When blood drips, the sound is different from the sound of any other liquid. Blood is thick, dense. Dark yet soothing. Words cannot describe the emotions that is drawn and painted with the rhythm of blood on the white bamboo wood floor. I was the first to find her. Bethany. My insane cousin. Manic depressive schizophrenia is what doctors said she had. I found her medical papers when I was nine. My Uncle Kevin slapped me across the face so hard when I asked him if Bethany was a crazy person, that I hit the side of their refrigerator. I cried until he slapped me again and told me to never speak about Bethany like that.
“Three can keep a secret if two are dead.” Benjamin Franklin said that. But as a child, you have no idea what kind of damage a secret could do. So as a young girl, I learned it was okay to have secrets. I was taught to trust what adults said, that when everything was “okay” it was actually okay, regardless of what I knew was right and wrong. I discovered that I should not question my aunt and uncle when I heard the shrieks of my cousin Bethany at night or banging coming from the walls of her room. In all actuality, the secrets I was told to keep was the closest thing to trust for the people surrounding me. Intimacy came in the form of unspoken words. Unspoken words came with the threat of disownment if I were to spill the beans on matters that no one wanted to be spoken aloud.
Because the number one thing to remember about the people in my family is that the secrets were secrets for a reason. If spoken, my family would be forced to confront the reality of the situation. And the reality of the situation was unpleasant. But no one in my family spoke of such unpleasantries, which is how things led to this. A solid wall built of forbidden words.
I can’t help but feel that it is partly my fault. Mostly my fault. Because I could have said something. I should have said something. Yet I didn’t. It has come to this.
···
She was their first born. Their disappointment of a life time is what my mother said when I asked her about Bethany. We never spoke about her at my house. Only that once when I came home from Uncle Kevin and Aunt Sally’s house that I stayed for a weekend when Mother and Father went on a countryside vacation. Both Mother and Father questioned why I had a bruise on my face, and that was the only time we ever talked about my cousin Bethany. Mother and Father sternly explained that we were to never speak of Bethany. She was a secret.
She was my cousin, but she never went to any family functions. No reunions, anniversaries or weddings. No funerals either. My entire family was embarrassed of her. I can’t blame her. Why she did it.
···
I found her. The girl that was hidden from the world. Locked away in her own little box in her jail keepers home. Shame, because she really was a pretty girl. Curly blonde hair, round emerald eyes and soft milky flesh. I had always been jealous of her looks. Despite her mental flaws, with the right medicine and the right man, I really think she could have found happiness. Or at least something better than what she had at home.
···
At the age of nineteen, it ended. The chance of a life of her own, out of the grasp of her tormenters. I found her. I found her , and came to the assumption by observing the entire scene that she took every means possible to flee from everything she didn‘t have, everything she wasn‘t allowed to have.
I found her. I was fifteen. She was nineteen. It was Easter day. Her favorite day. The day when her best and my most favorite personality came forward. I called her Little May. A youthful girl, innocent and carefree. Little May wore the prettiest dresses. She laughed at all my silly jokes. Usually Little May only came out when I was the only one around. But every year on Easter day, Little May visited everyone. Everyone being her parents and mine. The one day out of the year when all was fine.
She hung limply from the flood lights in her hall entry way. Both wrists bled slowly, mutilated, creating the rhythm of desperate longing into the already large puddle beneath where the stool she had kicked out had previously been. Scattered in the puddle of her blood were pills that were for God only knows what. The remains of a shattered bottle of what seemed to be cheap whiskey was by the wall she faced, as if she thrown it when she had had her fill. The puddle of what was probably half of the fifth was starting to make its way over to the puddle of the thick scarlet liquid that was supposed to keep her cheeks rosy red. I found her.
I didn’t even cry. I didn’t have to.
Little May had volunteered to get more ginger ale. For half an hour she didn’t come back. Her parents nor mine seemed concerned. I listened to them and stayed put, even though my heart told me something was wrong. For almost an hour, I just sat, waiting for her. All four adults were too lost in their own world to really care. They had forgotten about her.
So I went looking for her. And I found her.
···
There was no real funeral for her. Bethany or any of her other personalities. She was just buried. An unmarked tomb stone. The secrets still stuck around. “Why dig out the skeletons from the closet”, is what they said. I visited her. Every day until I left home. Before I left, I carved her name into her tomb stone. Because she was real. She didn’t care about the secrets. None of her personalities did. Even when she was at her worst, she didn’t care. I found her. She told me there were things they forgot to mention about secrets.
Secrets, good or bad, never let you be happy. With secrets, you can never be full. There is something always left out, something always to come. Finally I listened to her.
I’m letting go of secrets. Good or bad. I want to be happy. For Bethany. Because I found her for a reason. And now I want to be happy for her.
Things They Forgot to Mention About Whispers: story December 31, 2008
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