Peering between the slats of my crib, gripping tightly with anger. A baby had taken over my domain. I was fully prepared to yank her out and dump her outside. As my hand snaked through my mother caught me. I was two.
I wanted a cookie. Not just any cookie. Her cookie. Those wonderful baby-fist cookies that fit perfectly in those pudgy hands. She was no sucker. She wasn’t giving it up. So I took it. She started crying. My mother came to investigate and found a bite mark on her leg. She grabbed my ankle, yanking me upside down and bit me in the same spot. I was two.
I loved blocks. The old-fashioned wooden ones that were painted. I built grocery stores and castles and spaceships. Tabitha grabbed a block and toppled my world. I hefted one of the largest over my head before my mother yelled, startling me into tossing the block in the air, which in cartoon fashion, promptly thunked me on the head. I was two.
She was sick. I’m not sure with what but she was unhappy. I wanted to make her laugh. I started jumping up and down on my bed. She began to giggle. I jumped higher. She laughed. My foot slipped off the side of the mattress and I bit through my tongue. My mother freaked. No stitches for a tongue. But I got Popsicles. I was two.
I walked into a house of mourning. People were on every chair, table and covered the floor. Some were crying. Some had been. When they looked at me there was a pity I didn’t understand. But I felt it. Something terrible had happened. I fled, down the hall and into my parents’ room. To find them sitting on the floor in front of the closet. My mother was crying. Worse, my father was crying. They told me she was dead. I ran back down the hall, through the kitchen, out the backdoor into the yard screaming her name. I knew what dead meant and I wasn’t having it. I was still two.
Those memories still have the power to choke my heart.
The first three should buff any notion that I was a docile child into a shiny mirror of truth. Although I never bit again, unlike a younger sister that was never privy to my spontaneous punishment.
As for the fourth, I can no longer hear her laugh. I see her smile though and that’s enough.
Until the reel stutters, and I reach out only to find it spinning. The slap of film confusing my senses.
I want to scream.
Instead I’m immobile. The sound of mourning dripping from my lashes.
Sometimes I wonder how that loss altered me. Where it took up residence and what advice it passes along.
Is it tainted with grief? Or does it speak soothingly?
Perhaps I’ll never know.
But Tabby. I know she’s a part of me.
I hold her memory as tightly as she did that damn cookie.