I was five years old when my mother left me at Aunt Carol’s house for what she called “a short vacation.” I still remember that day as clearly as if it had happened yesterday—the way she kissed me on the forehead, the smell of her perfume, and the promise that she would come back soon. “Just a week or two, sweetheart,” she had said, brushing my hair back from my face. “Be a good girl for Aunt Carol and Uncle Jim, okay?” I nodded because I always tried to be good.
I didn’t know that those two weeks would turn into nearly two decades. Aunt Carol and Uncle Jim were kind people, but they weren’t my parents. Their house always smelled of baked bread and old books, and though they never made me feel unwelcome, there was always this quiet, unspoken understanding that I was not truly theirs.
Aunt Carol would tuck me in at night and whisper, “Your mama loves you, Rose. She’s just busy right now.” I clung to that sentence like a lifeline. Every day, I would stare out of the window, watching cars pass, waiting for one of them to stop and for my mother to step out, smiling, arms open wide.
But she never came. As weeks turned into months, I began asking fewer questions. Aunt Carol stopped answering them, anyway.
“She’s traveling through Europe,” she’d say, “seeing the world. Isn’t that exciting?” It didn’t sound exciting to me. It sounded lonely.
When I turned seven, a postcard arrived. The front showed the Eiffel Tower, glittering in the night sky. The back read: Hi, my little Rosebud!
Mommy’s in Paris! I’ll be home soon. Be good and listen to Aunt Carol.
Love, Mom. I slept with that postcard under my pillow for years. But “soon” stretched endlessly.
Every few months, a new postcard came—from Rome, from Barcelona, from Vienna. The handwriting was always rushed, the messages short. There were pictures of her smiling beside men whose arms wrapped around her shoulders.
Aunt Carol always hid those postcards before I could look too closely, but once I caught a glimpse of a man kissing her cheek. She looked happy, carefree, as if she had forgotten all about me. By the time I was ten, I stopped sleeping with the postcard.
By twelve, I stopped expecting letters. And by fifteen, I stopped hoping. It was around then that I began to understand what had really happened.
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