808 Miles Away From Home Chapter 08
Coming home did not make things easier just because the truth was finally out in the open. If anything, it made everything harder. Now that they knew, the details they had never noticed before started surfacing one by one.
Mom would be sitting in the living room, staring at nothing, when a memory would hit her out of nowhere.
For example, my 18th birthday.
“When is Paige’s birthday?”
Dad looked up and thought about it for a long time. “Sometime in the fall? September? October?”
“I can’t remember either.” Mom’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“I’ve never once forgotten Bria’s. I start planning a month ahead every year. But Paige? When was the last time I even did anything for her birthday?”
The two of them looked at each other, and neither one had an answer.
Bria was sitting nearby doing homework. Her pen stopped for a moment.
“It’s July 12th,” she said without looking up. “She told me back in third grade. She said Mom could never remember, so she asked me to keep track of it for her.”
The living room stayed quiet for a long time after that.
Mom got up and walked into my room.
It still looked exactly the way it had the day I left. She had not touched a thing.
She pulled open the desk drawers one by one, working her way down. In the very bottom drawer, she found a small stack of papers folded together.
They were certificates. First place in the sophomore class. Third in the junior class. Second prize in the city’s physics competition. Honor roll.
Every single one had creases running through it, as though it had been folded and unfolded over and over again.
The one on top, the first-place certificate from sophomore year, had a faint brown grease stain on it.
Mom stared at that stain for a long time before the memory finally came back.
I had brought the certificate home that year and left it on the dining table. The next morning, she made barbecued short ribs and set the plate right on top of it. When I came back and saw what had happened, I did not say a word. I just wiped the certificate off and put it away.
I never showed them another certificate after that.
Mom held the stack in her hands. The edges of the paper had already started to yellow.
She thought about what Mrs. Tillman had said on the phone. “She was always quiet, but her grades were solid.”
Quiet and solid.
Those two things were the reason this family had labeled me ‘the low-maintenance one’.
What did low-maintenance really mean? It meant no attention required. It meant I would never cause problems.
It meant every ounce of energy and focus could go to the other child without consequence, because this one would be fine on her own.
However, being fine on my own did not mean I did not need to be seen.
Mom straightened the certificates and placed them back in the drawer.
When she stepped out of the room, Bria was standing in the hallway with her textbook pressed to her chest. The look on her face was hard to read.
“Mom, does she hate us?”
Mom looked at her and shook her head.
“She doesn’t hate us. If she did, she wouldn’t have left so quietly.”
Sure, I did not hate them. However, what was worse than hate?
It was giving up. It was a child who had completely stopped expecting anything from her own family.
Mom could not sleep that night.
She lay in bed staring at the ceiling while her mind played back the last 18 years like a slideshow, frame by frame.
She had not gone to my first-grade parent-teacher conference because Bria had a fever that day and needed to be taken to the hospital.
She had not gone to my middle school graduation because she was busy signing Bria up for a summer math
program.
In my three years of high school, how many times had she been to the school? Once? Twice? Had she never gone at all?
She could not remember.
She could not even picture what my homeroom teacher looked like. Before that phone call, she did not even know Mrs. Tillman’s name, having to dig it out of an old school directory.
However, she knew every single one of Bria’s teachers by face. She sat in the front row at every parent meeting. She knew the results the moment every set of grades came out.
She had two daughters. One had been given everything.
The other had grown up in the margins, entirely on her own. When that daughter was finally finished growing, she had left without a sound, without a trace, and without so much as a goodbye.
