Then mommy got sick, and everything changed. Daddy was always sad, always crying in his bed at night, which scared me more than anything, even more than mommy being sick. I knew what sick was; I’ve been sick before, but it always got better, so I knew it would be the same with mommy even though I hated that she had an owie. But I didn’t know that daddies cried.
Mommy was gone for a very long time, and then Grandma Eloise was here, and she was crying too, and the house was full of people, and daddy sat me on his lap and held me so tight I couldn’t breathe. Mommy was not coming back. She’d gone to heaven.
At first, I was so mad that she left us; I thought that I’d done something wrong, that she’d found another daddy and little girl who was better than me. But daddy said mommy loved me more than anything else in the world, and it wasn’t her fault that she had to go away.
At night I’d stay awake crying silently into my pillow and begging whoever took mommy away to bring her back, but it never happened. A lot of things were confusing after mommy went away. First, daddy had asked Aunt Becky to take me to kindergarten along with Victoria because he had to go to the office. It was fun at first, though. I missed mommy, and the car was not as nice as mommy’s, and there was something poking my butt in the torn seat in the back.
It wasn’t long before Aunt Becky told daddy about this, and he decided to let her drive mommy’s car. I didn’t like that for some reason, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know why I didn’t like it. Then Aunt Becky and Victoria would stay over, sending the babysitter daddy had hired to watch me until he got home back to her house, until she never came again.
One night, I don’t know how long after mommy had gone by then, but I woke in the middle of the night from a bad dream where mommy was trying to tell me something that I couldn’t hear.
Mommy had looked scared in the dream, and the way her mouth opened as if to scream had scared me into jumping out of bed and running as fast as my little feet would carry me down the hall to daddy’s room.
“What is it baby, you have a bad dream?” Daddy sat up and turned on the light. That’s the first time I saw that look on Aunt Becky’s face. My tears dried up immediately, and my tummy started to ache. My fear of the dream was long forgotten by then. Once daddy noticed that I’d seen her, he got up and led me from the room after putting on his robe.
My young heart hurt as he held my hand in his, and when he tucked me back into bed, there was a look on his face that I’d never seen before. It was as if my daddy didn’t want to look at me, and it hurt. His words sounded different, too, even though they were the same ones he always said when I had a bad dream.
After that night, Aunt Becky was over more and more, but she too wasn’t the same. Then Grandma Eloise had argued with daddy, and there was a lot of yelling and screaming and bad words, but daddy kept saying he knew what was best for me, so I was confused because Grandma Eloise didn’t think so, I think. She was really mad.
Then there was a wedding with not that many people. Then Aunt Becky and Victoria moved in with us, and she was always in daddy’s room. I didn’t like when she started wearing mommy’s clothes and using her things; it used to hurt my heart. Then she stopped being nice to me, and that look was always there once daddy wasn’t around.
Now she was standing there in the doorway with that same look while Victoria’s eyes scanned around the room for the doll I’d hidden because, by the time they’d been here a year, I’d come to know the signs. I knew that everything Grandma Eloise or the aunts sent me was taken away and given to Victoria. At first, daddy didn’t let it happen. But then Aunt Becky had said that it wasn’t fair, that we were sisters and should share everything. Only she didn’t make Victoria share with me.
When I cried to daddy about it, Aunt Becky said that Victoria didn’t have a grandma and aunties to give her stuff, and that made daddy sad, so he said I had to share. I hate sharing with her because she either never gives it back, or she breaks it. It took me a while to not like Aunt Becky and Victoria. It’s like after mommy went away, something bad happened to them too.