She didn't remember anything. That was the thing that had always bothered Sunny. She knew she wasn't supposed to—she'd been an infant when it started, and even when everything was over she was little more than a toddler. She hadn't even been able to speak properly. But still, she felt she should have some memory of the events that defined her entire life.
When Sunny was young, her siblings had sat with her and Beatrice and told the stories all evening, for so long that any fire in the hearth would have died, if they had ever dared to light one. After a while, though, the two had stopped speaking of it, saying the events were better off forgotten. Beatrice, by then, had already internalized every word, but Sunny never listened, content with the fragments she could still remember. That was before she discovered that she lost more and more every year.
Some days, it seemed even Beatrice remembered better than her. Klaus and Violet would share a bittersweet recollection, or find themselves shuddering at a mundane object Sunny had barely even noticed—a jar of horseradish, a bread knife, a book of matches, a sugar bowl. Beatrice would tremble along with them, and Sunny would be left clueless. Her history had become a shared secret among the household, kept only from her.
All Sunny had left was a hatred of swimming, of the tightness in her lungs while she held her breath. She could just barely recall darkness, being trapped in an impossibly tight space where water surrounded every wall, and not being able to get enough air in, never being able to get enough air. She knew it must have happened in the submarine—she'd worked that much out—but whenever Violet and Klaus had neared the part of the story where she was certain it must have occurred, they had looked at each other and then at Beatrice and shook their heads. They were certain that Beatrice would never need to know, and would never be able to forget. They maintained that some things were too terrible to tell a child that small.
The sensation brought by frigid winds was something else she'd learned to fear. It brought back the memory of being alone in the open air in nothing but a nightgown, the wind whipping her until she was colder than she ever thought possible, and stuck with the knowledge that the people around her would be overcome with joy if she admitted how miserable she was. But she had truly been alone, her siblings far from that mountain top, and so her feature in that story was relegated to a footnote. Klaus and Violet had always mentioned that they were seperated from Sunny, who was in the villains' custody, at which point she was forgotten until the end. Even if she had paid attention to the account, there would have been nothing to be gleaned.
Strangest of all, she could never bear to look at birds in cages. She could only ever imagine herself dangingly perilously high, trapped behind those same metal bars, hoping for a sibling to come and save her. But if that had happened at all, it would have happened at the beginning of their misery, and Violet and Klaus deemed anything before they had learned about VFD unnecessary to recount. Sunny wanted to argue that it was more than necessary, that Beatrice needed to know the history of her own guardians, but she never had. She knew better, when she couldn't remember that history herself.
In the end, Sunny learned to hide how little she knew. She nodded along to everything Klaus and Violet said, and she imitated their shudders and nods. She became used to silently wishing for some scrap of memory of all the kind people they'd mentioned—Kit, Fiona, Quigley, Jacques, Duncan, Isadora, Charles, Uncle Monty, and most of all, her parents. But memories were irreplaceable, and perhaps that was why she had never listened to Violet and Klaus' recollections, no matter how direly she wanted to know. Learning what had happened was one thing, but it was not seeing it, feeling it, hearing it. She no longer remembered what it was like to live in a world that had been anything but quiet. When Klaus and Violet woke in the middle of the night, troubled by impossibly vivid nightmares, Sunny lay awake in her own bed, overcome with jealousy. Violet and Klaus no longer wanted to be back there, experiencing the old events as if they were occuring once again. They were content to forget all the events, to let their pasts die out without a second thought. But Sunny longed to have a past, to have a story, to feel the old fears and dangers in her own skin. More than their age, more than their talents, more than their experiences, that was what created a disparity between Sunny and her siblings. Violet and Klaus led a quiet life, having chosen to leave their pasts behind them. Sunny, on the other hand, had never gotten to make that choice.