Sisters [book one]

Chapter Eight

This is dedicated to @dreamy_ because a while ago, she gave me some advice on one of the clubs about which story I should develop. Thank you! That story is being developed right now.

Chapter Eight

The doctors said that temporary amnesia was normal. The key word here being temporary. Unfortunately, what the doctors failed to provide was an exact answer of when Michele's memory would return.

She stays in the hospital for several days after she wakes up. She speaks to a counsellor and passes many tests before the doctors allow her to come home.

Things should be back to normal by now. We haven't had official word from the doctors yet but when they're talking about Michele out in the hallway, I can see it in their expressions: her memory should've returned.

She's looking around the front hallway of our home like she's seeing it for the first time. Dad takes her bags up to her room and Mom escapes into the kitchen to cook something up for lunch. I follow Michele up the stairs. It reminds me of when Michele came home from Australia. Only now, she’s distant, hesitant and she has to ask me which room is hers.

I watch her as she enters her bedroom. I took the liberty of tidying it when the doctors said it wouldn't be long before she’d be able to come home. Dad places Michele’s bags in the middle of the carpet and Michele sits at the end of her bed. She stares at her vanity, at all the bottles and brushes lined up...

"Come on, Hales," Dad says. "Give her some space."

I nod and stand. I smile at Michele but she doesn't smile back. I close the door behind me and I fall into my dad's arms.

* *

For weeks, Michele and I brush shoulders with one another, exchanging few words: "dinner's ready," or "gee, it was really cold out today," and sometimes even, "so how are you?" Michele's been visited by her friends and Dr. Cole, a psychiatrist who comes by the house twice a week, to try to chisel away the dam that's stopping her from remembering us.

Mom and Dad are continuously arguing, a sign that Michele's return hasn't dampened their need to get at each other's throats every second of the day.

I sit in my bedroom on a Wednesday evening, doing homework, when bangs and crashes originate from next door.

I get up and knock on Michele's door, worried something has fallen and she's hurt herself. "Michele?" I call.

"What?" is her curt response.

I open the door. Her vanity’s stripped clean. Plastic bags filled with her stuff scatter the carpet. "What the hell are you doing?" I say.

"It just sits there," Michele says, tying a knot on one of the bags. "And I don't do anything with it, so I'm having a clear out." She tries to walk past me with a bag but I block the threshold. "Excuse me," she says, "Can I get past?"

"No." I snatch the black bag from of my sister's hands and drag it back to the centre of the room. I peer into the other bags. Inside: cuddly toys; most of her clothes; books, including the Harry Potter series. I pick up Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and flick through the red tinted pages of the endless times Michele’s read it, and when Mom accidentally spilt red wine over it.          

"You can't throw any of this out, you love this book," I say.

"Well I am," Michele says defiantly. "And the books sound childish anyway."