Page 47 of Forget Me Not
“My point is, you don’t know these people,” Ryan continues when I don’t answer. “You don’t know anything about them.”
I nod, swallow, finally realizing he’s right. Other than the diary and the few cursory details I found online, I don’t know anything about them at all.
“You’re making up a story based on a diary written by a kid,” he says. “A diary that’s over forty years old.”
“I thought you just said Marcia wasn’t a kid,” I mutter, unable to help myself. A fierce protection for this girl I don’t even know flaring up like someone struck a match in my chest. I can’t even explain why I’m doing it, either; why I have a burning desire to defend her like this. I suppose it’s because my sister was discounted, too. Because I spent my childhood listening to people make up excuses to explain what happened, biting my tongue as the cops called her difficult, troubled. Impossible to control. As if that somehow meant she deserved what she got.
“Claire,” Ryan says, and I look down at the pity in his tone, my eyes drilling into my damp jeans. “I think you’re jumping to conclusions because you still haven’t come to terms with what happened back then. That you’re turning this woman into your sister, and now you’re trying tosaveher because you feel like you couldn’t save Natalie.”
The sharp sting of tears pricks at my eyes, nothing but sheets of rain on the roof and the low growl of thunder masking my breathing.
“That dream,” he continues. “The one you had on your first night home. I think it’s pretty obvious what it means.”
“Please don’t psychoanalyze me, Ryan—”
“Your hands were holding the pillowcase,” he continues, trudging along, despite my reluctance. “In that dream, you were killing her, Claire. You feel responsible for your sister’s death, for whatever reason, but you need to know it wasn’t your fault.”
I feel a catch of something in my throat now, a sharp intake of breath at hearing those words.It wasn’t your fault.
Nobody has ever said that to me before.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” he continues, but I’mshaking my head now, back and forth, because I know that just isn’t true.
There are so many things I could have done,shouldhave done, had I been brave enough to speak up.
“I think that’s what’s driving all of this,” he says. “Some unresolved sense of duty to your sister. But once you accept it wasn’t your fault, you can drop this and start to move on.”
“But it was my fault,” I whisper, suddenly unsure if I’m still talking to Ryan or just needing to get the words out myself.
“No, it wasn’t,” he argues. “You were eleven years old. How could it have possibly been your fault?”
I sigh, pushing my fingers into my eyes. Then I open my mouth and start to talk, the memory of that night seeping out like the slow bleed of a reopened wound.
CHAPTER 31
It was dark, I remember. The kind of dark that swallows everything, my own hand lost in front of my face as I tried to find silhouettes in the murk: the canopy above me, cast wide like a net. My closet in the corner stretching like an inkblot or bleeding black hole.
“Claire, what are you talking about?” Ryan asks as I feel my body tucked deep in my childhood sheets, the smothering silence like cotton in my ears.
“She was always sneaking out,” I say, thinking about how I heard Natalie’s window slide open; the scrape of her jeans over the ledge and the crank of a car before it rolled down the drive. “I knew she was, because I could hear it through the wall.”
I imagine myself getting up slowly, slinking my way into the hall before creeping into her bedroom behind her. Yet another long night spent reading her books, wearing her clothes. Painting my face with her makeup as midnight stretched into morning, as I tried to understand what it might be like to be her.
“I was by myself a lot as a kid,” I continue, that familiar shame climbing the length of my spine as I picture Bethany sitting in the kitchen, the pity in her eyes as I stood there alone. “I didn’t have many friends, but especially that summer, with my parents’ divorce—”
I stop, trying to work out how to explain.
“Those nights in her bedroom, they were an escape for me,” I say at last. “They were a few hours where I could pretend to be someone else for a little. Someone who seemed to have all the things that I wanted. Who was pretty and popular, outgoing and brave.”
Ryan stays silent on the other side of the line and I take it as my cue to keep talking, to purge the guilt I’ve been carrying for the last twenty-two years.
“That night, I fell asleep,” I say, reminiscing on how I woke up in Natalie’s bed with a start. I was still wearing her sweatshirt, all those unfamiliar smells wrapping me tight like a hug, before I sat up quick, bleary eyes blinking while I turned to the side. The clock on her nightstand reading fiveA.M. “Normally, I would see her headlights shining in through the window. I would leave just as she was getting back home.”
I remember perusing her room in a lazy haze, vaguely wondering where she could be before slipping out of bed and making my way into the bathroom we shared. Bare feet cold on the slick white tile as I stared at my face in the moonlit mirror; streaks of her lipstick staining my skin as I longed for her reflection instead of my own.
“But then, she never came home,” I continue. “I knew from the second I woke up that something was different, but I didn’t say anything. I just went into my room and went back to bed.”
“Claire,” Ryan says. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
