"Mommy! Mommy where are you!" the little girl shrieked as she shuffled through the thick forest.
"I am here, my little baby girl. I'm right here!" A voice yelled back from behind the trees, but still out of sight from the little girl there wandered around, terrified into the depth of her bones.
"Where mommy? Where are you?" The little girl ran, removing the branches there came in her way. "Mommy!" she yelled out once again, her eyes glazed with a compact layer of fresh tears.
"My little baby girl, I'm sorry, but... but." The voice shook with guilt and awakened emotions deep within the girl, feelings of love, guilt, and regret. A heavy burden a little girl shouldn't be lifting on her tiny shoulders.
"But what, mommy? Where are you?" The girl stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes gliding over her mother laying in the cold dirt on the solid ground of the deep forest. "I'm scared, Mommy. I need help!" The little girl rushed over to her mother, kneeling beside her and catching her lifeless eyes.
"Don't be, my little baby girl. You're strong and you can write your own story, but I have to go. I have to be gone. Forever." Her mother smiled just before closing her eyes shut.
"No!" The little girl cried out, shaking her mother's body as a mist slowly carried it away and into oblivion. "No, you can't leave me, mommy! I need you!" As the tears stained what remained of her mother, she kept shaking, kept believing that it wasn't real. She had hope. Until her mother disappeared completely, leaving her alone in the world.
"No!"
The girl looked up the sky, crying to the god that didn't help or the god she didn't think helped her. "I don't want to be Nina Watson! I want to be normal!"
First, it was only a white light, my mind thinking I was gone, like my mother, but then it turned into a blur of various colors. Then noises came or more precisely voices. "I believe she went into a shock after being witness to such a horrifying event where she then suffered a panic attack which shortly after caused her to faint"
"Will she be alright?" another voice said.
I squinted, everything a bit clearer than before. I spun my head towards the voices. "Yes, physically, but emotionally I don't think so."
"What do you mean?" I blinked again, focusing on the voice I knew I knew somewhere.
"After being witness to such a horrible event, she'll definitely be suffering from mental and emotional trauma." I blinked again, their frames coming into focus.
"Anthony?" As rugged as I thought my voice could be, this beat it with thousands of meters. What happened to me?
"Nina!" Anthony opened his eyes wide and rushed over to me, taking my hand as he bent beside my bed.
"How are you?"
"I don't know." I glanced at the way too clean and white room. "Where am I?"
He cleared his throat. "In the hospital. You fainted after your mother..." He swallowed hard. "After your mother died."
"You mean killed herself in front of me after giving me the speech of the year?" I just stared at the wall, knowing that all of this had processed to easy for me for it to actually have processed.
"I'm so sorry. Just say if I can do anything for you."
"She shot herself in the head right in front of me! On my birthday! There is nothing anyone can do for me right now... so please just leave." I altered my face in the opposite direction of him, drawing my hands into my chest.
"Oh." His chair slid over the floor, creating an awful sound. "Okay, do you want to talk to anyone else? Your brothers or...?" I flinched at the pain in his voice, piercing my lip hard to not beg him to stay with me.
"No, I just want to be alone."
He sighed deeply. "Okay, as you wish, princess."
I listened closely to his footfalls as he fled the room and closed the door behind him. I released a breath and repositioned myself on the bed so I could watch comfortable out the half-covered window. The snow and the gray clouds blanketed the town in a shadow like an enormous comfy sheet.
"She doesn't want anyone in there." Anthony's voice ran out on the other side of the door and made my arms shake in need of hold around him and cry out on his shoulders, but I didn't. I just glanced out into the grey world and kept my eyes as dry as the Sahara.
"But we're her bothers! We have also lost a mother!" Liam's angry voice clasped back at him.
"She doesn't want anyone with her right now and you should respect that. I know that it's also your mom who's gone, but Nina is a bit more sensitive."
"Don't you think this is hard on me? My own mother killed herself in front of my little sister on her birthday! She needs someone to talk to and who is better than me right now?" Liam asked sternly.
"She said she wanted to be alone. Don't you want to respect that?" Anthony said smoothly.
There was a pause where I could catch my breath.
"Of course I respect that, but still, she's my sister. I should be there for her, not stand on the other side of a damn white door!"
I shut my eyes and inhaled, slow and steady, while my eyes wetted my cheeks as time went by. I sealed out the rest of their conversation, waiting for my hot-headed brother to burst through the entrance and come racing to me.
He never appeared and the voices left was taken elsewhere by the quietness. I sighed deeply, bending my fingers together over my lap and glancing down at the begging glass of water. I stretched my fingers away from each other again and struck for the glass on the nightstand, twisting my whole torse over trying to reach it.
My fingertips just grazed against the cold glass, crushing me right back in the bed again. I took a deep breath and tried again, rotating my torso and reaching for the glass, hoping for another result.
Another time failure was in my sight and I rolled back in the bad again. I stirred in my seat, moving closer to the edge. My throat was yearning for something to glide down and shut off its thirst.
My hands clutched the thin glass and hoisted it from the table. My arm leaped from the surprise of its weight, but quickly stabilized it again and lifted it up to my lips to take a long slurp. Liquid poured down my throat, carrying a pleasant feeling behind it and pacifying my burning throat.
I gazed up at the wall. The oh so dull white wall there just appeared to gawk at me too. I turned and caught my reflection in a miniature mirror. My father's face was staring back at me, grinning.
"You killed her!"
My hands traveled up to deposit over my ears and I gently bowed my head.
"It's all your fault!"
"No!" I glimpsed up and meet his glare. "You killed her! Not me!"
The reflection blurred back to me. I was now watching me and not him and he was no longer staring at me. "This wasn't my fault," I whispered to myself, running my fingertip over my bare lips.
"No, it wasn't."
In a leap, I spun around and peeked over at my psychologist who stood in the door.
"What are you doing here? I asked for no visitors." I positioned myself in the bed closer to the middle as she regardless of my words went closer, closing the door behind her quietly.
She greeted as she sat down the bouquet of roses, she had tied behind her back, on my nightstand. "It's so boring in here, so I thought it would be nice with some colors."
"Thanks, but I would like to be alone."
"Really?" She dragged over a chair and sat, relaxing her head in her palm. "Are you sure you're not just feeling depressed?"
"My mother died. Can't I feel down about that?" I chewed on my lip and returned my gaze to the world outside.
"Of course, but your mother didn't just die, Nina. She killed herself in front of you and you must feel a lot of things because of that." She sighed. "And you have to talk about it. Open up. Otherwise, I can't help you be normal or at least decent again. Isn't that what you want?"
"You think I am going crazy right? Shutting everyone out again and talking to myself to make everything better. Isn't that what you think of me? That I am just some other unstable patient of yours."
"Pain makes people do things like that. Shutting other out, trust less, and overthink everything a lot more. You're hurt in more ways than one," she told me calmly; like a real professional.
"Have you ever experienced it before?" I shifted towards her. "Someone killing themselves in front of you, on your birthday and then also being your beloved mother."
She swayed her head. "No, I haven't, so I can't say I know how you feel, however, if you do open up about how you really feel, then I can help you get better. It's my job after all."
I swigged followed up by a rusty cough. "I only cried just when it happened, but I'm not sure about if it was because she died or because she did it in front of me."
Mrs. Hamilton forced her chair closer to me. "What did you think when it happened? Can you remember that?"
"You know, in reality, it all went so fast, but to me, it was the longest time of my life. I just remembered that I wanted to start over and that I didn't want her to die, however, the strangest thing was that I blamed her. I blamed her for ruining my life again, making sure I would never be normal again."
"I believe you when you say that you wanted a good relationship with your mother, however, I think that you haven't allowed yourself it. You're still so angry with her that she left you out in the dark and let all those things happen to you. You blame her for ruining your life. That's a big thing and it takes time to heal from such wounds and for what I can see, you haven't healed."
"That doesn't make sense. I was ready to forgive her. She's my mother after all." I ruffled my hands in my lap and watched them as they waltzed with the blanket some nurse had tucked over me while I was out. Kind of creepy to be honest.
"See that's my point. You're only ready to forgive because she's your mother, which in your head makes her someone worth forgiving, but in your heart, you probably hate her even more than your father. She turned her head away when you were abused, something even worse than abusing you."
My hands melted into fists. "You don't know what you're talking about!" My heart battled with my head to draw the words back because it knew that she was right, but my head had other matters in mind.
"You're getting angry, which means those words had a deep emotional impact on you. You have to acknowledge this anger and ask yourself, who is it really towards. Me? Your father? Your mother? Or maybe even yourself." She rolled back, correcting her glasses and swirling baby hairs behind her ears.
"I'm not angry!" In a flash of a moment, my hands twirled around the half-filled glass and tore it towards the wall where it splashed into thousands of pieces scattering across the room. "I... am.... not.... angry."
My breath was as heavy as a giant and my chest rose in quick short breathes.
Mrs. Hamilton's eyes were huge as teacups as he stared at the wet spot on the wall where the glass just had hit. "Your mother never said goodbye, did she?"
She spun towards me again, her eyes glazed with a feeling of fright. Something I had put there. I stared down at my shaking hands. I had done that. My eyes found the spot. "I'm so sorry."
"Answer my question, Nina."
I swallowed. "No, I don't think so."
She sighed, reaching out to take my hand. Before I could remove it, she had it locked in her grip. "No goodbye is way more painful than a goodbye, because a never told goodbye, is a never explained goodbye. You have all this grief inside of you, but you don't know why it has been put there. Your mother did something terrible not only to you but to your heart. When she died, she took a piece with her that you'll never find as long as that goodbye hasn't been explained or said."
"She gave me a gift. Before she chose to be gone for eternity, she gave me something." I darted my eyes up at Mrs. Hamilton. "The missing piece."