Eleven Months

By: Jordan Seifert

We climbed over the last hill of what had been an incredibly bumpy journey. I had felt my ears pop half a dozen times, and mom and dad had more than grown tired of my groaning. Coming around a bend, I felt the turn in my gut as I watched the never ending sky pass over. The sun beat down hard on the tip top of the ridge, bleaching everything a soft spring colour. Shamrock green grass met the gray-brown soil that skirted the edge of an almost forgotten road. The hill dropped off as we barrelled around its sharp curve, the old wheels on our van desperately trying to cling to the pavement. We passed by rows and rows of trees, until finally we were enveloped under a massive ceiling of branches and leaves. Finally we came to a stop in the deepest part of the valley, the one I’d been told about nearly every day for the past three months. Silently I wished that my sister could be there to see it too. Like my sister, I had long auburn hair which shone brightly in the sun, a tiny nose that often made it hard to breathe, and two pale freckles on each side of my face. Like my sister, I was five foot five, and I had a set of deep blue eyes that were the envy of more than a few girls at our school. Like my sister I was built skinny and looked good in a dress. But unlike my twin sister, who hadn’t been able to make the trip out to our new house, I was alive.

I could only remember it like a story book. Everything had split into disjointed scenes. I remember her and I coming back from school, a smile on her face that mimicked my own. I remember her screaming into the shadow of the night, and I remember screaming back. And finally, as disjointed as my memories, I remember pieces of her body scattered about her room, and thick black blood that would never come out of the hardwood floor. Separated only by an ultra-thin wall, I heard every yell for help, every choke and every gurgle. I didn’t know more than a few adults growing up. There were my teachers, my aunts and uncles, and my parents, but that was it. I’d met their friends a couple of times each, but our parents liked to go out and they had no qualms with leaving us by ourselves. It would’ve been stupid of me to have assumed whoever it was had carefully picked my sister, April. It was because she was there, just as it would’ve been me if I slept on the other side of the dividing wall. Left alone, my parents out late, I had let my sister get killed. I sat frozen in fear while she struggled with everything she had. I know what she was wishing at that moment… That I would help her. I didn’t see who did it. All I saw was a shadow hanging over the perch of her window, and then the same shape again escaping into a vehicle parked in the alley behind our house. I had been a coward, and it cost my sister her life, but I couldn’t help but feel that it saved mine. A dirty, selfish thought And even though my parents never resented me for stalling--on the outside--I felt selfish, resentful of myself. As if it would’ve been better to have two brave daughters die than one scared little daughter alive. After that night, I forgot what it felt like to believe in God.

I overheard the police. They couldn’t keep quiet, remarking in less than tender terms the severity of the crime. From birth I was taught that the police were there to protect me, an illusion that died out as I watched them break down. In shock, I didn’t say a word. The police tried to talk to me, but all I saw was the wall, and in its shallow, empty beige I watched my imagination strangle and cut and slice my sister. I tried to place an action to every sound. That’s the last thing I remember before the funeral.

We pulled up to the old stone villa at 6:23 PM, April 22nd, 1997. I bet when my parents decided to name my sister April, they never thought there would come a time they‘d only be living eleven months a year. 8 days left. April 1st was the first day I really wished it had been me who died. Amy wasn‘t a name you saw on every calendar, and TV station, and it wasn‘t associated with the rain or the spring. It would’ve been easier to forget about me in the long run, I thought. I sat staring at my watch for a good portion of the trip, ignoring the old houses and towering trees as if by refusing to acknowledge them, I might find myself somewhere else. Like my mother and my father, I hadn’t wanted to stay in the home where April died. Any sentimental value I had attached to that place was long gone. But I wanted to move somewhere big and bright and city-like, where I could hear people at all hours of the night and where I’d never feel alone. Instead, we were exactly 743 meters away from the nearest neighbour. I counted.

The house stood high, overshadowed still by the billowing Elms and Oaks that stood in our yard. They were distanced from one another so that the yard opened up like a massive field, each tree standing fifty feet or more, most of them incredibly wide. Tiny slivers of light broke through the thick barrier of leaves and branches; golden flecks that revealed the world underneath. Our new house was a hundred year old stony villa, and colourful rock paths led around the stone walls to every one of the houses many doors. It was bright inside, a stark contrast from the yard, every room lit by a half a dozen lamps that were fixed into the walls. It was a more beautiful home than most, but it was fairly normal outside of one small thing. In the farthest room, a door we’d first thought was a closet opened up to a hallway, dingy and uncared for. Two empty rooms, featureless, were tucked away. And in one of them was a safe. It was massive, taking up the entire corner and much of the floor space. It stood several feet tall, and was hundreds, possibly thousands of pounds. My father rapped his knuckles against it. Nothing. With no combination, there wasn’t much reason to keep it around, but dad had said it weighed a million pounds and wasn‘t worth the trouble. To get it out of the house, we’d have to bring in a special truck to lift it, and then there was the problem of getting it down the stairs. Since we hadn‘t planned on using the rooms anyways, we decided to leave the safe be and it soon left our minds.

My room was amazing. Dad had come to set it up in the weeks prior. I wanted to cry. It was my first time seeing it, or even thinking about seeing it. A luxurious four poster bed was crowned by a soft, white duvet. Pictures of all my favourite cities hung on the soft red walls, and the roof peaked high above where I stood. Four small lights hung from each corner of my room, the warm, romantic light illuminating my new world. I went ahead and filled my closet and dresser with dresses and shirts and uniforms for school. On top of my dresser, I placed a small steel lock box with a picture of April inside.

“Why don’t you just take a picture of yourself if you’re so sad?” a girl at school had teased me. The small crumpled photo was everything to me, but I felt embarrassed to have it. I didn’t want my parents knowing I mourned my sister the way they did. I could never be sure if they felt like I was responsible. I wasn’t sure if they wanted me to mourn.

On May 1st, April came to visit me. For the first day in a month, I was sleeping soundly. I hadn’t been scared out of my dreams by monsters or what they’d done. Inside my head I sat within a massive field of blue flowers, their stems bent over as if to accommodate the weight of the huge tulips on the end. They shimmered in the sun like glass, sparkling. In every direction outwards from the garden were deep fields of grass. I could see the blades waving towards me, and a soft wind blew by. The warm breeze felt personal. I didn’t need a face or a voice to tell me that my sister was there in my dream, trying to tell me she was okay. As the first few glimmers of sunlight were drawn into my room, I slipped out of bed and greeted the morning. Quickly I dressed myself and ran down to the beginnings of what was to be our garden. I hunched over under a massive Elm tree, the light making its way through the endless canopy in small bursts. I bit my tongue, rubbing it in between my lips, and started to scribble down all my ideas in an old notebook I’d decided to make my diary. The garden and its tulips and the breeze that blew through the grass. They were all stuck permanently in the wall of my memory, engraved into its thickness. As I sat out by where we’d just begun to plant our garden, the trickling light brought me scattered ideas, and the friendliness of the dream slowly began to wear away. It could’ve been that there was no grander meaning. That I was all alone and imagining things to comfort myself. Or it could’ve been possible that it was a sign that April resented me, blowing hot wind from hell’s dingy black furnace.
“Amy! Breakfast!” my mother called, pulling me away from my thoughts.