Why was I telling him that? “Anyway, things have always been bad between us. I don’t have a single decent memory of her. Not one, Aiden. There was the closet thing, her coming up and smacking me in the face for no reason, yelling at me, pulling my hair, breaking my things for no reason… I mean, all kinds of crap. I didn’t fight back for the longest until I got tired of her shit, right around when I grew to be bigger than she was, and I finally had enough. She had already been drinking and doing drugs by then. I know she had been for a while. But I didn’t care. I was tired of being her punching bag.
“Well, this one time, she really kicked my ass. She pushed me down the stairs and I broke my arm. My mom was… I don’t know where she was. My little brother freaked out and called 911. The ambulance came and took me to the hospital. The doctors or the nurses or someone called my mom. She didn’t answer. I didn’t know where she was and neither did any of my siblings. The hospital finally called CPS and they took me, and then they took them. I don’t know how long it took my mom to figure out we were all gone, but she lost custody.
“I spent the next almost four years with my foster parents and little brother. I saw my mom a few times, but that was it. Right after I went away to school, she started calling me asking what I was going to do during the summer, telling me how she’d love to see me. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking back then. She had a steady job, so I went… and it wasn’t until I got there that I realized she wasn’t living alone. Susie and my oldest sister were living with her. I hadn’t seen either one of them in years.
“I should have known then that it would have been better for me to go somewhere else. My friend Diana’s parents were still living next door, but she was doing something that weekend so she wasn’t going to be home, and I didn’t want to stay there without her; my foster parents had told me I always had a home with them—I mean, my little brother was still with them. But for some stupid reason, I wanted to give my mom a chance. We—Susie and I—started fighting the moment I got there, and I should have fucking known. The moment I saw her, I could tell she was on something. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but she blew me off and said Susie had changed, blah, blah, blah.
“Seriously, it was my second night back, and I had walked by my mom’s room and found her going through my mom’s drawers. We started arguing. She called me a bunch of ugly stuff, started throwing things at me, and nailed me with a vase. I barely saw her grab my purse off the kitchen counter when she ran out of the house with whatever else she had grabbed before I caught her. I was so pissed off, Aiden.
“It’s so dumb when I think about it now, and what’s even dumber is that I still would have chased after her even knowing what would happen. She got into her car, and I started yelling at her through the window when she backed out of the driveway. I didn’t want to get my toes run over, so I went to stand in front of her car when she suddenly put it into drive and hit the gas pedal.”
Anxiety and grief kind of grabbed my lungs as I kept telling him what happened. “I remember her face when she did it. I remember everything. I didn’t black out until the ambulance showed up, which was after she peeled out of the driveway and left me there. Diana had gotten home early and she was in her room when it happened, and overheard us shouting. She came out right before Susie hit me and called 911, thankfully. The doctor told me later on that I was lucky I had my body turned just right and that she only hit one of my knees and not both.”
How many times had I told myself that I was over this? A thousand? But the betrayal still stung me in a million different sensitive places. “Lucky. Lucky that my sister hit me with a car and only hurt one of my knees. Can you believe that?”
Something bubbled up in my throat and then made its way up to the back of my eyes. Some people would call them tears, but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to cry over what happened. And my voice definitely wasn’t cracking with emotion. “My tendon was ruptured. I had to miss an entire semester of school to recover.”
The big guy stared at me. His nostrils flared just slightly. “What happened after she hit you?”
“She disappeared for a couple months. Not everyone believed me when I told them she’d done it, even though I had a witness. I was pretty sure she’d been sober when she did it—that’s probably why she was stealing money, to go get whatever it was she wanted. My mom wanted me to forgive her and move on, but… how could she ask me to do that? She knew what she’d been doing. Susie had stolen money from her too. She’d chosen to do it, you know? And even if she’d been high, it would still have been her choice to get high and steal shit from the people she was supposed to love. Her choice led her to that moment. I can’t feel bad for that.”
I couldn’t. Could I? Forgiveness was a virtue, or at least that’s what someone had told me, but I wasn’t feeling very virtuous.
“I went and stayed with my foster parents afterward. There was no way I was going to stay at Diana’s right next door. My foster dad had me do his accounting work, be his secretary, all kinds of things so I could at least earn my room and board because I didn’t want to freeload off of them. Then I went back to school once I was better.”
“What happened with your sister?” he asked.
“After she hit me, I didn’t see her again for years. You know what kills me the most though? She never apologized to me.” I shrugged. “Maybe it makes me a little coldblooded, but—”