I found the journals three days after Aunt Kate died.
She’d hidden them in the attic. Locked trunk. Combination was my birthday.
Nineteen years of secrets sitting above my head every night while I slept.
I knew I was different before I could name it.
Other kids had nightmares about monsters under the bed. I had nightmares about standing in doorways. About watching myself from across the room. About a woman driving through the dark calling my name even though I hadn’t been born yet.
Kate told me it was just anxiety. Told me some kids are more sensitive than others.
She was lying. I know that now.
My name is Ellis.
My mother named me before she left. Wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to the inside of Aunt Kate’s front door.
No last name. Just Ellis. At least that’s the story Kate told me.
Kate said she found me on the porch three months after I was born. Wrapped in a blanket. No note except the name.
That part was a lie too.
The journals are my mother’s.
Sarah. Her name was Sarah.
I’ve been reading them for two days straight. Haven’t slept. Haven’t eaten much.
Every page makes less sense than the last. And every page makes more sense than anything Kate ever told me.
There are photographs tucked between the entries.
A man with brown eyes. My father, apparently. Though the journals say he stopped being my father long before I was born.
A little girl. Six years old. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Smiling in some photos. Terrified in others.
Maya. My sister.
Kate always told me I was an only child. Another lie.
The last entry is dated three months after I was born.
—-
Ellis is healthy. Growing fast. Kate says she’s never seen a baby so alert.
I watch him sleep sometimes. Looking for signs. Waiting for something to surface.
Nothing yet. Just a baby. Just my baby.
Maybe it worked. Maybe breaking it was enough.
Maybe he’ll get to be just a person.
I want to believe that. I want to believe I saved at least one of them.
But I still hear her sometimes. Late at night. When it’s quiet.
Mommy.
So faint now. Getting fainter every day.
I don’t know if that means she’s fading. Or if I am.
—-
That’s where it ends.
No explanation of what happened. No details about the confrontation. Just that one word.
Breaking.
She broke something.
I’ve read the earlier journals. The ones Eleanor wrote. The letter from Abigail Marsh. I understand what my mother was facing. What she was trying to do.
Find the seams. Pull them apart.
But there’s nothing about how. Nothing about what it cost her.
Just that final entry. And then silence.
—-
Kate always said my mother died in an accident.
Car crash. Icy road. Body never recovered.
I believed her for nineteen years.
—-
I asked Kate about my sister once. I was maybe twelve. Had found an old photo album in the closet.
“Who’s this?”
Kate went pale. Took the album from my hands.
“Nobody. Just a cousin.”
“She looks like me.”
“Lots of people look alike.”
She burned the album that night. I watched the smoke from my bedroom window.
—-
The journals mention a place.
The house where it started. Where the first deal was made.
My mother was driving there when she wrote her final entries. Driving north. Following breadcrumbs left by my father’s body.
I found a map tucked into the back of one journal. Hand-drawn. My mother’s handwriting labeling landmarks.
The destination is circled three times.
A town I’ve never heard of. In a part of the country I’ve never been to.
—-
I should leave this alone.
Kate spent nineteen years keeping me away from it. Died without telling me the truth because she thought ignorance would protect me.
I should burn these journals like she burned that photo album. Should forget I ever read them. Should live whatever normal life I can cobble together from the pieces she left me.
But I’ve been having the dreams again.
The doorway dreams.
Standing at the threshold of somewhere dark. Something waiting on the other side. Something that knows my name even though we’ve never met.
And lately there’s a new dream.
A woman driving through the night. Hands tight on the wheel. Tears on her face.
She’s talking to someone. To something inside her.
I’m coming, baby.
And I feel it. In the dream. I feel her driving toward me. Through me. Past me into something I can’t see.
—-
I stood in front of a mirror yesterday.
Just stood there. Looking at myself.
And for a second, just a second, my reflection didn’t move when I did.
It smiled at me.
That wrong smile. The one my mother described in her journals.
Then it was gone. Just me again. Same face. Same eyes.
But I know what I saw.
—-
There’s something else in the trunk.
Not journals. Not photographs.
A children’s drawing. Old. Faded. The paper brittle at the edges.
Two figures holding hands.
One labeled “me.”
One labeled “the other me.”
And at the bottom, in a child’s careful handwriting:
When we’re older we’ll be the same person.
—-
I’m packing a bag.
Don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. The house where it started. My mother. My sister. Answers.
Kate would tell me to stay home. To let the dead stay dead.
But the dead aren’t staying dead. That’s the whole point. That’s what the journals taught me.
The dead just keep finding new places to live.
I called in sick to work today.
Loaded the trunk into my car. The journals. The photographs. The map.
My hands were shaking when I turned the key.
Not from fear.
From anticipation.
And that scares me more than anything in those journals.
I keep thinking about what my mother wrote.
Maybe he’ll get to be just a person.
The way she phrased it. Like it was a hope. Not a certainty.
Like she knew there was a chance I wouldn’t be.
There’s one more thing.
Something I haven’t told anyone. Something I’ve never said out loud.
I hear voices sometimes.
Not words exactly. More like echoes of words. Fragments of thoughts that don’t feel like mine.
They’ve been getting louder lately.
Since I found the journals. Since I started reading about what my family really is.
Like something waking up. Something that’s been sleeping a long time.
Something that knows I’m finally paying attention.
—-
I’m on the highway now.
Heading north.
Following my mother’s map. Her twenty-year-old breadcrumbs.
The voices are clearer out here. Away from the noise of the city.
I can almost make out what they’re saying.
Almost.
—-
My phone buzzed an hour ago.
Unknown number.
I almost didn’t look.
A photograph. An old house. Falling apart. Surrounded by trees.
And a message underneath:
She’s been waiting for you.
We all have.
—-
I typed back: Who is this?
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Then: Don’t you recognize your own face?
Another photo.
A woman standing in a doorway. Mid-twenties maybe. The age Maya would be now if you did the math.
My face.
Her face.
Our face.
She’s smiling.
That wrong smile.
I pull over.
Sit in my car on the shoulder of the highway.
Staring at that photograph.
My sister. Whatever’s left of her. Still out there. Still wearing that body.
Still waiting.
—-
The voices are so loud now.
A chorus of whispers. All the same tone. All the same timbre.
All saying the same thing.
Come home.
Come home.
Come home.
—-
I put my hand on the steering wheel. Feel my pulse in my fingertips.
And I notice something.
My reflection in the rearview mirror.
It’s not looking at the road ahead. It’s looking at me.
It’s smiling.
I should turn around. I should drive back to the city. Burn the journals. Forget all of this. I should try to be just a person.
But I’m not sure I ever was.
I pull back onto the highway.
Keep driving north.
The voices get louder with every mile.
And somewhere up ahead, in a house I’ve never seen, someone who looks exactly like me is waiting to show me who I really am.
—-
My mother broke something twenty years ago.
But broken things have a way of putting themselves back together.
I’m proof of that.
—-
The sun is setting.
The road is getting darker.
And in the mirror, my reflection is still smiling.
Waiting.
Patient as only something very old knows how to be.
—-
I’m coming, I think.
And I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore.
Just like my mother at the end.
Just like my mother.