#spmv

The next day she waited until he had left for work to gather her gear. She felt bad leaving him out of this but she had to do this alone and she wasn’t quite sure this would even work. Silas had always wanted to know the truth about what happened, who wouldn’t after their world got turned upside down and he didn’t even know why. The running line was ‘animal attack’, that they were so lucky to get away with their lives. The siblings had never quite fallen for it, after all how could two small children get away from an animal that took out too grown adults. For Silas, that meant their parents were still alive but Mari had always suspected something darker. 

Silas was too young at the time but Mari had known their parents were into something illegal. More than a few times she’d been asked to hide something in her bag or seen something she shouldn’t when she snuck out of bed. She never quite knew what but her father had made sure she knew how to protect herself and her brother, knew what to do if something went south, even if she never knew what that something was. After that night, the attack, whenever she attempted to remember anything all she felt was a darkness dropping into her stomach. She tried to tell herself that her parents were likely dead, that some vicious animal attack was the trauma that locked up her mind, that she didn’t need to remember to know the truth and she put up a wall trying to close that night off forever. 

Over the years, the wall had taken hits. She spot someone in a crowd she thought she’d recognized and fear would come back. Eventually she’d tell herself that she was crazy and revert back to ‘animal attack’ mantra but she’d still end up in the gym to keep up her sparring and checking the locks on her doors and windows every night. Seeing the knife in the camping shop though had been like a bulldozer to the wall, memories were seeping through and she finally realized it was time she stopped hiding from the truth. She needed to know what happened that night if she was going to move forward, if Silas was going to move forward. 

Stepping into that fateful spot in the forest was honestly a bit anti-climatic. She’d imagined a wave of memories just hitting her like a mac truck but it didn’t come. She remembered it for sure. As she walked around the small clearing in the trees she could almost see where they had set up her tents. She couldn’t help but smile at their campsite, she could almost smell whatever concoction her father was cooking up over the fire. Everything else seemed distant, fractured as usual. Setting her back down she settled in, she wasn’t going to give up this time. If she was going to do this she had to atleast give it a good try. 

As the sun lowered in the sky she started a fire. She’d been running over what she could remember in her mind. Her parents, their life before all this happened, trying to think of any clue that might have led up to what happened that night but was coming up dry. A twig snapping nearby set her on edge and she pulled her hunting knife from its sheath crouching down trying to see who or what was there. 

Just like that the floodgates let loose, her eyes shifted back to the camp but what was once just a fire transformed into their campsite. Her mother was arguing with someone, their back to her. It sound as though she was trying to work out a deal. Her eyes shifted to her father and a ripple of anger went through her. Fighting against the men that held him he was pleading not with them but with his wife to change her mind, not to go forward with this. Before she knew it, things had escalated quickly and she was jumping in to help, her knife sinking into one of the attackers. She was easily knocked away and then there was that knife again, glinting in the light of the fire. Searing pain made it hard to breathe, hard to focus but when she looked up her mother was no where to be seen and her father was screaming for her to run. 

What happened to their family in the woods was still a mystery. When she and her brother, Silas, had been found they were in bad shape, Mari herself wounded. The Vargas’s had said that when the pair had stumbled upon their camp, the kids were scared, Mari in front of her brother brandishing a knife she was too weak to really use. After getting them to the hospital, Mari had been in and out and they really only had Silas’s point of view to go on. He’d said that the siblings had gone on a hike together, out to a waterfall and back. Mari knew the forest well, so their parents had let her take her brother out there alone. When they made it back to camp something was wrong. Things were strewn about and a large shape seemed to be in one of the tents. Silas hadn’t seen it, not up close, Mari had told him to crouch down and hide among a set of logs nearby but he was sure it was a bear. He said that his sister went to go investigate alone and a few minutes later he heard her screams. By the time she ran out of camp screaming for him to run he’d convinced himself that some monstrous bear had attacked their camp and never looked back.

When Mari woke she wasn’t much help. She remembered bits and pieces of their trip but the doctors didn’t want her to push more. The Park Rangers said the wounds were inconclusive and despite blood at the camp they couldn’t say what had happened to their parents. A search party had continued to look but everyone was convinced they were dead. Their uncle had even come to town, long enough to play the picture of the children’s savior, come to take them home but when the estate was finalized and their life insurance came in he was long gone. Mari couldn’t say she was surprised. Despite the perfect little family they seemed to be, that Silas thought they were she was old enough to have seen the darker side of her father and his side of the family. They weren’t the saints her brother made them out to be and while he was convinced that their parents were alive, somewhere out there trying to make their way back, something in Mari knew that even if her parents were alive, she doubted they’d come back to town, not even for their kids.

The Vargas family was kind enough to step in, building the kids a home. They tried to help the siblings deal with that night. Both children went into therapy but it didn’t stick for either. As much as Mari wanted to remember, to know what truly happened the sessions only made her nightmares more vivid. Eventually they stopped making her go and Mari stopped trying, tired of sleepless nights. For a while the nightmares stopped or atleast were less prevalent. She tried to move forward with her life. Remembering wouldn’t bring them back and she doubted even the truth could make her brother come home.