A Missing Heart(51)

“I can’t,” she continues, her voice now escalating into a higher pitch.

“Why, Tori?” I match her volume.

“Because then I’ll remember what it looked like when I found my mother hanging from the ceiling beam in her bedroom. I’ll remember what starvation looks like in a five-year-old. I’ll remember what the people I loved more than anything looked like the moment they died in front of me.” Tori’s words are quiet, firm, and shattering all at the same time. She falls to her knees, with the papers flying out of her hands, and curls up into a ball on the ground. The time it takes for me to process what she said feels like I’m trying to figure out a difficult math equation. Or as if someone were to tell me the sky is actually orange, and my brain receives the coloring in a malfunctioning sort of way. I don’t understand and I can’t comprehend. Yet, the words make perfect sense. I can’t think of one thing to say right now, and by the looks of her mentally shutting down, I should be saying a whole lot. Though, the things I want to say won’t help. It’s not going to be okay. It will never go away. She will never be okay. And then there’s “sorry”. That word does nothing for anyone.

“Have you told anyone else?”

“No,” she breathes out through heavy sobs.

Her father left. Her mother committed suicide, and her sister starved to death.

“Tori, I need you to take a deep breath, babe.” She’s going to hyperventilate herself into passing out. She doesn’t hear me. Or she chooses not to respond. The speed of her breaths increase, and I know this isn’t going to end well. I pull her heavy body up into my arms and bring her up to our bedroom where I lay her down on the bed, propping her up to help her breathe better. “Look at me.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “You’re going to pass out if you don’t calm down. Tori, look at me.”

“They blamed me,” she gets out. “They told me it was my fault.”

“Who?” I snap. “Who the hell would blame a child for that?”

“My grandparents,” she says between hiccupping breaths. “They told me I drove my mother insane. They told me it was my fault that my sister died.”

I climb up on the bed and I grip her shoulders within my hands. “You know that isn’t true.” The resentment against her grandparents and father is pouring through me, making my chest ache. “No one should have blamed you for what happened.”

“It was my fault,” she says. “I was awful. I should have called 9-1-1 when I found my mother hanging. Just an hour before, I had been mad at her for not letting me buy something so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was. She kept telling me we were running out of money, but I didn’t understand what she meant by that. We never had money problems, not until my Dad left us I guess. I pushed her too far that day.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes for a pause. “I stared at my dead mother for the longest time, watching as the blood drained from her face while trying to convince myself she was only sleeping. I was too scared to call 9-1-1. I knew my sister and I would be taken away or handed over to my grandparents who hated me—if they would even take me. Turns out they wouldn’t.”

The images breezing through my mind are hideous and scary. I don’t know this woman sitting in front of me, not that I haven’t said this to myself a million times in the past year. The truth is, I have only known her outer shell. Instantly, I realize why she has never told a soul the truth. She would be judged, labeled, and marked. The truth can’t be taken away or changed. It can only be accepted.

“We need to get you help,” I tell her. Because what else is there to say? I don’t remember being twelve, or what my thoughts were like back then, how much I loved or how much I hated. I had a good life, with two healthy parents who kept me safe and sometimes in a bubble. So, how can I understand? How can I agree or disagree that what she did was normal or abnormal? What I do know is, shock can cause a mental disruption, which apparently is exactly what happened to her.

“No one can help me,” she says. “I thought when we met and agreed to only move forward from the place we were standing, I could finally leave everything behind me.” She takes a few quick, pausing breaths before continuing. “Having a child, though, has reminded me every single day of my sister, how I watched her die too. I couldn’t keep her alive, so I could never risk being in the situation to care for someone, ever again. It is destroying me. I see my mother in me whenever I look in the mirror—the cowardice and weakness, and whenever Gavin cries, my chest tightens. I feel like I can’t take another second of crying or I might lose it.”

“You never hurt anyone, Tori,” I tell her, feeling that sickness grow in my gut.

“My sister cried for days and days, because she was hungry. I couldn’t take it anymore, AJ. I couldn’t take another minute of her crying.”

“Tori,” I interrupt her. What the hell is she about to say?

“I knew I needed to get her food, and I had no money, so I brought her to the local church and left her there so I could try to figure out what to do next.”

“Why didn’t you just call the police? You were two innocent children.” I don’t understand.

“I was afraid they would have separated my sister and me. We would have been thrown into some kind of orphanage. She was so scared, and I couldn’t do that to her. My sister was all I had left, and nothing was going to take her away from me.” Tori pulls her knees into her chest and wraps herself up like a ball, rocking back and forth as she continues to cry.