There are three different types of people, as my great aunt Louise used to say. The ones who watch, the ones who are watched, and the ones who decide who are watched. And in this case, my darling Maisie was one who watched, with eyes full of wonder that soaked up the world like every detail was a big matter.
Instead of playing dolls and princesses like other little girls her age, she preferred to sit, legs dangling off the side of our elevated porch, gentle brown eyes picking out the details nobody else ever saw. She was a peculiar child, but in a good way. She always noticed things nobody else did, and her quiet nature and trusting personality created the ultimate people watcher.
When I was in third grade, I would bring Maisie along with me to hang out with my friends when I felt they were hiding something from me. It was a bit odd to bring a three and a half year old to a friend's house, but Maisie was an expert in body language. She had wisdom beyond her toddler years.
Maisie was my best friend for all those years, my quiet, reclusive younger sister always made me feel special, even if she did nothing but look at me with her larger than life chocolate eyes. She was my calm, but we were both surrounded by the torrential storm that was the rest of our family. I'm sure I contributed to the awful fighting that went on, but through the whole thing, Maisie never said a word. She just watched, even as my oldest sister threatened to move out and my parents debated a divorce.
Life was not good, but I had Maisie. I was determined to sheild her from any bad in the world. She was fragile, but not once did I ever see her cry.
"Michelle?" She asked me one day, while I sat next to her on the porch, my converse clad feet dangling off of the side of the platform, watching two robins make a nest.
"Yeah, Maisie?" I answered quietly, not wanting to scare the two birds away, my eyes bringing in the storybook like sight hungrily.
"Do you think I'm... odd?"
Maisie had just started kindergarten, and her peers were nothing but awful to her. She was the grade's obvious wallflower, not pursuing little boys on the playground or dressing her skinny body in pink princess prints. The children laughed at her and called her terrible names, and in that moment, in my melodramatic sixth grade brain, I felt I had to correct something the children had done to my sweet Maisie.
"Maisie, everyone is odd in their own ways. Sometimes people will say mean things, but maybe that is the way that they are odd. Never let anyone tell you you're odd, because I love you." Satisfied with my response, I returned to watching the birds.
But, later that year, our parents signed the divorce papers, and Maisie stopped talking. She didn't even reply to her own name, she was so lost in her own mourning for our fragmented family.
Countless therapy sessions and doctor's appointments were made. Maisie remained mute and distant, forgetting to eat and spending more and more time on the porch, high above the ground, where she pondered every thought that flew through her brain. My mother was at her wit's end. She was a newly single mother to five children, one of which was mute. She couldn't figure out how to help Maisie. Nobody could.
One morning, I woke before everyone else, something that had been happening more and more. I went to fetch Maisie, but she was nowhere to be found. I woke my mother. She woke my older sisters and we began to search for her.
Growing more and more feverish, my mother dialled the police as my oldest sister Mickey called my father.
I slipped out on to the porch, certain that Maisie would be there, sitting alone like she was every morning. The cool morning air was all too quiet as I called her name, my voice ringing through our densly wooded backyard. She didn't answer, but I hadn't expected her too. She hadn't spoken a single word since our parents had split and our father had moved out.
"Maisie, please! Stop playing!" I called out, my tone a bit harsher than I would usually use on Maisie, masking the worry and fear I felt building in my stomach. Slowly, I made my way to the edge of the porch where the board had dipped from Maisie's constant prescence. A glass of melted ice water sat on the ledge, knocked over, the contents dribbling of of the porch.
What I saw when I peered over the ledge is something I will never forget, not even if I live to be one hundred.
Maisie lay, in the piles of dead leaves that carpeted the ground, an eerie smile on her lifeless lips, her eyes, which had observed so much and weathered so many childish taunts wide open and fearfull looking.
And I screamed. I screamed until my throat felt raw and there was no air left in my body. I didn't even have to say anything, Mickey appeared with my mother and my sisters, summoned by the animalistic noises that I was creating as I screamed. My mother dropped the phone she was holding.
Mickey collapsed.
I let sobs wrack my body, as the woman on the other side of the nine one one call my mother had been making searched for answers.
But there were no answers to be found, as our entire family disinegrated in a matter of seconds.
They said it was an accident.
That she was sitting down and slipped, her balance disturbed by the glassof ice water she had most likely held in her delicate hands.
My mother blamed my father.
My father blamed my mother.
I blamed myself.
Maybe, if I had watched the People Watcher more carefully, none of this would have happened.
After Maisie's passing, and after the funeral that just solidified the horrible nightmare that was going on around me, I tried to become more like her. Speak less, watch more, observe everything. But all that I found was that my younger sister had a true gift, a gift that people found 'weird' and 'odd'. Maisie was so much stronger than I had thought before.
My sisters, Mickey, Maddy, and Melody, were less effected by Maisie's accidental death than I was. They had never really payed much attention to our simple, quiet youngest sister, choosing instead to focus on dreadfully shallow things like hair and makeup. But they were still traumatized, especially Mickey, who had mentioned just days before Maisie's death that mom should really put a railing on the high, towering two story porch.
Life was so different without her. It was like some hand had reached out of the sky and tried to pluck all of Maisie out of our lives, but failed. Maisie's small bedroom stayed exactly how she had left it on the day she died, and my mother refused to let any of us clean any of her things up.
My father next to disappeared, picking up and moving to Ontario with a girlfriend he had aquired a bit before Maisie's passing. I never really saw him after that, but I missed him terribly. It was like every person I loved was being plucked away, one by one, especially when Mickey moved out of our childhood home to live with her boyfriend, who was three years older and played in a rock band.
My mother almost never left her room, eating oatmeal for every meal, her entire body masked in a thick covering of blankets that were obviously supposed to keep pain away. It was like we had lost her, too. She hardly spoke an when she did it was in a voice that was so broken you could hardly understand it.
Life was hard.
Honestly, I missed her with my entire being, her little laugh and her wide, all seeing eyes. But maybe, maybe she just needed a new place to watch the world go by from, her legs not dangling from the edge of a porch but from the edge of a cloud high above in the heavens.
