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We were never quite sure what happened to my older sister, Clara. I think Edie knew, but if she did, she never told anyone. I didn’t even know until I came back to the house. Even now, I’m not really sure I do.
My mom never really looked at Clara, after she was born. Edie was the one who raised her. Mom was 16, when she gave birth to her. I once overheard Mom called Clara ‘her greatest mistake’.
Clara was a child of rape.
Mom had wanted an abortion, but the doctors said it was too risky.
She went to twenty-three different doctors before she gave up.
Mom left for India when Clara was just three years old.
She disappeared in the year 2000, a year after I was born. We never met, but she wrote me letters. She wrote all of us letters. Mom was furious when she found out, but Clara was already gone by that point.
Lewis and Milton had always wanted to meet her. They used to write back to her. I was too young even to know what was going on, but Clara started writing to me before I was even born. I think Lewis used to read them to me like a bedtime story.
I was honestly surprised she wrote me so many letters, sometimes I would get one a week. She started writing more, in the year of her disappearance.
It was almost like she knew it was coming. Maybe she did.
Clara was a child prodigy, not that anyone but Edie was there to see it. She fast-tracked all of her classes and graduated when she was 12 in 1996. Edie used to write to mom all the time. I can still remember her burning the letters.
Clara’s room wasn’t made for her specifically. Mom had just put a cradle in the attic and called in a day. Edie was the one to help Clara decorate it. Clara owned a lot of books. I read some when I was younger, they were always my favourites.
Edie used to say that Clara was an author, but I never really believed it. I guess I was wrong.
‘Pen Names of Clara Finch
-Ella Stuart
-Desi Cobb
-Tayla Wilkins
-Kianna Masters
-Tibby Clark
-Casey Barnet
-Karinna Richards
…”
The list of pen names went on and on. Looking at the shelves in her room, I realised that she had written all of the books on those shelves. Even when I was older, I still somehow ended up unknowingly reading some of Clara’s books.
I’m not ashamed to admit she was all of my favourite authors.
Lewis cried when the letters stopped coming. Milton did too. That was how Mom learned about the letters.
I was pretty sure she and her books were the reason for Lewis’ and Milton’s imaginations.
Two years later when we moved back after Dad’s death, there was a gravestone for Clara. Edie never gave us a straight answer, when we asked what happened. What she did tell us at least, was that she never found Clara’s body.
We didn’t ask how she knew she was dead.
There was a music box in her room too. I found it one day, mom had never bothered to seal the attic. It wasn’t like anyone but I could get in there. Engraved inside the lid of the box was the phrase ‘The trees know all the secrets.’.
A short letter sat in front of her shrine. It said,
‘Great Grandma Edie, I am tired. We both know Mother never loved me, and that she never will. But she loves them, my siblings. I wish I could meet Lewis, Milton and Little Edith, but I know now I will not be able to. I’ll sleep among the trees, I think. Do you think they will tell me their secrets, GG Edie? I hope they will. They would be such fun stories. Give my wonderful little siblings my best,
Signed, Clara’
I guess I know what happened to Clara now. But part of me still wonders.
If she was really dead. If maybe, just maybe, she had kept walking. Through the trees. Out into the world. If maybe she took up another pen name if she was still out there somewhere. Alive, maybe with a family of her own. My imagination can think of thousands of different scenarios.
A living, happy Finch.
The stuff best left to the imagination.