The Girl in the Box (short story by me)

Elody Sherman woke with a start to a cold blast of autumn air whipping down her exposed neck. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and looked up towards the source of the draft, pulling the covers tighter around her. She’d left the window over her bed open overnight. Again. The bright light of her alarm clock caught her eye as she rose to pull the window shut, and she slammed it down loudly in surprise. 12:30 pm?! School started almost 4 hours ago! Why hadn’t her alarm gone off? But before she could cry out in panic, she remembered. She didn’t have school. She was on Thanksgiving break.

Exhaling with relief, Elody shivered. The cold air had frozen her toes into teeny icicles, and her room felt like the inside of a refrigerator. She looked around her room for a pair of socks for her icy feet, but could only find one of her little sister Echo’s stinky soccer socks. What the seven-year-old’s laundry was doing in Elody’s room was a mystery. She was tiptoeing across the floor on numb feet when she tripped on a picture frame that the wind had blown off her desk. It held a photo taken long ago, when Elody was about Echo’s age. She was sitting on the couch at her mom’s old house, snuggled into the lap of her older half-sister Eden.

Eden was in college now, but Elody remembered that she was coming to town that day to spend the break with her family. Elody hadn’t seen her half-sister in months, since they both took turns celebrating holidays at their parents’ respective houses. Their mother, Amy, married Eden’s father, Joe, right out of high school. They went to community college together, but Amy dropped out when she got pregnant with Eden at age 20. Their marriage, though slightly unstable, lasted for about six more years. They divorced when Joe discovered that Amy had been cheating on him with Elody’s father. By the time the divorce papers were filed, Amy was pregnant with Elody. Elody’s parents never married, but remained relatively friendly. She lived with her father for most of her childhood because her mother was going through “personal issues”. Then, Amy got remarried to a good man named Charlie, and returned to stability. She had little Echo when Elody was 9, and, in an effort to reconstruct her broken family, invited Elody to come live with her and Charlie. Elody had lived with them ever since. Her family was complicated, but she loved them.

Elody righted the picture and set it back on her desk. Scanning her messy room once more for a pair of clean socks, she went down the hall. As she neared the kitchen, the sweet, warm scent of pies filled her lungs, making her mouth water. Charlie baked the best pies anyone had ever had, and always got started baking the day before Thanksgiving. Elody passed the kitchen door and walked down the hall until she reached her parents’ room. She nestled her toes into the plush carpet as she shuffled across the room to her mother’s bureau. She opened the sock drawer and grabbed a pair, one of the only ones left amongst various stockings and pantyhose. She made a mental note to remind Amy to start the laundry soon. As she closed her fingers around the socks, she felt something cold and metallic brush her knuckles. Elody pushed aside a few rolls of pantyhose, uncovering a small metal box.

It was a little larger than her fist, and engraved with the initials ERM. Elody scanned her memory for someone she knew with those initials, but came up with nothing. Eden’s initials were EKM, and Echo’s were ECL. Elody’s full name was Elody Anne Sherman, EAS. Their mother was named Amy, nowhere near ERM. Curiosity overcame her, and she opened the box.

Inside, Elody found two Ziploc baggies. One contained eight miniscule baby teeth, spotted with dried blood and smooth as pearls. The other held three locks of curly blonde hair, soft and wispy. Beneath the bags, there was a small stack of photos. One was of a chubby, cherubic baby with blue eyes and a head of blonde curls. Another was an action photo of the same child, a little older, kicking a soccer ball across a field. Elody shuffled through the photos. They were all of the same little girl, blue eyed and angel-haired, at various ages. In one picture she posed with a smaller girl with wide brown eyes and straight golden hair, who Elody recognized immediately as her own sister Eden. Chills ran up her spine.

The last two photos were different. The angelic little girl had grown up, and her blonde curls were ironed flat and dyed ink-black. One was a school photo, the girl smirking at the camera as if daring it to take a picture. In the last one, a fuzzy Polaroid, she shot daggers with eyes pooled in eyeliner at something beyond the camera. Her pretty pink mouth was painted blood red and twisted into a frown. Her blue eyes were sharp and distant as icebergs. The intensity of her glare gave Elody goose bumps.

At the very bottom of the metal box there was a newspaper clipping. The same school photo that sat in the box smirked at Elody from the upper right corner. The headline read “Troubled Teen Ends Own Life” in block, sinister lettering. The picture’s caption identified the mystery girl as Emma Rose Mason. Daughter of Joe Mason and Amy Peters. Sister of Eden Mason. Elody’s head spun. She had another half sister? HOW?! She looked at the date on the newspaper. March 2002. She would have been 6 years old when it happened. Who was this Emma girl, and why hadn’t she ever heard of her?

The sound of the doorbell rang through the house and jolted Elody out of her trance. Somewhere from across the house she heard Echo shout Eden’s name. That was it, she thought. She’d ask Eden about this mysterious secret sister. She returned the clipping, photos, and plastic baggies to the metal box with shaking hands. Shutting it tight and shoving it into the pocket of her pajama shorts, she raced down the hall an bounded into her room, stashing the box under her pillow. She shed her pajamas and pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans, combed her wavy brown hair into a messy bun, and went to welcome her sister home.

Eden was tall and graceful, with soft brown eyes and caramel colored hair that was constantly pulled in a high ponytail. She was athletic, having been the star of her high school volleyball team. She went for daily 5-mile runs and was a complete health freak, made evident by her flat stomach and chiseled calves. All of Elody’s five feet two inches barely reached her sister’s sculpted shoulder.

The sisters embraced tightly when they saw each other. From the kitchen, their mother crowed, “Well look who’s risen from the dead! Good morning, Sleeping Beauty!” The jibe rang ironically in Elody’s head as her mind flashed to the girl in the box. She grabbed Eden’s arm, whispering in her ear and steering her to her room. Eden sat on the bed, looking expectantly at her half-sister. Elody reached under her pillow and pulled out the little metal box. Eden sucked in her breath sharply. She closed her eyes, massaging her temples, and whispered one word.

“Emma.”

She told Emma’s story with a shaky voice and punctuated it with teardrops. Emma had been Amy and Joe’s first child, born when they were seventeen and madly in love. They got married and went to college together, and Joe’s mother watched little Emma while they were in school. When Eden was born, Amy dropped out to care for the girls. They were a relatively happy family, until Amy went back to school six years later and fell for her English professor. Elody’s father.

When the affair was uncovered, Joe and Amy divorced. Emma went to live with her father. From then on, the rest of her life was a quick and rocky downward spiral. She entered her teen years with a bad habit of stealing her dad’s cigarettes and breaking into the liquor cabinet, and a volcano of fiery feelings and rejection inside. She refused to see or talk to her mother and burned the Christmas and birthday cards Amy sent her. She referred to Elody as “the Devil’s Spawn”. They sent her to countless therapists, but the drinking and smoking and anger just got worse until one day she drowned in it. On March 20, 2002, Emma overdosed on prescription painkillers, antidepressants, and vodka.

The news destroyed Amy. She hadn’t seen her daughter in six years. She went through an intense depression, developed an addiction to alcohol, and went to rehab twice before meeting Charlie and cleaning up her act. After that, she vowed to leave that part of her life behind. She made Eden, Joe, and Charlie swear to never talk about Emma in her presence. As a result, Elody never even knew Emma had existed.

Eden broke off with a sob, and looked up at her sister. Elody’s eyes were as wide as saucers. She felt numb from head to toe. She couldn’t believe that her mother would keep such a huge secret from her. Emotions coursed through her veins – warm, toxic rage, disbelief, betrayal, hurt... But also a tiny glimmer of understanding. It was overwhelming. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream at her mother and shake her by the shoulders. She was shell-shocked. Her mother had lied to her for her whole life.

After a few moment of sitting in stunned silence, Eden dried her eyes and cleared her throat.

“You have every right to be mad at her, El,” she said shakily. “But you have to understand. Emma is the source of most of Mom’s painful memories. She tried to start fresh when she had you, and Em already wasn’t talking to her… It was easier for her to just push it all away. When Emma died, Mom was devastated. She cried constantly… She wouldn’t even get out of bed, except to make herself a gin and tonic. You never really saw her like that because you were living with your dad then, and he thought you were too young to know about Em. Anyway, I think she convinced herself that the only way to move on was to forget everything from her past, including Emma. I know it wasn’t right for her to lie to you, but she had to move on somehow!”

She took a deep, ragged breath. “Are you okay?”

Elody gazed at Eden dazedly as her face slowly morphed from a mask of shock to a look of calm.

“I understand,” she said. “And I’m not going to confront Mom. I don’t want to cause her any more pain than she already has experienced. It might take awhile, but I think I can forgive her. One day.”

Now it was Eden’s turn to look shocked. “So you’re just going to forget about it?” Elody stood and picked up the box.

“Perhaps not forget. But I get why she hid all this from me. I think it’s best that I just let it go. Maybe eventually I’ll talk to Mom about Emma. But for now, this,” she shook the box, “is going back where I found it.”

Elody and Eden entered their mother’s room in silence. Eden opened the drawer and moved aside the rolls of pantyhose and stockings, and Elody placed the box back in the drawer. They shut it slowly, burying all the pain and tragedy of Emma with Amy’s socks, and the two sisters exited the room hand in hand.