You want me to talk about my past? Stop shaking your head and stuttering. I know that’s what you want. We’re never going to see each other again, so what does it matter? You want me to expose myself to you so you can feel better about working at a run-of-the-mill law firm as a middle aged divorcée without custody. You only told me the first part, but it was easy enough to guess the second. You wouldn’t be out drinking on a Tuesday night if you had kids to look after. But you certainly would be if your ex-wife fed your kids poisonous words to describe you as she tucked them into their bunk beds and kissed them goodnight.
Yeah, I get that. Sometimes I just want to pretend that all the things I’ve left behind don’t exist. You know, that’s the only thing I’ve ever done. Left things behind. The people that were in my life when I was in high school, I can hardly remember their names. Hell, even the co-workers I had at my last job. Don’t even get me started on my parents. This life is painful, but it’s nothing compared to the living hell they made for me. Whenever I’m driving on the highway and I catch myself thinking, “What’s the point of all this?,” I remind myself that I’m spiting the people who thought they could control me. Who thought they could tear me to the ground for not being like my perfect sister. I guess I’m feeding into their expectations. They always told me that I would amount to nothing, and so I am. But they wouldn’t know. I stopped talking to them the night I left.
Nancy was everything I wasn’t. Smart, friendly, social. She had so many friends. She was well behaved, but not so much that she was tethered to their expectations of what a daughter should be. Her generosity knew no boundaries. She was always busy, whether it was tutoring people or helping an old man cross the street. All this she did without being asked. Not to gain anything, or even because she had a deep desire to do it. She saw that people needed help, so she gave it to them. It was as simple as that for her. I can’t even begin to count the amount of stuff she was involved in. Swim team, Model UN, school plays. You name it, she did it. In hindsight, it was a sign. At the end of the day, when she got out of her carpool from whatever community service project she was involved in or something like that, she’d collapse onto her bed across the room from mine and just sit there for a while. Her beauty was legendary, but it couldn’t mask the exhaustion lining her face. There was no life in her eyes at all. It was like she shed that smiling persona everyone knew and loved at the door. I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who ever saw that face.
Compared to her, I was a nightmare. Everyone knew who I was. The one who stayed out late in the park smoking with the other burnouts. The one who mouthed off to teachers. The skank. The whore. The slut. Whatever you wanna call it. School just wasn’t for me. I was smart, you know. But not book-smart. My parents hated me for it. They told me I wasn’t trying, and they were right. But that’s all they did. We wallowed in our apathy together.
I flunked my classes because I didn’t try. I can’t really call myself misunderstood, because no one really knew who I was. They heard things about me, sure. But they didn’t really know me. I was just Nancy’s burnout sister who was the butt of every joke. I grew a thick skin, but I can still remember their words. Not their faces, though. It’s always the words that stick with you.
My parents relished every opportunity to compare me to her. Every report card, every referral, every screw-up was an invitation for them to ask, “Why can’t you just be like Nancy?” It was always like that. I won’t deny that I was hard to love. But they made a point of not loving me. Every time they praised her, every hug and word of encouragement, was steeped in contempt for me. It would’ve been easy enough to neglect me, but they took it a step further. Not once when they saw me stumble through the door late at night, barely able to stand on my own two legs, did they do the bare minimum of asking what was wrong. They said, “Why did you bother coming back?” Maybe that was why I didn’t care. They did nothing for me, so I did nothing for them. It was a balanced relationship.
It was a miracle that she turned out the way she did. I still can’t understand how she was filled with so much love when there was a complete absence of it in our house. What? Well, yeah, they definitely did more for her. I’ll get back to that later. But when we were alone, after finishing a family dinner punctuated by awkward silences and unsaid words, she would sit me down on her bed and look me in the eye. It sounds like a simple gesture, but no one but her ever did that for me. She saw past all of the things people said I was, everything our parents made me out to be, and just saw me. Not for anything in particular. She just took me in. When was the last time someone did that for you? That someone actually took the time to check in with you, and not just by saying, “How was your day?” No one does that anymore. I could finally feel like I had value around her. It was the only time that we could really be ourselves. She talked about how much she hated whatever new activity our parents had goaded her into joining, and I listened to her when no one else did. In a way, she was just as overlooked as me. Our parents never asked her how she was feeling, or if she needed to rest. They just showered her with meaningless affection and congratulated her on whatever race she’d won or test she aced. Of all of her trophies that sat on the shelf behind the dining table, she was the biggest one of all. The centerpiece of any occasion; the conversation starter for any dinner party. A trinket pushed in the face of an unsuspecting recipient.
It was late that night, and she wasn’t home yet. It was normal for her to get home late, but never without calling first. We hadn’t heard anything from her. My parents were worried sick. They called just about every single person who was somehow connected to her and interrogated them on her whereabouts. Naturally, they found a way to pin the blame on me. They tried to convince me that it wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn't skipped sixth period, citing a call from the school earlier that day, then left for the police station. A few minutes later, I heard a knock on the back door, and opened it. It was Nancy.
Before I could say anything, she stepped inside and turned off all the lights. She told me that she was fed up with all of the pressure and expectations people had for her and that she was running away. It all happened so fast, I don’t think I was able to say very much. I remember her eyes the most. They weren’t still and opaque like they always were. They were filled with hope. In the semi-darkness, I could make out the tears that filled them and slid down her cheeks, glistening in the glare of the streetlamp outside. She told me that if our parents couldn’t love her, they couldn’t love anybody. It sounded selfish, but it was true. What can I say? We were seventeen years old. She told me that I was special, and I deserved better than to be pushed around and ignored for the rest of my life. Then she got this crazy look in her eyes and grabbed my hand. “Come with me,” she said, “and we can reinvent ourselves.” I could hardly believe what she was saying. But I looked around at the trappings we’d grown up in, all her trophies and the chintz curtains and popcorn ceilings, and I knew it was the only choice. I packed a duffel bag full of whatever I thought I might need for the undetermined future, then we climbed over the fence and dashed a few blocks over to a car that she had arranged to pick her up weeks earlier. As we pulled onto the freeway, she turned to me and clasped my hands in hers.
“We did it.”
We switched out our ID’s every so often and never stayed in one place for long. She made sure of that. It was hard to be on the move so much, because for the first time in my life I felt like I belonged somewhere. She grounded me wherever we ended up, and helped me to see the positive side of things when we were struggling. The vagabond life suited us well. We were like children trying on oversize clothes from a mother’s closet at first, adopting personas with a giddy dramatic flair. But it became routine eventually. We did odd jobs to supplement ourselves. Nothing that would require us to put roots down. With Nancy, being on the run was a fun game, not a terrifying reality. What province should we go to next? How long can we go without re-dying our hair?
She passed away four years ago today. I’m grateful that we were together for so long, or I wouldn’t be able to carry on with this coward’s existence at all. When I traverse the same circuit that we drove around the country so many times, I remember the music that we blasted in the car and screamed the words to instead of looking at the monotony of the traffic ahead. It was probably pneumonia. We could’ve found treatment for it, but she told me that she was ready to go. So we drove up to the territories to wait out her final month. You can disappear up there. I dumped her body in a lake, per her wish, and sat by it for a few days. Then I packed up our tent and drove down south to find my next job.
It’s hard to never know who you really are. Every day is harder than the last. I sometimes think of giving up the ghost and turning myself in. But I see her everywhere. In the faces of strangers, in the sun hitting the trees in the fall. She always wanted to get outside more, but her schedule wouldn’t permit her to do it. Whenever I land in a beautiful place, I think about how she would see it. Everything was beautiful to her, so I can’t imagine what those places would look like in her eyes. I’m doing all of this for her. I know she’s looking after me. I wouldn’t feel at home whenever I saw a flicker of her if she wasn’t.
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