"Where the hell is she?" Cassius's eyes flare, ready to unleash the pent-up anger he's been building up for weeks. The door slams behind him as he marches up to the woman who's been like a second mother to him ever since he lost his.
Aunt Joyce looks up from her computer and sighs, taking off her glasses and placing them on the desk in front of her. "Hello boys," she says and stands, walking toward us. Her eyes land on Cassius.
"I suggest you check that tone, Cassy." Despite her almost deadly warning, she pulls him into a tight hug, and for all his anger, Cassius melts into her hug and squeezes her.
There's only so much that can calm Cassius's anger but she hugs like Amaris. She hugs me next and if I close my eyes, she feels like her too. Her skin is soft like hers and their curly hair smells the same; like coconuts and shea butter.
She lets go and I miss her touch. For a split second, I forget that it's not Amaris and I want to pull her back. She steps in front of Aiden and she sees something in his eyes. He looks down and she tilts his head up to look into his eyes. Aiden hasn't spoken since Amaris left apart from the orders he barks out for the security team to find out where she is. He blames himself the most for what we did.
"I'm sorry," Aiden says looking into beautiful brown eyes eerily similar to Amaris's. Aunt Joyce frowns for a moment before realization sets in and she pulls him into a hug. "Me too," she says quietly before pulling away.
We look at her confused and before I can ask her what it is that she's sorry for, she clears her throat. "I'm sorry about what Amaris did. I'm sorry she hurt you."
"She told you?" Cassius asks.
Aunt Joyce looks at him with an expression that looks like remorse. "No, but I can see it in your eyes."
She leads us all to sit on the couch in her office before sitting on the coffee table directly in front of us. She takes a deep breath as if to ease her nerves and exhales. "Do you know why Amaris did what she did? do you understand it?" she asks cautiously.
"Dissociative identity disorder. It's usually a reaction to trauma as a way to help a person avoid bad memories." I recite the words Amaris used to describe it to us. "Amaris created the grim reaper because she's unable to control her emotions. I don't think she ever learned how. When she experiences extreme negative emotions, the grim reaper takes over and acts as a shield." I say, thinking back to when she found out what we did and imagining how painful that must've been for her. We hurt her.
"Yes. That's my fault." Aunt Joyce says, bringing me out of my thoughts. She looks down and fiddles with her fingers in shame.
"Your fault?" Aiden asks, frowning at her statement. "How?"
She looks up and her eyes go vacant as if she's lost in a memory. "After her parents died I wasn't sure how to comfort her. Her reaction was... unusual. Tears ran down her cheeks but she didn't cry. It was like as she was feeling her emotions, something was sucking them away. It was like she was just numb."
"Amaris developed her reaper personality as a child?" I asked, confused. "Amaris never showed any signs of having an alter until after she started killing."
Cassius scoots out further in the chair, leaning closer to aunt Joyce. "Are you saying it wasn't created for killing?"
"Yes. She uses the alter personality as a tool to help her dissociate when killing now but It was created to take the pain of her parent's death away. Doctors suggested that she see a therapist but I refused. I couldn't take away her pain but her alter personality could. I thought I was helping her but in reality, I just let her create a part of herself she couldn't control." Aunt Joyce gets up from the coffee table and walks over to her desk. She pulls out a folder and cuts the red seal to open it.
"There's something else you should know." She hands the file to Aiden who's sitting between Cassius and I and he opens the file. It takes me a minute before I recognize the little girl strapped to a chair with a big curly afro and SpongeBob pajamas is Amaris. Her eyes are cold, lifeless. Blood covers her pajamas and she has a chilling grin on her face.
"What the fuck is this? what happened to her? why is she strapped to a fucking chair?" It's not Cassius who loses his cool this time, no. This time it's Aiden. His brown eyes flare and I swear I see something like a spark of flame.
Cassius grabs the picture and looks at it closely as if he doesn't believe what he's seeing. He runs his fingers over the picture slowly and whispers "bug?"
"So far there's only one drawback to Amaris's personality, that we know of." Aunt Joyce points to the file and encourages Aiden to keep going. Aiden hesitantly looks back at the file and keeps flicking through the pages. "In the beginning, I didn't know much about the consequence and I didn't think there would be a limit."
"A limit?" I ask, tearing my eyes away from the file to look at her.
"Yes. This disorder affects everyone differently. For Amaris, she was always aware of which alter was out and she decided which to use. kind of like a switch. When she first developed her, she didn't want to switch out personalities. She wanted to keep being the reaper because she was afraid the pain would come back and I didn't want to push her but as it turns out, there's a limit to how long Amaris can let one personality out at a time. " She takes another deep breath before exhaling.
She points to the picture in Cassius's hand "This is what happened after two months. Amaris became more detached every day she remained the reaper. She would either lash out or go silent."
"I remember. The summer after her parent's death we'd come over almost every day but she would tell us to go away. We thought she hated us but you told us it was just grief." Aiden says absentmindedly, still reading through the files. "This says she was 'treated' for a month at a facility for difficult children in Belize. Was that the month you took her away from us?" He asks, looking up with pinched eyebrows.
Aunt Joyce's face paints with sorrow for a moment before she regains her composure. "Yes. I'm sure you all know that Amaris's mother and I are originally from Belize. I thought it'd be good to take her away for a while. I thought she'd be happy to see where her mother was from and it worked, for a while." We all look up at her, listening intensely.
She continues, "One morning I took Amaris out for a walk and she stabbed a teenage boy with a stick at the park for bullying her. That's when I realized what was happening to her. In truth, the grim reaper is Amaris. It's a part of her that she chooses to use as a defense from pain. She feels invincible because she locks away the vulnerable part of herself and allows the dangerous part to take over."
"Both sides are like her soul cracked in half. She can't lock away one half of herself for too long. The last time she did this, she started to show signs of a psychotic break at the two-month mark." she says, gesturing to the picture as if to say 'exhibit A'. "The psychologist said that the only way for her to avoid this is if she maintains a balance."
"Why didn't you tell us this before? Why didn't she?" Cassius asks.
"Amaris doesn't know. In order to bring out her 'brighter side' we had to drug her. She was willingly keeping her 'darker side' in the driver's seat and we had to break that willpower. That night I noticed tears running down her cheeks as she slept and when she woke up, all she remembered was having a nightmare. She said it was like the reaper was punishing her for giving in to her 'brighter side."
She must've been so scared. So alone. Is that how she feels right now? Scared and alone? We told her that we love her and that we'll always protect her but she's out there somewhere and we haven't found her.
"I chose to keep it from her because I figured as long as nothing too painful happened to her, she would maintain the balance on her own and she did, until now. I was being selfish and for that, I'm truly sorry." Aunt Joyce says, biting her lips nervously.
She's using us to apologize to Amaris because Amaris isn't here and like us, she needs forgiveness. I gently take her hand and she looks up and me. "It's okay. We'll bring her back this time."
She gives me a small smile and squeezes my hand. She swallows as if she's remembered something and her eyes go wide. "I think I know where she is," she says, running to her desk for a paper and pen. "She called me to say goodbye the day she left and she said something that bugged me. She said 'don't worry. I have plenty of knives for the bullies'. I thought she was talking about the yakuza but Amaris has only ever been bullied once and she made him pay for it. It's a long shot but she might have gone back to Belize."
The connotation of what it means for Amaris to remember the bully hits her at the same time it hits me and she looks at me with a knowing expression. She gives me a smile that never reaches her eyes. "I know. She's probably remembering what I did to her. Still, I hope I'm right. It's been seven weeks since she's been gone and no other leads have been helpful. You need to find her soon and fill in the blanks. Drugging her the way you did when you were taken by the yakuza or the way I did when she was younger is the only way I know how to bring her back to herself but hopefully, she makes the decision on her own this time. This is the address of where we stayed and the drug we used, just in case." she says, handing me the paper she retrieved from her desk.
"Thank you," I say and hug her once more.
"Good luck."