The Eraser In My Brain Moved And My Sister Disappeared Chapter 05
Mom knelt at the edge of the hollow as if the snow had glued her there.
Then she began clearing away the loose snow bit by bit.
First came the faded pink thermal shirt, with the little duck I had begged her to stitch onto the collar last year.
Then came my loose hair, threaded with tiny ice crystals and stuck to my deathly pale cheeks.
My eyes were closed. Frost clung to my lashes, and my skin had an unnatural purple tint.
“Sien…na?”
Mom’s voice was very soft, as if she were afraid of waking me.
She reached out and touched my face with her fingertips.
It was icy and hard.
Her hand jerked back as if she had been burned.
But in the next second, she lunged forward, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me hard.
“Sienna Miller! Get up!”
My head lolled weakly with her movements, my neck limp and loose.
“Keep pretending. Go on, keep pretending. You think you can scare us like this? No way. Get up. Get up right now, do you hear me?”
Dad rushed over and shoved her away. Then he bent down and held his hand beneath my nose.
It was as if someone had pressed mute on the entire world.
Dad’s hand hovered there for a long, long time without moving.
Then his back bent little by little until he finally dropped to his knees in the snow.
Mom sat there blankly, looking at Dad and then at me.
She wanted to say something, but nothing came out.
“How is this possible? My Sienna is seventeen. She’s known this road home her whole life. How could she not come home?”
She suddenly crawled over, pulled me into her arms, and pressed her warm cheek tightly against my frozen one.
Her hands rubbed frantically over my arms and my back.
“You’re cold, aren’t you? You must be so cold. Mom’s here now. I’ll hold you, and you won’t be cold anymore. Sienna, open your eyes and look at me.”
“Baby girl, I’m not mad at you anymore. I’ll never yell at you again. Please open your eyes.”
“Didn’t you always love it when I held you? Wake up. I’m holding you now.”
Her body heat melted the frost on my lashes.
It turned into water, mixed with her tears, and dripped onto my face.
But I could never come back to life again.
“Why didn’t you come home? Why? Did someone hurt you?”
Mom finally broke down sobbing.
“Call the police. I’m calling the police. Someone must have hurt my baby girl.”
Sunny was being held by one of the neighbor women. Her small hand was clenched tight around the button eye, and it dug painfully into her palm.
Suddenly, she broke free and ran to Mom. Standing on tiptoe, she reached up with her little hand to wipe the tears from Mom’s face.
“Mom, don’t cry,” she whispered.
Then she looked at me.
“Sienna is asleep.”
It was as if those words jolted Mom awake.
She jerked her head up, her bloodshot eyes locking onto Sunny.
It was the same way she had stared at me yesterday.
“Asleep? She’s dead. You killed her. Why did you ask her to play hide-and-seek with you yesterday? Why?”
Sunny shrank back in fright. Her mouth trembled, and tears filled her eyes, but she did not dare make a sound.
Dad lifted his bloodshot eyes and yanked Mom away from me.
“Are you insane? What does this have to do with Sunny?”
“How could it not have anything to do with her?”
Mom pointed at Sunny like she had lost her mind. “If she hadn’t insisted on playing, if she hadn’t hidden and gotten lost, how could I have left Sienna here alone? My Sienna. My Sienna was only seventeen.”
She collapsed into the snow, pounding the ground as her words broke apart.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have hit her. I shouldn’t have left her here alone. She was sick. She couldn’t control it. I killed her. I did.”
Before she could finish, her eyes rolled back, and she fainted.
I watched everything, my thoughts turning slow and dull.
I was dead, so why was Mom so sad?
Shouldn’t she have been happy?
I watched the neighbors rush around to help Mom, who had nearly passed out completely.
Someone went to call a doctor, and someone else brought a thick blanket to cover me, but Dad stopped them.
He took off his own coat and gently laid it over me.
Then, with extreme care, he lifted me out of the shallow hollow.
My body stayed stiffly curled in that same position, and my head hung limply in the crook of Dad’s arm.
The snow was still falling, landing on my hair and my face.
Dad clumsily tried to brush it away with his hand, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not clear it all.
As we passed the old oak covered in memorial ribbons, Sunny broke free from the neighbor woman’s hand and followed us.
She tilted up her small face and looked at me in Dad’s arms. Then she suddenly reached out and took one of my cold, dangling hands.
“Sienna.”
She gently tucked the button eye, warmed by her palm, between my stiff fingers.
“Here’s your doll’s eye. I’m giving it back.”
The button eye slipped through my fingers.
It fell into the snow and disappeared.
Sunny lowered her head to look for it, but Dad stopped her with a low, strained roar.
“Stop looking.”
She trembled in fright and stood frozen in place.
Then, in her own blurry way, she finally understood something.
Sienna would never come back.
The eraser had really erased Sienna.