My name is Clara Bennett. I’m thirty years old, and for most of my life, my mother treated me like a flaw she could never remove from the family picture.
When I was eight, she sent me away for seven weeks.
It happened on a Saturday morning while our house smelled like lemon cleaner and overheated curling irons. My older sister, Elise, was humming in the bathroom as Mom sprayed her golden curls into place.
I sat on my bed wearing socks with holes in the toes and watched my mother zip up my purple suitcase. I hadn’t packed it.
“Get dressed, Clara,” she said in the soft voice she used whenever someone might overhear. “You’re staying with Aunt Lorna for a little while.”
“How long?”
“Don’t start.”
That was Mom’s favorite answer whenever I asked a question that came too close to the truth.
The Martins were arriving that afternoon. They were wealthy friends from church, the kind of people my mother laughed too loudly around. They owned a photography studio and had offered to take what Mom called “proper family portraits” for our Christmas cards.
Elise had a new white dress.
Mom wore pearls.
I got a suitcase.
The birthmark on my left cheek stretched from my temple to my jaw, red against my pale skin. As I touched it, Mom caught me looking at myself in the mirror.
“Don’t make that expression,” she said. “You know photographs last forever.”
At eight, I didn’t understand cruelty disguised as practicality. I only understood that my sister was being curled, dressed, and placed beside our parents while I was being removed from the house.
When I returned seven weeks later, the portrait was already hanging above the fireplace.
Mom stood in the center wearing her pearls. Elise smiled beside her in the white dress. My stepfather, Frank, stood behind them with one hand on Elise’s shoulder.
There was no space for me. No empty chair. No shadow. Not even the edge of a sleeve that might suggest another child had once lived there.
I stood under that photograph until my throat hurt. Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of tap water because no one had asked whether I was hungry or thirsty.
That winter, I heard Mom say the words I would carry for the next twenty-two years.
She was at the dining table with Aunt Lorna, sorting church donations into cardboard boxes. I walked in holding a bowl of cereal.
“I swear,” Mom said as she folded a pink sweater, “sometimes I wish I had only one child.”
She didn’t whisper. She didn’t look ashamed. She said it with the same casual tone someone might use to mention rain.
Aunt Lorna looked at me, then lowered her eyes.
See more on the next page
