I didn't call Suzanne that day.
I needed to understand what my mother was trying to protect before I decided what to do.
The yellow notebook was in my trailer.
That evening, I opened it to the pages where the tally marks began.
Each date brought back a different room, a different instruction, and a different version of the same feeling.
I had recorded the weekends because I wanted proof that the pattern existed.
Now the notebook had become the clearest record of how long the pattern had lasted.
My mother wanted me to say I had left in 2014.
The first tally mark was there.
So was the second.
So were the marks for birthdays, holidays, and family gatherings that I had been ordered to miss.
The notebook didn't tell me what my family had said to Avery.
It couldn't explain why Suzanne had stood outside my bedroom.
But it proved that I had been living at home while being repeatedly forced to leave.
I closed it.
The next day, Mitch sent me a message through the orchard website.
He asked me to call him.
He gave me his own number and said he wanted to speak without Mom listening.
I waited until evening.
Then I called.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
I could hear faint background noise on his end, but he didn't say where he was.
Finally, he said my name.
“Stace.”
I closed my eyes.
Nobody else called me that way.
For a moment, the sound took me back to the brother who had stood in my doorway while I packed my bag.
Then I remembered that he had walked away without telling me why he was sorry.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
I waited.
“It started with me.”
His voice sounded tired.
He told me that in 2014, he had been dating Avery for only a few weeks.
One night, she spoke about her brother, Trip, who had died in a car accident before graduating.
She described how people treated her afterward.
She told Mitch how difficult it was when others tried to comfort her without understanding what she had lost.
Mitch had been worried about me after my hospitalization.
He said he had been frightened and didn't know how to explain what had happened to someone he barely knew.
Then he made a choice.
He told Avery that his sister had died.
He said he meant that he had lost me in the sense that I was no longer the person he remembered.
But he didn't explain that distinction to her.
Avery believed him.
She cried and held on to him.
She told him it was the first time anyone had understood her grief.
And Mitch let her believe it.
“I thought I could correct it later,” he said.
“Why didn't you?”
He took a breath.
“I was afraid of losing her.”
I waited for him to say more.
He explained that by Easter, Mom knew what he had told Avery.
Instead of insisting that he correct the lie, she helped maintain it.
She told him people understood grief.
She told him Avery had suffered enough.
She told him it would be cruel to take away the comfort he had given her.
I thought about all the weekends I had spent outside my own house.
“So you decided I should keep leaving,” I said.
He didn't answer immediately.
“I thought it would only be for a while.”
“That was eight years, Mitch.”
“I know.”
“You watched me pack my bags.”
“I know.”
“You knew I wasn't dead.”
His voice broke.
“Yes.”
I looked at the notebook on the table.
I wanted to ask him how he had slept at night.
I wanted to ask whether he had ever considered what it felt like to be hidden from someone who was supposed to become part of the family.
Instead, I asked the question that mattered most.
“Why are you telling me now?”
He said Mom had asked him to support her new explanation.
She wanted him to say I had left in 2014 and that nobody had known whether I was alive.
If I confirmed that version, Avery might be hurt, but the story could be presented as a misunderstanding caused by grief.
His marriage might survive.
His relationship with Avery's family might survive.
His job connected to her father's business might remain secure.
He wanted me to help.
I listened until he finished.
Then I asked whether he understood what he was asking me to do.
He said he did.
I wasn't sure he did.
Before we ended the call, I asked him what had happened after I left in April 2022.
He hesitated.
Then he told me.
Mom had found my bedroom door open.
She had read the message I sent.
She knew I was alive.
But she went to sunrise service anyway.
Afterward, she told Suzanne that she had finally found the courage to open my room.
Suzanne cried with her.
People at the church believed my mother was grieving a daughter who had died years earlier.
I sat very still.
I had left the door open because I wanted the truth to be visible.
My mother had turned that act into another performance.
I asked Mitch whether he had tried to stop her.
He said no.
That answer hurt more than I expected.
We ended the call without resolving anything.
I didn't promise to help him.
I didn't tell him I would expose him.
I simply said I needed time.
The following Saturday, my father called.
He didn't begin with an apology either.
Instead, he told me about a sister my mother had never discussed with me.
Her name was Rosalind.
She was four years older than Mom.
When Rosalind was twenty, she developed schizophrenia and entered a state psychiatric hospital.
My grandparents moved to Hoover and told their new church that Rosalind had died.
My mother was sixteen.
Dad said the family had treated Rosalind's illness as something shameful.
They spoke about her in whispers.
They stopped mentioning her in public.
They let people believe she was gone.
I remembered the woman beside the group-home van at Grandma's funeral.
I remembered her calling my mother Linny.
I remembered Dad walking back toward the grave without his sunglasses.
“Was that Rosalind?” I asked.
“Yes.”
He admitted that he hadn't forgotten anything.
He had gone back to give her his phone number.
He had been visiting her once a month ever since.
My mother believed he was attending branch meetings in Tuscaloosa.
Dad said he had never told her.
I didn't know what to say.
He continued speaking.
“Your mother learned this from her own mother,” he said. “That doesn't excuse what she did to you.”
I looked down at the table.
For years, I had wondered whether there was some hidden reason for the way Mom treated me.
Now I knew where part of it had come from.
She had grown up in a family that concealed illness.
She had watched her parents erase her sister from their public lives.
When I struggled, she repeated the pattern.
Understanding that history didn't make the years disappear.
It didn't unlock my bedroom door or return the weekends I had lost.
But it showed me that my mother's behavior had not begun with me.
She had inherited a way of dealing with pain.
Then she chose to pass it on.
Dad was quiet for a moment.
“There is something else,” he said.
After I left, he had checked my bank account.
He remembered seeing a transaction at a gas station in Cheyenne.
That was all he had.
I waited for him to say he had tried to find me.
He didn't.
“You could have looked further,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You knew I was alive.”
“Yes.”
“And you stopped looking.”
He took a long breath.
“Yes.”
My father had worked as a bank manager.
He understood records, transactions, and the kinds of details that could lead someone from one place to another.
He could have asked questions.
He could have contacted people.
He could have made an effort.
He chose not to.
I wanted to be angry enough to make the answer simple.
Instead, I felt tired.
Before he hung up, Dad gave me Rosalind's visiting hours.
Fridays, ten until noon.
I wrote them in the yellow notebook.
I didn't know yet whether I was ready to visit her.
But for the first time, I had a chance to meet someone from my mother's hidden history who had not been allowed to remain part of the family story.
I wanted to hear what she remembered.
And I wanted to see her for myself.
Source: kaylestore.net
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: Before Easter, I Flew Back to Alabama to Meet the Aunt My Family Had Erased and Face the People Who Had Mourned Me While I Was Alive
The Weekend My Mother Hid My Medicine and Removed My Photographs, I Still Believed I Was the Problem in Our Family
Part 7 of 8
