Snatched
Courtesy of Melissa Wiese via Flickr
By Nicole Cushing
I leaned the painting from my brother against the wall and fell back onto the bed; the thick cherry-wood frame made me think some elderly couple died in it and their 40-something-year-old kids sold it off to my parents at a yard sale. My parents. Two weeks ago this family never knew they’d have me back. I was lucky to have a bed at all. I looked up at the bare walls. They were as stark as this new life of mine.
I glanced at the painting and attempted to imagine that day. The grey sky was streaked with clouds. My brother was standing by an umbrella that was shoved into the sand beside some abandoned beach chairs. In the painting, he was looking down at a shadow—a blend of his body and the umbrella, a little girl in a dress. His expression was as bleak as the sky.
I imagined I was playing in the sand when my mom went to get Chris after he wandered off that day. She probably thought I wouldn’t go far since I was perfectly content plopped on a towel filling a pail with sand.
Chris knocked on the inside of my open door, breaking me from my trance. I shook my head, snapping the room back into focus and looked up, smiling softly.
“Wanna go for a walk?”
“Sure.”
I nodded in agreement and lifted myself off the bed.
“Ma, we’re going for a walk. We’ll try not to get taken by any strangers!” He smirked at me. “Too soon?”
We shared this expression along with medium brown almond-shaped eyes and long eyelashes.
Chris opened the door; the sound of the bustling cars was deafening. Just “going for a walk” was not something I was used to.
The air was cool and in the midst of the city’s fumes, there was a distinct smell of crisp leaves with a tinge of rich Italian spices. I thought to myself, I could go for pizza right about now. All I had eaten was some toast and it took a lot of effort to keep it down.
“You wanna get some pizza?” Chris looked at me then at the vendor across the street.
“Okay, freaky-twin-mind-reader. Yeah, I’d love some.”
“I figured, since you haven’t had more than a few bites since you came home.”
Home. That word seared through my chest like lightning.
I didn’t realize I had stopped walking.
“Oh, sorry—I need to think before I speak.” Chris looked at me then down at the ground.
“It’s okay.”
We paid for our pizza and found a dry spot on the curb, where we sat eating in silence for a while.
“You’ll get used to us, you know. It won’t always be this hard.”
“I’m just trying to figure out who I am. A month ago I was Nora; I had her life and her dad—and now I’m expected to move on as Charlotte?”
“Those are just names. You can be whoever you want to be now. You can start over.”
“I know. But my dad…”
“He’s not your dad.”
“He raised me,” I said, feeling defensive.
“He took you away from us. I wandered off and he stole you.” His eyes welled up and he looked away.
“Chris, you were a toddler, how would you have known?”
I thought back to the painting he crafted—a dark and depressing yet beautiful piece of art.
His heart hurt as much as mine but his pain followed him for over fifteen years. Mine had just begun.
I put my hand on his and yanked both of us up off of the curb, feeling exhilarated.
“Let’s go.”
He promptly followed me across the street back to the brownstone I now called home.
I led him through the front door, past the kitchen, to my room and tacked his painting on the wall above my dresser.
Grinning, I turned to him. “That day is in the past. Look at all of these blank walls we have to fill with the future. I’m no longer a shadow.”
Nicole Cushing is a writer and technical support lead from the Boston area. She finds passion in blogging, fiction writing, reading thriller novels, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts. Her happy place is hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.