They Left Me to Drown: A Family's Regret

1: 1

After I could hear my family's thoughts, I learned that every kindness they'd ever shown me was only to keep my sister happy.

When Mom ladled soup into my bowl, what she was thinking was:

If Nia sees this, she won't feel like we only love her sister.

When Dad came to my parent-teacher night, it was because June Swanson had suddenly decided she didn't want him at hers.

The birthday gift my brother gave me came in the color June had picked over and left behind.

Even when my fianc, Sebastian James, draped a coat over my shoulders, the thought in his head was:

If June were here, she'd get jealous again for sure.

I pretended I knew nothing.

After all, on the surface they still cared. They still called the doctor when I ran a fever, still wrote my name on my birthday cake.

Until the flash flood came.

The rescue boat had room for only one more person.

June clung to Mom, crying, saying she was scared.

Every one of their thoughts rang out at the same moment.

Let June go first.

But out loud, Dad said to me:

"You're a strong swimmer. Just hold on a little longer."

Sebastian pulled off his life vest and fastened it around June, and he couldn't even meet my eyes.

"Nia, I'll come right back for you."

The rescue boat pulled slowly away.

Their thoughts scattered in the downpour, and all that was left were little rushes of relief.

Thank God June's okay.

When the water rose to my chest, I suddenly thought this ability of mine was a good thing.

At least, before I died, I finally didn't have to keep mistaking their love for me.

...

The rain hit my face and it hurt.

On the rescue boat in the distance, Sebastian carefully tucked a shell jacket tight around my sister, June.

Dad had his arm around Mom, who was trembling, and their backs blurred into the sheets of rain.

The wind and rain were fierce, yet every one of their thoughts still carried, sharp and clear, through wave after wave, straight into my ears.

Thank God June got on. She's so frailif she'd been soaking in this filthy water, she'd have come down with something serious!

Mom thought, relieved.

Letitia Swanson's a strong swimmer. She even won a medal at the school swim meet back then. Another half hour in the water won't be the end of her. Once June's in the safe zone, I'll come back with the rescue team for her. That'll square things with her.

Sebastian shielded June from the wind and rain with his body while he told himself all of this.

I tugged the corner of my mouth into something like a smirk, and the floodwater rushed into my mouth, thick with the reek of mud.

My palms clawed at the waterlogged bark of the camphor tree behind me, blood seeping out from under my nails.

But in the icy river, I couldn't even feel the pain.

I really had won a medal at the school swim meet.

But that was because June said she wanted to see a gold medal, so Dad forced me to sign up. Even when my legs cramped in training, he'd say, face dark, that I was just being lazy.

The current grew faster, and a huge slab of driftwood slammed into my lower spine.

The pain tore through me, my hands gave out, and in an instant I was dragged into a churning whirlpool.

The frozen current poured into my windpipe from every side, and the suffocation swallowed me like a rising tide.

My body kept sinking, and everything around me sank into dead, silent darkness.

I might be about to die.

So it turned out that when a person is close to death, their life really does flash before their eyes.

I saw the whole twenty years I'd lived.

When I was five, I fell down the old well back home.

Back then Dad wasn't cold the way he is now. He kicked off his shoes, stripped off his shirt, and climbed down the rope like a madman, and held me tight against him.

Mom cried at the mouth of the well until her limbs went weak, screaming that she'd trade her own life to keep Nia safe.

That year, my brother piled every snack he'd saved up for half a year at the head of my bed, thumped his chest, and swore that from then on he'd be the one to protect his little sister.

Those memories were warm, warm enough to sting my eyes.

They really had loved me once, I thought.

Was it because June got so sick later, and it took all their attention, that they no longer had any to spare for me?

If they reached the safe zone now and saw the rain getting worse, would they suddenly remember that I was a girl who could feel pain too?

The air in my lungs was completely gone, and my mind began to scatter.

Just as I was about to give up struggling for good, a blinding light flared to life on the dim surface of the water above me.

A powerful searchlight beam was cutting through the murky water, shining straight in my direction.

Faintly, from above the surface, there seemed to come ragged shouting.

Had they turned back to save me?

2: 2

The beam kept coming closer.

Strength surged up from somewhere I didn't know I had, and I kicked with everything in my legs, breaking the surface toward the light, coughing hard.

I spat out mouthful after mouthful of muddy rainwater and gulped down air, both hands clamped tight around a drifting plank.

It was Sebastian.

He sat in a plastic kayak he'd borrowed on the fly, a flashlight in one hand, paddling this way along the current.

When he saw me surface, his hands paused, then he steered the kayak over beside me.

I wiped the water off my face, tipped my head up at him, my voice weak but full of hope. "Sebastian"

My heart was pounding, tears and rain running together.

Mom and Dad might favor June, but Sebastian was the one person I loved.

He'd come back after all. He still had me in his heart.

But before I could even reach my hand out, Sebastian frowned.

He didn't reach down to pull me up. Instead he swept the flashlight beam back and forth around me, his voice openly frantic.

"Letitia, did you see June's bracelet? The one I gave her for her twentieth birthday. It was so crowded when she boarded, she said she thinks she dropped it around here."

For that one moment, the wind and rain seemed to vanish from my ears.

I heard what Sebastian was truly thinking.

June's crying so hard at the shelter she can barely breathe. That bracelet means everything to her. Letitia swims well, why isn't she helping look already! Making trouble in the middle of the night. If it isn't found, June won't sleep a wink tonight.

My hand, still out in the air, slowly dropped back down.

So he hadn't come to save me. He'd come to help June find her bracelet.

"I didn't see it." I heard my own voice come out flat, with no rise or fall, cold as the downpour swallowing the sky.

Sebastian slapped the paddle against the water, irritated, and looked down at me from above.

"You swim so well, can't you dive down and feel around for her? How heavy can one bracelet be? June's not strong, she can't take being upset like this. Letitia, you're the older sister. How can you be so small-minded? You'll pick a fight with her over a little thing like this?"

The moment he finished, he didn't wait for an answer. He turned the kayak around and paddled off toward the deeper water.

The flashlight beam slid off me and threw me back into the endless dark.

That was when the memories came roaring back to tear at me.

I thought of the day Sebastian proposed, the way he slid the ring onto my finger and kissed my forehead so gently.

That night I found a receipt in his pocket.

The diamond ring he bought me was twenty thousand. The same day, he'd bought June a custom necklace worth sixty thousand.

When I asked him why, he laughed and ruffled my hair and said June was the younger sister, delicate, and it was only right to spoil her a little more.

So every bit of the favoritism had left its trail all along.

What they called doting on me was only the fig leaf they tossed my way to cover the fact that their hearts had always leaned somewhere else.

The current turned savage all at once. The floodgates upstream must have opened wide, and the churning brown waves came at me like some huge beast.

My plank shattered in an instant, and my body was dragged back into the rapids.

Just as I was about to go under again, a megaphone crackled to life somewhere far off.

"Letitia! Letitia!"

It was my brother Elmer Swanson's voice, a thread of urgency in it.

3: 3

"Letitia, what's taking you so long? Mom's stomach is acting up again. Which bag did you put her regular meds in before we left? Bring them over here, now!"

The voice crackled out of the megaphone, laced with a harsh burst of static, echoing through the dark.

Nothing but trouble, that girl. Now of all times, still throwing her little princess fit. She's sulking because we took June out first, hiding up on some high ground and refusing to come down. If she makes Mom miss her medicine, I'll deal with her.

That was my brother's voice inside his head.

The last faint thread of hope scattered into nothing.

I stopped fighting.

I let the freezing floodwater pour into my lungs, let the crushing weight of it tear at my eardrums.

The second my heart stopped, the world finally went quiet.

When I opened my eyes again, I couldn't feel the cold anymore.

My body lay still in a pile of rubble downstream, my face bruised blue, all life gone from it.

But my soul drifted, weightless, in the air.

I followed that thin thread of lingering will and floated back to the disaster relief shelter at the foot of the hill.

Inside the tent, the lights blazed.

Mom lay on a folding cot, clutching her stomach and moaning.

June had changed into clean, warm clothes and sat by the bed, her eyes rimmed red.

"Dad, Elmer, it's all my fault." June wiped at her tears, her voice catching.

"Nia must be angry that I got the seat on the rescue boat. Before we went into the water, I saw it with my own eyesshe tucked Mom's stomach medicine into her own coat. The way she looked at me then was so frightening. Is she doing this to punish me?"

Mom heard it and shot upright, slamming her hand down on the cot.

"That wicked girl! She wants me to die in agony, doesn't she! Over some petty jealousy, she'd throw away her own mother's life!"

Dad's face went as dark as the sky before a storm, and he lurched to his feet.

"I'm going downstream to look. And I'll drag that ungrateful girl back while I'm at it!"

I hovered in the air, watching Dad storm out.

When he reached the riverbank in front of the shelter, he was actually less than two hundred meters from the pile of rubble where I'd died.

A few more steps forward, one glance in the direction of the current, and he would have seen the torn hem of my clothes.

But then June's scream rang out from inside the tent: "Ah! My foot hurts so muchI think I just twisted it!"

Dad's steps stopped dead.

He didn't even turn his head. He spun around at once and hurried back to the tent, cradling June's ankle carefully to check it, his eyes full of worry for her.

4: 4

By dawn the next morning, the storm had finally broken. The floodwater that had raged all night was slipping away, leaving mud and wreckage everywhere it went.

Inside the shelter, though, the mood had dropped below freezing.

June was curled against Sebastian's chest, face pale, pointing at a post on her phone and crying prettily, tears spilling like petals in the rain.

"Elmer, look. Blake Finch from the next town over posted this last night, and the background looks like the little motel in town. Nia... did she leave with some other guy last night? How could she do something like that, when Sebastian's still out there looking everywhere for her?"

Sebastian took the phone, and his face went hard in an instant.

*Letitia, that shameless woman. The whole family is here worrying itself sick over her, and this is what she doesrunning off to a motel with another man just to get back at me. I really misjudged her. She couldn't even bring herself to grab one bracelet for June, and her heart turns out to be this vicious, this low.*

Elmer shot to his feet and slammed a fist down on the table.

"The nerve! Our whole family bent over backwards for her, gave in to her every mood, and this is how she repays us? Humiliating the Swanson name like this?"

Their father's face darkened as he threw his jacket over his shoulder.

"Let's go. To the motel in town. Today I'm dragging that ungrateful thing back here, and I'll make her kneel and apologize to June, right in front of Sebastian!"

Their mother pushed herself up on her weak body too. "I'm going too! I want to see for myself just what kind of selfish, ungrateful animal I raised!"

The five of them set off downstream, righteous and seething, wearing the faces of judges who had already handed down the verdict.

In their eyes, I was surely hiding out in some warm room right now, guilty and content, savoring the thrill of betraying my family.

Up ahead, on the riverbank, several rescue workers in orange uniforms had gathered in a tight cluster.

From a pile of stones the water had just left behind, they had hauled up together a heavy shape wrapped in plastic sheeting.

The captain leading them turned around, straight into my seething father, glanced at the family photo in his hand that they'd been using to search, and came toward them with a grave look on his face.

"Excuse me. Are you Letitia's family? If you are, I'll need you to come identify the body."