to the view outside the parlor window. But she wasn’t looking at anything.
I told her that she didn’t have to tell me anything if she didn’t want to and she shrugged and both of us went back to our cones of ice cream.
Somewhere in my head, the gears were working to connect the dots of something that was not a pretty picture.
//
We had slumber parties almost every week, and when the ‘incident’ happened, we were 7th graders.
The four of us shared the two beds in the room. I remember we tried to stay up as late as possible before we all basically passed out under the covers. I remember she shared the bed with me because, well, we’re sisters and I had told her on her first day, that we would share everything.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and that she had wet the bed and cried. I wasn’t sure if it was out of embarrassment or something else, but she didn’t move. Like she was afraid that something bad was going to happen to her if she did.
I said to her in a whisper, so that we don’t wake up the other two girls in my room, that it was alright. That I wasn’t mad. That we could just change the bedding, she could take a quick shower and that nobody had to know. It took a while but eventually she took that shower and the bedding was changed.
The next morning, when it was just the two of us in the kitchen, she asked me, “did you know that people aren’t supposed to hit you? Even when you wet your bed?” After a quick pause she added that she didn’t know that before. I opened my mouth to ask her when is this ‘before’ that she’s talking about. But she already turned around, heading upstairs with two bowls of cereals for our friends.
//
We had gym one day and for the first time in almost two years, I noticed a scar on her back. It wasn’t a big one, and it wasn’t very visible. But it was there and I couldn’t help but think that I had been a terrible sister for not noticing.
She saw where my stare had laid and shrugged. “It’s okay, it’s just an old scar,” she said. “Steve was just too drunk sometimes.”
//
One day, my dad came home with too much stuff in his hands. So after he managed to open the door, he used his foot to kick it shut.
We were in the living room when the door shut with a loud slam. Her eyes widened out of shock and for a moment there I thought she was going to jump and hide behind the bookshelf. She looked so scared and I made up stories in my head about how she used to hear things being thrown around. Or worse, that she used to have things thrown at her.
It killed me thinking that those stories I had just made up were probably not just a part of an overactive imagination.
//
After the bed incident, she refused to bunk with anybody else but me during our monthly slumber parties. She would always apologize before we went to bed, and I always told her that she didn’t have anything to be sorry about.
“I never liked sharing a bed,” she said. I had my back turned against her but I could hear her yawning her face off. “But I like sharing it with you. All three of you. I just wish I know that I won’t wet the bed again, you know,” she deliriously continued.
I was too sleepy to respond and was about to drift away, but then I heard her say something else. “My mom used to let Steve come into my room and share my bed.”
My eyes went wide in a second. Perhaps my heart had stopped too. But as always, I was too late. She was already asleep.
I stayed awake all night watching the door.
//
The first thing I did that morning was hugging my mom in the kitchen. Then when she asked if the other girls were still asleep, I cried into her apron. My dad, who was busy reading the paper, carefully put his arms around the two of us, sandwiching me between my mom and him.
“What’s wrong, honey,” he asked, stroking my hair. “Did you have a fight with the girls?”
I shook my head.
Then, I guess, it clicked for them. My mom pushed me away from her hug and bent down so she could look into my eyes.
“She told you, didn’t she,” she asked. I nodded between my sobs. Instantly, I was wrapped in another hug.
“She was just a baby,” I cried over and over again.
//
“Hey. You awake,” she asked me from under the covers. We were 16, having another one of our slumber parties, and this time, it was tent night. We had draped blankets and comforters over the furniture and pretended we were at a campsite somewhere.
It had been a year after I cried in the kitchen, and by then she was convinced that her wetting the bed was a one-time thing. She grew brave enough to share her sleeping space with people other than me.
As it turned out that night, she couldn’t sleep because she kept getting kicks from one of our best friends, and pinned down by the other. After I told her they were extremely heavy sleepers, she finally moved and shared my blanket.
“You don’t have to be angry with her,” she said, her eyes looking at the ceiling. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she knew. She spelled it out anyway. “My mom,” she said. “You don’t have to be angry with my mom.”
“I can’t not be angry with her,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
She takes a deep breath. “I used to be,” she nods. “But now I’m here, aren’t I?”
There was a long pause after that— but not a bad kind of pause. I think she may have given me some sort of peace with that last line. And I remember feeling ashamed because I was supposed to be the one giving it to her.
“What do you wanna be when you grow up,” I asked her, breaking the silence. I then explained to her how one of the sleeping girls next to us wanted to open a bookstore, or how the other one is so good with languages and she wanted to travel the world, and how I wanted to be famous for something I’m good at. She told me I could be a dancer and promised me to watch every single one of my performances.
She told me that when she was little she wanted to open a bookstore too. But then she left her words hanging in the air and didn’t finish what she was going to say. She closed her eyes for a moment, and I observed her in the darkness.
I was selfish about what she was going to say. I knew she just told me that she wasn’t angry anymore. I knew that to her it became ‘just’ a part of her life. But somehow, I needed her to be angry. Or cry. Or throw vases at the wall. Anything. Just so I didn’t have to.
She opened her eyes and I could see that she was deep in thought about something. Then I heard her say, “pretty sure I’m already living it.”
I stilled my eyes on hers. There were no heavy clouds. I saw bliss there, and then it hit me— who was I to take that bliss away?
I got dizzy right away. Ashamed of myself. She probably had cried a million times over. She probably had wished everything was just a bad dream that she could wake up from. Or she probably had actually threw vases at the wall.
So I made her a promise, just like she made me one. I made her a promise that we would all live her dream forever.
So far, so good.
(end)
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