When I get inside my apartment I go straight to her room even though I know she’s asleep. It’s just past three in the morning so she should be.
She is sleeping but the light is on and she’s curled up in the bed with her head resting on a tear drenched pillow, evidence that she cried herself to sleep.
Next to her is a little journal with the same picture I saw her looking at her sister’s house.
The one of her with her sister when they were little and an older woman with her arms around them. I recognize the woman as their grandmother, the Hollywood legend.
I pick up the journal and look inside it. There are pictures of Summer from when she was little. They go right into her teens and she even has some pictures of Hollywood actresses she admires. There are a lot of Vivien Leigh from Gone with the Wind and then I find one of Summer dressed up exactly like her. With her striking beauty, she’s a dead ringer for the actress.
When I get to the middle of the book the pictures change. Instead of images of her, there are images of Ted, her stepfather. And they’re all newspaper clippings.
I find a clipping from an article praising him with his work for the children in the community. Underneath it Summer’s written the word Monster in red. The next few pages are the same. All with articles of Ted and her defacement of his image with the word Monster or crossing his eyes out. I go on for about twenty pages like that and it ends with a clipping from an article of him getting featured in People Magazine as man of the year. Underneath it she’s written.
While they praise him, I’m still in hell and still in pain.
No one listened to me because they didn’t care.
No one watched over me because they didn’t care.
No one saved me because they didn’t care.
I’m so worthless, I fear the day will come when I won’t care.
Then even I won’t want to save myself.
The words send a shiver of ice down my spine that works its way through me and I stare at them as if they’ve taken on her being and are speaking to me.
The words on this page and the name she christened him all roll together in my mind and it dawns on me in full force why she might have been trying to escape life from when she fled to Monaco.
Ted.
He did something to her.
Something that made him become her monster. I have a fucking good guess of what that something is, but I don’t like the answer that comes to my mind.
It takes me a moment to flip the page and I see there’s nothing more to look at after that. It’s just blank pages but I can see she must have been reading this tonight because the pages look like teardrops must have caught them.
I look at her, noting how vulnerable she looks and even though she’s asleep I can see she’s already in that frame of mind where she won’t want to save herself.
I don’t want that to happen to her.
I set the journal back down next to her and lower to sit on the window bay.
Like a dark angel, I watch over as she sleeps.