My first memories aren’t of my mother, but of my grandparents. They were already old even when I was a toddler, but they seemed so full of life and joy at having me in their lives, and until I was six, they were my world.
But then my mother came back. She had run off years ago with someone, and when she returned, it was with a new baby. A little sister for me that she called Amberlyn. And before I knew what was happening, I was whisked away from my old life by a woman I didn’t really know to a different house, a different family, a different life.
In those early days, I felt like Dorothy when the house finally landed in Oz. The world was similar, even familiar in some ways, but the things that were the same only made the rest more disorienting. This was my mother’s house, her world, not mine. And just like everything else around me now, she was a stranger.
Children adapt quickly though. I'd had only had a few weeks in the first grade at my old school, and while my new school was old and rundown, some of the other kids were nice enough. After a month, I had a couple of friends and was starting to get used to living with my mother, even if I was still a little afraid of her.
Not because of anything she did, really—at that point, she didn’t do anything that six year-old me could point to and say that was bad or really that different than my grandparents or other people I knew. She kept me fed and clothed. She didn’t abuse me and made me take baths and go to bed at a reasonable hour most nights. And once I accepted this wasn’t a short-term change, I think I made peace with the grief of losing my old life, even if I still missed my grandparents terribly. That made it easier to accept this new life, but I was still slow to accept her. Not because she was loud or cruel, but because she was so quiet, so pensive. I could see she was wound so tight I worried she might break at any moment, and I had no idea what might happen to me if she flew apart.
But time wears down so much, doesn’t it? I never lost some level of fear and anxiety, but by the next summer, they no longer registered most of the time. And my mother, while still strange, was no longer a stranger. I’d started to trust her a little and love her more, if only because I didn’t have many other options. When she told me the last day of first grade that my grandparents had passed away in a fire the month before, I cried for them and for me, and she held me and stroked my hair. Told me it was going to be okay. That I had her and my little sister too. Burying my face in her chest, I nodded and tried to ignore the panicked fluttering in my heart.
Between ages seven and nine, things were normal. Amberlyn was growing fast and growing on me faster. She followed me around all the time back then, and I didn’t mind a bit. I was proud to be her big brother, and I felt like I was making up for some of our mother’s indifference toward her as well. It was so strange—my mother took care of her well enough, but she never spent time with her beyond what was strictly necessary, never showed any real emotion toward her other than…well, looking back on it, I think it was some kind of tense distaste, though at the time it just came across as resentment. Either way, I felt sorry for Amberlyn, and I loved her.
And then one night, my mother woke me up to help kill my sister.
I was terrified, of course. I was a week shy of ten and not stupid. When she shook me awake and led me into the bathroom with the tub already running, I knew something was wrong. When I leaned over and saw Amberlyn in the bottom, unconscious and already mostly covered by several inches of water, I tried to pull away as I felt wet creep across the front of my pajama pants.
“No,” my mother whispered, her face gnarled into a hard frown. “No, there’s no time for that. You have to help me with this. You have to learn it.”
I yanked again at my arm, but her grip was too strong. “What are you doing to her?”
She sighed. “What must be done.”
With that, she pulled me closer and picked me up as she moved toward the tub and leaned us both over. The water was almost to Amberlyn’s mouth and nostrils now. My mother grabbed me at the wrist and forced my hand onto my four year-old sister’s arm as she whispered in my ear.
“When she sucks in water, she might wake up. Try to struggle. That’s when we must hold her down. Hold her under until it’s done.”
“No…I…why are…”
She gave my wrist a painful twist. “No questions. You’ll do what you must, just like I do. Now keep your hand…” My mother broke off as Amberlyn sputtered water and began to sit up. Grimacing, she pushed my sister back down below the water line while forcing my hand against the toddler’s flailing arm. I just remember crying after that, and when Amberlyn was finally still, my mother taking me back to my room, telling me I did good and that this was just for us. To not talk about it outside our family.
Somehow I fell back asleep in the blue-grey morning hours, and when I got up to get ready for school, I was half-convinced it had all been a nightmare. My stomach was in knots as I crept down the hall from my room to the bathroom, but I kept telling myself I was just being silly. That Amberlyn was probably already downstairs eating breakfast with Momma. It had all just been…
She was still in the tub.
The water had been drained away, but as I stepped closer, I saw her grey skin and pale, sightless eyes staring up at me as I turned to the sink to vomit. Wiping my mouth, I backed out of the bathroom as quietly as I could manage and slipped out to the bus stop without ever seeing my mother at all.
Once I got to school, I told my teacher. At first she thought I was lying, but when I started crying, she carried me to the principal. I was terrified they would just call my mother and send me home, but to their credit, they didn’t. They called child protective services and the police, and by lunchtime I’d been talked to by both. Everyone was very sympathetic and kind until a call came in. Police had gone and done a welfare check at the house.
Amberlyn was alive and well.
I could tell the moment everyone went from being concerned to being irritated, though they tried to hide it for the most part. I argued with them. Told them it had to be a mistake or a trick. That I’d seen my little sister. I’d been there when our mother killed her.
But no. Apparently, the cops at the house had seen Amberlyn themselves, and while I wasn’t being officially suspended, the principal had talked to my mother and suggested I stay home a few days to “sort things out”.
The teacher actually got a substitute and drove me home herself. She was a nice lady, but I could tell she didn’t believe me now either. She told me on the drive about how I needed to always be honest. That telling lies could hurt people, and my mother, still fairly new to town with two kids to raise by her lonesome, didn’t need any more hurt or worry than she already had.
I just stared out the window, dreading every mile that crawled by and brought me closer back to her. I half-expected her to scream at me, attack me even, as soon as I got out of the car. Maybe then they would understand that I had told the truth.
But when we pulled into the driveway, my mother and Amberlyn were there waiting. She was smiling as my little sister waved at me. It didn’t make sense. I hadn’t imagined all of that had I? I felt a new twist in my guts. Was there something wrong with me?
I got out of the car and my mother swept me up in a big hug, telling me that it was all going to be okay. That we were going to get me whatever help I needed. That she loved me so, so much. That she did, and so did Amberlyn. I felt a strange mix of fear and embarrassment and gratitude. Maybe it was me after all. Maybe I was crazy and imagined it all?
After a couple of minutes of awkward conversation, my teacher drove away as I held my mother’s hand and we waved. When she’d passed out of view, my mother shook me free and looked down with a frown.
“I told you not to say anything.”
I spent the next few weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop. Anger or punishment or violence. But there was none of that. My mother didn’t mention it again, and terrified of talking about it now, neither did I.
I did try bringing it up to Amberlyn once, but she just giggled and said I was silly. After that…well, my little sister seemed the same as before, and I tried not to treat her different, but I couldn’t help it. Either something was wrong with me and I’d imagined it, or something was wrong with her. Because if it had all really happened, she had been dead.
The next two years were a period of brittle peace in our house. Amberlyn started school and got her own friends, while I became desperate to spend time with mine whenever I could. I made an art out of playing sports, doing extracurriculars, sleeping over at friends' houses. I’d learned to not say anything bad about my mother, not that I had anything new to say, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be in a house with her anymore than I could help.
But there are limits to staying away when you’re a kid. Most nights I was still at home, and over time, I began to doubt myself more and more as the edges of those memories began to soften and fade. One night I lay in bed thinking about everything and feeling guilty. We’d all had dinner and watched t.v. together, and for a few hours everything had felt like what I imagined normal to be like. Maybe that was just it. They were normal and I was the weird one. The one messing everything up.
After all, my mother was still a strange woman, but she wasn’t unkind. And despite all the trouble I’d caused, I could tell I was still her favorite. And Amberlyn…she was older now and seemed happy a lot of the time when I saw her at school, but at home…I saw her growing stranger in her loneliness and her close proximity to our mother. With me avoiding her most of the time, all Amberlyn had was her, and I was afraid she was like food left in a fridge too long, picking up the oddities of the things around her. Unless, of course, the odd thing in the house was m-
“Get up. It’s time.”
I let out a short yell as I turned over to see Momma crouched next to my bed. I shouldn’t have known what she meant, but I did. Some part of me, small and hard and buried beneath all the self-doubting bullshit, had always known.
She was going kill Amberlyn again.
This time, she used a hammer. Amberlyn was out cold and tied to a tree at the woodline of the yard, and my mother demanded that I take the first swing. Told me it was my duty. That it would get easier after the first time. When I refused, she tried to grab me and force me to hit my sister.
But I was bigger now. Stronger. And so I fought her off and ran for the house. I could hear the first wet thuds of the hammer before I made it inside.
I tried to call 911, but my mother was one step ahead of me. The phone was dead in the kitchen, and when I tried the one in her room, it was too. I was turning back to run out of the room, out of the house, to go find someone to help somewhere, anywhere, when I saw my mother standing in the doorway to her bedroom. She still had the hammer, now coated with blood, hair and torn meat, dangling from one hand, and her arms and chest were splattered in red.
I knew that was it. The end. She was going to come in for me, and either she was going to kill me or I was going to kill her. And while the thought terrified me, I welcomed it in a way. Anything for it to be over.
Instead, she stepped back and shut the door, locking it.
All of the windows had “security bars” on them. They had been like that since I’d first been brought there at six, so I barely noticed them most of the time. Trapped in that room for the next day, I had plenty of time to think about those bars as I tried to get past them. Plenty of time to consider how much the windows and doors, the alarm system and the locks, were all closer to a prison than the homes of friends I’d visited.
When I was freed the following afternoon, it was Amberlyn that let me out.
She gave me a hug and told me she’d missed me. I lied and said I was happy to see her. Tried to not show how much my skin was crawling until I could slip back upstairs to my bedroom and lock the door.
After that time, Momma quit trying to get me to help kill my sister, but she didn’t hide it from me either. I always heard or saw some of it. Amberlyn was burned to death when I was fourteen. Decapitated when I was fifteen. At seventeen, Momma tied her to the same tree as before and then yanked her head off with a chain and her pickup. There were even a couple of times I saw traces left behind that my mother had missed during her meticulous clean-ups. But I just ignored them now. It didn’t matter. Amberlyn always came back a few hours later like some undying revenant.
Yet despite it all, I was the true ghost in the house. I ate my meals in my room mostly, and any interaction with either of them was always guarded and tense. There were still times when I wondered if I was the crazy one, but I’d decided if I was, I didn’t care. I just wanted to not be terrified all the time.
That’s why I started working when I was fourteen, and by seventeen I had saved up twelve thousand dollars. Enough to get me away and let me survive until I got into college or found a steady job. I’d pushed for extra credits the last two years of high school, so I already had enough hours to graduate by January of my senior year. When I went to my principal and asked for permission to go stay with my ailing grandparents out of state the last part of the year, he didn’t ask too many questions. He’d been principal there a long time, and if he knew I was lying…well, maybe he figured I had my reasons. He said I could call in and give them an address and they’d mail me my diploma when summer came.
I travelled halfway across the country and got a job while going to a cheap community college. Two years later I had the grades and the time in-state to transfer to a state school as a resident. I went through fast again, though this time it wasn’t because I was running from something, but because I was running toward it. A new life, free from the nightmares of a childhood I felt I’d never truly understand. A mystery I just wanted to forget.
I got a scholarship to pay for part of graduate school, and as of now I’m in my second year as a child psychologist focusing on behavioral and cognitive therapy for victims of abuse. I like my job and my life, and most days now I don’t think about how I used to be scared all the time.
And then last month, my grandmother called.
She said she’d gotten the number from a letter sent by my mother’s attorney when she died. When I told her I’d thought she’d been dead since I was a kid, she started crying. Told me that no, they’d actually spent years looking for us, wanting to make sure I was okay, that we all were. That they’d known there was something wrong with my mother when she’d disappeared when I was a baby, and they should’ve known she’d come back just to get me and vanish again.
She said my grandfather had died of a heart attack just a couple of years ago, but that he’d never stopped hoping they could find me again. Never stopped thinking about me or loving me. I felt a hot, sick hatred welling up in my chest for my mother. She’d stolen so much from me. From all of us. I didn’t care if she was dead. I was glad. When I said that to my grandmother, she didn’t scold me. She just sniffled quietly for a moment and then asked me how I was.
We spent the next three hours talking on the phone, and the next day I drove back to the house I remembered from the early, happy days of my childhood. My grandmother was older than in my memories, but not so old as I would have thought. As it turned out, she’d only been in her early fifties when I was taken from them the first time. We spent the weekend catching up and enjoying being together, and it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that she finally broached the subject of my mother again.
“They say it was a fire. Burned down most of the house, I think. It…they won’t say it was a suicide directly, but…well, the letter was mailed the day before. She must have known what was going to happen.”
Despite myself, I asked the question I’d been avoiding since I got her call. “What about Amberlyn? Was she…was she there?”
My grandmother frowned and shook her head. “Your mother’s letter said Amberlyn is overseas now with her father. And the police didn’t find any sign of her around there past when she graduated high school a few years back.” She looked up at me with a nervous glance. “I haven’t asked because…well, I know you ran away years ago and I know you’ll tell me why when you feel the time is right. But you haven’t heard from your sister have you?”
Lowering my eyes, I shook my head. “No. I haven’t.” I felt that familiar guilty fear stealing across my heart, making me feel like a child again. “I try not to think about that part of my life anymore.”
She reached over and patted my arm. “I understand. But I think you may have to, at least for a little while.”
I looked up at her, my eyes wide. “Why?”
She slid a set of keys across the table to me. “Because your mother sent this to you in my letter. Because everything your mother owned belongs to you now.”
Driving back up to my mother’s house after so many years felt like sliding down the throat of an old nightmare. It was as though I thought she was going to crawl from the burnt ruin and drag me back in. Shit, maybe part of me did believe that, even after all this time.
Because I’ve reconciled the fact that I had a bad childhood. My mother was unstable and violent and terrifying, and her relationships with me and my sister were abusive and strange. And whatever happened when I was growing up, my memories of murder and resurrection were just the warped coping mechanisms and fantasies of a very sad, very scared little boy. But even knowing that now, it was hard pulling up to the house.
It really was burnt down almost to the ground. The front walls of the house were mostly there in spots, but even from the car I could see through black and broken brick and wood all the way to the woods behind the house. Funnily enough, I still had to use one of the keys to get past the front door.
I took each step inside gingerly, keenly aware of stepping in the wrong spot or having something fall my way. Still, it had been three weeks since the fire, and I didn’t intend to be there long. My grandmother had suggested I not visit at all. Just sell the property cheap and be done with it, sight unseen. I considered it, but the idea made me wary. Much as I hated it, I needed to see it again, if only to confirm for myself that it was really gone. That she was really gone.
And there were also the other two keys.
The first had clearly been a house key, and that had opened the front door. The other two were smaller, thicker keys that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t figure I’d find what they went to looking through the burned out shell of the house, but I guessed it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out anyway.
When I made it into the back hallway, I saw what remained of the door leading down into the basement. This part of the house didn’t seem as damaged by fire, but it looked as though the fire department had broken down the door to go down and check for survivors. I could see several pair of sooty bootprints heading up and down the concrete steps that led down into the dark.
I didn’t want to go down there myself, closure or not, but wasn’t that more reason that I needed to? If I was really going to put this behind me, I needed to beat the fear this all still held for me. Force myself to fully accept the truth—that my childhood wasn’t haunted by some undying creature posing as my sister, but simply by a mother who was severly mentally ill. Sucking in a breath, I headed down the steps.
The basement was largely empty other than a couple of tables covered in tools and a pair of long metal boxes in one corner. Turning my flashlight on them as I walked closer, I realized what they were. Huge steel gun safes, a twin pair of them. I slowly shook my head. I didn’t remember these, didn’t remember her ever even owning a gun, but she could have gotten them in the years after I left, of course. Shining my light back across their tops, I saw brass ovals where a small, thick key might go.
My stomach clenched as I forced myself forward and crouched down beside the gun safe on the right. My hands were sweaty and shaking, so it took me three tries to get the key in the lock, but when I turned it, I heard the metallic thunk of the lock disengaging. Holding my breath, I pulled open the lid and looked inside.
It was bones. Hundreds of human bones. My first horrified thought was that my mother must have been killing people over the years. Maybe I knew it and had suppressed it, turned it into some bizarre fantasy about her killing my sister over and over aga…
But no. I saw several skulls in there, all identical except for their size. One had several cracks, as though it had been struck with a hammer. Another looked badly burned.
And they all belonged to my sister.
“Let me out.”
I let out a scream at the muffled whisper to my left. Crab scrabbling across the concrete floor, I stopped on the far side and stared at the left gun safe. Had I really just…?
“Let me out, Evan.”
Even after all these years, I recognized her voice. It was soft through the steel and deeper with the passage of time, but it was still Amberlyn whispering from inside that metal box.
“I…that’s impossible. This can’t be happening.”
“Let me out and we can be together. I’ve missed you.”
I clenched my fist around the keys in my hand, barely feeling it as they bit into my palm. I couldn’t leave her there, could I? But how could she be in there in the first place? How could she be alive?
The gun safe jumped slightly as something hit it hard from the inside.
“You can let me out now or I can wait until it’s time again. Then I’ll get out on my own.”
My voice sounded high and thin when I spoke next, and it seemed to take all my strength just to push out the words. “Time again for what?”
I thought I heard a slight laugh from the metal box and then: “You know, silly.”
Shuddering, I made it to my feet and took the steps two at a time. Once I was outside, I got in my car and drove all day until I was back to my grandmother’s house. She didn’t ask me what I’d found or why I looked so haunted. And when I asked her if she knew someone that did construction, someone I could trust, she gave me a name and number without hesitation.
Three days later I was back at the house, supervising the work. It only took two more for them to get done. I was terrified the entire time that someone would hear a voice from the basement, but no one did. I’d only heard it once more myself, when I was down locking the bone box back before the construction crew got there.
“What’re you doing, brother?”
Stepping away quickly, I made it to the steps before I gave a reply.
“Doing what should have been done a long time ago.”
When I left the house after the work was done, it was for the last time. Yesterday I went back to visit my grandmother, and after some time she did finally bring up my mother’s property, asking if I was fixing it up to sell. I shook my head.
“No, I don’t plan on selling it ever.” When her eyes went wide, I went on. “I don’t plan on going back there either. I’ll just pay the taxes on it and let it sit. It can rot for all I care.”
She frowned slightly. “Why did you want to have work done out there then? Or did you change your mind about that?”
I shook my head. “No, they did the work. They were reasonable and did good. I was out there the whole time. Watched them demolish the house and then fill in the basement with concrete.”
My grandmother blinked. “Why?”
I reached over and took her hand as I met her eyes. “Because some things…Some things just need to be buried.”
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