My Family’s Elephant in the Room, pt. 2

READ PART 1 HERE

The next day I woke up with my sister telling me that Mom and Dad were freaking out because Shannon had disappeared. I heard my parents talking in the other room and it didn’t sound good.

I felt as guilty as an 8 year old can feel- basically; it was the end of the world. I had known Shannon was going to leave, but I had promised my best friends I wouldn’t tell on them, and now I felt like I was the reason my parents were upset. As Chloe and I listened through the door to their conversation I could tell how devastated they were and I was feeling more and more crushed. I didn’t tell Chloe that I had known; because I was afraid she would tell Mom and I would be cast out of our family forever.

Eventually, the conversation quieted and Mom and Dad came to our bedroom door and knocked. Chloe and I ran to our bed and jumped in, wanting to seem as if we had been sleeping. Mom and Dad came in and told us, very matter-of-factly, “Wake up. You two need to come with us to Grandma’s house. Your sister has left, no one knows where she is, and apparently destroyed the house. We need to go clean it up.”
We played ignorant and got up, quickly put on our clothes, and endured the intensely silent car ride to Grandma’s house.

The whole ride I was in a state of utter panic. Destroyed? Grandma’s house was DESTROYED? Like.. burnt to the ground? Did Shannon take a sledge hammer to the walls before she left? Why hadn’t Jake and Leah told me they were going to DESTROY Grandma’s house.. Because then I would have told Mom and Dad. Why hadn’t I told Mom and Dad in the first place? Were they going to find out I knew and I was going to be homeless forever?

I felt so responsible for how shitty everything felt.

We pulled into the driveway at Grandma’s , and it was then we figured out what my parents had meant by “destroyed”.

Shit was everywhere. The innards of the house were spilling out the doors and windows. It looked like the house had thrown up it’s contents onto the lawn. Tables and chairs had been thrown haphazardly into the yard, papers and trinkets littered the stairs leading to the door. We walked through the crunchy broken glass, fearfully, knowing that the inside of the house was going to be much worse than the outside. And we were right. The screen door was hanging by one hinge as my parents carefully opened it and we got a glimpse into the pit of despair. All of the filth and scum that I usually associated with Shannon’s dwellings seemed to have reproduced exponentially overnight. Like a fungus that had spread from the basement of the house up. Stains that had never been there before had suddenly appeared. Everything was broken. Literally just.. EVERYTHING. Memorabilia from my Mother’s childhood were crushed into dust on the floor and ripped in half and more than likely spit on. My sister had really gone to town. And we didn’t know why. This was the house that a few weeks earlier, my grandparents had lived in. Now they were dead and my sister had desecrated their memory.

I looked at my parents faces. On my Dad’s face I saw utter horror, shock, and disgust. He had always been the emotional one. Then, I looked to my Mom. I expected her to be crying but what I saw instead was a pale white stone wall where her face should have been. There was no color or emotion, instead there was just a void, sucking in everything that she was seeing. And there was so much to take in.

We continued down into the basement, which had been Shannon’s lair. The dark gloomy basement she had inhabited because that was the kind of nest she had preferred. Musty, dark, damp and gloomy. We got down there and saw the rest of the wreckage. But what sucked even worse was the pristine table set up in the middle of all of the chaos. It was waiting there for us. A light was turned on above it, the table was clean, and sitting perfectly in the middle of it was a note, typewritten, by Shannon, addressed to my mother.

My mom told us to go upstairs and have Dad take us home.