Little Footsteps

A second chance:

How could she forgive herself?

Paula asked herself this question every day since her memory came back. Paula was devastated, the guilt she felt for the crime she had committed was immense. She called the doctor the next day and told him everything while crying but she was surprised that he took the news with glee and optimism. Anyway Dr. Rush promised to go see her when he vacated.

What the doctor had not liked was the method the Parkers had used to make Paula remember. He was very angry with them because they had broken the most important rule he assigned them when she went to live in that house. He wanted to speak to the two of them, especially Mr. Parker.

Paula spoke very little to her aunt about what had happened, and she didn't speak to Mr. Parker. That man's hostility went a long way. Not even he sat at the table in front of her at meal times. Mr. Parker insisted that his wife serve him food in his room, but Paula was not offended by that, but she did expect him to have a little more respect for her. But she contained that thought. Did she really deserve to be treated with respect after what she had done?

Mrs. Parker immediately suspected that something had changed in her niece. Paula was very sad and silent. She sensed that Paula had remembered something and so she wanted to know it, but when she asked her niece about her memories, she avoided the subject, but the woman didn't give up so easily so she at least got Paula to admit that she had remembered something.

The first days of her «recovery», Paula had a very bad time. She couldn't forget the memory of her baby and her husband and was left with the horrible question of whether her husband was really cheating on her with her friend. She could never know because Erika would not tell her.

Paula asked Dr. Rush where Erika was but he replied that he didn't know anything about her after the trial, which she attended confused and almost unable to believe that Paula had done something so terrible, but finally she had a hysterical attack when she realized that it was true. The doctor recommended that Paula not look for her, at least for now, and only confront her when she was ready and she wanted to receive her.

The girl felt dirty and somewhat sick, she distanced herself from the others because she was afraid to repeat, in a fit of anger, what had happened in the past. What if she might one day get mad at Aunt Parker or Daiana? What would happen then? Would she attack them too? Paula didn't want to see her friend, even though she had visited her a couple of times that week.

Being afraid of herself was worse and more destructive than all the fear she had felt before about the supposedly paranormal things that had happened to her. Now she was certain that all of this was the product of a disturbed mind like hers.

The old house seemed harmless to her now, too gray abandoned and «normal»

Only the village children could fear that house. Paula understood that her fears were unfounded, so she felt ashamed. For that reason Daiana was not everything that she had told her about the boy, because none of it was real. The house with its dark, shadowy corners no longer frightened Paula nor did they rob her of sleep.

Paula never heard little footsteps in the dark, nor cries of children, nor did she see dark ghosts. All that seemed to have vanished when the truth appeared in her mind, but what was more terrifying than the truth?

Time passed, the days became more routine. Paula stopped thinking that she did not deserve the second chance that life gave her and that instead she deserved a worse death than she had given her family. At first she had thought that God had not been fair to them, but Paula saw a new path in her life, at last she was able to convince that, after all, the death of her family had been a terrible accident. She was never aware of the damage she could cause, she acted on impulse.