Prologue
Calla
Five Years Old.
* * *
“I miss Daddy and Petal, Mama,” I whisper. Mama has been strange lately. She’s jumpy and barely looks or talks to me.
I miss her hugs and the way she would tell me stories at bedtime. I don’t understand why we left my big sister and Daddy behind, but we’ve been driving and sleeping in motels ever since.
“They don’t matter anymore, Calla. Forget about them.” Her eyes are angry as she yells at me, and I can feel my tears spill over onto my cheeks.
They do matter. Petal loves me; she said so. Daddy does too. He used to laugh and spin me in circles. He kissed my cheek and whispered his love to me all the time.
I don’t understand what’s happening or why we left.
I just want to go back.
Ten Years Old.
“I hate you!” Slamming my hands over my ears so I don’t hear her hateful words, I burrow deeper into the closet as my mother loses her mind. “I wish you were never born!”
I used to tell myself she didn’t mean that. They were just words she spat when she was sick. Now, I'm unsure.
I don’t know anything anymore. All I feel is this slicing pain in my heart. My memories of Petal and Daddy fade more and more each day, and soon, I know they’ll be nothing but fragmented figments of my imagination.
“Do you hear me, Callalily Davies! Do you hear my hatred?” The closet door flies open, and there’s drool on the sides of her mouth. Her eyes are scary too.
“Yes, Mama,” I whisper because she won’t stop until she hears me concede to her terrible words.
Sixteen Years Old.
“Miss? Are you going to be alright?” I stare up at the coroner as he stands nearby, waiting for me to leave. But I can’t.
Two days ago, I nearly died. Beaten until my face was a horrifying mask of black and blue. A broken nose, two broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder. My body is now a walking, talking bruise from top to bottom. All because my mother stopped taking her meds again. Her mania became worse than I’d ever seen it, and after she ran me down in front of my school, nobody could find her.
Now we know why.
Mamma killed herself.
Found overnight hanging from the bottom of a bridge, a suicide note in her pocket.
When I read the words an hour ago, I had a hard time processing them. Even in death, she hated me.
Calla,
This is your fault. I should have left you when I had the chance. I failed in killing you, and I can no longer be on this earth while you breathe.
You are to blame for everything, and I hope your father and sister hate you as much as I do.
That’s it: nothing but contempt for me.
I don’t know why, and now, I never will. From the day we left our family back in Long Beach, she’s despised me. Blamed me. It wasn’t until I turned seven that she was diagnosed as manic.
“Miss?” the coroner asks again.
“I’m fine.” I can’t bring myself to cry for my mother. I don’t hate her, but I can’t remember a time when I loved her either. For years, I wished she would have left me behind too. That way, I could have recollected her when she used to love us. I would have preferred it.
Seventeen Years Old.
“She’s been searching for you for a very long time, Calla,” Derek, the investigator, explains. “It’s almost Christmas; if ever there were a time for miracles, I’d say it’s now.”
I have mixed feelings. Since Mamma died, I’ve been on my own. I dropped out of school, started working so I didn’t become homeless, and now I live in a shitty apartment on the east side of Portland.
Derek found me a few months ago, explaining that my big sister, Petal, and father have been looking for me. That they want to reunite with me after so many failed attempts when I was younger.
“What have you really got to lose?”
I stare at him and wonder if he knows. Does he realize I’m the one who caused my mother's death? Does he know I’m the reason our family fell apart? Why would they want me?
Chapter 1
Calla
Present Day.
It’s been six months since I returned to Long Beach. Six months of feeling like an outsider with the people who love me most in the world. It’s not their fault; it’s mine. I don’t know how to accept love, how to love in return.
A lifetime spent running from one bad situation to another has corrupted me. Mom could never hold down a job long enough for us to find an apartment or create a life anywhere. It was a dozen years of living in limbo with no end in sight.
When she killed herself, I felt relief because the abuse was over. Her suffering was over. The uncertainty of where our next meal would come from, over. Everything…was over. And yet, the guilt has eaten me alive every day since. It doesn't matter how many times she spewed her hatred for me or how often she threatened to kill me, she was my mother, and I only ever wanted her to love me.
Petal doesn’t say it, neither does our dad, but I can see it in their eyes when they ask about her. When I lie to them about the woman she was.
They want sunshine and flowers.
She was skulls and daggers.
Darkness and anger.
But I lie—every single time. I tell a fancy tale of what I wish she had been like because that’s a mother I could have loved.
They don’t hear about the time she locked me in the closet one summer when I was thirteen for the entire break because I lied about the last day of school being two days later than it was. She remembered to feed me once or twice a week, but I didn’t see the sun for two months. I had a bucket for the washroom and was allowed to clean it out once a week, but I was never allowed to shower. To this day, I can’t go more than 24 hours without showering.
I’ve never told them about the time when I was nine and she forced me to play Russian Roulette. I peed my pants after every pull of the trigger. I puked every day for a month from sheer terror. The only reason one of us wasn’t dead that day was that the gun malfunctioned.
I ache for Petal and Dad to hate her as much as I do, but they never will. They never could because they weren’t there. For years, I begrudged them as well. Not because they’d done anything wrong but because I felt abandoned. Which is illogical. They didn’t leave me; we left them. It doesn’t lessen the feelings, though. I was desperate to be rescued for so long, and when it never happened, my blame shifted to them because they were free of Mamma's manipulations.
Staring around my room of the one-bedroom apartment I share with a girl I met in a hostel a few weeks ago, I have to wonder if I’m even free of her. I’m still moving from place to place, job to job. Only I have family now. I could ask for help.
The trouble is, I don’t know how to.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Cali, my roommate, comments from her bed.
We share the only bedroom. Neither of us saw a reason not to. We have separate beds. She uses the closet; I use the single dresser. Plus, it’s the only room with a window large enough to let in a breeze.