18. Jack
18
JACK
I had steeled myself for a miserable fucking day. But I don’t think there’s any way I could have prepared for today’s bombshell.
As soon as the adults in charge herd them all up and get them back to the school bus —after trips back for a lost mitten, a final trip to the bathroom for a whiny kid insisting he has to go now and some other bullshit — the bus finally rumbles out of the parking lot.
I go into my office, slam the door hard enough to rattle the framed map on the wall and flop into my desk chair. The springs squeak in protest as I tip it back. I toss my hat onto the desk and blow out a hard sigh, scrubbing a hand over my eyes as I try to absorb my discovery.
T he school bus had only pulled up maybe ten minutes earlier, but the little shits were already giving me a splitting headache. After I waited for the teachers to get them down to a dull roar, I introduced myself and the nature center, read all the stupid things off the files Laura had printed up for me and dismissed them so they could fill out worksheets the teachers had distributed as they sat down —some fucking scavenger hunt or something. I tried not to pay attention.
A girl in a purple coat with a messy brunette ponytail and dark eyes that made me inexplicably uneasy marched up to me. She put her hands on her hips, wrinkling the worksheet in her hand as she craned her neck to look up at me, and said she had a question. I figured she probably wanted to know where the bathroom was, why she wasn’t allowed to touch the life-sized model of the black bear, or how to find one of the things on her stupid assignment sheet. It turned out to be none of the above.
How come I had the same last name as her mom?
The question was nonsensical enough to be funny at first. But as the girl kept running her mouth, blithely ignorant of the effect her words were having on me, it dawned on me that evidence was piling up, and what I’d dismissed as a crazy, fleeting thought when it darted through my mind a moment ago was looking more and more like reality:
The mom this chatterbox was prattling on about was my sister, Sarah. Which meant that this dark-haired girl in the puffy purple jacket standing in front of me was my niece. A niece I never knew until today even existed.
I realized with a shock why her eyes unnerved me. It hit me all at once, like one of those illusion posters where a silhouette pops out of a pattern, and then you can’t unsee it. She had my mother’s eyes. My sister’s eyes. My eyes.
I let out a sigh of frustration. So my sister has a kid. Big fucking deal. Lots of people have kids. Doesn’t make a difference in my life. Rather, it shouldn’t make a difference in my life. I can’t understand why the discovery has rocked me like an explosion.
My sister, along with my mother, cut me off a decade ago because they chose to believe my conniving, asshole ex-boyfriend’s explanation for why there were pictures on his phone of him, battered and bruised.
Maybe they legitimately believed his claims that the marks he displayed after submitting to me were evidence of abuse at my hands. Maybe they couldn’t wrap their heads around the thought that anyone could leave handprints, welts and bruises on someone they professed to love. Maybe they secretly were looking for an excuse to shove me out of their lives and slam the door shut behind me.
I figured I’d never know for sure, and tried to make peace with that. Instead, I tried my best to pick myself up and get the hell over it. And I like to think I’ve done a decent job of rebuilding my life after the whole clusterfuck. But I had to shut the door on everything I lost.
I always resisted the urge to look up friends or family members who made themselves scarce, dropped me or cut me out of their lives afterwards. I decided I didn’t need to feed my anger by seeing them happy and successful, fulfilled and surrounded by people who loved them and gave a shit about them. Fuck that noise.
But I also squashed the mean-spirited impulse to look them up in the hopes that they’d become sad sacks with miserable lives. Much as I love the dark, gleeful thrill of schadenfreude, everything was just too raw. I was afraid that if I spent too much time wallowing in my bitterness, it would become a kind of quicksand, trapping me until I drowned in it.
I let out a bitter laugh that sounds hollow in the quiet office as a thought strikes me: I guess I got lucky in that at least my sister wasn’t one of the chaperones. I’m not sure how that would have gone down, but it probably wouldn’t have been good.
So what do I do now? I scrub a hand over my eyes again. It’s been ten fucking years, and she apparently never got around to telling me she got divorced. Or had a fucking kid. Or… God only knows what else has transpired since then. But however monumental it was, apparently it didn’t shake her foundation enough to make her think about the brother she severed contact with years ago.
It’s settled, then. I swing myself back up in my seat. I’m confident I can just push this out of my mind and not think of it again.