SCARLETT
Jeremy was out with friends, so it was the perfect time to finally speak to my parents about what was going on. Only I was terrified to. They didn’t like going over the past and discussing the fire. I understood why. It must’ve been awful, but I had questions that were just getting louder and louder until I wanted to scream.
They were sitting on the sofa watching a house renovation show when I walked in the living room. Here goes. “Mum, Dad, can I talk to you about something?”
Looking up, they both smiled. “Of course, sweetheart,” Mum said. They looked happy, like I was about to tell them something great. I felt worse.
Sitting down, I avoided eye contact. “When I was waking up from the accident, I had dreams, as you know. They seemed so real that it made me wonder about before.”
“About before?” Dad said, prompting me to elaborate. He knew what I meant; he just didn’t want to be the first one to say it.
“Before the fire.”
I was met with silence and finally had to look up. They watched me carefully.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t like talking about it, but there are things that I think I remember.”
“Like what?” Mum asked.
“Like a girl named Evelyn. Who is she?”
“Darling, we’ve told you before, that was your doll.”
Yeah, they’d all said that, but the “doll” I remembered was running around. “I remember a girl; this wasn’t a doll.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Scarlett. Evelyn was your doll. This was a dream, not a memory.”
“It felt like a memory. Everything was so familiar that I…”
Dad sat forward, straightening his back, and asked, “That you what?”
“I went to see a hypnotist.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell us? Why is this the first we’re hearing about it?” Mum asked, sitting up far too straight.
“Because I know how you feel when we talk about the fire.”
“Hey,” Dad said softly. “It’s hard. I won’t deny that, but I don’t ever want you to feel like you can’t come to us. Nothing is off limits, Scarlett, no matter how difficult the conversation may be.”
“Okay,” I replied, dipping my head. “Then will you tell me about it again?”
Dad took Mum’s hand. “The hypnotist couldn’t help?” he asked. I shook my head. “Right. Well, it was just after two in the morning when we were woken by the smoke alarm. We ran out of our room and grabbed you and Jeremy. You were hysterical, screaming and crying on your bed. You were so scared. Your mum picked you up and covered you with a blanket, to try to limit how much smoke you inhaled. I got Jere, and we made our way downstairs.”
They obviously had a hard time reliving what’d happened. Mum’s knuckles had turned white around Dad’s hand and her eyes had glossed over.
“The smoke was so thick, and when I think back, I can still feel how suffocating it was. The whole of the ground floor was in flames. We made it out the back door. Your grandparents made it out the back window, from where they were sleeping on a sofa bed in the dining room. I think if we had been just minutes later, we’d have been trapped there. Your mum collapsed to the ground when we got out. Neighbors had come to help. You screamed the entire time, Scarlett. By the time we got you on the lawn to check you over, you had passed out and didn’t come to until a few hours later in the hospital. When you woke, you remembered nothing.”
“Why was I the only one in the hospital?”
“We all went, sweetheart,” Mum said. “We all had inhaled smoke and needed to see a doctor, but because you were in such a state, you inhaled a lot more and you were very young.”
“Okay. Then what happened?”
“Then we had to start again. We tried everything we could to get you to remember. We were told that familiar things might jog your memory, but we lost everything to the fire. I’m sorry, sweetheart. We tried therapy, and we spent every night for a long time telling you stories of your past but nothing helped.”
I remembered them telling me stories. But not being in the hospital. The earliest thing I could recall was being curled up on a sofa with them while Jeremy told me about a hamster we’d had. There was one thing that bugged me: if Evelyn was a doll I had, why was now the first I was hearing of it? Surely they would have mentioned her if they went through everything in my past to try to help me remember.
Something was definitely off, and I couldn’t help thinking that my parents were lying to me.
“What did the doll look like?” I asked.
“Um,” Mum said, “she wore a dress and had fair hair, I think.”
So did the girl I saw when I was waking up. Either my fuzzy mind made her a human, or I was remembering a girl I’d known before and they weren’t telling the truth. At this point, I had no idea.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”
Dad frowned. “We did, but it was clear that talking about your toys wasn’t helping you remember, so I guess we just concentrated on the more important things like family and things we’d done together.”
“Did you take me back to the house?”
“No, by the time you had calmed down enough to talk and interact with us again, the house was gone. There was too much damage, so the landlord had it torn down and built three houses on the land.”
Completely possible, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
“Why do you think your dreams were of something that happened?” Mum asked. “You’ve had plenty of dreams and nightmares over the years. Why this one?”
That was true. I did dream a lot, and there was some pretty odd stuff in them, but it was because this one wasn’t like the others. I didn’t walk through my bedroom door and go into the public swimming pool or get chased by a heard of sheep one minute and fly in a plane the next. This was real, normal stuff that just wasn’t dreamlike.
“It feels different,” I replied.
“So you don’t just think, because Noah has said a few things about how strange it is to have no recollection of almost four years of your life, that you’re slotting perfectly normal things into something that makes sense, or no sense, of that time you lost?” Dad said.
I understood what he meant, and it was possible. It’d been a long time since I had given up letting it bug me, but since Noah, I was trying to remember again.
“Honey, I know it is strange and frustrating, but it doesn’t make you different from anyone else,” Mum said.
“This isn’t about fitting in. Noah hasn’t said anything horrible about it or me.”
“Good,” Dad said, raising his eyebrows and sitting back in his seat. “So, the hypnotherapy didn’t work. Is there anything else you’d like to try?”
Sighing, I ran my hands through my unruly hair. “I don’t know. I don’t want to obsess about it anymore. It’s tiring, but it does bother me that I don’t know.”
“Would you like to work on seeing if you can remember or learning how to let it go again?” Dad asked.
I’d let it go before. When I was eleven and determined to remember. It had been useless and Mum and Dad had spent a lot of time helping me come to terms with the fact that I probably wouldn’t ever get it back. It was a difficult time when I argued with my parents a lot, even though it wasn’t their fault. I had no desire to thrust us back to that.
“Let it go,” I said with a defeated sigh. “I want to let it go again.”
Mum smiled. “I think that’s a wise choice. And you never know. You may remember one day. You’re most likely to when you’re not stressing over it.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I didn’t feel like I would remember though. I wished I could let it go like I had before. This time was different; I had something to hold on to. The memories as I had awoken from the accident had created real hope.
“What do you need from us?” Mum asked.
I need you to tell the truth.
“Nothing,” I said. “Can we just forget this happened and I’ll stop letting some stupid dreams eat away at me?”
Mum smiled, swallowing hard. “Of course we can.”
“Good,” I replied, standing up. “I’m going to get ready to go over to Noah’s.”
I didn’t look back, but I knew they were watching me as I left the living room. I hadn’t let it go, but they needed to believe I had. They weren’t going to tell me anything, if there even was anything else to tell. Whatever happened before my fourth birthday, it was up to me to unlock it, because no one else was going to tell me the bloody truth.