The High Price of Living

Bridget

I never wanted to be the person I am today.

Though if you think long enough about it, nobody really gets to choose that, do they?

The same way Victoria didn't choose to be misunderstood or isolate herself, I was thrown into her place in our school, with no idea how to fill the role or what I needed to know, do, or say. 

I used to be nothing more than a bystander, which just goes to show that changes really do happen overnight. I used to be the person who blended so well in the background you wouldn't know I was there unless you were looking. 

The way it happened was so unexpected and unnerving, almost like everyone wanted to believe I was Victoria, somehow. I went from eating lunch in the library with a book on my knees to having people surrounding me, buying me every single food item there was to buy in the cafeteria, laughing and complimenting me on my clothes and hair and shoes. 

It was like Victoria had never even left.  

So I might tell myself I never feel one hundred percent comfortable with my group of friends because I was never prepared for the part I was thrown into, because I'd been wallflowering up until I became the most popular girl in my school. I might say every day to the mirror that I'm still who I used to be, that nothing has changed. Although I know it doesn't look that way, at least not on the outside. 

All the same, I can't help thinking, at least once every day, be it when I wake up or when I skate to school or when I'm listening to the people at my table at lunch talk about the latest party couple, that it hasn't changed. Just because nobody else sees it doesn't mean it's not true. 

My friends have replaced Victoria with me, and in doing so they've made it feel like she never existed. 

The day unfolds like this:

I get up at seven with my alarm like I do every day, and lie in bed considering if it's worth skipping school, also like I do every day. As always, I decide against staying home, mostly because I don't have an excuse to give my parents apart from feeling crappy. 

It seems like it's a long way from my bed to the bathroom, though that might just be my brain and some warped time-space perception issue - in reality the sink is exactly six steps from the edge of my bed.

I live in the laundry room on the ground floor of our house - and no, that's not some weird grief response or anything - I moved into it when I was thirteen as an experiment and loved it ever since. It's about ten by eight feet, not big by anyone's standards, but it's enough for me to exist in. The bed is narrow but cosy, and doubles up as a desk (with the aid of a helpful hardcover atlas I dug out of our basement) and dining table (for when I can't face another silent dinner with Mom and Dad). 

After I've washed my face and brushed my teeth (thirty strokes on each side, spit, rinse, repeat), I look into the mirror and see the person I've seen for the past eighteen months - I like to think of the girl in the mirror as Untouchable Bridget. The one who doesn't see the gaping holes everywhere Victoria used to be, the one who can get through day after day of homework and conversations that don't mean anything and the concerned stares of her teachers and parents. She's got long, tangled hair that bleeds the rich, raw colors of cut wood and wide, startled eyes that make her seem like she's running from something and not standing in the laundry room of a quiet cul-de-sac in New Jersey. 

I breathe in, try to merge my reflection with my body, imagining all her fearlessness and impenetrability infusing me until I am nothing but strength.

'Good morning, Bridget,' I whisper, and I turn my back on the untouchable girl.

There's a phenomenon in the world of psychoanalysis called survivor guilt. It's defined as 'a 'mental condition' in which a person sees himself as having done wrong for surviving a traumatic event that others didn't. The individual with survivor guilt typically has symptoms such as and including 'anxiety and depression, social withdrawal, sleep disturbance and nightmares, physical complaints and mood swings with loss of drive'.

I blame myself all the time for Victoria. But I don't have any of those symptoms. And that somehow makes it worse.

Mom and Dad tell me it's okay, that it's normal to have those feelings. But they also tell me Victoria's death wasn't my fault. 

After that lie, I'm not sure I can believe anything they say.

It was a suicide. That's what it said on the pathologist's report, from the autopsy. It was bad enough that I had to think of some stranger touching my sister's body, seeing things nobody else saw in her too-short life, slicing past skin to peer at her organs, the very same pulsing masses of cells that kept blood pumping through her veins for fifteen years. Until she decided to end all that. 

What was worse, though, was knowing nobody else would ever think otherwise.  

I snuck into Mom's home office the day after the funeral and I pulled out the envelope they'd gotten in the mail that week. Both of them had pretended it was just another bill, but I saw the sharp black letters at the bottom - American Medical Experts, LLC - Nationwide. There was no way my parents were getting an invoice from a lab, no matter how normal they were acting. 

It was lying under a pile of her work, like it was just another new case to work on, another trial scheduled. I felt this slow burn of anger, at the injustice of my mother pushing this envelope carelessly under things that didn't even matter, at the exact same moment I knew it was about Victoria.

The sheaf of papers inside included the results of some tests the pathologist had done, but the numbers blurred as I flipped through to the page I somehow knew to look for. 

CAUSE OF DEATH, I read. From this examination, the cause of death to the late Victoria Rutherford was multiple lacerations to the wrists. 

COMMENT: The manner of death is likely suicide. The case should be investigated as a suicide until proven otherwise. 

That's when my knees gave out, and I half-sat, half-lay on the carpeted floor of the office, clutching those papers to me like they were a lifeline. All I could see were those words, swirling in my head in a horrible whirlpool.

The cause of death to the late Victoria Rutherford. The manner of death is likely suicide. 

The late Victoria Rutherford...

This was my sister I held in my hands. 

Those four words hit me in a way sitting through her funeral white-faced and tight-lipped didn't, hit me harder than an uppercut to my stomach, and suddenly the tears I hadn't been able to cry since I'd found her body in her bathtub ninety hours ago were everywhere, replacing skin and muscle and bone, replacing air, until I was gasping for breaths that didn't exist and drowning in the ocean of salt and grief. I couldn't get my lungs to respond, and in those airless moments, the seconds when my body was deprived of the oxygen that made it run, there was a sudden clarity, a blinding realisation that left me winded in reverse, able to breathe again.

Victoria shouldn't have died.

The only reason she did was because I didn't save her.