Sophie Love - For Now and Forever

In a flash, Emily ran out of the room and downstairs to where her cell phone was in its usual perch by the front door. She grabbed it, scrolled through the numbers, and dialed her mom. The sound of ringing filled her ear.

“Come on, pick up,” she muttered under her breath, willing her mom to answer.

At last, she heard the static noise that indicated the call had connected, and then she heard her mom’s voice for the first time in months.

“I was wondering when you’d pick up the phone and apologize to me about running away from New York.”

“Mom,” Emily stammered. “That’s not why I’m calling. I need to talk to you about something.”

“Let me guess,” her mom said, sighing. “You need money. Is that it?”

“No,” Emily said forcefully. “I need to talk to you about Charlotte.”

There was a long, heavy silence on the other end of the phone.

“No you don’t,” her mom said, finally.

“Yes I do,” Emily insisted.

“It was a long time ago,” her mom said. “I don’t want to drag up the past.”

But Emily wasn’t going to let her make excuses anymore. “Please,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to never speak about her. I don’t want to forget. It’s not like we have anyone else.”

At this, her mom seemed to soften. But she was as blunt as she ever was. “What made you decide you suddenly wanted to talk about her?”

Emily chewed her lip, knowing her mom wouldn’t like the answer. “It was Dad, actually. He left a letter for me.”

“Oh, did he now?” her mom said, the bitterness in her voice unmistakable. “How very nice of him.” Emily tried not to feed into her mom’s anger. She didn’t want to get into that old argument about her dad. “And what did the letter say about Charlotte?”

Emily shifted from foot to foot. Even after months away from her nonplussed mom, the old need to please her resurfaced, making Emily feel anxious and agitated. It took her a while to formulate her sentence, to get out the words she needed to say.

“Well, he said it wasn’t my fault that Charlotte died.”

There was another long pause from the other end of the line. “I didn’t know you thought it was your fault.”

“Why would you?” Emily said. “We never spoke about it.”

“Because I didn’t think there was anything to talk about,” her mom said defensively. “It was an accident and she died and that was that. What on earth could have given you the impression that you were in any way to blame?”

Emily felt her mind swirling again. It felt so alien to be engaged in this conversation with her mom after so many years of silence, and so many months of estrangement. She felt a shard of pain lodge in her throat as tears found their way into her eyes. “Because I let go of her hand in the storm,” she stammered through her sobs. “I lost her and then she drowned in the ocean.”

Her mom exhaled loudly. “It wasn’t the ocean, Emily. That wasn’t how she died.”

Emily felt like her world was crashing down around her. Everything she’d believed to be true was shattering. Not only had Daniel betrayed her trust, but now she couldn’t even trust her own memories?

“Then how did she die?” Emily asked in a quiet, nervous voice.

“You really don’t remember?” her mom asked, sounding shocked and bemused in equal amounts. “Emily, your sister drowned in the swimming pool. It was nothing to do with you or the storm.”

“Swimming pool?” Emily repeated in a daze.

But no sooner had the words left her lips than a swarm of memories hit Emily in a flurry. She dropped the phone and ran to her father’s study. There she grabbed the key chain she’d found in the vault, with all its many keys. She raced through the house, the noise of her heavy footsteps distressing the puppies and making them yap in anger.

She ran straight out the front door without bothering to put her shoes on, and up to the barn. Raj had removed the fallen tree from its roof, so she just had to step over the broken planks to get inside. She went past the destroyed darkroom and the boxes that contained the rain-ruined remains of Daniel’s photographs, then up to the door she’d seen the first time she was in here, the door to nowhere. She fumbled with the chain, trying one key after the other, until she found one that fit the lock, turned it and pushed the door open.

It swung open and hit the side, making a bang echo out. Emily peered into the new, undiscovered room. And there it was. The large empty swimming pool in which Charlotte had drowned, and in doing so, changed the course of Emily’s life forever.

She could see her now, her little sister dressed in her Care Bear pajamas, face down in the water. The memories came back to her with the force of a tsunami.

Her parents had told them they were getting a pool put in the summer house. She and Charlotte had kept trying to guess where the pool would be, had tried sneaking into different rooms looking for it, then had finally found it in the outbuilding. Charlotte had wanted to swim right away, but Emily knew they wouldn’t be allowed to without supervision and had reminded her little sister to keep it a secret that they’d found the pool. That evening their mom went out and their dad fell asleep on the sofa. Charlotte must have gotten out of bed to secretly swim. Something had woken Emily, maybe the unusual silence from the lack of Charlotte snoring in the bed beside her. She’d gone looking for her and found her in the pool. It had been Emily who’d had to rouse her father from his drunken stupor.

Emily shook her head, feeling suddenly nauseous She didn’t want to believe it. Was that why she had no memory? Because seeing her dead sister had traumatized her so much she’d blocked it out entirely? And her mind, in attempting to fill in the blanks, had turned the guilt she felt at being the one to rouse her father into a different type of guilt, into blame?

It hadn’t been the storm. It hadn’t been her fault. She had lived under a cloud of guilt for all these years for no reason – just because she’d learned from her parents to ignore her problems, to forget the things she did not like about her past. Because of them she’d repressed the trauma of finding Charlotte floating face down and lifeless in the pool twenty-eight years ago, and her mind had tried to fill in the blanks, to explain Charlotte’s absence, picking the memory that made the most sense.

It really wasn’t her fault.

Emily collapsed to her knees at the edge of the pool and cried.

It was the sound of Mogsy’s frantic barking that finally brought Emily back to her senses. She looked up, not sure how long she had been sitting there at the side of the pool staring into the emptiness, but when she stood up and went back into the barn, the sky she could see through the hole in the roof was black. Stars winked down at her and the moon was hazy. That’s when Emily realized it was obscured by smoke. She sniffed and smelled burning.

Heart racing, Emily rushed through the barn and out onto the lawn. She could see the house ahead and smoke billowing from the kitchen window. Mogsy and the puppies were barking from inside.

“Oh God, no,” she cried aloud as she ran across the grass.

When she got to the kitchen door, she went to reach out for the door handle when a sudden force shoved her out of the way. She stumbled then looked up. It was Daniel, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

“Did you do this?” she screamed, terrified that he’d committed arson out of revenge.

Daniel stared at her, horrified by the accusation. “If you open the door you’ll create a suction draft. The flames will race toward the oxygen. Toward you. I was saving your life!”