The Ghost of Sisters Past

The snow fall, the colored lights, the smell of spruce hanging in the air and the buzzing of everyone you know usually signifies a time to be celebrated and hints that preparations for most peoples favorite time of year is underway. I would give anything if this still rang true for me. Sadly, I have not felt anything close to that holiday magic since I was a young girl.

I would like to pretend that all my Christmases were exactly what you would see in a movie. The decorations, the gifts, the family…. But life does not need your approval and will be as much of an asshole as it likes. Sure, I had parents and even a sibling or two but what good was it? At the time I felt more alone than I do now, regardless of my new family.

You may be under some disillusion that this is a story of more cliché value than it is. You may picture me sitting here, staring out a snowy window or perhaps I am wandering down beautifully lit streets watching the cheer of others as I reflect on what could have been. Well, friend, neither is true. That would simplify my life in a way that it was not allowed to be. Granted, it definitely starts off like a story you have heard many, many times before, but it surely does not end that way.

The fact of the matter is that I had a family, and they were themselves all too cliché. An alcoholic father, a mother too insecure to leave, siblings that could not or would not get along and a sibling that was my best friend. My only friend. To retell this story makes my stomach turn with how generic it sounds. Even as a child I could see the writing on the wall, nothing about us was special. I knew kids at school who were treated like shit by their parents too, so what? My aunt was a chain smoker and my neighbor constantly emasculated her husband. My principal was busted cheating on his taxes, my cousin has an eating disorder. All of it means nothing. I have seen good people and I have seen a whole lot of bad people, the one truth none of them could escape that tied them all together? They all die. Every one of us. It all comes to a screeching halt one day no matter how good or how bad you are. Whether you wake up and give every day your all or go to bed every night knowing you are doing nothing with your life. We all die.

My first awakening to this was when my sister passed. Did you see that coming? Possibly. She was not a terrific person, but she was my best friend and I think the thing that drove us so close together was something that she took to her grave and I will take to mine. She was killed in a freak accident when she was 15 and I was only 11. We were jumping from our upstairs porch to our garage roof. We had made that jump a million times, but she lost her footing at the wrong time and fell to her end. She was not so sure about making the jump because of the rainfall earlier that day leaving everything still damp, but I had really wanted to cross over and sit in our ‘’safe spot’’ as we called it. It was this little spot all the way on the other side of the garage roof that hid secretly under the coverings of a willow tree. We would escape there more times than I can remember to get away from my dad screaming, my mother weeping, our brothers practicing to be on the next episode of America’s Most Wanted Criminals with all the wanna be gang violence they participated in.

We debated back and forth for a few moments before I just went ahead and made up our mind. I brushed passed my sister and I jumped first. Aside from a minor slip with my foot landing on my scarf, I stuck the landing just fine. I called over and taunted my sister a little, hoping that would make her join me. She took a deep breath and began singing to herself just like she did any time she was afraid or nervous. She climbed on to the railing, looked briefly at me and then to the ground. I began to feel uneasy because I had never seen her second guess this jump before. We had done this leap even when snow was falling, but something about that day was different. Just as I opened my mouth to tell her I would just cross back over, she lunged. Her foot slipped right at the last second and I saw her eyes widen as she plummeted down, trying to grab anything she could to save herself. I was stuck, frozen in my boots looking down at her limp body like my eyes were not permitted to look anywhere else anymore. I am not even sure how long it was before finally someone saw her. I just remember screaming and tears.

My parents were wrecked. Now that she was gone my dad, who was not hers, would have to go back to sleeping with only my mother. My mother was as clueless to this as she was to everything else in her life, or she at least played like she was beautifully.

Just a month later it was Christmas. Like I said our Christmases were never perfect, but this one was especially grim. My sister had this little black notebook that she was always scribbling in when she thought no one was around. I remember walking in on her frantically trying to hide it when my mother and I would get home from the grocery store or when I would go to get ready for bed. I happened upon this notebook just a week before Christmas.

To my surprise, there was more than one of these little black books. She had half a dozen or so stowed away in between her mattress and the wall pushed way down deep to the floorboards. It amazed me as I read them to find out she was not the only one writing, someone else was writing responses back to her. I read her words of fear and desperation, of hatred and confusion towards my father, of feeling invisible and abandoned by our mother and even funny stories about her day and things she loved. This person wasn’t just someone she confided in to unload her worries but this stranger in ink was someone she was close and intimate with. She was never that way with anyone but me, I read faster and faster the further I got. Her first book seemed like your typical trying to get to know each other stuff, they agreed how nice it was to meet after this person’s car had broken down just a few blocks from our house; on their way to somewhere better I would assume. No details on how this pen pal friendship formed though.

Soon my sister and this person were talking in much more detail of each other and not long after that there was a proposition brought to her.

It seems whoever this was needed an innocent face to go to a house suspected of renting out ladies of the night to go and see if mystery person’s niece was there. There would be a hefty reward of $20,000 if the confirmation and proof were recovered for them. The plan and details of this great rescue was all written out right in front of me, all that was missing was my sister.

I could not believe the surrealness of it all. How could it be true? This kind of thing just does not happen outside of a Liam Neeson movie. After a few days of constant thought and consideration, I decided pretending to be a hooker for a night was better than being stuck in the home of a child molester and a few other idiots that would never amount to anything. It was time to get while the getting was good. The biggest problem I saw was that being a girl of only 12 now, I had never been to bed with anyone. What if I had to go into a room with a man before I could get away and put the requested proof in the location my sister had been instructed to? I had to swallow my nerve and just chance this, I guess.

I armed myself with the sharpest knife I could find in our kitchen and tucked it away in a folded bandana under my waistband and headed to the address on Christmas Eve. Do sex workers work the holidays? I was about to find out… I walked for over an hour before coming up to the spot. The home was a massive place right in the middle of abandoned cement buildings and alongside a very polluted river.

The infiltration and escape are a bit dicey to describe, it all happened so fast. I mainly remember the smells of stale cigarette smoke, the poor lighting and the sounds of different music playing in different parts of the house. I suppose suspicion was risen when they didn’t seem to buy my story on being a new girl sent over but after using a code word from the journals, they let me in. The real disaster sprung from my refusal to undress for Mr. X in the bedroom, after that there was yelling, running, gunshots and blood that was not my own. My knife was left in a man’s leg with the bandana still cradling the handle. I saw the girl in the photograph as I had run through multiple doors, what a maze of a house. The poor girl looked so used and worn down, I knew trying to take her would not be feasible. I did the only thing that made sense in my racing mind, I ran through her room to the window and as I passed her, I reached out and grabbed a clump of her hair before making it out on the other side. I heard her scream out as I went through the screen and landed outside. I quickly got up and dashed across the poorly constructed walkway on the second story. I could feel it wain beneath each stride of my feet. I came to the end and there were men down below yelling and running about, I looked ahead and made the decision to chance a jump across to one of the abandoned buildings that shared close proximity to this vile establishment. The jump only a bit more than my hurdle to my safe spot, I felt confident in my chances. Just as I leapt a man ran up behind me and almost clenched my hood but was too late.

I landed on everything but my feet and blacked out. When I came to there was a very nicely dressed person crouched above me smiling. Through blurred vision I noticed the symbol on their lapel matched the symbol etched onto the notebooks my sister had tucked away. As another person slipped a needle in my arm everything started to fade as I heard them say, “Ah, poor stupid girl. Welcome to Courtesy House.” My promised money was placed in their deceitful hands and my fate was sealed.

As I said, I have a new family now. I think of that little girl often as the years have passed and wish I could tell her there is so much worse than living with just one pedophile and a house full of idiots. Now I live in a house full of pedophiles and I am the idiot.