Page 104 of Shadows Within
“Mom?” I call out. There’s no answer.
“Mom!” I yell again, a little louder this time.
I pull my keys out from my pocket, and find the one to her house. I unlock the bright teal door.
As I push it open, I can tell she’s not here. It’s too quiet. Mom always has the TV on or music playing in the background. She never sits in silence.
“Mom, I’m here,” I say just in case. The stillness of the house speaks for itself.
I walk over to the kitchen, passing my baby picture on a table in the living room, and open the fridge door. A terrible smell escapes it.How long has she been gone?
I shut the fridge and walk over to the living room, tracing my finger along the dust covered coffee table. I walk across the shag carpet to her bedroom. Her once cozy abode feels deserted, but nodes of her orange and vanilla scent remain. I spot her perfume on the dresser, pick it up, and bring it to my nose. I hear her laugh in my head. A distant memory.
I return the glass bottle to the dustless circle on her dresser and walk over to the closet. The door sticks when I try to open it. I give it another good tug, and it comes loose, making a loud creak as I prop it all the way open. There are at least six boxes in here. Some of them are labelled, and I read the sides of them.
Scarlett
Jake
unlabelled
unlabelled
DO NOT OPEN
Unlabelled
My eyes move back on theDO NOT OPENbox. I pull the second last box out from the bottom of the stack and hope that the rest don’t fall on me.
As I open the box, I prepare myself for the worst. It’s half empty, filled only with another small box, some pictures, receipts, and notes.
I pull the pictures out and look at them. They look about ten years old, back when Mom was in her silver jewelry phase. She wears silver hoops in the photo, even though she has the perfect skin tone for gold. She always referred to this phase in her life as “when things changed.”
The next picture is of her on a man’s lap. I recognize him—Archer Alden.
I can’t stop looking through the stack of pictures. In most of them, she is fully naked, captured giving different men lap dances. She never looks at the camera, almost like she didn’t know these were being taken. I go over our family’s timeline in my head— she was still with Dad at that point. Her silver phase was almost a year before she left.
A handwritten receipt from a hotel falls out from the bunch of pictures. It’s from a place in Boston.Why was she going there?
More receipts fall onto my lap—from phone bills with unknown numbers to restaurant bills from Boston. I think back to the moment I’ve tried so hard to erase. When Mom left, she didn’t just leave us gradually, she left like a grenade. She took all of her things and never came back, with no care in the world about who she hurt. She pulled the safety pin out before the final explosion. Finally, I open the small box and spot mom’s handwriting.
I’m not happy with the person I’ve become. I walked away from my family and I’m so disgusted with myself, I’d rather stay high then remember. My precious baby. My heart breaks every moment I’m not with her, but I have no other choice. I didn’t give them up for money, I did it so they wouldn’t bebrought down by what I’ve done. They’ll never understand, and I’ll never forgive myself.
What is she talking about?I pull out the next letter to try and make sense of it all.
I saw Scarlett today. I can tell by the way she looks at me that she’s humiliated by who I’ve become. She’s the only good thing in my life, and I’d give everything up just to spend ten minutes in her presence. Instead, I weigh her down. I know she’ll never understand that I’ve done all of this for her, so that she can have a future. I can’t tell Jake. Every time he looks at me, it’s like he’s erased all the memories we’ve made. He’ll always be the only man I’ll ever love. I hope one day he can find out that once they took those pictures and used them to blackmail me, they had my life in their hands.
Tears fall and blotch the paper.She suffered in silence.
I’m so lonely. I miss my daughter, I miss my husband. I miss my family. Sometimes I drive by their house just to mourn the loss of my old life. These people don’t care about me, they just use me until they’re tired and then it starts all over again. Scarlett never returns my calls, and I don’t blame her. Sometimes, I call just to hear the sound of her voicemail. My sweet girl, I’m so proud of her. I wish I could just end it all. No one will miss me. I’m just someone who used to be loved. I’ve tried and just got punished. They’ll never let me succeed. They own me.
She didn’t choose to leave us, she was forced. She traded herself for our freedom, and for that, The Society blackmailed her with photos from a job she never wanted to fulfill. Dad never knew what she was doing for extra money, for our family. What started off as her stripping for extra money, turned into her being manipulated by The Society. They used her as a pawn in their game. She was broken before she was given the chance to fight back.
I place the letters close to my chest. “You don’t have to fight anymore. I’ll fight for you.” I whisper and regret every time I ever judged her—my amazing mother.
Quietly Suffocating
Scarlett
