Motes of dust cloud the bottom of the bed, choking me as I pant the old air frenziedly. The grains in the wood are carving reddened murals into my skin as I duck away from imagined cobwebs. Like in a fever, my skin is sticky with nervous sweat, tremors rack my knees, and my breath quivers like that of a caged mouse. Plagues of my imagination are haunting me, inciting images of cockroaches, spiders, and, my current fear, burglars. A nervous child, I am having a panic attack. Small already, I squeeze myself into a tiny ball, thinking that if I become small enough, invisibility will be attainable. Over the noise of my raspy inhales, the front door’s little bell jingles, followed by an opening and shutting. Accompanying it is my mother’s voice calling me to dinner. Vaguely, I recall when her speech once ebbed and flowed like the tide, soft and melodic as the ocean’s whisper swirling in a conch shell, but now it only betrayed fatigue and a sordid note that I would only later recognize as remorse. I jolt at the sound, embarrassed knowing that she would not condone my hiding if she saw it, that she is ashamed of my still wetting the bed at ten, that she is still wishing for my brother back. A horrible thought sears through me from my toes to my head: Would she trade me in exchange for him if she could?
Since my mom is back, I start to crawl out, because any robber trying to mess with her after she’s back from a long day of work and shopping would be in for a nasty shock. But as I try to maneuver my lanky legs around the bedposts, I hit something with my big toe, knocking it away and yelping in surprise. Although my toe aches, I’m glad that whatever I kicked was too hard to be a bug. Relatively nonplussed, I wriggle out, stand, and shake off the dust; yet, my throbbing toe still bothers me, and I am reminded of the thing beneath the bed. Curiosity overpowering my fear of dark places, I lie on my stomach and stretch out my hands tentatively, and they bump against a box-like something with frayed ends and a course covering. A present? After groping over its edges and finding a grip, I edge my way out again and lean onto the bed. What I see surprises and disappoints me: an old book. No, a journal, I discover when I open it up to face page after page of messy scrawl. Whose? I can’t imagine my father writing down his feelings; mother used to leave notes on the refrigerator all the time, and this isn’t her neat penmanship. Upon the next option, my heart sinks, pained: David? Then that meant this diary must be over six years old! Still too young to understand why mother would keep it out of sight, I confusedly pour over the pages, but the letters are small and warped by time, and the paper holds a plethora of moth holes, as if it is a strainer for the words to pass through. As I flip through the pages, a flash of brown and white blares out at me from the weathered notebook. I stop to observe it: rusty umber encrusting a cotton ball. Engrossed in childish skepticism, I don’t notice my mother walking into the room until it is too late.
“Katie, didn’t I tell you not to-” she stops, silent, eyes fixated on the leather-bound diary. Guilt is choking me now, coiled around my neck, and I look in horror as her expression changes from one of anger to that of a wounded animal. I don’t know exactly what I’ve done to upset her, but, nevertheless, I am terrified that she might relapse into one of her long silences. My hands slowly render the book before her, which she grips more and more tightly, until I believe that if it were pulling her down to a grave, she wouldn’t let go.
“Get out,” she mumbles frigidly, cold words permeating the room’s flat air, and I happily oblige, scurrying to the kitchen counter and hiding the dirty cotton ball deep into my pocket. Though I obsess over it that night, I don’t find out what it is for years.
