Chapter 21 The Darkness of Hearts
TWENTY-ONE
The Darkness of Hearts
In bed, where Tristan and I go as soon as we get home, he climbs into my arms and lays a hand across my cheek. I start trying to undress him, my fingers fumbling with the buttons of his shirt.
“Stop,” he says, his fingertips firm against my face. “Wait.”
“I don’t want to wait.” The words in my head are flirtatious, but in the air between us—the way they come out—they sound too insistent. I try to kiss him, but he retreats.
“Fine.” I push his hand away and sit up.
“Archer, listen to me.”
“I’m sick of listening tonight. I don’t want to hear anymore. What? What do you have to say right now? What’s so fucking important?” I’m not shouting at him, but almost.
His eyes widen just before they grow cold. “Nothing. Forget it. Just fuck me if that’s what you want.”
Helen is right. I will lose him. I’ll lose him because I’m too fucking broken to let myself have him.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He nods, but his mouth is tight. He starts to get up, but I reach out and clamp a hand on his hip, not letting him move. “You said you’d stay the night.”
“I’m not sure I want to anymore.”
“I’m listening. Please. I don’t want you to go. You promised.” My voice breaks, which isn’t surprising. Everything about me is breaking.
Our eyes meet like a clash of swords. “What did she say to you?”
I shake my head. “Not tonight, okay?”
His expression softens. His voice comes out gentler. “You know you can tell me, right? You can tell me anything. It would mean so much to me if you knew you could do that. I—” He hesitates. “I care about you so much.”
“It isn’t you, Tristan. This is me. There are just things I don’t talk about. I don’t need to. I don’t want to. It has nothing to do with you.”
“If it’s about you then it does have something to do with me.”
“You won’t understand.”
When I let go of my hold on him, he sits up and faces me. “Explain it to me then. Explain it like I’m seven years younger than you.”
“I’m done talking.” With that, I get up from the bed.
“Can I say something before you walk out?” he asks.
“What?”
“Is this about your mother?”
“I said I don’t want to talk.”
“I knew her. Remember?”
“You knew Connor’s mom. It’s different,” I say.
“You don’t know that,” he states sharply. “Archer, please just talk to me.”
I stare hard at Tristan, wondering what he’ll think about me if he knows how far my mother really went, and how I managed to survive it.
I bite down on my back teeth. I see him getting more and more upset with every rock I put into my stonewall, but I can’t help it.
He still strikes me as so innocent. Someone I should be protecting from the harsher realities of the world—the truth about the darkness of hearts.
My muscles tense with anger I can barely contain. I’ve been angry since we left Helen’s, and I know it’s out of context, but sometimes anger is the only way—it makes a good shield.
“You wanna know the truth about me and my mom?”
He nods, looking genuinely afraid for the first time since I’ve known him.
“I’ll tell you, but you have to drop it when I’m done. If you can’t promise that, then I’m okay if you leave.”
His expression falters. “Never mind. I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t want to go or make you upset.”
“That ship sailed. I’m already upset. You’re gonna listen now. But only if you promise you will never ever tell Connor what I’m about to tell you. This is my life. Not yours. I get to decide who hears about it. Can you promise me that?”
He grips the edge of the mattress and nods.
I don’t give him a chance to change his mind.
“My first memory is waking up with a pillow over my face. I was five years old. I couldn’t breathe.
I kicked so hard, she let go long enough for me to see who was holding the pillow.
I remember I wasn’t surprised. She was pissed I kicked her, but I was more pissed.
She didn’t leave, though. She took me to the emergency room.
Whatever she told the doctor got me diagnosed with a severe sleep disorder.
Insomnia versus narcolepsy. The narcolepsy part was because I couldn’t keep my eyes open in school.
The insomnia was because I couldn’t sleep at home, but that was because she kept me awake all night.
Every night. I don’t know how long she’d been doing it, but from what she said to the doctor, I remember thinking she’d been doing it to me my whole life. Because I was so fucking tired.”
“Archer—”
“No, no.” I hold up my hand to stop him from commenting. “You wanted to know, remember?”
He keeps quiet.
“So, they started doing sleep studies. For nights in a row, I’d have to sleep in some weird sleep lab.
But I couldn’t sleep during those either because she was drugging me.
I don’t know if she was using caffeine or pseudoephedrine or fucking cocaine.
But it was all the time. She’d grind up pills and put them in my food and watch me eat, but that wasn’t good enough, either.
The doctors started prescribing longer acting drugs to keep me awake when I was away from her.
Amphetamines, I’m guessing. At night, she’d let me fall asleep for like a minute, and I’d wake up because she was holding my nose shut or music was playing so loud it hurt my head. ”
“Jesus Christ,” Tristan whispers. But I’ll give him this. He hasn’t flinched. He hasn’t looked away.
“When I was seven, I got diagnosed with autism because I started refusing to speak. I was in and out of doctor’s offices and child psychiatry offices multiple times a week.
She was always with me, so even if I wanted to, I couldn’t talk.
At the time, I didn’t want to because they believed every lie she told—she got them to feel sorry for her.
She got me to fucking feel sorry for her and what she had to go through to live with me, and so they kept medicating me.
I was scared to be awake and scared to fall asleep.
All of it was wrong. Anything I did, I had to go back to the doctor for.
I had to spend more time with her while she pretended she was the fucking victim, and people bought it. ”
Tristan unfolds his hands, bends his head, and covers his face. He doesn’t look surprised, only resigned.
“By the time I turned eight, I wanted to kill myself. I thought the only way out of it was to die. That I should just let her kill me. It would have been better than losing my mind. Because I was losing my fucking mind.” Fuck. I close my eyes and make myself breathe.
Tristan waits for me to continue without saying anything, but I don’t know if I can do it. It’s the emotional equivalent of castration. It’s so fucking degrading.
I can’t.
I can’t do it. “I’m sorry,” I say to Tristan.
He looks up. “Archer, please. Don’t walk away.”
But I already have. I’m in the kitchen when he catches up to me. He’s about to hug me, but his pity coupled with the shine of tears in his eyes is almost a worse burden than the memory. I want it over with. I hold his arms at his sides and keep talking.
“I thought one of two things was going on. I thought either there was something very wrong with me, or she was a monster. Her first mistake was sending me to school—letting me interact with normal people. Her other mistake was buying into the autism thing, because I think she did. I think it fed her sick need for attention. Anyway, one day at school, it clicked. I figured out she was poisoning me and deliberately keeping me sick. If she’d been kinder—the way most Munchausen’s moms are kinder, I might not have put it together, but she was cruel. Always.
“That one day when I finally had a clear enough moment to put it together, I was finally able to tell a doctor exactly what she was doing to me. I begged her to get me away from her. And then it all just stopped. She backed off. I stopped eating the food she served. I made my own. I woke myself up every morning and got myself to school. I shut her out of my life, and I took care of myself. A year later, I was in New Hampshire.”
The look on Tristan’s face is some combination of appalled and devastated. “Archer, I’m sorry.”
I let go of his arms. My jaw twitches because I’m clenching it so tight. “Why? It was a long time ago. I’m over it. I got out.”
“How did you…?” he breaks off and doesn’t finish.
“How’d I wind up like someone who looks normal?”
He shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“It’s a good question, though.” I think about Helen.
Helen means my mother got lazy. At some point, when I was too young to notice, she let her guard down.
Helen may be the only reason I ever learned the difference between love and hate.
Realizing this now, I soften my approach with Tristan.
“I think Helen probably saved my soul or something.”
“By bringing you home?” he asks. I think he means the way she found me in Seattle.
“Tonight she told me she’s known me my whole life. From the day I was born.”
“What?”
I don’t think I’ll be able to rehash my conversation with Helen without crying, and I’m done crying for the day. “I’m sorry, angel. I can’t right now. It’s been a lot today. Can we be done with this?”
“Not yet,” he says. “I need to know something. About you and your mom.”
I wait, nervous and on edge.
“You said she was never kind, but you knew there wasn’t anything wrong with you.” He says this like it’s the most shocking revelation in all of this.
“When I was eight, I had a good nap finally, and when I woke up, I knew how to make it stop. It was like I woke up with a whole plan. So, I’m fine now. It was a long time ago. That bitch doesn’t get to scar me for life.”
He lets out a shaky sigh, and tears fall down his face. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse that he can cry so openly. So easily. I wonder if it makes things feel better. I rub his arms because I don’t want anything I say to hurt him anymore.
Then he says, “You were lucky.”
“Was I?” I ask, incredulous.