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 f**k 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 whispers, 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…”