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Chapter 3
I come home from school to utter silence. This house feels more like a tomb than a home now. Everything in it feels wrong, stuck, unchangeable. As if all the feelings and things in here are set in stone, never to move or be anything other than what they are again. Even turning on the TV feels strange. As if it’s disrespecting the stillness here, disrespecting Callie’s memory.
Because Callie liked the quiet. She liked the quietness of her room, of her bed. She preferred the peace of staying up all night when the rest of the world was sleeping and sleeping when the rest of the world was awake. She liked when my parents stopped telling her to just get better and do better. She liked when I stopped asking her about her feelings and just laid with her, pretending I didn’t notice the pillow getting wet with her tears. Maybe Callie really just liked to pretend more than she liked the quiet. I’ll never know now.
I walk down the hallway, but like always I can never pass her room without pausing, without looking into it, without my eyes dropping to the spot on her bed where I found her. I take another of those deep breaths, willing that image not to become any clearer than it already has. I try to breathe in calm, but I can only exhale anger. I wish I could remember her without anger, without having to fight not to clench my hand into a fist. But it feels like all my memories of her are tainted. It hurts to remember someone you love and feel like you’re fighting not to hate them now.
I take the last few steps to my room and close the door, as if that can keep the emotions out. I wish. I get into the shower, something I often do now just to avoid how empty the house seems when I’m here alone. Even when I’m not. By the time I get out and put on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, I hear the sound of pans in the kitchen. Ah, the other reason I hate being here now. My parents. If this house feels like a tomb, then they are the groundskeepers. Making sure nothing is out of place, especially in Callie’s bedroom. It’s like they think if they keep everything looking perfect, our lives will fall into line. Still trying to keep up the illusion they’d always projected, even if everyone now knows it’s a lie. The suicide of their daughter saw to that.
They will probably never let that illusion go, so now it falls to me to keep it up. It’s why they put me in therapy right after Callie’s death. Why they’ve been making me go to the support group. Why they are on my back every day to make sure I don’t end up like Callie. To make sure the other daughter, the one who isn’t troubled, stays that way.
“Time to eat,” my mother peaks her head into my room and tells me.
Another thing they’ve started now. Family dinners. It used to be every man for himself. Eat in the living room, bedroom, kitchen, wherever, but don’t expect my parents to eat with us. But now, we need to be united. Now, we need to come together as a family. Or so the family therapist has told us.
I go to the dining room and stop when I see what my mother’s prepared. Vegetarian lasagna.
“Callie’s favorite.” My mother smiles.
I bite my tongue to keep from saying I’m surprised she even knows that and take a seat opposite her. My father sits down to my right. When we were younger, Callie and I wanted this so badly, to sit at this table like we are now, to have some sense of normalcy. Only now, we’re here and Callie isn’t, the one empty seat at this four chair table much more than painful than it ever was when me and her sat here without our parents.
“How was school today Jolie?” my father asks.
“Same as always.”
“And you’re sure you’re not finding the job and school too much right now?” my mother inquires.
“I’m fine,” I all but growl.
Wrong thing to do, if the worried looks they give each other is any indication. But, my God, how many different times and ways can they ask me the same question? No, it’s not school and my job overwhelming me. It’s them.
“Maybe we should schedule another family session for this week,” my mother suggests.
“I actually have a pretty busy week,” I say.
My father clears his throat. “The therapist told us we all need to make sure we don’t get so busy that we forget to process Callie’s… Callie.”
Yes. Process Callie. Because in this house, full of death and mourning, we don’t actually ever say Callie’s death. Callie’s suicide. As much as they want me to talk about every feeling inside me, there are still words they don’t want to hear. Words they cannot yet process.
“I already go to the support group. It’s enough.”
“Ah, so it’s helping.” My mother gives a hopeful smile.
“It is.”
Or more like the guy I met there is. Elijah and I have been texting every day since our lunch, and it’s done what the group and family therapy hasn’t been able to. Just made me feel normal. Like I’m more than the sister of the girl who killed herself.
Although he doesn’t seem to talk much in person, he does text a lot. Just the thought of a text waiting from him on the phone in my room is making this meal feel extremely long. I don’t even know if the lasagna is any good because the conversation has spoiled this entire meal for me. Dinners feel more like an interrogation than a family coming together.
“I’m finished,” I stand up and say.
“You barely touched your food.” My mother worries. “Are you losing your appetite?”
Like Callie did? I want to shout. Because that’s really what makes me not want to spend a second around them. The hypocrisy of it all. Callie barely ate. Callie needed someone to ask about her feelings instead of just telling her to get over them. Callie needed someone to ask her if school, hell if life was overwhelming. Callie needed…them. And they were nowhere to be found.
But here they are now, asking me all these things and more. And all it does is make me hate them more. Had they asked Callie these things, would she still be here? Could she have found a way to cope? Their ignoring of what she was clearly going through only helped to steal my sister from me. And now they dare to ask me how I am, how I’m feeling, if I need anything from them?
I don’t need them, and when one of their daughters did, they chose to look away.
