The first time it happens, I lose three weeks. In the moment, I am oblivious. It’s like a brief hiccup, a pause, and then I’m right back outside my home, just as I should be. My schoolbag is as heavy as it’s always been, and my left knee is itchy beneath a healing scab. If my mother’s face is a little whiter when she greets me at the door, her eyes a little duller, then I don’t notice it. I’m ravenous, and eager to get outside to my new trampoline and Buster the family dog.
That night, I write in my diary. “Buster ate a dead bird,” I scrawl in purple ink. “Dogs are gross.” I do not read the previous entry. Why bother, when I already know what it says?
Except, I don’t.
I find the diary again when I’m thirteen. It’s buried in a plastic crate of old school projects, crumpled comics, and childish treasures. As I turn the pages, I’m filled with a creeping embarrassment. The girl in the diary is like an old skin I’ve sloughed off, but there’s less air between me and the past Riley than I’d like to admit. The words are faded memories. Buster: two years dead. My best friend, Luce: moved to Perth. My parents: still here, but wearing harder smiles. I read about school, about piano lessons, about climbing the apple tree and breaking my arm. And then the writing changes—barely, almost imperceptibly—and the words and the memories are no longer running side-by-side. I remember pizza on my seventh birthday and a trampoline adorned with a red tulle bow. I remember Buster’s tail wagging with a bloodied bird wing hanging from his jaws. Everything in between—three whole weeks of entries—is as strange to me as lines in an unread book.
It scares me, so I hide from it. I’m three months out from my first period, clumsy and shame-filled, and at war with a body that no longer feels my own. This lapse is one betrayal too many, so I bind it up, deep inside me, and ignore it as best I can. Sometimes, late at night, when I wake from a recurring dream of endless darkness, I take the knowledge from its hiding place and try again to remember. All I can grasp is an echo of that dreaming darkness. I stare into it, but whatever stares back at me is a monster I cannot see.
In time, I become the monster. I am rage-fueled; I am poison-spiked; I am claws and fangs and flame. But the scales are heavier than my human hide and, when I peel myself out from within them, I am pink-skinned and resilient. I finish school. I move to Melbourne. I begin to build a future, instead of dwelling on the past.
I start keeping a diary again when I’m pregnant with my first child. It’s my husband’s idea, and at first I am against it, wary of opening a childhood fault line and staring deep inside. Jack is persuasive, though, and soon I grow to love it, sitting on the couch each evening and pouring my love and hope into every cursive-covered page. Jack keeps his own journal, and sometimes we swap when we’re done for the evening. When I read his words and see myself in them, I think I am the luckiest, and happiest, woman in the world.
Brooke is born three days late and I find myself capable of greater happiness still. She is dark-haired and healthy, hilarious and challenging, and when she is two years old we start trying for a sibling. I don’t question it for a moment. Jack adores me; Brooke is a treasure. We are the perfect family, but perfect can stretch to one more.
The first trimester is easy, but in my fourth month I am overcome by a leaden feeling deep inside me. My doctor declares both the baby and me healthy, but the heaviness lingers, growing within me like an oozing parasite. I have never suffered from depression, but this seems something akin to it. I have everything to live for, a thousand things to look forward to, but there is a darkness dragging at me, trying to pull me down.
I re-read the diary from my first pregnancy, hoping to find a clue there: a similarity, perhaps, or a vital difference—anything to reassure myself that my fears are groundless and all will be well. I smile at my former naivety, the me before nappies and sleeplessness and milk-stained blouses, and burn to do it all over again, just more experienced this time. I remember the morning sickness, the anticipation, the trips to IKEA. I remember everything… until the entry I don’t.
It’s my writing, or at least a close enough imitation. The words are not mine, though. The sentiments mimic those of earlier pages, but there is no love behind them. They are empty, forced: a pastiche of a mother’s hope. For nearly four weeks, the fake words weave a tale of false happiness. But what, I wonder, do they hide?
That night, I am quiet.
“Not your chatty self,” Jack calls it, sitting next to me on the couch, with Brooke not long asleep.
“I’m worried about the baby,” I say, and it’s the truth, if only part of it. “I don’t remember the fourth month being so hard last time.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he says. Is his voice too light or am I seeing shadows where none exist?
“Funny,” I say, and as the words form, I know them to be true. “I don’t have much memory of last time at all. Not the fourth month. It’s all a bit hazy. Maybe it was hard, then, and I’ve just blocked it out. Like childbirth. Except I’ll never forget that pain.”
“It was fine,” Jack says, and squeezes my hand. “Why don’t you find your old diary? That’ll ease your mind.”
I look at him, this man I love more than sunshine, and I know that he is lying. “Good idea,” I say. “I’ll do that.
And I know, then, that I must be crazy, because the other explanations are all too hard to bear.
My childhood diaries are still at my parents’ place, stored alongside other relics of my youth. I leave Brooke with Jack, and drive the two hours to the town I grew up in. The sun burns me through the windows of my car. I’ve driven the road a thousand times, but it seems longer than before, almost endless, and by the time I pull into the gravel driveway I am tense with blooming dread.
The diary is as I remember it: page after page of banality that fills me with a fear I can’t define. I read the false entries twice—for I am sure, now, that’s what they are—and then take the book into the living room and drop it in my mother’s lap.
“I need to know,” I say, my voice stronger than I feel.
She looks at me, her eyes sad and guarded, and slowly shakes her head. “Leave it where it lies, Riley,” she says. “It’s not a scab you want to pick.”
She’s right; something deep within me knows it. But I can’t keep pretending now that it’s happening again.
“How many times?” I ask her. “When I was seven, when I was pregnant with Brooke… how many times in between?”
Her frown is authentic. “Just the once, honey,” she says. “One time, I promise.”
“Tell me.”
My mother presses her hands together and unravels the woven lies.
The story she tells is no more familiar to me than the diary entries that stand in its place. It is too terrible, though, to be her creation, and as the sense of it falls upon me, I know it must be true. It is a tale of great trauma: of abduction, of assault, of things too weighty for a seven-year-old to bear. And so the load is taken from me. “A minor procedure,” my mother calls it, but it sounds like something from a Cold War movie. A “cybernetic mind-recalibration” is the official term, but it’s really just brainwashing and memory erasure, as though I were a Russian spy, instead of a broken kid.
“We couldn’t stop him hurting you,” my mother says, “but we could take away the scars.”
I love her too much to tell her that the scars are always with me—they’re just buried deeper down.
My parents know nothing of the second span of time I’m missing, but before I head back to Melbourne, my father pulls me aside.
“I don’t want to cause trouble between you and Jack,” he says, “but you should know that I told him about the recalibration.”
“You told him, but not me?” I ask.
“He needed to know,” my father says, not at all abashed. “What if you remembered?”
My smile is a fabrication. “Yes. What if?”
I wait to confront Jack until Brooke is in bed. We’re curled on the couch like a hundred other nights: a shooter paused on the TV screen and a book in his lap. I love him so much it tears at me. The monsters of my past are nothing compared to the light Jack’s brought me, but I’ve learned now that the shadows hide far beneath.
“How did you do it?” I ask him. “How did you convince them to operate without my consent?”
“I don’t know what—” he begins, but I cut him off.
“My parents told me about my childhood,” I say. “I’ve had enough lies for a lifetime, so don’t.”
He nods, remains silent. I don’t care; I’m filled with words.
“What was it?” I ask. “An affair, I suppose. And I found out, but you wanted to hide it, so you betrayed me a second time and tore it from my mind.”
“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t. It was you who wanted it: wanted to forget. You were pregnant and everything was crumbling and you wanted the memories gone. I just knew what your father had told me. I knew who to go to, and you did the rest.”
“Awfully convenient for you,” I say. “You get to cheat, and I don’t remember a thing.”
He takes my hand and holds on tight when I try to yank it away. “I wasn’t the one who cheated.”
Something inside me fragments. My god, he loves me anyway, and I was the monster all along.
I am tempted to forget again, to have the burden of my guilt removed from me and replaced with that perfect life. But I understand the dark places within me now: all the twisted scars of hurts forgotten, all the anger and grief I wasn’t able to express. I am neither the innocent that was protected, nor the villain I couldn’t face. I am broken—and I break people—but with the truth I can repair myself and try to make amends.
The scans say our second child is a healthy girl. I dream of a happy life for her, but Jack and I are agreed. If the darkness finds her, we will lead her through it, instead of trying to scrub it all away.
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Tara Calaby lives on Boon Wurrung country in Gippsland, Australia with her wife and far too many books. She is currently a PhD candidate at La Trobe University, researching familial relationships in Victorian lunatic asylums. Tara’s debut novel, House of Longing, was published by Text Publishing in 2023, and her second book, The Spirit Circle, will be released in January 2025. Her speculative and historical short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. In her free time, she enjoys playing video games, attempting to learn Danish, and patting other people’s dogs. |
I really enjoyed reading this eerie & devastating (yet somehow relatable) story.