“Why did you marry Dad, then?” I asked. A burst of unbidden anger broke through my lips, and my grip tightened on the photo. “Why would you marry a man who hit you—and kept hitting you for my entire life? Why would you do that?”
“He didn’t hit me again until you were almost a year old,” she said. “We made up when I got back from France, so I didn’t see a point in mentioning Sébastien. Then I missed my period.” She looked sheepishfor a moment before lifting her chin. “I told him I was pregnant, and he proposed. He never questioned the timing of your birth. We just fell into step and carried on as if we’d never been apart.”
My heart beat painfully as I absorbed this news. I wanted to scream or overturn the table. I wanted to cry. To demand a different childhood. But nothing seemed appropriate. Was any response to news like this appropriate?
“Mama, why?” I began again, more slowly this time, still unable to fathom her horrendous choice. “Why did you willingly live like that? Raise a child like that?”
Raisemelike that?
“Those were different times,” she said. Her dismissive tone indicated the conversation was over. She’d dropped the bomb in my lap. And that was that. “You can keep the photo if you’d like.” Her frail body trembled as she finished the spiked coffee, then rose on unsteady legs for a refill.
My eyes traveled back to the faded image.
Mom was young and thin, wearing a bright smile and striped sweater with a denim miniskirt. Her long ponytails hung over her shoulders to her waist.
The man beside her was tall and narrow with a round baby face and mischievous eyes. His hair lifted on top, as if caught in a breeze, and he held on to my mother as if he’d won the greatest of prizes.
“Oh,” Mom muttered, drawing my attention to her as she took a wobbly step backward from the countertop.
I was on my feet before I’d thought about it, arms reaching to catch her as she collapsed.
Chapter Four
Inside the walls of Wells Memorial Hospital, I felt like a child again in all the worst ways. I was rattled, worried, and afraid. Mom barely spoke a word after her fall, but she’d opened her eyes, and I took that as hope. Still, something dark twisted in my chest. A knowing I didn’t want to accept.
She’d lost so much weight. Her complexion looked strange, almost yellowish, and based on our phone calls, it seemed like she was drunk by lunchtime these days. Historically, she waited until at least dinner. Then today she’d confessed something so huge, I still couldn’t believe it was real.
The man who still starred in my nightmares, the monster who’d beaten my mother and caused me to hide in closets until the day I left home, the father who taught me to detach from life so it didn’t hurt so much, wasn’t really mine.
How was I supposed to process that?
Blasts of rage, shock, and betrayal stung my eyes and nose. How could she keep something like this from me? How could she let me believe I was made up of half his DNA? I hated parts of myself I’d never seen, because I believed they were there, passed on genetically and hiding as I had, waiting to come out.
I’d lived a lifetime afraid of my anger, determined to remain calm at all costs, and terrified of what might happen if I expressedthose emotions. Afraid I was my father’s daughter. That I’d ruin my relationships and make my daughter hate me.
None of it was real. She’d known, and she’d let me suffer. Eighteen years with him. And eighteen more since he’d died. Maybe she was the monster.
I pushed the thought aside, because I didn’t know her at all, and that was also her choice.
Intuition told me she was sick, and she knew it. Worse, I suspected she was preparing to say goodbye.
I inhaled deeply through my nose, seeking peace and hating the ever-present scents of antiseptics and cleansers. The unique blend of smells that screamedhospital, tragedy, trauma, death.Would it kill them to add some of those diffusers to the air vents? Puffs of vanilla or lavender would go a long way to settle folks down. Why hadn’t anyone ever done that?
Another ambulance pulled into the bay, and I let my head fall back against the wall behind my chair.
The emergency room’s waiting area was packed with the ill and the injured, all waiting their turns behind an exam curtain. A dozen or more car-crash victims moved to the head of the line following a pileup on the highway that pushed patients with non-life-threatening issues down the queue. Once Mom was stabilized, she too would have to wait, but at least she’d made it behind a curtain before the first accident victims arrived.
I’d ridden with her to the ER, seated across from the EMT, afraid she would die. Now, when I could no longer be with her, or bear the stream of bloodied humans being transported from the wreck, I just wanted to escape.
I wished I hadn’t left my SUV in Mom’s driveway. The vehicle was my lifeboat. I used to sneak into the dark garage when Camilla was small just to sit inside my ride and cry. It’d been years since I managed actual tears, but my car was still a sanctuary. An escape hatch. Mine.
At one point in my life I felt as if I spent all my time on the verge of a breakdown and hiding that from my young daughter. I constantly looked for ways to explain away the tears in my eyes. Allergies. Yawns. Fatigue.
One day the tears dried up without me noticing, and I couldn’t recall the last time I cried.
I still got in my car as often as possible, though, usually just to leave home. I went anywhere I could justify going, chasing the dopamine rush that came with driving away.
At the moment, shrapnel from the truth bomb Mom had dropped in her kitchen remained in my heart. The pieces pierced and sliced through me each time I thought of her secret. The weight of the photo in my shirt pocket was probably enough to kill me if the shrapnel didn’t.
