808 Miles Away From Home Chapter 06
All three of them took the first flight out the next morning.
When the car pulled up to the building, Mom was practically running as she climbed the three flights of stairs.
She jammed the key into the lock and pushed the door open.
The apartment was spotless. The floors had been mopped, and a single key sat in the middle of the coffee table with nothing else around it.
Mom went straight for my room.
The bed was perfectly made, the comforter folded into a neat square. She opened the closet and found nothing inside except a few old pieces that Bria had outgrown and passed on to me.
The textbooks and study guides were still lined up on the shelf, but every drawer was empty. There were no personal belongings left anywhere. My ID, my bank card, and every small thing I had ever owned were gone.
Mom stood in the middle of the bare room and looked around.
There was not a single certificate on the walls, no photographs, and not even a sticker. The room looked as though no one had ever lived in it. It was too clean to have belonged to an 18-year-old girl for 18 years.
Dad came in behind her and took it all in.
“Where’s the acceptance letter?” he asked. “Mrs. Tillman said it was mailed in July. Where is it?”
Something clicked in Mom’s head. She spun around, ran back to the living room, and started tearing through everything on the coffee table like a woman possessed.
There was nothing.
“That day” She stopped suddenly, her voice shaking.
“That day we came back from shopping, I dropped the bags right on the coffee table. She pulled something out from underneath them, and I thought it was junk mail. I told her to throw it away.”
Dad said nothing.
“That was her acceptance letter.” The words came through Mom’s clenched teeth. “She had put it right in the center of the table and waited for us to see it. I put my shopping bags on top of it and told her to throw it out.”
The living room stayed quiet for a long time.
Bria stood by the front door, still holding the bag of saltwater taffy she had brought back from the beach.
“Mom, did she leave for college?”
No one answered.
Mom started searching every corner of the apartment. She found the little red ledger from the night of the graduation party and flipped to the last page, where she saw her own handwriting.
“Gift money collected at Paige’s table to be counted toward Bria’s school fund.”
She stared at that line for a whole minute.
Then, it came back to her. The $300 Uncle Keith had given me, the envelope Uncle Ed had pressed into my hand,
every gift that the relatives had specifically given to me…
She had moved all of it into Bria’s column.
“How did I…” Mom’s voice trailed off into a murmur, thick with a disbelief she could barely process herself.
It had not been deliberate. She truly had not done it on purpose. She had simply gotten used to it.
She had simply grown used to every resource in the household revolving around Bria, to assuming I did not need anything, and to the fact that I never asked.
In a family where everything was already spoken for, a child who never asked for anything got quietly filed away as one who did not need anything. It had not been cruelty. It had been habit.
However, habit, left unchecked, cut deeper than cruelty ever could.
Dad sat on the couch with his hands braced on his knees and his head bowed.
“I couldn’t even remember what grade she was in,” he said. His voice was flat and muffled.
Mom did not respond.
She picked up her phone and started calling everyone she could think of, from relatives to neighbors to the parents of my middle school friends. None of them knew where I had gone, because none of them had ever paid attention to me in the first place.
A person who had been invisible in her own family for 18 years had disappeared the same way she had lived, without making a sound.
By the 12th call, she reached the mother of the girl who sat next to me in high school.
“Paige? Didn’t she get into some university? I remember my daughter mentioning it. Somewhere down south, I think, really far away.”
“Which university? What was it called?”
“I’m not sure. You’d have to ask her homeroom teacher.”
Mom dialed Mrs. Tillman again.
Her tone was nothing like the night before. The accusations and the anger were gone. All that was left was a mother’s frantic, desperate pleading.
“Mrs. Tillman, please. Which school accepted Paige? What city did she go to?”
Mrs. Tillman was quiet for a few seconds, probably trying to absorb the absurdity of what was happening. A mother was calling to ask what university her own daughter had been admitted to, after the girl had already left home.
“Paige’s university is 808 miles away.”
She said its name.
The phone nearly slipped out of Mom’s hand the moment she heard it.
It was one of the top three universities in the entire country. It was the kind of school other parents dreamed about their children getting into. Her daughter had made it in, yet she had not even known.
