A Song for Us

Chapter Thirty-Eight

SARAH

I TRIED TO ESCAPE from my thoughts, but it was useless. A knock came at the door to my room and I turned to see a nurse standing in the open space.

“You have a visitor.”

I pushed up from my bed, terrified and hopeful in the same moment. The nurse stepped aside to reveal a woman who looked like the mirror image of myself, only younger. I blinked, unable to believe what I was seeing.

“Jenny?” I pushed to my feet and my vision blurred. I wanted to run toward her, embrace her, but I stopped. I hadn’t spoken to her in years and she had every right to hate me. But then she took a step forward and then lunged toward me, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me against her.

“I’m so sorry, Jenny. I’m so sorry,” I whispered over and over as she buried her face in the crook of my neck. “I shouldn’t have left you there with him. I’ll never forgive myself.” I pulled back to look her in the eye.

She grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly as tears streamed down her cheeks. “No. Don’t do this. I was safe. I went and lived with Aunt Carla.”

Relief washed over me as I realized she had never had to endure what I went through. I had been carrying around the guilt of what could have happened for years, and it had slowly been killing me.

“Why didn’t you go to her house, Sarah? Why didn’t you ever come find me?”

“I couldn’t look you in the eye after . . . after what had happened. I was afraid everyone blamed me . . . afraid of what had happened after I’d left you . . . I couldn’t face it.”

“No one blamed you. Not even Mom. She was devastated by what happened.”

“What?” Jenny knew? And she told Mom? And Mom was . . . devastated? Maybe her indifference to my pain had just been . . . blindness?

All of these years I thought I carried the burden of this secret alone.

“When you didn’t come meet me at school, I knew you had finally left. I ran back in and told my teacher to call Mom at work. I didn’t understand. I was too young back then, but I knew you ran away because of Phil. I tried to explain it to Mom. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but she knew it had to be more than you just disliking him.” She paused and met my gaze. “She confronted him and he denied ever doing anything to you, but she knew he couldn’t be trusted to be around me without knowing the whole story. She took me to Carla’s and we never went back. She tried to have Phil arrested, but without you there wasn’t any proof, and all I knew was that he scared you and was always trying to be alone with you when Mom wasn’t around.”

I took a few steps back and sank down on the edge of the bed as my thoughts raced with all of this new information. Everyone knew. I could have told my mother . . .and she would have believed me. Jenny had been safe all this time.

“How did you know I was here? How did they find you?”

“You have some very good friends that really care about you. Cass spent hours scouring the Internet, Facebook, everything. It was her who got in touch with us.”

“How is Mom?”

“She misses you.”

“Then why isn’t she here?”

“She blames herself for what happened to you, Sarah. It nearly killed her, you know. She was afraid you wouldn’t want to see her.” She swallowed. “She’s never stopped thinking about you, talking about you . . . She’s just been living in fear that you hate her, that you blame her like she blames herself . . .”

“That makes two of us.” I looked over my sister. She was wearing a sundress with yellow roses covering the bottom of the skirt. She wore little makeup and her hair was swept up in a ponytail.

The nurse who had been waiting in the hallway stepped inside, clearing her throat. “Are you okay, Sarah?” Her eyes danced between my sister and me.

“Yeah, I think . . . I think that, finally, I am.”