Page 9 of Haunt Me

Her family had been searching for her since she was a few months old.

They had given up hope of ever finding her by the time we met—by the time she was fifteen. She had beenmissingfor fifteen years.

The whole damn country had been looking for her, but no one found her. Not even me.

I didn’t know she was what the news channels have dubbed ‘Edie, the missing girl’ back then—by the way, she is much more famous than I will ever be, but that is a whole different can of worms I refuse to open.

When I first met her, nearly six years ago, I thought that she was just a kid like me. Perhaps a kid from a tragic or ruined home, a home like mine, but I never imagined the truth. She was nothing like me. Her problems made my wounds seem like mosquito bites. Mosquito bites compared to a dagger wound. Through the heart.

Because yes, someone had tried to kill her. Someone was killing her while we were friends. She was quietly dying every day. While we sat under the trees and talked, she was drowning twelve inches away from me.

And I never knew.

…

Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I notice?

Was I too self-absorbed? Definitely. But I thought I had a good reason.

My father had died. Lots of people die. Lots of fathers die. But this was my dad. This happened to me. And I broke into a million pieces and I couldn’t put myself back together.

The day my father died, I was sixteen years old. My little brother found him–he was fourteen. My mom was on stage, leading the philharmonic orchestra of New York with her cello. I was in the audience, waiting for my dad to come on stage and sing. He never did.

That was the day that I stopped believing in God.

It ended, that day, any faith I may have had growing up.

But two days later, I reconsidered. Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped. Maybe God had done this horrible thing to me for a reason. Although what reason could be good enough for Him taking away the best dad any kid could wish for, taking away my mom’s best friend and the love of her life, and traumatizing my little brother for the rest of his life? But two days later, He sent me Eden.

So, if He sent me someone like her, someone who made me come alive for the first time in my life, then maybe I owed Him my thanks, after all.

But then, it turned out, He had only sent me more poison on top of poison.

I had been right to stop believing, after all.

The only mistake I had made was opening my heart again.

…

Back before my life imploded, my mom, dad, brother, and I used to live in a gorgeous three-story white house in Massachusetts. My brother was a musical genius, as was my dad and my mom. And I, well… I wasn’t. I loved music and had been studying it since before I could talk properly, but I was practically musically challenged compared to my parents and my little brother, James.

So it fell to me to have the Ivy League dream.

As the son of a Chinese mother who was a musical prodigy, and the son of an American father who had done the impossible and made a huge career out of being a tenor… I felt the pressure.

I felt I had to do something to earn my place in the family hall of awesomeness.

I decided to pursue the prestigious college dream—I would be the only one, after all. That ought to make everyone good and proud of me, right?

So I went to a Harvard prep school, which I hated but was apparently super good at, got straight A’s, and made my dad happy. Not that he needed my straight A’s to be happy with me. He never once indicated that he wanted me to go to an Ivy school. That was all on me.

I just wanted to do something to make him proud, and I couldn’t be a tenor like him. I couldn’t play the cello—well, I could, but not as well as my mom could. My mom played the cello, among every other musical instrument on the planet (my brother is the same—it was so insufferable growing up with two geniuses). The media will say that I am a genius as well, but no. No no no.

I know what a genius is. It’s my mom and my brother.

There is no mistaking what a genius is after meeting them. It’s not just someone who has talent or is very good at one thing. It isn’t even someone who is insanely successful. It’s someone through whom talent flows as effortlessly as if the sea were pouring water into a glass. The glass is the world. And they are the sea: endless, effortless, and overwhelming.

But me, I was just talented at music. Big deal. Everyone in my house was. We never cared for the so-called Chinese-American dream of becoming lawyers or doctors, but there was the idea floating around that if someone was gifted with the ability of getting straight A’s at an expensive prep school, one should at least go to Harvard. I knew that my dad had wanted that dream for himself, and even though he never once told me, notonce, that it had been his dream for me or James, I knew it would make him happy.

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