Jessica Sorensen - The Forgotten Girl

“Who’s her?” I step in her line of vision and make her look at me. “And what do you mean questionable?”

She swallows hard, still not looking at me. “Starting fires. Getting into fights.” She’s avoiding my first question and I want to press her about it but she keeps rambling. “You would get so violent every time anyone tried to make you do something you didn’t want to do… and then there was Evan.” She shakes her head and sighs with remorse. “You wouldn’t let him go either… and the hallucinations all the time…”

I absentmindedly touch the scar on my side and say softly, “Evan... Evan Ryan Wellings…” I’m starting to remember some more. The boy in the cabin, that I counted buttons with, buttons that belonged to the man upstairs who kept us trapped. The boy who told me to pretend to be someone else… the boy who made me feel safe when everything else felt so wrong…

“You refused to let him go, Maddie. It wasn’t healthy talking to a person who wasn’t there like that… who didn’t exist but you wanted to exist because you were afraid to accept what really happened.”

“I don’t understand?” I ask. “I thought I talked to Lily.”

“And Evan.” She pauses. “You don’t remember Evan at all?”

“Evan Ryan Wellings…” I say his name again. It sounds so familiar. “Tell me about him,” I demand, inching closer to her, feeling Lily scratch her way to the surface. I think she might remember him and she doesn’t like it.

“I don’t want to,” she whispers, her fingers going to the base of her neck. “It’s good you can’t remember him… I wish you couldn’t remember Lily either.”

“My sister?” I ask in horror and she nods, sobbing. “Why?”

She shakes her head. “Because she wasn’t good.”

Again I think of the woman upstairs and wonder if it was her.

I want to run, yet at the same time Lily forces me forward, making me stay strong and get answers. I get in my mother’s face, ready to do whatever it takes to get her to tell me. “Tell. Me. Who. Evan. Is.” I demand.

She flinches back and almost falls out of the chair. I see the fear in her eyes. She probably thinks I’m Lily at the moment and maybe I am. “Evan’s the little boy that was in the cabin with you and Lily,” she says.

“And where were we exactly, mother?” I pause. “Did my father… did he do something to me, Lily, and this boy?”

She touches the base of her neck, tears slipping down her cheeks. “Your father… he was such a nice man when I met him. A little wild, but he seemed nice… but sometimes people aren’t what they seem… And he… well, he ended up having all these crazy beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, and then he started hanging around these people who sort of pushed out these beliefs but to an extreme extent.” She chokes back a sob. “I should have never let it go on for as long as it did… I should have left him sooner… maybe then he wouldn’t have taken you and Lily and that boy…”

“Evan.”

“He was the next door neighbor’s son.” More tears pour out of her eyes. “Your father had something going on with his mother and they took off with all of you… hid out in the forest…” She starts to sob. “Hid out in a cabin in the woods for years. I thought I’d never see you two again, but then you burned it down… but Evan he didn’t make it out and you blamed yourself for that.”

Pitter-patter… I can hear the rain falling.

“Maddie, please wake up. You need to get out of here. Go get help.”

Fire. Blazing. Flames. Smoldering Smoke. Smothering. I’m going to die. He’s going to die. Watch him burn. Feel his pain. The pain you inflicted on him. I didn’t save him. I just ran and left Evan with him, trapped in the cabin to die.

We left him trapped in the cabin to die.

“No…” I trip back, slam my elbow against the wall. Hard. Tears well into my eyes, but not from the pain. “No. No. No. No. No.”

“Maddie, I’m sorry,” my mother stands up and reaches for me, but I step away from her. “See this is why we didn’t want you to remember. The pain in your eyes—it nearly killed me to look at every day.”

“I have to go,” I say, my voice sounding so hollow as I stare at the wall in front of me. All this time and I think I always knew. “I have to go,” I repeat, then go to my room to grab my jacket and wallet.

“Where are you going?” she asks demandingly as I pick up her car keys. “Maddie, you’re not going anywhere until we talk about this. We need to go see Preston.”

“You and Preston have done enough,” I snap, my voice so angry, so dark. But I know I’ll hurt her if she tries to take the keys from me, so hopefully the anger in my voice will scare her off.

She calls out to me, this time chasing me down the driveway, shouting for me to stop. The neighbors outside stand there, watching in horror, but I don’t stop, hopping in the car and locking the doors.

She bangs on the window. “Maddie Asherford, you will open this door. Now!” She wiggles the handle as I start up the engine. “I won’t let you drive off when you’re this upset.”

I buckle my seatbelt and put the car into reverse, feeling like I’m going to puke. The one thing in my life that made me feel whole wasn’t even real. It was more fake than Lily. And as soon as I drive down that road, I’m choosing to let all that go. What do I want? Fake peace? Or the painful truth?

I take a deep breath and give my mother one last look, thinking about how much she’s lied to me over the years, and how I hated every moment of it. Then I back away, heading to my secret spot, heading to Ryland.

To Evan.

Maddie

I sit in the car for quite a while, knowing that the moment I get out is the moment that I’ll be admitting the truth. That Ryland is nothing but a ghost. A memory of Evan Ryan Wellings, the boy I lost a while ago and who I can’t let go. The boy I counted buttons with, who told me to be someone else, who I left to burn in this very cabin after he kept me sane all those years. I’m slowly remembering, yet forgetting at the same time, memories so distant, slipping away like pieces of sand in the wind.

It’s not raining yet it feels like it’s raining as I get out of the car. Hours feel like they pass as I walk through the field toward the cabin I burned down so many years ago. And when I approach it, it somehow looks faded, more nonexistent, as if it’s just a shadow of a memory sitting out in the middle of nowhere hidden by the grass and the trees.

I enter without saying a word and walk around the place that used to be my solitude. I can remember now, how he kept us here, chained up in the basement below, hidden beneath the floorboards. Lily, Evan, and I, the things they did to us for years until Lily got a hold of a match, struck it, and the whole place started to burn.

“I was so happy when I first saw the fire,” Ryland says from behind me, close but so far away. “All I could think was either I was going to get away or burn to death and I was happy with either way, because I knew I’d be free.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, staring at what was once the trap door that led to where he kept us hidden. “I let you burn… You told me to run and I did… I just left you.”

I don’t hear him step up, but I feel him right behind me, the coldness that brings me warmth. “There was no way for you to get me out.” I swear I feel him touch me, trace a finger up my back, but it might just be me remembering another place and another time that doesn’t exist anymore, even though I’m trying to hold onto it. “I was locked up with chains. All you could do was run and get help.”

“If I wouldn’t have tried to shoot him.” I struggle for air as I recollect pulling the trigger, missing the shot, the man coming at me, but Lily stepped in the way and took the gun from my hand. After that, there were only flames and the feeling of melting. “Then maybe I would have had enough time to get help before the place burnt down.”

“You know that’s not true,” he says. “You knew the moment the place started on fire, that I wasn’t going to make it out.”

I shut my eyes, remembering how he kept Evan chained up, wanting nothing to do with him, but wanted everything to do with me and Lily. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry,” he says quietly. “What’s done is done. You need to stop blaming yourself and let me go.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to… you’re the only person that makes me feel like everything is going to be okay when clearly it’s not.”

“Everything is going to be okay,” he promises as I open my eyes and face him. His hair is in his eyes that look brighter, not as sad as they usually do, like he can sense that he’s about to be free from the place. Free. “Once you admit the truth, it’ll all get better from there. You just need to accept what is.”

“I don’t even know what is or what was,” I say, reaching for him, wanting to touch him just one time. Just once.

“That’s life Maddie,” he says, my hand moves toward him, so close, just a little more and I finally feel him. Just once. “No one knows much of anything, whether they have amnesia or not. But they keep on living, just like you need to. It would be a tragedy if the fire ended up destroying all three of us.”

I stand on my tiptoes and lean in toward him, our lips so close. “And what about you?” My hand hovers right beside his cheek, a sliver of space between us, just another inch and I’ll touch him.

“That’s up to you,” he says, his eyes drifting to my mouth. “I already told you that as long as you wanted me here, I’d always be here.”

“But you don’t want to be here?”

“I just want you to be happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”

I want to ask him what will make him happy, but I think I already know. Being trapped is something no one wants. I’m the thing keeping Ryland… Evan a prisoner here, simply because I’m selfish. And it’s not Lily who’s doing it. This is solely me. Maddie Asherford. I’m selfish and it’s time to stop.

“Thank you for everything,” I say, tears stinging my eyes. “And I’m so sorry, for what happened to you.” Then before I can back out, I move my mouth toward his quickly, bringing my hand against his cheek. The contact sends a surge of heat through my body, so sweltering I feel like I’m back in the cabin again when it was on fire.

And then the heat goes cold—I go cold. And I know he’s gone.

I stand there for a while, unmoving with my eyes shut, knowing the second I lift my eyelids, it’ll all officially be over. It’ll all be gone. If I could, I’d probably stay that way forever, holding on for just another second, another moment, just one more. But eventually I have to move forward and open my eyes.

And when I do, I’m not standing in a cabin, just a field that once held one.

All alone.

Maddie

The entire drive home, I try to figure out what to do with my mother. She spent so much time lying to me, thinking it was for my own good. I don’t think she’s necessarily a bad person, just delusional and perhaps insane. But I know it’s time for her to let me go so I can move on and try to live life on my own, either with or without Lily—I haven’t decided yet.

Never once does it cross my mind that there’s so much more to this than Evan being a memory or simply remembering my past. Quite honestly, I’d forgotten about a lot of the stuff that had happened over the last couple of weeks, like the murders and how I’d never even figured out if I was doing them or not.

But then I enter the house and see her sitting on the sofa in the living room.

At first I think I’m hallucinating again, seeing her outside my head. But there’s something different about her this time. More life in her eyes. More confidence. More darkness.

“Lily?” I whisper in astonishment and horror, the door blowing shut behind me, and I whirl around in surprise. It’s quiet except for the wind howling outside as I press my hand to my heart and rotate back around to face her.

Her lips turn upward like she’s going to smile but it looks warped and wrong, like it’s melting off her face and her mouth instantly sinks. Her blond hair matches my freshly dyed hair, only hers looks longer and shinier—better. Her eyes are even darker than they were in my hallucinations, her cheekbones more defined. She looks less like me and appears more in control of her surroundings, which is very unlike me, except for when I’m Lily—or her I guess.