Chapter 3 - THE SISTER DANIEL STOPPED BELIEVING
Natalie was thirty-seven now.
Fourteen years earlier, she had been twenty-three and recovering from spinal surgery after a car accident outside Albany.
Daniel had been twenty-two.
Their father had died two years earlier.
Vivian ran the family.
Everyone knew that without saying it.
Natalie lived at home during recovery.
The first month went badly.
She was in pain.
She slept strange hours.
She became irritable.
Vivian told relatives Natalie was becoming obsessed with medication.
Daniel remembered the family conversations.
“She watches the clock.”
“She gets angry if I’m five minutes late.”
“She keeps asking where the bottle is.”
“She’s changing.”
Eventually Vivian arranged what she called an intervention.
Daniel attended.
So did an aunt, an uncle, and Natalie’s boyfriend, Eric.
Natalie screamed that Vivian was hiding her medication.
Nobody believed her.
Daniel remembered being ashamed of his sister.
That memory now made him physically sick.
Natalie came to Emma and Daniel’s house the next afternoon.
She stopped just inside the foyer.
She had not entered Vivian’s orbit willingly in years.
Emma sat on the sofa with Oliver.
Natalie looked at the baby first.
Then Emma.
“I’m sorry.”
Emma’s eyes filled.
“You didn’t do it.”
“No. But I know exactly what it feels like when everybody decides the person controlling you is the trustworthy one.”
Daniel sat opposite his sister.
“Tell me everything.”
Natalie laughed once.
“You say that like I haven’t tried.”
He lowered his eyes.
Fair.
She began.
After surgery, Vivian insisted on keeping Natalie’s medication downstairs.
At first Natalie accepted it.
Then doses started arriving late.
Sometimes an hour.
Sometimes three.
If Natalie complained, Vivian wrote the complaint down in a notebook.
“She said she was tracking my behavior.”
Emma gripped Oliver’s blanket.
Natalie continued.
“One night I crawled downstairs because my back was spasming and Mom wouldn’t answer me.”
Daniel remembered.
That was one of the stories Vivian had told as proof Natalie was desperate for pills.
Natalie looked at him.
“You were there the next morning.”
“I remember.”
“Mom showed you the bottle.”
Daniel nodded.
“It was almost empty.”
“Yes.”
“You told us you’d taken too many.”
Natalie’s face tightened.
“I hadn’t.”
“Then where were they?”
“I didn’t know.”
Daniel stared.
Natalie continued.
“I asked the pharmacy for refill history later. I never filled anything early. Never doctor-shopped. Never had multiple prescriptions. Nothing.”
“Why didn’t you show us?”
“I did.”
Daniel froze.
“What?”
“I mailed copies to Mom.”
She laughed bitterly.
“She told you I was manipulating records, didn’t she?”
Daniel remembered Vivian saying something almost exactly like that.
Natalie continued.
“By then all of you had already decided what the story was.”
Emma asked:
“What happened to you?”
Natalie looked toward the window.
“I moved out before I could stand upright without a brace.”
“With Eric?”
“For three months.”
“Then?”
“We broke up.”
Daniel knew that part.
He had always believed Natalie’s “addiction period” destroyed the relationship.
Natalie looked at him.
“Eric didn’t leave because I was taking pills.”
Daniel waited.
“He left because Mom called his parents and told them I would ruin his life if he kept helping me.”
Daniel stared at his sister.
May you like
For fourteen years, he had carried a family story in which Natalie’s medication problem explained everything.
Now every piece of that story was beginning to move.
