What made everything worse was the fact that I knew she was alive. She was living somewhere under the same sky, breathing the same air. Perhaps in Brazil, her home country. It really didn’t matter, since wherever she was, she wasn’t with me. And the one time she’d come back for me, she’d really wanted money.

I was five when it happened—around the time Dad had met Edie, my stepmom. Val, my mom, had asked for joint custody and enough child support to fund a small country. When she’d realized I wasn’t going to make her rich, she’d bailed again.

At that point, I had made it a habit to tiptoe to the kitchen at night, where Dad and Edie had all their big talks. They never noticed me. I’d perfected the art of being invisible from the moment Val stopped seeing me.

“I don’t want her anywhere near my kid,” Dad had gritted out.

“Neither do I,” Edie had replied.

My heart had melted into warm goo.

“But if she comes back, we need to consider it.”

“What if she hurts her?”

“What if she mends her?”

Experience had taught me that time was good at two things: healing and killing. I waited for the healing part to come every single day. I sank my knees to the lacy pillows below my windowsill and cracked it open, praying the wind would swish away the memories of her.

I couldn’t hate Valenciana Vasquez, the woman who’d packed up her things in front of my crib while I’d cried, pleaded, screamed for her not to go, and left anyway.

I remembered the scene chillingly well. They say your earliest recollection can’t be before the age of two, but I have a photographic memory, a 155 IQ, and a brain that’s been put through enough tests to know that, for better or worse, I remember everything.

Everything bad.

Everything good.

And the in-between.

So the memory was still crisp in my head. The determination zinging in her tawny, slanted eyes. The cold sweat gathering under my pudgy arms. I’d racked my brain looking for the words, and when I finally found them, I screamed as loud as I possibly could.

“Mommy! Please! No!”

She’d paused at the door, her knuckles white from holding the doorframe tightly, not taking any chances in case something inspired her to turn around and hold me. I remembered how I didn’t dare blink, too scared she’d disappear if I closed my eyes.

Then, for a split second, her motherly instincts won, and she did swivel to face me.

Her face had twisted, her mouth parting, her tongue sweeping over her scarlet lipstick. She’d been about to say something, but in the end, she just shook her head and left. The radio had played a melancholic tune. Val had often listened to the radio to drown out the sound of my crying. My parents hadn’t lived together, but they shared custody. After Val had failed to answer Dad’s many phone calls, he’d found me some hours later in my cot, my diaper so soiled it outweighed my tiny body.

I hadn’t been crying. Not anymore.

Not when he’d picked me up.

Not when he’d taken me to the emergency room for a thorough checkup.

Not when he’d cooed and kissed and fawned over me.

Not when hot tears had silently run down his cheeks and he’d begged me to produce a sound.

Not at all.

Since that day, I’d become what they call a selective mute. Meaning I could speak, but I chose not to. Which, of course, was real stupid, since I didn’t want to be different. I simply was. My not speaking wasn’t a choice as much as it was a phobia. I’d been diagnosed with severe social anxiety and attended therapy twice a week since babyhood. Usually, selective mutism means a person can speak in certain situations where they feel comfortable. Not me.

The nameless tune on the radio that day had been burned into my brain like an angry scar. Now, it popped up on the radio, assaulting me again.

I was sitting in the car with Edie, my stepmom. Rain slapped the windows of her white Porsche Cayenne. The radio host announced that it was “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode. My mouth went dry at the irony—the same mouth that refused to utter words for no apparent reason other than the fact that when I’d spoken words aloud, they hadn’t been enough for my mother. I wasn’t enough.

As the music played, I wanted to crawl out of my skin and evaporate into thin air. Hurl myself out of the car. Run away from California. Leave Edie and Dad and Racer, my baby brother, behind—just take off and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Somewhere people wouldn’t poke and pity me. Where I wouldn’t be the circus freak.

“Geez, it’s been a decade. Can’t she just, like, get over it?”

“Maybe it’s not about the mom. Have you seen the dad? Parading his young mistress…”