I decided to paint Lauren’s old bedroom. Don’t ask me why after all this time. There’s a heavy old dresser in there that’s been against the same wall since she was little. I shoved it out to paint behind it, and something fluttered down to the floor.
A card. Homemade, construction paper, the front colored in with crayon. A birthday card. From the look of the handwriting she couldn’t have been more than 12.
I sat right down on that floor and I read it. And I have not been the same since.
It said, “Dear Mommy, I love you. Please believe me. He comes into my room when you work nights.” I read that line and the whole floor seemed to tilt. When I work nights. She wrote that at 12. Twelve. Two years before she ever said a word to me in that kitchen.
It kept going. “He doesn’t do anything yet. He just stands there. But last night he said-“
And it stops there. The sentence just stops. She never finished it, or she was too scared to, or she meant to give it to me and lost her nerve, the same way I keep losing mine. So she hid it behind the dresser. A 12-year-old child wrote down the most frightening thing in her little life and then hid it in the one place she figured I’d never look, because she already knew. She already knew her own mother wasn’t going to come.
She was telling me at 12. The door wasn’t locking at 9 o’clock because she was moody. She was barricading herself in. And I stood at my sink and heard that click every single night and decided it was easier not to wonder.
I have read that card every day since Thursday. It’s on my kitchen table right now.
Her phone number is written on a sticky note next to it. Her cousin gave it to me a year ago and I never used it.
I keep picking up the phone. I get as far as her name. And then I think about her standing at that door with a garbage bag saying please, and me saying nothing, and I put the phone back down.
I don’t know what I’d even say. There’s no sentence big enough. So I just sit here with her crayon card and her unfinished line, and I wait for a nerve I never had.
