The Wrong Daughter

by Dandy Smith

The girls lie on the grass and gaze up at the milk-white clouds in the endless blue sky – they point out shapes they see: a leaping hare, a witch’s hat, a ballet slipper. If they knew of the horrors of tonight, or the savage reality of tomorrow, they would want to pause time, to burrow down into this warm, July afternoon.

A lesson Caitlin has learned early on, is that beautiful people are often gifted beautiful things. Like flowers. Or journals.

Though her bedroom is plunged into blackness, the moonlight shut out by the heavy curtains, there is a high, round, stained-glass window on the landing which casts the space beyond her room in an eerie silver glow.

Lululemon

Today, so close to the sixteenth anniversary, I can’t bear to dredge it all up with a practical stranger who will act as though the hole Olivia left in her life is as big as the one she left in mine.

They took the story and feasted on its carcass, sucking meat from bone until there was nothing left. ‘Thank you.’

I keep my identity a secret. I want people to buy my art because they love it, not because I am the sister of that missing Arden girl.

Because of course she wants me to be happy. But, more than that, she wants a safe, stable, reliable career for her remaining daughter. One less thing to worry about. And she brightened so much when I showed a flicker of interest in English Literature

Mum would never admit it, not even to herself, but that’s part of the reason she encouraged me to follow that path. In the ghost of Olivia’s footsteps.

This time of year, I see sisters everywhere. Pairs of women, safe in the knowledge that at the end of every bad date, or party or day, there is a soul out there born of their blood who will love them always.

Words are powerful. Experience is more. And because of that, I can be in a crowd of people – strangers or family and friends, even people who’ve known me my entire life – and feel as though I’m standing by myself. Alone.

‘Your mother is the reason you didn’t go away to university. The reason you didn’t study what you wanted to study. And now you’re spending your honeymoon in dreary old England just to placate her.’

The man is kissing his way up the girl’s throat, his hands moving around her bare stomach to cup her breasts.

It is a forceful tsunami that washes over her and fills her ears and her eyes and her lungs until she cannot hear or see or breathe.

I’ll lie awake, counting down the hours to the anniversary. Suffocating beneath the memory of Olivia being taken as I hovered uselessly nearby.

The horror that starts in the balls of my feet and rushes up through my body like engulfing flames.

I say because sex is a place I can go where the dark glitter of her disappearance can’t follow.

We’d use the fluffy white bath towels as veils and sneak our mother’s white stilettos from her cupboard. We’d liberate flowers from the wild meadow for a colourful bouquet.

As we draw closer, I am battered by too many emotions: fear and anxiety, joy and torrid anticipation.

always imagined if she came home, it would feel like slotting a puzzle piece back into its rightful place. It isn’t. It’s jarring.

‘I just want things to be how they used to. I don’t want to relive what happened. I just want to be … normal.’ She meets my eyes. ‘Like you.’

‘You want us to lie for you, dear Uncle?’ Heath asks, bored and mocking.

‘Because I do believe in it. Because the only thing these books will teach you is that happily-ever-afters are as common and as easy to find as dirty pennies.’ She tries to get up but he blocks her with his arm. ‘It’s all sugar-spun lies. Nothing worth having comes easy, Ellie. Nothing.’

And though, academically speaking, Elinor can contribute to the discussion, she finds the words jam in her throat, sticking to the roof of her mouth like toffee.

‘I thought you didn’t even want this party but you’re all dimples and charm.’ ‘Because you asked me to be,’ he says. He strokes her long hair. ‘You have more power over me than you know.’

‘They want a family man in charge of operations to help with their new, family-friendly image. I think Robert’s proven his case, trotting out the orphans he raised.’

throng,

You’re never lost if you can find landmarks.

I suppose, over the years, I’ve become accustomed to saying or doing things I think will make others happy. Especially our parents. I have spent years shrinking myself to make room for their wants, their plans, their idea of who I should be.

I’m sure when push comes to shove, that just like me with mine, he will do whatever it takes to appease them, even though his heart won’t be in it.

She stares at his lips and thinks of them devastating the mouth of that other girl. Betrayal burns through her like the vodka. And something else. Something cold and sharp and deeply sad: the feeling of being unloved by the person who knows her best in this world.

There is so much sadness inside her. She wonders if she sticks her fingers down her throat, that she can empty herself of that feeling, too.

We aren’t two naughty children disobeying curfew. We are grown women. Old enough to drink and drive and have a mortgage. Still, that childish terror of disappointing my parents weighs heavily on me.

I don’t think I’ve ever turned off my phone when Mum calls, too afraid it will send her into a tailspin. Too afraid of Dad’s wrath for ignoring her. Too guilty for the part I played in the vanishing of their eldest.

I still remember the debilitating fear, the tight coiling of every muscle, the mantle of control I thought I had over my own body slipping completely out of reach as my thoughts came as fast as my panting breaths.

Betrayal spreads inside me like a dark moss. I’ve become used to my father’s contempt, but I never expected it from my mother. Growing up, my father made sure there wasn’t so much as a millimetre of space for me to put a foot wrong. I had to be the perfect daughter because he believed I’d robbed them of the one they had. I never wanted to add to their worries.

Even as I folded pieces of myself away, shrank myself and my ambitions until I fitted into the box they had built, my father viewed my efforts through a lens of disappointment. It was never enough. I was never enough.

I won’t allow them to curtail her ambitions the way I’ve allowed them to do to mine.

‘Mullets

Wanting to please your parents is one of those universal instincts, like opening your mouth to apply mascara.

They shriek and giggle when one of them tumbles and lands on her back. I don’t think I was ever that carefree.

‘Happy-go-lucky. Rebellious. I had to be perfectly behaved to make my parents’ lives easier. It was exhausting.’

‘Sometimes, the only person worth satisfying is yourself. It’s your life, you’ve got to live it for you.’

And for the first time in my life, that barrelling wave of loneliness falls softly, like rain. Fine, inconsequential rain. I won’t drown, not now.

When he sees me, gaze drifting over my wet, naked body, his fingers tighten around the stems of the glasses. He sets them down and without taking his eyes from mine, he strips too.

Accepting the reasons behind his deceit feels a lot like swallowing stones.

Yet, keeping it all to myself feels like a betrayal. As though I am a peeping Tom, peering through the curtains, looking in on something private.

Sometimes it’s easier to burden a stranger than it is those closest to you.’

I know loneliness, the taste and smell and shape of it. The clawing desperation to slough it off like dead skin. Loneliness is the most harrowing kind of poverty.

She isn’t sure why she is being so candid. Maybe it is loneliness that loosens her tongue. Maybe it is just a relief to hear another person’s voice. Maybe, she thinks, being near another person will stop her fading quickly into nothing, like a handprint on cold glass.