We sat together in the family waiting room watching the sunset through grimy windows and I told her what I had learned. I keep thinking about all the times I almost died. I said, “I always thought I was clumsy, accidentrone, unlucky. But what if none of it was accidental?” Caroline sat down her coffee. What do you mean? I listed the incidents.
The basement stairs at 12, the bicycle accident at 9, the car at 14, the food poisoning at 16. As I spoke, more memories surfaced. The camping trip when I was 10, where I had somehow wandered away from the group and gotten lost for 6 hours in increasingly dangerous terrain. The swimming lesson at 8, where I had nearly drowned after inexplicably forgetting how to float, something I had mastered weeks earlier.
The allergic reaction at 11 to a food I had eaten dozens of times before without incident. Every few years, I said slowly, something nearly killed me. And every single time my mother was nearby, present, but not quite close enough to prevent it. Always arriving just a moment too late to help, but early enough to appear concerned.
Caroline’s face had gone pale. Natalie, that’s insane. I know, but the pattern is there. I just never saw it because I couldn’t imagine my own mother wanting me dead. The next morning, I called my aunt Lucille again. She answered on the first ring as though she had been waiting. Our conversation lasted 3 hours.
She told me things about my childhood that reframed everything I thought I knew. My mother, Lucille explained, had always been jealous of me. Not in the normal way that siblings sometimes resent each other’s children, but with an intensity that bordered on obsession. From the moment I was born, Priscilla had complained that I received too much attention from their parents.
When I showed early academic promise, she had dismissed it as showing off. When I formed a close bond with my grandmother, she had tried repeatedly to poison the relationship. Your grandmother saw through Priscilla years before anyone else, Lucille said. She told me once that she feared for your safety.
I thought she was being dramatic. Your mother always seems so loving in public, so devoted. But Elellanar knew something was wrong. She felt it. Why didn’t anyone do anything? Lucille Sai carried decades of regret. What could we do? There was no proof. Your accidents always looked like accidents. Priscilla always appeared devastated when you got hurt.
She was a master at playing the concerned mother while simultaneously engineering your destruction. By the time I witnessed what happened on those basement stairs, I had already convinced myself that I was the paranoid one, the one seeing monsters where none existed. I rationalized what I saw because the alternative was too horrible to accept.
