Chapter 40
From Sage’s Notebook:
Before I left Grayfleet, I went up to the tower one last time and looked down. I don’t know why. I just wanted to see it in the light, without the craziness distorting my vision or the fear tainting everything.
If I close my eyes, I see it clearly. There’s nothing but water below, no rocks or anything that looks remotely like it could crack a skull open going down.
There was blood on Nell’s diary when Father showed it to me. I often wondered whose blood that was, and why the pages were torn. I had a fantasy that I would go down to the rocks, where my father said her diary was found, and find those lost pages, and they would tell me everything.
Like a letter to myself.
The house I grew up in feels like a museum, or a mausoleum. It’s cold and unloved, and filled to the brim with expensive things that no one is allowed to touch.
My old bedroom is exactly as I left it two months ago, which means exactly as my mother arranged it. It’s pink and white and frilly, filled with dolls and teddies, and a dressing table laid with a silver brush set and matching mirror—a room designed for a little girl.
Except for the books, lots and lots of books, in my reading corner. There have been many fantasy worlds I’ve explored, so many mysteries I’ve solved, from this very love seat I’m sitting in right now.
But I’m not interested in reading.
Not since they locked me in.
But Nell taught me how to pick locks. Or should I say, I learned how and gave Nell that skill when I became her.
I use it now to leave my room, but pause on the stairs and then sit, dangling my legs through the banister to listen to my parents go at it.
My father is back from his trip, and his voice already echoes up the stairs like a bulldozer, wreaking havoc through the house with all his shouting and banging. No wonder Mother left him. Except she’s back, for me, for a short while at least, or so she tells me.
“Has she said anything?” my father asks, lowering his voice to a more dangerous tone, if you know him the way I do.
Mother lets out a breath. “Nothing that makes sense. Yet.”
“Try and get hold of Fogg again. She needs to be checked over. She might be having another episode.”
“Richard—”
“I’m not losing everything because our daughter can’t tell reality from fantasy!”
“The hospital said she might get better once the head trauma from the fall healed, with the right treatment. I really think it’s time we took her to see a proper doctor.”
“Fogg is a doctor.”
“A specialist, Richard. Not one of your boys’ club buddies.”
“No. She’s fucked up my deal because she thinks she’s fucking Nancy Drew. I’ll not have her start spreading lies about this family outside of it.”
“But she’s getting worse. They said once the stent went in, her headaches would ease off, and they haven’t.”
“I don’t care about headaches. I can’t lose this fucking deal. Get Fogg here. If that bastard has fucked our daughter, we might be able to salvage this.”
“I think you need to calm down. You did this to her. You. So you need to fix it, Richard.”
“I do not need to do anything. Get out of my house, you infuriating woman. Go back to your boyfriend. No one wants you here!”
Then my father slams his office door, and it’s quiet for a very long time.
I knew before the accident that Nell wasn’t real, but I needed her and imagined what it would be like to have a sister who would protect me, listen to me, see me when my parents didn’t, and keep me company when I was trapped in my room, listening to them argue.
When I was younger, she was an imaginary friend; my mother hated that I had one.
My father ignored that I did. Later, Nell became someone I could be when I didn’t want the shackles that made me Sage to hold me down anymore.
Nell could be reckless and bold. She would be the lock picker, the escape artist, the risk taker.
And then, I (Sage) could remain the good one.
But then the accident happened.
When I woke up from my coma, and Nell was gone, all I had was a diary with lost pages, a story of my life with holes, and I forgot she was made up.
You see, I dreamt of her while I slept.
I forgot that I even fell.
It’s only now, when I painstakingly read my medical records, those clinical essays that say what happened to me, that the truth slips into focus, like a camera lens. Though, what see through it, like a past that’s not mine, are small things…
The never-ending visits to the hospital, the inability to sleep at night, the fevers from a brain infection, a complication with the medication, the constant beeping of the machines, the nurses helping me go to the toilet, the forgetting of words, names, and places, and the godawful headaches.
And worse, the delusions, the dreams that felt so real that when I woke up, it felt like everyone was gaslighting me.
But then I would read my diary, the one that my father said was found where I fell, with pages missing, blood on the edges. And who I was, Sage, started to come back, slowly.
Nell didn’t.
That’s when I thought she’d died.
No one told me any different.
Dissociative amnesia with confabulation following a traumatic brain injury, they call it in my medical notes. Apparently, the false memories aren’t lies but the brain’s coping mechanism to protect me, and with gentle therapy, I would have realized it.
I do now, though it’s fragmented.
Three weeks ago, I didn’t want to believe it.
I stared at the letter Troy gave me until my eyes blurred with yet more tears.
Laine listened to me ramble on and on about how Nell had to be real.
But over the last few weeks, with the help of my medical reports and the complete diary (my father kept the pages from me), it’s been coming back.
Nell, brushing my hair at the dressing table, was my mother. Nell, holding my hand under the bed, was one of many nannies, one of the younger ones with lighter hair than mine. The pearls left on my bed weren’t from Nell; they were a parting gift from my mother, the day she walked out.
Some days I wake up remembering her, but then she’s gone, like a puff of air. The unbearable sense of loss that weighs like lead on my chest is, in fact, the loss of my mother, who moved out the day I fell.
It was too much for me to know my mother washed her hands of her family, leaving her broken daughter with her cheating, lying husband to deal with. So far, I’ve pieced together that they disagreed on the method of my recovery. Instead of therapy, my father decided to let me believe Nell was real.
But why?
What was so awful that my father wanted me to believe my imagined memories rather than the truth? And why did my mother let him?
I wait until my father is asleep, and then I push open his office door and lightly step inside. He’s snoring, lying on his account book, dribbling on the paper, and smearing ink.
I kneel beside his desk and pull open the loose carpet, easily finding the location of his safe. The code to the keypad hasn’t changed. My hands shake as I punch in the numbers I left for myself scratched into the side of my wardrobe in case I forgot.
The door opens, and inside, it’s dark but organized, full of legal documents, share certificates, our family passports, even money. But I’m not here for them.
I find what I’m looking for in a nondescript folder, pages and pages of diary entries that make up the missing half of my life. Then I turn on the desk lamp to wait, reading the missing pages my father kept from me.
And gradually, like waking from a nightmare, I take it all in again.
Everything.
When my father wakes, naturally woken by the light being on, he stills when he sees me sitting there on his couch.
In my hands is the razor I stole from Troy.
I found it between the stones when I went back up the tower that one last time.
My father watches with wary eyes as I flip it over and over in my fingers.
He tenses, testing the wires around his wrists and ankles that I’ve used to tie him to his chair with, before sitting back and exhaling a breath, slow and sure.
“Sage.”
I smile at him. “Yes, father?”
There’s always a calm before the storm.