Chapter 44
How shockingly unfair it was, being a child. How barbaric, not only to have so little control over your own life, but also to have no control over who was controlling you. Cess and Ness were leaving. My father was coming back. My mother was dead.
I remained in bed all weekend. Daphne came over and chatted without pause for hours while I stared at the wall.
Cess made my favorite dinner—her famous chicken and vegetable pie with mash—but even that wasn’t enough to summon me to the dinner table, so she left it on a tray outside my bedroom, despite her hard-and-fast rule that all food needed to be consumed at the dinner table.
The grief was all-consuming. It wasn’t that life before had been perfect.
It had only been a couple of months since my mother died and I still felt the loss of her in my every breath.
And yet, in the strange bubble of time I’d spent with Cess, Ness, and Daphne, I’d felt safer and more peaceful than I’d ever felt.
My father had undone all of it in a matter of minutes.
I understood Cess and Ness weren’t happy about it either.
But unlike me, who languished in bed, Cess got busy.
Apart from when she delivered meals, I hardly saw her, but I knew she was there because I heard her voice wafting up the stairs as she took endless phone calls, and visited with unfamiliar people.
“I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I said to her on Sunday night. She’d come to take my dinner tray and say good night. I’d been unable to even summon the strength to roll to face her.
“You can’t just lie in bed for the rest of your life,” she said from the doorway.
“Why not?”
“Because that would be a waste of a brilliant life.”
There was something about the pragmatic, straightforward way that Cess spoke. She said what she meant, and she meant what she said. It made even her simplest comments so powerful. More profound than a million words could have been from my mother.
“Why do you care anyway?” I asked.
“Why do I care? What kind of comment is that?” she said crossly. “Why do you think I care?”
I had no idea, obviously. “Duty?”
“Look at me, Mabel.”
Reluctantly, I rolled over. She stood in the doorway, backlit.
“I care because you’re my niece. My sister’s daughter. The only blood relative I have left. You’re the only member of the next generation for me to pass the flag to when I go. That makes you the single most important person in my life. Maybe you call that duty, but I call it family.”
“My father is my family,” I said. “And I’m not the single most important person in his life.”
“Which is exactly why I’ll never leave you with him,” she said softly.
She sounded so sure of herself. I wanted to believe her with every fiber of my being. But I knew, even at that young age, that life rarely worked out the way you wanted. “But it’s not up to you.”
“If that’s what you think, darling, you don’t know me very well.”
I nodded, and even managed a smile, and Cess wished me good night. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking. That if she thought she was going to outsmart my father, she didn’t know him very well.