When the Countdown Ended, I Became the Family Curse Chapter 06 (Continue)
She didn’t finish. Her hand slipped from Dad’s wrist, and she was gone.
Her last words hung in the room like a wisp of smoke, and neither of them could stop shaking.
Those words – God will never forgive you – neither of them would ever unhear them.
Dad looked hollowed out. The funeral was arranged quickly – small and simple, nothing like what
Grandmother deserved.
A grandmother and a granddaughter, dead in the same week. There was no good way to do any of it.
“Mia!” Mom threw herself over my body, clutching me so hard her arms trembled, as if she could squeeze the
life back into me.
“I was wrong… I was wrong… please, baby, open your eyes – just look at me
But I was past answering.
“Mom look. There’s something under the pillow.” Sean pulled out the letter before anyone else even saw it.
Dad wiped his face and unfolded it with shaking hands.
“To Mom, Dad, and Sean if you’re reading this, the countdown is over and I’m gone. I want you to know I
was so happy. Eighteen years with you was more than I ever thought I’d get, and I’m grateful for every single
day.”
“If there’s another life after this one, I hope I find you again. P.S. – The piggy bank is for Sean. There’s enough
in there to get him something good. Think of it as an early birthday present from me.”
I’d written it the night of my eighteenth birthday, right after blowing out the candles.
The storage room went so quiet you could almost hear the letter trembling in Dad’s hands.
Mom slid to the floor, and the regret hit her all at once- not in waves, but like a wall.
She saw it now – all those years of giving me the best of everything and all the new clothes, and not a single
bit of it had been love. It was guilt. Compensation. Paying off a debt to a daughter who was meant to die.
She remembered the look on my face when I said goodbye on my eighteenth birthday calm and sad and ready, like I’d been rehearsing it my whole life.
She saw her own hand slapping mine away from the egg.
She heard herself blaming me for the water bill, Sean’s grades, the burned dinner, the blown light bulb. She heard herself screaming greedy, useless, a jinx.
She remembered locking me in this room with a fever and walking away. No food. No water. No second thought.
She’d convinced herself I was an aberration – something that should have died and didn’t. And that story had
given her permission to hate me.
She never knew I was supposed to live. That Grandmother had given everything so I could. And they – Mom
and Dad, with their own hands – had destroyed the very thing Grandmother died to give them.
Mom’s screams had gone hoarse. The grief pouring out of her now was just as violent as the cruelty that
had caused it.
Dad had his back against the wall, shaking, tears running down his face without sound.
He thought about how quiet I’d always been, how easy. He remembered waving off the fight in the kitchen
like it was nothing go do something – while I stood there with a swollen hand.
He heard my voice again, small and breaking: Is this happening because I didn’t die?
He remembered the phone ringing, and leaving. Grabbing Sean, heading for the nursing home, and leaving
me locked in this room to die alone.
He understood now. Their love had always had an expiration date. They’d loved the daughter who was about
to die.
They couldn’t accept the one who was supposed to live.
“We killed her,” he whispered. “It was us.”
Dad slid down the wall until his knees hit the floor. He pressed his forehead against the concrete and stayed there, his whole body convulsing with sobs that sounded like they were being ripped out of him.
All the regret in the world couldn’t change it. They buried me three days later.
They laid me to rest right next to Grandmother.
I watched them shovel the dirt in, spadeful by spadeful. I was standing right there among them – and no one
knew.
Mom collapsed twice during the service. Dad looked ten years older than he had the week before.
Sean limped to the edge of the grave and knelt there, laying down flowers one by one with his small, careful
hands.
A petal broke loose and drifted up. It landed on my palm- or where my palm used to be. I could almost feel
it almost.
“Mia,” Sean whispered. “I used the money in the piggy bank. All of it. I got you the biggest bunch of flowers
they had.” He paused. “Can you see them?”
I knelt beside him and reached for his hair. My hand went right through.
The dates on the tombstone showed I’d lived exactly eighteen years. In the end, that was exactly right – just
not for the reasons anyone thought.