Chapter 8
Our mother left us when I was a baby. Teal was five, and Sage was seven. I don’t even remember her, not even the suggestion of a memory. No hint of a fragrance note. No distant lullabies. Nada. But her abandoning us, it hit Teal and Sage hard. Especially Sage.
We were left with Nadia, who, for some ungodly reason, decided Sage was old enough to raise me and Teal. At seven years old.
Sage potty-trained me and introduced me to solid foods.
My first taste of something not puréed was Nadia’s famous caramel flan.
Sage laughs when she tells the story. Me, sitting in a scuffed-up high chair in Nadia’s yellow-walled kitchen, my eyes fluttering as I tasted heaven in flan form.
And my next move was to grab the rest of the piece of flan in my little fist and shove it in, and all over, my face.
Until I was sixteen, Sage was, for all intents and purposes, the only mother figure I knew. Me and Teal, we got to be the kids. Sage’s childhood was stolen from her, first by our good-for-nothing mother, and second by Nadia’s neglect.
Sage always said she never understood why she and I were connected when I was a ghost. Why when she cried, I appeared to her, looking as though I had never been anything but alive, solid with matter.
But I always knew why. When a child becomes frightened, that child always longs for her mother.
And though it wasn’t either of our choices, Sage raised me.
Me and Teal both. That’s how we were connected.
If our biological mother had loved us properly, and if I had still fallen, I’m certain I would’ve come to her via her tears. But that’s not what happened.
As I fell, I screamed for Sage. Not our mother. Sage.
I probably shouldn’t have run out of Sage’s apartment like that. But I’ve worked really hard on not burdening Sage anymore, not after everything she has gone through for me, including having to deal with me when I was a ghost for all those years.
I made her old room my safe place. I got a real, grown-up job. Every time she and Teal ask me if I’m okay, I give them a big-toothed smile and say Yes with as much feeling as I can muster.
But finding out that despite that, Sage still feels like I need to be parented. Emotionally coddled. I can’t take care of you and my child at the same time. Shame runs over me, warm and clammy, like a sudden fog descending on an unbearably hot beach day.
I make it back to Nadia’s, and when I check the time on the dashboard, I gasp when I see it’s taken me fifteen minutes less than usual. I wonder how many traffic laws I’d accidentally broken as I drove home in this somewhat hysterical state.
Since it’s Sunday, Nadia will be at church all day and probably till late in the night, too. So that means that after placing Geri back in the garden, I can stomp and sob as loudly as I want, up the stairs and into my bedroom.
When this was Sage’s room, it was decorated with a botanical, rustic, cottagecore style.
The walls were white and chipped, the windows always had plants in front of them, and there were paintings of leaves and flowers over the bed.
It was understated, allowing the view of the distant ocean through the balcony French doors to be the main feature of the whole room.
When I moved in, the first thing I did was take a few days off work to apply wallpaper over the too-much-white of the walls. (I told Anise I was going on vacation. I hated lying to her, but also the truth seemed a bit pathetic. Luckily I had and have plenty of PTO.)
The wallpaper pattern I had chosen was of a forest. It wasn’t a landscape—no, you didn’t get the feeling like the forest was somewhere out there.
Instead, my bed felt like it was placed right in the middle of the gently swaying, birdsong-filled woods.
Trees grew out of the ground all around me in curvy, stylized linework, their green, soft-looking leaves highlighted in flecks of gold, the canopy filled with a pale blue, magical fog.
Animals watched from secret places—the big eyes of an owl behind the leaves of an oak.
A fox curled up in a thicket of ferns, taking a nap with one ear turned toward the viewer.
A serpent, spotted with yellow and red, curved on a branch, its black eyes glittering with copper flecks.
The whole thing was a bitch to put up all by myself. But I did it, and it was so worth it.
I placed a huge green rug embroidered with gold flower designs at the foot of my bed, which was the same one Sage had used—a brass wire bedframe that I had polished until it gleamed exactly like yellow gold. I put a lacquer over it so it wouldn’t patina and would stay shiny.
I didn’t want to put up bookshelves that would cover the wallpaper, so instead I found some tall, polished maple bookshelf nightstands for either side of the bed.
It only took me two weeks to fill them so thoroughly that books were basically pouring out of the shelves now.
Over the bed I hung a photograph of Ana Mendieta’s The Vivification of the Flesh—labyrinth-esque lines she drew, or maybe painted, on warm brown paper that resemble…
well. They kind of resemble the old gods to me, if only I could remember what they looked like.
When I wasn’t a ghost, walking the earth, either vividly and in color after Sage’s tears, or distantly and in a thick cloud, I was…
elsewhere. Back in my body inside the cavern of the ancient oak tree in Cranberry Falls State Park.
I remember dappled light from above, pouring over me in a broken sheet of gold, and the wind through the leaves of the trees, coupled with birdsong and the occasional owl’s hoot.
Sometimes I remember someone holding my hand…
maybe. Or brushing my hair. Maybe. Nadia says these were the old gods, taking care of me, to answer her prayers for my protection.
After all, none of my family knew where my body had ended up.
Nadia definitely neglected us, but she did pray relentlessly for my safekeeping.
From this, I have learned that prayers to the old gods are powerful.
I remember my supernatural hibernation, all eight years of memory fragments from the woods, in the way we remember dreams. The more I try, the more I forget.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. I look around my room and remember something else I wish I could forget, something that makes my heart pinch.
Teal and Sage still haven’t come by to see my bedroom since I’ve done it up.
It’s been…what? I count on my fingers. Almost a year since I moved in here…
and four months since I redid the whole attic.
I pick up my phone and find messages and texts from both of my sisters.
Sage has left many apologies. I’m so sleep-deprived.
I’m sorry, Sky. Thank you for the food. Teal has added in, Look, Sage told me what happened.
We’re both just worried about you. Maybe you and I can meet up like we said we would, and just chat about some things?
I roll my eyes at the “like we said we would.” We didn’t say anything. She left me on read.
And the “we’re both just worried about you” is a rough read. It means they’ve been talking about me, while being too busy for me at the same time.
I stare at my phone for a few minutes and finally realize what my subconscious has been dancing around for a good long while now.
My sisters have many priorities, and I am simply no longer one of them.
The acceptance hurts, but it also comes with relief.
The pieces of the puzzle in my hands have finally come together.
I have answers now, and with the answers, I can make decisions on where to go from here.
I’m not going to fight them on this any longer.
I’m not interested in bending over backward and doing somersaults to get my own family to remember I exist. Or to get them to just be up front with me and say, “Please leave the snakes at home.” I would’ve done it. I wish Sage or Teal had just told me.
For the last weeks, even for the better part of the last few months, Teal and Sage have been living their lives and leaving me out of it. They’ve done nothing that would make me believe anything is going to change in the future. So. I just need to do the same.
I text Teal back, Sounds great! Get back to me with a date when you can and we’ll set something up. These words are Teal’s kryptonite because she never gets back about dates, ever.
Next I write Sage, Don’t worry about it. I know you’re exhausted and busy. This, I really mean. Whenever you have some free time, hit me up and we can get pizza, yum!
The message is as childish as Sage implied I am. But I don’t know what else to say. I don’t want her to contact me, and if she thinks I’ve forgiven her, she won’t. It’ll be just like before.
They each “heart” my messages—neither of them responds with words—and I bite back a bitter laugh.
I sit back on my bed and let my mind wander for a few minutes. It doesn’t take much time at all to come to a significant conclusion: In order for me to do what I just said—live my life, leave my sisters out of it—I need to…well, get a life to live, right?
I close the text messages and open up a new app, one whose icon is a city skyline in the shape of a heart. Sign up for today! the screen announces cheerfully. And conquer loneliness for tomorrow!
A few months ago, someone launched this dating app, Matchmakr, for all the largest cities in the Northeast—New York, Philadelphia, D.C.
, and more. Even though the name kind of makes my skin crawl, I downloaded it the second I heard of it…
but something a bit like the threat of humiliation kept me from making a profile.
Making a profile on a locally used dating app felt a great deal safer.
Stupid, really, considering that I will never escape my reputation.
No one from Cranberry would ever want the girl who lied, the antler vagina girl, et cetera ad infinitum. If I’d had my doubts about this before, they all were shattered by Grayson Baker and his cruel, stupid friends.
But no one knows Sky Flores in Baltimore or New York City.
Hell, in those places, even if they did know me, it probably wouldn’t faze men from bigger cities.
They probably walk by women with far more bizarre backstories than me literally every day.
The street musician with her banjo, the living statue painted in white bronze from head to toe—I could be considered in an eccentric category alongside them, you know?
I snort as I imagine it: me, standing on the corner of a busy downtown, a sign hanging around my neck: Ask me about the old gods!
I look around and sigh. My room is magnificent, and whenever I spend time in here, I feel so peaceful. I did this. All by myself. And I’m so proud of it.
I’m gainfully employed. My job is fascinating. I love my boss. And I love my daily walks in the woods to be with the crows, the deer, the voles.
But I want something more.
I want someone to prioritize me so deeply, to remember me so consistently, that I never feel like a stranger in my own skin when I’m around them.
I snort when I remember there’s only been one person who I’ve fantasized about having that with since ghosthood—and he’s just agreed to be my fake friend in exchange for the story of my trauma, basically. My snort quickly becomes a sigh.
The truth is, I want what my sisters each have. A family of my own.
With my heart pounding, I hit the cityscape heart on the app button and tap Create an Account.