I am waiting.
It is dark here, where I wait. So very dark, and cold. But I am patient. I can wait.
It is quiet here, but that I can stand, too. I lived all my life in silence, never telling anyone anything from my heart. Except one time, long ago. I can wait in the darkness and the silence, can suffer the isolation and the cold, can even leave behind all the things I once thought were so dear to me, as long as I hold to that one time, long ago, when I made a promise to the one person I love.
That promise has become the only thing upon which I focus. It is what holds me here, keeping me from winking out like the ember on the wick of a dying candle.
Memory is a powerful thing. People who are wrapped up in their rushed existence have no appreciation for its ability to restore life in things long dead, to make them move again, to give them a shadowy life of their own.
It is the memory of her that I cling to now, scrolling through the images time after time, many times seeing in the images something new and precious, always ending with the promise I made to her, before going back to the beginning and starting anew.
I am waiting. And while I wait, I remember.
Will she?
I go back in time - to my sixth year. My mother is in the hospital, pregnant. My father has just taken me to a Disney movie. Someone asks me, jokingly, in the condescending way adults have with children, what I would name my sibling if it were a girl. I say Cinderella, and the adult laughs.
Now I see her as a curly-haired little baby, crawling around on the front porch in a pink dress, giggling. I am crawling behind her, clowning for the motion picture camera my father is aiming at us, doing things that will embarrass me when I watch the film at thirteen.
Now I see her trying to run toward me, a little child still learning to walk, her eyes wide with shock and pain, ants all over her bare legs. And I see something new in this scene, something I had missed all the times before: our parents are there in the yard with us, but she is running to me.
Now I see her in my room, sitting on the floor. I am reading to her from one of those old Doc Savage adventures I loved so much, and she is listening closely, interrupting only when she does not understand. We live in a house in the country; our nearest neighbor is five miles away and 67 years old. Lacking a society, we make our own. I am her best friend, and she is mine.
The images of my memories blur as they flit by, finally solidifying into a dark woodline. This is the one time, this is the special time, this one is not like the others. The others, I watch. This one, I live.
I am walking toward the woodline, and she is behind me, my constant companion in adventure. We enter the woods and wander down the long and sometimes treacherous trails far behind the house where we live, far beyond the boundaries our father set for our adventures. We hear the distant echo of water falling, and it draws us like a siren's song.
We cut our way through the nearly impenetrable thicket, and finally come upon a scene that opens before us like a fantasy.
We stand on the brink of a waterfall. In our youthful eyes, it is Niagara. I turn to her, laughing, and take a sideward step, and I slip on the slick clay. I am falling.
She screams and reaches out and catches my hand. For a sickening moment, I think my weight will pull her down, but she grabs a small tree with her other hand and hangs on desperately.
She cannot hang on for long. She is staring at me, that child-shock in her eyes, and she pleads, "Don't leave me alone."
I can hear it quite clearly. Any time I want.
"Don't leave me alone."
"I won't," I promise, but I do not think she hears me. She is screaming as I fall, and I am no longer there.
It is painful, in a way, watching her grow up, leaving the adventures and Doc Savage and me behind, in favor of makeup and clothing and boys.
She dates several young men and eventually marries one of them, and they move far from the house in the country. She has a child, then another. She is active in the PTA, she is a Mother Against Drunk Driving, she takes valium from time to time when the nightmare comes around and her husband is out of town and no one is there for her.
The waterfall is forgotten. The magic is long gone. Her memory of me is far, far away.
Ah, but closer now.
I am closer now. I feel it.
Relentless am I, in my concentration on the promise that means everything, made to the only person who meant anything. Powerful am I, for few could have endured what I have endured and still retain their sanity. Terrible am I, some might believe, and might run to their old rituals and charms, trying to ward me off.
But nothing can stop me now.
I am come. After all the waiting, after the years in darkness and silence, holding for so long the promise to my cold and empty breast, I am come.
See her there? She sits up in her bed, startled out of a bad dream, calling out the name of her dead brother, a name that has been locked away in the darkness of her mind by the terror of watching me die. And now the tears finally come as the memories flow once more, and she weeps in the darkness.
Don't cry, don't cry, I whisper. I told you I'd never leave you alone. You will never be alone.
I know she cannot hear me. But why has she stopped crying? And why is she sleeping peacefully now? And why does she smile in her sleep?
I see her healed of the horror, I watch her dream of our childhood, and see myself live again in her heart.
My promise is fulfilled.