I need your advice. I’m not sure what to do anymore.
My daughter was born a happy, bouncing baby girl. She had those big blue eyes that shift into a deep brown as she ages. Those bubbly blonde curls that straighten and darken with age. She was a perfect baby. Quiet, sleepy, never fussy, always up for anything. And that attitude continued as she aged. By the time she was 3, she had joined a Kindergarten named “Miss Blue’s Adventure Emporium”.
Miss Blue was always so kind to Reed. She said that she was the best behaved in the entire school, which consisted of all 12 kids. I think she said that to everyone, though. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel proud of her. When she ‘graduated’ that year, she received a certificate - “Best At Being Friendly”. The first two words had been typed out and the final two were hand-written with a pink sharpie. Copy and paste certificates. Every kid had gotten one.
Still, though, Reed was so proud of herself. She had insisted I place it on the crammed fridge door. And it hangs there now as I type this with shaking hands.
The scribbles of rainbows and fairies had been replaced by business cards and school photos. All up until her fourth-grade picture, which consisted of a smiling buck-tooth girl missing her lower canines. She had a bright purple and pink spotted dress with unicorns rearing and swinging their manes around decorating the front. Each was in a different pose, though there was only 5 poses to pick from. She had a broad smile plastered across her freckled face. Her long, brown hair was still in youthful ringlets laying haphazardly across her shoulders. I’d tried to brush it out before the picture, but it had only made it frizzy. She’d cried a little but seemed excited with the photo nonetheless.
God, I miss her.
The day she started to change was in mid-December of her 4th grade year. She’d come home crying down the front of her butterfly dress. When I begged her to tell me what was wrong over a cup of hot cocoa, she sniffled out that someone had made fun of her because “I don’t have a Mommy like they do.” I felt my face flush. Her mother had hardly stuck around long enough to hold her for the first day before running off with her boyfriend. A deadbeat mom.
“Well, you have a Daddy. And you have Fish,” I had said, gesturing to our ugly Persian cat. Gifted to us by my Mother, who enjoyed ‘rescuing’ cats. Reed loved that buttercup-yellow furball.
“And you have your dresses and your nice room.” I insisted, my voice cracking. Nothing could ever make her forget the loss of her Mother.
“I want Mommy to come home! When’s she coming home, Daddy? I want to be…” She sucked in a deep breath and I heard it whistle between the gaps in her teeth, “I wanna be normal!” She screeched, storming into her room with all the sass a 9-year-old could muster.
I placed my fingers over the crest of my nose bridge, begging something, anything, to just let her mother send one birthday card. One Christmas present. Anything. When Reed was 2, her mother had sent me several cards begging for money. I’d tossed them deep into the recycling without opening any after the first one. But they just kept coming. They stopped about 6 months later, though.
Which leads us to today. I received a package with a neat bow wrapped around the box. Well, it would be neat if it wasn’t wrapped messily around the entire box. Every inch had at least two layers of ribbon.
I’d opened it, hesitantly. Inside was a doll with short, savagely chopped hair, messy, uneven makeup, and a cruel smile on its pale white face. It was porcelain and was chipped in several places. Not ideal to give to a small child. And there were letters. So many letters. Pictures, too. Of her. Screenshotted from my rare posts on Instagram and Facebook and cut so I was always out of the picture.
The pictures posted to my public account always had her face blurred to protect her privacy (though, I never had many followers, so why worry?) and when the screenshots were blurred out, her mother had shoddily drawn on a horrific imagining of Reed’s face. Warped with either tears or some other liquid substance, the faces seemed to be laughing and overly ecstatic. So… wrong.
She’d added clippings of her own deep brown hair to Reed’s own lighter brown hair as if to hide the fact that Reed had gained my light brunette hair. It was the same for every picture. Her hair was replaced, her face shape rounded out with a yellow crayon, her clothes had even been changed to different colors using magazine clippings. “My God,” I whispered, “What the FUCK, Maggie?” I felt myself gag.
One picture was of Maggie, Reed’s mother, laying in Reed’s bed. Beside her. The clock read 3:30 am. Reed was snuggling her and… Smiling at the camera. She was awake. Awake and overjoyed.
The picture was dated 3/09/17. Reed was 2 when this picture was taken. A toddler. An infant. I felt myself heave and rushed for the sink.
My ex-girlfriend was breaking into my house to be with my daughter?? I began to wipe away tears. There were more pictures. More and more. Dating back to the day I brought Reed home. I was in a couple. Knives pointed at me, guns in some, rope. I saw one with her smiling as she feigned dumping bleach into my open mouth.
She’d left a note, too. Scrawled with deep black ink in hasty writing. On OUR stationary. On the paper, I used to write grocery lists. Where Reed always wrote ‘candy’ or ‘soda’ when I asked if she wanted anything from the store.
“I’ll be with you soon, sweetie. Where your awful, terrible Dad won’t ever take you away again. Wouldn’t you like that, honey? To live with me forever? We’d live on and on, like superheroes. We’d never ever die, as your REAL Daddy did. He’s not your real daddy. I know who your REAL Daddy is. Write me back and I can tell you. Write me back that you want to see me tonight.
I love you with all my heart,
Mommy.”
Help me.