I stood silently behind the closet door as the robbers slit their throats, watching their blood flow onto the bed. After they were gone, I left the sanctity of my childhood innocence in the closet and laid beside my dead parents in the puddles of blood. It was my way of saying goodbye, I suppose. I fell asleep that way, clutching their cold bodies and whimpering their names.
The next day, somebody walked in the house and found us. It was my brother's girlfriend, Jamie, coming to pick him up for school. She saw me sitting beside my parents' bed, once so warm and comforting, now covered in blood and looking more like a coffin then anything else. I was as soaked in blood as my parents were, and I was nicknamed "walking death" by all the local newspapers because of that. I hardly gave any thought to Jamie, only slightly turning my head away when she vomited on the floor.
Police came and took me from my house. I never looked back, just let the memories of Chad going off to the prom and Christmas carols being sung by the fire fill my thoughts. I watched the bodies being carried away without crying a tear. I was cleaned up and taken to the police station. Because I was so little, people thought I couldn't understand all that went on the evening before.
When I was waiting to be interrogated by the police, I got up from the bench I was sitting on and walked into a room where half a dozen police were talking. Nobody noticed a lonely little girl standing off in the corner. Nobody cared. I stopped when I heard their names, Lynn and Nathan. "Drugs," one of them said, "that's why they were killed. Drugs. One, maybe all of them, were users. The suppliers came in and killed them for money. They probably deserved it, too."
I sat and watched as people said all these terrible things about my family. I knew the truth; I knew the real Lynn, Nathan, and Chad. I knew how kind they were--how they contributed to many charities, started shelters for the homeless, and helped in rehabilitating people with alcoholic and drug problems in treatment centers. Nothing anybody else could say would matter, not to me.
I was interrogated later. Had I seen the men? Did I recognize them? What did they look like? Why did we return home early? Did I ever see any unmarked packages arrive at the house? I had a feeling the policeman already had his opinion, so when I told him the truth, he looked at me as if he didn't believe me because I was a child.
Later, they caught the men who did it, though they may get off. As it turns out, they were looking for drug money, or rent money. But it's all the same to me--blood money.
My grandfather returned home that night. When he stepped off the plane, he was told what happened, minus the way I was found and their beliefs about drugs. He decided to stay in the house. To live in the house after all that happened, with all the memories. I was assigned a psychiatrist, it wasn't my choice, and he said that I should not stay in the house with my grandfather, where all my memories lay.
I've been moved through many foster homes since that day last year. Nobody seems to know quite what to do with a little girl who stays by herself, who visits a graveyard and talks to graves like other children talk to close friends. I've lived with many people, but I have always been alone, perhaps that is my fate.
I never did cry, not even at the funeral. I had seen hell, and nothing could be worse, so there are no more tears to cry.
The press leaves me alone now, except for the times when they feel like doing a follow-up report, and then they surround whatever house I haappen to be living at at the time, and follow me around wherever I go like a flock of hungry buzzards waiting for an animal to die. Many people have forgotten me and all that happened that night. But Jamie and I can never forget.
I am better now. I'm staying with a family that will never truly understand what happened to me, but at least they try, and I know they will always be there for me. My face is no longer flashed all over the news, and everybody in school has stopped asking me for all the morbid details, at least most have. At any rate I am left alone most of the time. I still see a psychiatrist, though I dread those meetings more than I dread sleeping at night.
I don't wake up screaming most nights. When I say I do not wake up screaming, that is not to say I don't have nightmares. Now, nightmares are as natural to me as eating is to others. I will wake up every night to the nightmares that haunt me forever and the memories that will plague my soul until I die.
I write this now in hopes that it will bring a sense of closure, of ending, to this tale. This is more of an account for me to keep then it is to tell other people what happened. They will always believe what they want, whether or not it is the truth. I hope now my obsession will end, so that I can get on with my life, without a graveyard.
Yes, I am better, but I will never be truly healed. I will always have blood on me that no amount of showers will wash off, no matter how hard I try. For that night, lying on that bed, I not only lost my family, I lost part of my soul as well.
In memory of Lisa, Nick, and Chris
Author's Note:This story is based on a true event. However, it is a work of fiction, a product of my rather overproductive imagination. My family is alive and well... as well as they can be living in Bloomington, Indiana. Thanks for your concern. (I feel so LOVED!)