The Wishing Game(75)
Lucy couldn’t say anything. Words refused to form. She’d imagined this day a thousand times, when her mother or father or sister or all of them would come crawling to her, begging for forgiveness. Sometimes in her daydreams, she forgave them. In most of her dreams, she didn’t. She told them it was too little too late, that Lucy had moved on, didn’t need them anymore. Then she got up and walked away, never turning back no matter how loudly they called her name.
Finally, Angie broke the silence in the room. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll go now. You deserve an apology, but you also deserve to be left alone if that’s what you want.”
Angie pushed herself slowly up off the sofa. Lucy noticed a grimace of pain and wondered if her sister had lingering complications from all her childhood illnesses. This wasn’t part of her daydreams.
“You can stay,” Lucy said.
Angie looked at her, suspicious, before slowly easing down onto the sofa again.
“Can I just ask,” Lucy said, “is what you said true? Did Mom and Dad have me because the doctors said you might need bone marrow someday? And when you ended up not needing it, I was just taking up space?”
Angie sat back on the sofa, her eyes staring blankly at the cold and empty fireplace.
“Can I tell you something?” Angie asked. “Will you listen?”
“I’m here,” Lucy said. “Go on.”
“Did you know that the kids who grow up as the ‘favorites’ in families are usually more screwed up than the kids who aren’t the favorites? The first lesson we learn is that our parents’ love is conditional and that failure to perform means that they can take all that love away. We see it with our siblings, so we do everything we can to make sure that never happens to us. Fun, right? I learned that in therapy.”
Lucy couldn’t quite speak yet. She took a moment and then said, “You’re in therapy?”
“I’ve been in therapy since I was seventeen,” she said and gave a cold little laugh. “Mom and Dad’s idea. Well, command.”
“Because you were traumatized by being sick your entire childhood?”
“Because they weren’t happy unless I was sick,” she said. “They liked me when I was sick. They liked sending me to doctors and getting me treatment. Once I got better physically, I had to have other things wrong with me for Mom and Dad to fix. So first they said I had a learning disability, then an eating disorder, then they decided I was depressed and possibly bipolar. You name it, they tried to find a doctor to say I had it. They sent me to every psychiatrist and psychologist and psychotherapist they could find. If they weren’t heroes, trying to do everything they could to save their precious baby, what else would they do with their lives, right?”
Lucy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was like learning her sister was a spy, and now she was double-crossing their parents.
“They’re not healthy people,” Angie went on. “I don’t know if they’re both narcissists or it’s just Mom, and Dad’s so weak he can’t help but follow her lead…Who knows? Not that it matters. Whatever’s wrong with them…” She looked up at the ceiling as if trying not to cry. “Let’s just say, looking back, I envy you for growing up with Grandma and Grandpa instead of at home. I know you’re pissed at me for what I said at my birthday party, but I promise you this—you’re the lucky one, Lucy. I wish you knew…”
Lucy simply stared at her while her brain tried to process what she was hearing. “I’m sorry. I can’t wrap my mind around all this.”
“Really? I thought you left because you’d figured it all out. Another thing I learned in therapy?” Angie said. “The kids in dysfunctional families who act out and rebel are the ones who are the healthiest mentally. They’re the ones who see that something’s wrong. That’s why they act out—because they see the house is burning down, and they’re screaming for help. That was you. The rest of us were just sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner, while everything was burning down around us. I should have listened to you. I should have screamed for help too.”
Warily, Lucy listened while Angie shared her side of the story, haltingly at first, but then it all seemed to come out in a rush, like a dam breaking at last…
Angie spent half her childhood sitting at her window, watching other kids playing in the streets, going trick-or-treating, riding bikes, sitting in their backyards reading or running around or climbing trees. She hated other kids, but it was jealousy and nothing else. She knew that now. And yes, she’d really been sick. That had all been real, but there was no need to send Lucy away, except it made her parents seem like bigger heroes to the world, that their oldest child was so ill they had to focus 100 percent on getting her better. Oh, and what a sacrifice to give up their youngest daughter. What heartbreak! What heroism! It made Angie want to puke.
Then, finally, Angie was better. Stronger, healthier…Angie figured out fast that when she wasn’t sick, her parents lost all interest in her. She started to fake illness, to fake a fever, to pretend to be sick. It played right into her parents’ hands. Then it started all over again. The therapist appointments. The martyrdom of Mom and Dad.
“Except it didn’t work out how they wanted,” Angie said, her face triumphant. “My therapist saw what was going on. I wasn’t the screwed-up one in the family. Mom and Dad were. And I was done playing along.”