He wants answers I can’t give him, just like before.
He wants a truth I can’t show him, just like before.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words blowing like ripples across his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t apologise. If we start swapping apologies, then I’m gonna be here for a year listing out all the shit I did to you.”
As I laugh, he curls me even closer into him, cradling me like I’m something precious.
“Why don’t you want me to call your parents?” He slowly rocks me, not enough to trigger another surge of pain, just enough to soothe me. “Is it because they won’t care? Because you know, that’s on them. It’s not a reflection on you.”
And there’s the trouble. He shoots and misses this time but it’s so near the target that I’m afraid.
It’s so close that I almost believe I could open my mouth and confess. That maybe, just maybe, he’s caught up enough in this tangled cord between us he wouldn’t mind.
“They’re not my parents,” I say in a rush, digging my nails into my leg to centre myself when it seems that this can’t possibly be happening. I can’t possibly be telling somebody the truth. “My mother was a heroin addict who didn’t know who my father was so neither do I.”
There’s a long pause, then he softly asks, “I beg your pardon?” like he’s too fancy to just say what.
“You heard me. The Blacks picked me up from the group home when I was eight, took me to a different city, put me in a nicer dress than I’d ever seen before, and sent me to school.” In case he still hasn’t connected the dots, I repeat, “They’re not my parents.”
“But… They adopted you?”
“Not that I know of. I think of them that way, but the day they took me away was the last time I ever saw a social worker. It’s more likely they just bribed someone to look the other way.”
“But…”
“Allain is very fond of presenting a complete family unit to his investors,” I say before he can go digging and work a different truth out of me. “Since Marnie can’t have kids, I’m sure this seemed an easier way.”
“Sure. Like picking up a snack pack for lunch.” His hand continues to stroke the side of my face and I turn so my nose is pressed against him, hiding my face entirely from the world.
I can remember how ecstatic I was to get out of the home, how fearful to go into foster care. It was my third time in the system. None of them had been pleasant.
The other children in the home valued strength, valued size. I had neither. There was a boy there who picked me out the first day as a target. If it had just been to hurt me, to hit me, to trip me, to give me Chinese burns like the others, I could have struggled through it.
But that wasn’t it. He wanted to hurt me the same way men who spent time at my mother’s squalid flat had enjoyed hurting me. I would have done anything to flee, believed any story.
Even the story they were different. That their brand of hurt was better.
Seb’s voice is hesitant, struggling to understand. I suppose it has come out of the blue. “I didn’t know.”
“Nobody is meant to. It’s hardly a united family unit if I blab to everyone that I’m a last-minute addition.”
“What about grandparents? Aunts? Uncles?”
“I guess not. Or not in a position to offer me a home. I got placed in foster care a few times, keeping me in the group home until a family was free to take me. If there’d been relatives available, I would have gone to them instead.”
“And your mother…?”
“Died of an overdose.” I give a short laugh, unable to tuck my face further into his chest so wrapping my arms around him instead. “I tossed a blanket over her and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened for as long as I could. We had so little, I was used to going through the rubbish skip behind the dairy to steal food and washing my clothes in the sink each night so they’d dry by morning.”
“Pretty industrious eight-year-old.”
The drugs hit me the right way, finally. Eased along by the wine, though I still wouldn’t mind another glass.
A fledgling drunk, following in the footsteps of her pretend mother, perhaps soon to follow the path of her real one.
But in this moment, I can’t get too worked up about it. I’m floating on a wave, one that will have a sickening crash at the other end, but for now has me riding high.
