Page 44 of Way Down Deep

10.39pm

You don’t have to barge in, and you don’t have to pester. Truthfully, it’s always on the tip of my tongue now. Or at the tip of my fingers, if you want to be more accurate. All of which is weird to me, because I spend so much time pretending it never happened. I press my thumb down on the memory so that it can’t get out.

I’m here, stranger. Whatever it is you’re holding in, just know it’ll find a safe home with me.

Good, because it wants to be out, with you. You make it easier to think about somehow. Like you’ve created a force field around me, and once things have escaped my fingertips they can’t beat their way back in with a hammer.

Or at least, not this time.

What do you mean?

That was what he used, you see—though even now I don’t think he meant to. I think it was just in his hand, ready for things like locks that were in the way and windows that wouldn’t smash on the first try. Only once he was inside, he realised we were there, so he just smashed us instead.

Though I say us. When I really mean everybody else.

Nothing happened to me, safe in my little attic room that he didn’t even know was there. It all happened to them—first to my dad, who surprised him on the stairs. Then to my mum, who went to defend her husband. And then to my brother, my brother, I don’t know why he killed my brother.

Oh, honey.

He was just a little thing. He barely came up to my waist. His arms were made of sticks and air, and his hair was so fine you could almost see through it.

Iknow that boy well.

Iknow you do. I know. So maybe you can tell me: why did he do it?

The police said he surprised the guy too. That he pounced on him to protect my mum, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I think. Because if it’s true, if he did, then I have to think about him being so good and so brave and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t.

I heard them. I heard him. I heard it all.

But I didn’t come down.

Honestly, I think I’m still there.

Still waiting to be as brave as my tiny brother, with my hand clamped over my mouth and my face made sticky and taut with tears. Still wanting to go down but not daring to, never daring to. Why didn’t I dare to?

I could have grabbed him before he ran to help our mum. Got us both out of a window and away through the fields behind the house. Or maybe if I had fought, too, the tide would have been turned. The murderer was only young, only slight, and only there to take our things. He wasn’t expecting a fight.

It might have been all right if I’d joined the fray.

You were a kid. As helpless as your brother.

And partof me gets that. Most of me knows it’s just as likely that he’d have killed me too. Sometimes I even wish that, along with all the others. Like the sweetest fantasy of the three—just to be wherever they are, instead of in this hell.

Though I say hell, I say it, when the truth is … it isn’t anymore. It was, it really was for a long time. And it was an impervious sort of thing, too. I had counsellors and therapists and foster parents who tried to crack it, and some of them were even nice. Some of them partly got through.

But nothing has ever made me feel as free of it as you do.

Maya.

Don’t, don’t, just let me say.

You make me feel like a person, not a thing who had that happen to them.

Not a mess of guilt, not a lonely girl made lonelier by families that were not my own, not someone afraid he’ll come back even though I know he can’t. I’m just me, with you. The one I should have been if time could be turned back and everything started again. Like you were waiting in the dark of our house with a shotgun in your lap.

Then you just blew it all away.

IwishI had been there. Waiting, protecting you. Same as I wish I’d been there for the boy, through whatever he endured before… Before things that I haven’t told you the whole truth about.