The Summer, The Silence and You

It was the summer of a thousand flowers when the lies finally fell apart. The summer of 2003, when the world came flooding back in and reality with it. The summer when you came to visit.

I am older now, but sometimes I think that part of me still lives in the dappled rays of that summer when everything changed. Sometimes my mind falls back into those flower fields, before we found out where Mum disappeared to. When she was simply Mum, and I was just Scarlet.

When I am alone, I am fifteen again, back in my childhood bedroom, perched on the window seat in my nest of boyband posters and pillows. I am once again looking out the window past the houses down the street to Thatcher’s Meadow nearby, where hundreds of flowers are blooming. A rainbow of colours floods the fields but I do not smile.

I remember that summer, because it was the first year so many flowers had appeared. It seemed then to be the summer of a thousand flowers.

The sun is low in the sky when I see a little red Volkswagen Beetle rattling up the cul-de-sac of our sleepy neighbourhood. I see that Beetle scuttling through the corners of my memory even now, parking outside the house, and I see you stepping out, your hair as blonde as the daffodils in the meadow nearby. A creak, the sound of the door opening, and you.

“Eleanor?” my mother’s name, strange in your voice, strangled. It feels like you have pulled the word from your throat, as if you have not said it in years, as if it holds a hundred years of memories. No answer, of course. Eleanor has hardly been home this summer.

Instead of Eleanor, there is only me. Dad is at work and while my brother is out with his friends, I have none to speak of after the accident. And so I am home trying – and failing – to make a dent in my summer reading, staring at the flowers and imagining what today could have been.

I pull myself up and walk downstairs, one step at a time, refusing to rush for this woman I do not know. Your gaze falls on me, and for a moment I swear I can see something like disappointment in your eyes, but you sweep it away in a second.

“Scarlet,” I say, and you nod. I can see the pieces falling into place in your mind. Your confusion is quickly replaced by a lipstick smile and you introduce yourself as Aunt Gloria, Mum’s sister. You say you haven’t seen Mum since before I was born, and ask where you might find her.

You say you are my aunt but I have never heard of you. I don’t know who you are and I am not sure you know either, standing there in your heels and pearls smelling of cigarettes.

I realise that you are the person Dad called. He had found you somewhere, some number scrawled across a scrap of paper. He told you about the accident, about how the Eleanor who came home had not been the one who left that morning, how she needed her sister because his words no longer reached her.

In the darkened house, he hadn’t seen me sitting at the top of the stairs. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now as I stare at you.

I don’t know, I say. Mum disappears all the time now. Sometimes she leaves the house and doesn’t return for hours and doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going. Sometimes she is sitting at the dinner table and suddenly she is no longer there.

You press your lips together, and that look doesn’t go away until Mum wanders through the door sometime after the sun has set. Her eyes widen as she sees you, and it is clear that the darkness is threatening to overwhelm her, that she wants nothing more than to fall into the ground. But she does not, and you envelop her in a hug, and I take in the resemblance between the two of you.

The deep-set eyes, the strong jawline, the streaked blonde highlights. Anyone could tell you are sisters. But you both wear life differently; next to you, Mum looks exhausted, almost dead, and the longer I look the less I want to see it – see you – anymore. I go upstairs, and I don’t see you again until later that night.

Mum is yelling at you that she is going out to see friends. You poke at her story, an explosion behind your eyes, unravelling its threads as she gives you name after name and forgets them as they stumble from her mouth. I stand next to Dad at the foot of the stairs and we watch but you do not see us. I glance out of the corner of my eye at Dad, watching his gaze flicker between you and Mum. It is unclear who will win here. It is clear what you are trying to do.

But we do not interfere, for what good would it do – in this house, our yells fall on deaf ears.

After the accident, the month of May was loud with arguments demanding explanations of where Mum was going, what she was doing. June was quiet, the only sound that of quiet resignation, drowning in silent questions. Now it is mid-July and we no longer try. Now, there is no sound at all, only the acceptance of smokescreens. Sometimes I think I am angry, but then I see the look in Mum’s eyes and realise I am empty.

Mum wins that night, and you let her go. The door doesn’t open again until she comes stumbling in with the dawn. You find her unconscious on the rug and Dad helps you carry her up to bed. I see it all.

You see through the smoke and mirrors she has so meticulously built, for something within you isn’t as tired as the rest of us. There, at the door, day after day, you argue with her. You are trying to prove something the rest of us have learned to ignore.

What you do not understand is that we welcome the smoke she so carelessly leaves in her wake. Perhaps the life she creates is untrue, but if it allows her to keep going then so can we. But you beat through it, smashing everything in your path. You are wearing her down until she can stand it no longer, and I wonder if you take pride in this.

Each night, I stand under the dim light of the landing and listen without leaning over the bannister to match voices to faces. I do not need to. Yours is the voice which takes no mercy for the victims it leaves prostrate on the ground, a come on, Eleanor, this is not who you are. You are a detective, an investigator for a crime no one wants to uncover.

Mum is the one pleading that she is telling the truth, lie after lie spilling from chapped lips. You demolish her daily, bringing her to her knees, reminding her of where she stands as she begs you to accept this truth we have all chosen to believe. The argument continues, neither side willing to surrender, mum willing to continue this falsified life as if she can speak it into existence.

Until one evening, when she breaks and the world she has created comes down with her.

The day the lies fall apart, the sun is low in the sky like the day you arrived. It is a cruel joke, as if the world is saying that this was your destiny: to destroy our family from the inside out. The low light spills through the window; if I squint I can see the flowers. There are fewer of them now.

Mum is going out again. Her story hovers on the verge of truth, and all I want is to tell her to go. Rowan stands in the darkness against the wall. He seems thankful that the broken lightbulb has dimmed his view of the two women before us. Dad is sitting on the stairs, his head in his hands. But I am staring directly into this fire, and I cannot tear my eyes away.

I watch as you charge through her lies, ripping them apart, and perhaps it is because she is tired, because you have ripped her life apart every night for weeks, that she breaks down so easily. The smoke falls away and I look up at you. I look into your eyes as they gaze down at Mum, kneeling on the ground, the sobs wracking her body so strongly I fear they will drown her.

There is a satisfaction in your eyes that does not disappear even as I search your face for an indication that you do not appreciate hurting your sister like this. And yet your lipstick smile hovers on your lips, and you do not take your gaze from Mum.

It is as if the numbness I have felt since the accident dissolves all at once. The world grows brighter in my vision and your voice charges against my eardrums, yelling and yelling You are a liar. Your voice cracks as you cry how could you do this.

I kneel down next to Mum and hold her as I scream at you to stop. But you don’t, not for a long time, and what you say then still echoes in my memory, drilling through years and years of bitterness and slow comprehension.

I don’t remember when you left. Sometime in early August, I watch from my window as you slip into your little red Beetle, and I hold my breath as you reverse out of the cul-de-sac and disappear down the road. I don’t exhale until you are completely out of sight, and for the first time since the accident I notice that the air has returned to the house. You did not say goodbye, and you never returned. I think something in you was afraid of what you might find.

The rest of that summer is spent putting the pieces of Mum back together. August is a month of rehab, hospital visits and drowning my pillow in my tears in an attempt to fix the holes you left behind. Dad leaves in September, shortly after I return to school. He tells me he cannot talk to Mum anymore; he whispers under his breath that it was easier pretending. I go back to my room and scream at you into my pillow again.

As the leaves begin to fall, Rowan leaves for university, escaping across the country to start again. He says he will miss me, but I can see in his eyes that he is glad to leave. As his car rolls out of the driveway, Mum and I are alone. I remain outside for hours until the cold bites at my skin, staring at the fields in the distance, wondering if I should pick some of the flowers before there are none left.

Years later, I still think about the summer when everything changed, and about you, Aunt Gloria. Alone in that empty house, I thought you had destroyed my life, and when the emotions returned, I thought you wanted to hurt us. Wanted to hurt her. But you were her sister, and you wanted her back just like we did. At fifteen, I had crafted a fraying tether between my mother’s lies and my life, and when my mother’s life fell apart, so did my family.

That summer, a thousand flowers bloomed like the lies my Mum once told, and by September they were dying and reality had charged back in. Pretending didn’t make it any easier, I have realised. The end of summer is inevitable, and the truth will bloom just as the flowers die.