Prompt: (Auto)biography – Free Choice
Character(s): Ema and Lana Skye
Originally Written: 7.1.2009
My childhood was happy.
Don't get me wrong; we had our fair share of skeletons in the closet. Every family does. And my parents died when I was young, so I was left to Lana, but other than that my life growing up was pretty good.
Good things don't last, though.
I'm not really saying that to garner sympathy or anything; it was just an unfortunate turn of events that led to the state of things today.
And there is still that one thing that stands out in my mind…that one incident that will forever stay ingrained in my memory. It's the kind of thing that most sisters take for granted and don't realize how much it actually matters until much later. I remember it all so distinctly, and I guess that's why I'm so weak whenever my mind drifts into that memory.
I don't think I was older than seven or eight at the time when Lana had gathered me into her arms and told me the story of how Mom and Dad met.
"Mom and Dad were so different from one another, you know," she told me, laughing. "I never understood how two people like them could end up together."
"So how did they end up together?" I asked, quirking an eyebrow with the skepticism that children are credited for.
"I'm getting to that, don't worry. But just so that you know, Mom was a very carefree woman. She hardly ever let things get to her and she didn't agree with Dad being so uptight about everything. It's still a mystery how she somehow managed to make him turn to mush whenever she wanted."
I pinched Lana's nose with my tiny fingers and giggled. "Daddy was just like you then!"
She smiled, saying in a nasal voice, "You think so?"
"Yeah! You're always so serious about everything."
That probably hurt her in a way that I, at my young age, couldn't have realized. She mistook that for an insult and couldn't see that it had been innocent. Her own innocence had been lost while she was still so young that she was incapable of comprehending the ways of children. Lana couldn't understand the shamelessness of youth or how they would say things before they thought of what they meant.
"Well, anyway, Mom and Dad worked in the same hospital. Dad was a surgeon and Mom worked for their morgue—"
"What's a morgue?"
She sighed, not enjoying the constant interruptions. "It's a place where dead bodies are kept before they're buried."
I nodded and she continued.
"It was a few days before Christmas, two years before I was born, when Dad was operating on a man who had gotten into a car accident. Glass shards were embedded in his heart and it was too dangerous for them to try and take them out. While Dad and the other doctors were trying to figure out what to do, the man died," she told me carefully, making sure that nothing was too heavy or difficult for me to understand. "Dad was so torn up about the incident that he left work just a couple hours later when he was supposed to be staying the whole night. Mom wasn't very well acquainted with him at the time, but she had passed by him when he was getting ready to leave."
It was all very hard for me to follow and I could barely grasp what she was telling me, but it was a story about my parents and I was desperate to feel like I knew them. That was reason enough to pretend that I knew what Lana was saying.
"You know what Mom did? She just patted him on the back and said, 'If it weren't for guys like him, I would be out of a job. Don't worry too much about it.'"
She began going on about the course of Mom and Dad's relationship, but she began to speak more to herself than to me. I suddenly began to ruminate on the possibility of Lana leaving me like my parents did. She would never leave, would she? In my eyes, she was invincible. She could tackle any obstacle that came her way. She would scoff in the face of Death.
I pressed my head against her chest and told her, "Please don't leave me, Sis."
She was surprised; she hesitated before pulling me closer.
"I will never leave you, Ema," she whispered.
Even after everything that's happened, I know she has never once left me.
