Page 6 of Forget Me Not

My mother comes to the door with a bottle of wine in one hand and a full glass in the other, ruby-red liquid threatening to spill over the lip.

“To celebrate your return,” she says by way of a greeting, hoisting it high, though I glance at the bottle, already half gone, and can’t help but wonder how long she’s been drinking. She’s never needed much of a reason before.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, pulling her in for a reluctant hug. There’s a black brace on her leg that makes her body tilt at a harsh angle; another on her wrist that digs into my spine.

“Welcome home, Claire,” she says at last, both of us letting go as soon as we can.

I step back, taking the free seconds to scan her face.

I can’t help but register the way fifteen years have changed the lines of it.

Everything looks deeper, settled in, soft like the well-worn surface of a leather couch, with permanent wrinkles and a dark stain to her skin.

She looks thinner, too, flesh hanging off her bones like a mannequin modeling clothing two sizes too big, but although her hair is longer and streaked with gray, it’s still the same honey blond she passed down to her daughters.

“I couldn’t believe it when I got your text,” she adds.

“I couldn’t believe it when I sent it,” I admit.

She smiles at me, a red tint to her teeth, and I step into the living room, looking around as two large duffels hang heavy at my sides, a single briefcase slung over one shoulder. It feels like stepping through a time warp, the doorway a portal to the world of my past.

“So, your father told you.”

I twist around, eyeing her from across the room.

“You didn’t ask about the braces,” she says, gesturing down to her leg, her wrist. “You didn’t even seem surprised.”

I bite my tongue, realizing my mistake.

“ Thinking about coming home for a visit ?” she asks, parroting my text with an expression that looks mildly amused. “Since when have you ever done that?”

“He was only trying to help,” I say, turning back around as I clock all the same furniture in all the same places, a sense of surreality descending upon me until my eyes land on a cluster of pictures hanging prominently on the wall.

The biggest one square in the center slightly loose like a wobbly tooth.

I take a step closer, all the memories I’ve tried so hard to forget washing over me now with a staggering strength.

There are a few pictures of my mom and dad only, sepia-toned snapshots from when they met in the seventies; rosier days before life got so thorny and they eventually drifted apart.

Next to those is a shot of us all at the beach, gangly girl legs and a crumbling sandcastle off in the distance.

I take in our diapers and pigtails, our missing front teeth.

Natalie in kindergarten, third grade, fifth grade.

High school. The slow march of time as her face shifts with age, a baby-faced kid to an awkward adolescent; a teenager with braces to, at last, her senior-year picture.

The last school picture she’d ever take. The oldest age she’d ever be.

“Why do you still have these?” I ask, barely realizing I said it out loud as I zero in on the frame in the middle.

A family portrait I remember getting done at the mall.

Then I bring my fingers to the glass, remnants of dust brushing off on my skin as I lean in close, eyes resting on the necklace nestled into the dip of my sister’s throat.

It’s her birthstone, a peridot, held in place by a dainty gold chain—although I know it’s not a real gem.

It’s not real gold, either, because I bought it for her for her sixteenth birthday from one of those vending machine jewelry dispensers.

It had cost me a quarter, I was only nine, but she told me she loved it and she wore it everywhere until that last summer, when she finally took it off.

I look away, eyes stinging as I think about the very first time I saw her without it. The moment I realized she had outgrown it in the same way she had outgrown me.

“Why would I not?” my mom asks at last. “It’s our family.”

I turn around, cocking my eyebrow. This is the kind of delusional behavior I’ve come to expect from my mother—blindly displaying the photos of a family that was so violently ripped apart—although I suppose I’m not one to talk.

According to Ryan, avoidance is a coping mechanism.

I know I must have learned it from somewhere.

“I’ll just put these upstairs,” I say instead, pointing to my bags.

She nods, gesturing to the steps like I could have forgotten my way, and I start to ascend, holding my breath as I reach the landing.

Then I glance down the hall, toward the two doors situated side by side.

Natalie’s room to the left, mine to the right.

The small sliver of wall that separates the two.

The doors are both shut and I say a small thank you as I think about how I’ll simply breeze past her bedroom, spend the whole summer ignoring it completely and convincing myself it’s not even there, when Ryan’s words once again enter my mind uninvited.

Soft and serene like a whisper in the night.

Avoiding the thing you’re afraid of only gives it more power.

I chew on my cheek, taking a few tentative steps forward before dropping my bags in the center of the hall and closing the last handful of feet.

I don’t want to go in there, my skin crawling as I imagine how it might look inside.

The room a casket I’d prefer to keep closed…

but at the same time, maybe Ryan is right.

Maybe my avoidance has only made this all worse, Natalie’s absence pulsing like a neglected tumor. Pinching my nerves, twisting my senses. A sickness that’s grown too big to ignore.

I take a deep breath, placing my hand on the knob before turning it gently and peeking inside.

Nothing has changed in here, nothing at all.

The walls are still the same pale pink, her twin bed still pushed against the one that we shared.

There’s a white desk in the corner, her closet door closed—though I imagine that, if I opened it, I’d probably still find all her clothes tucked inside.

The familiar smell of her skin forever caked into the fabric wafting up like a shove, pushing me back.

I step deeper into the room, leaving the door open behind me and feeling, strangely, like the floor is tilting. Then I walk toward her bed, letting the tips of my fingers trail across the comforter before glancing out the window, the latch on the bottom firmly flipped shut.

I twist around, finally facing the other side of the room.

“Okay,” I whisper, my heart starting to creep into my throat as I eye the old desk, the paint in the middle weathered and worn. “See? This is okay.”

I will my legs to keep moving before pulling out the chair and lowering myself down. My hands feel damp, but still, I extend my arms, placing my palms firmly on the table. Ryan’s words gently forcing me forward.

But if you expose yourself to it, little by little, maybe it can start to release its control.

I look down, studying my chewed-up cuticles, my ravaged nails, as my mind starts to scan all the nights I would lie rigid in bed, pretending to sleep, but instead listening to my sister’s movements in this very room through the wall: her window sliding open, the scrape of her jeans as she slinked her way out.

My own body easing out of the sheets before creeping into her bedroom behind her and helping myself to her stuff like a bottomless buffet.

I can still see the glow of the moon through her window as I tried on her makeup, sticky pink lipstick that never stayed in the lines. The smell of her sweatshirt as I slipped it over my head, limbs swimming in fabric six sizes too big.

“Goddamn it,” I mutter, closing my eyes.

All the old recollections sweeping me away like a riptide I know I’m not strong enough to fight.

We had been seven years apart, the gap too great to have much in common, but I looked up to her.

I envied her. In so many ways, I longed to be her, but despite how alike we looked, how many times people pegged us as sisters with our butter-blond hair and wide doll eyes, lurking just beneath the superficial surface of it all, once you drilled into our respective cores, Natalie and I were opposites in every way that mattered.

Our personalities so different, the disparities so vast, it was hard to believe we were even related at all.

I push my palms into my sockets, letting it hurt for a few seconds before I remove them. Then I look down at the desk, suddenly desperate to keep digging as I realize I’m still thirsty for information about my big sister.

A sister who it felt like I lost long before I actually did.

I stare at the knob on the top drawer before grabbing it without thinking, pulling it open to find the usual clutter: notebooks and pencils, highlighter and tape.

A collection of pushpins and paper clips and metallic gel pens next to a barrette I remember her painting with nail polish once, the sparkly pink now dull and chipped.

I close that drawer, moving on to the next one.

School supplies and report cards, binders and files, and I sift through it all with a ravenous urgency, the last two decades spent starving myself of all these details now catching up to me with an insatiable strength.

I can’t believe my mom kept all this stuff, but at the same time, I’m not actually surprised.

Judging by the state of the house downstairs, the way it still looks exactly the same, it makes sense that she would keep this room untouched, too—although I know it isn’t from some sense of nostalgia, some maternal need to preserve Natalie’s memory like a shadow box displaying all of her things.

Instead, it’s her inability to deal with it all.

A deep-seated delusion that if she keeps this door permanently shut, keeps polishing those pictures hanging up on the wall, then she can keep pretending that nothing has changed.

I push a stack of paper to the side, trying to ignore the fact that this is a delusion I apparently inherited, too, considering I’ve been doing the exact same thing.

I shrug the thought away, my attention now drawn to the bottom of the drawer.

There’s a shoebox nestled into the back, hidden beneath the papers I just removed, and I twist my head, trying to place it from all the other times I’ve snooped through her things.

There’s no way to be sure if I’ve seen this before—it’s been fifteen years since I was last here—so I lean down and grab the soft sides, the corners torn from too much use.

The box is old, clearly, and I slide it onto my lap before slowly lifting the lid like I’m afraid there might be something in there that bites.

Instead, my eyes are met with a collection of photographs. The old, shiny kind developed from disposable cameras or rolls of film.

I move the lid to the side and pick up the stack, my fingers sticking to the glossy paper.

A pinch in my chest when I see the one on top.

It’s a picture of our parents, significantly younger, the two of them standing on the steps of our porch.

They had been high school sweethearts, apparently inseparable since the age of sixteen, though they look a little older than that here.

And they look happy, truly, my dad grinning into the camera as he hugs my mom from behind.

I turn the shot over, their names and the date written in pencil. This was taken before Natalie and I were born, back when they first moved into this house, and I feel my eyes sting at the thought. This proof that their marriage wasn’t always so stale.

I move the image to the back and continue to flip.

The rest seem to be pictures of Natalie and her friends, mostly.

Pictures I’ve never seen before. Her tan lines and freckles tell me they were taken sometime in the summer and I spy a tangle of thin limbs laying out on a dock, a couple shots from a house party with a red plastic cup clutched in her hand.

A few of the prints have those thick yellow streaks on the sides, like the film was faulty or the lighting was weird; others have fleshy little orbs in the upper right-hand corner like someone’s thumb was partially covering the lens, but the one thing that’s consistent is the size of her smile.

A smile I haven’t thought of in years.

“Claire?”

I look to the side, to the wide-open door, my mom’s voice traveling from down the hall fracturing the reverie like cracking glass.

“You doing okay up there?”

“Fine,” I yell, my eyes on the pictures again. To the way Natalie looks so happy, so free. The exact opposite of how my mind insists on remembering her as she haunts my dreams from the vanity mirror.

“Come on down!” she calls again. “This wine isn’t going to drink itself!”

I place the box onto the desk, ready to nestle the images back into the drawer when something in the corner catches my eye.

It’s a little black tube barely bigger than a battery and I lean down slowly, picking it up and feeling the gentle weight in my hand as I realize, with a jolt, that it’s a roll of old film.

A roll of old film that was never developed.