Chapter 7
Gail was so caught up in self-recrimination and emotions that she was beside herself.
Yet she had to sort it out, so she got things down on paper.
She had journaled the bulk of her life, and she wondered if she should go back and take a serious look at everything she had memorialized during that tumultuous time.
Yet she also knew she wasn’t capable of too much of that because the tears would just rip through her, and she couldn’t read the words she had written.
Ever since she’d seen Riley again, everything had fallen by the wayside.
All the self-deception, all the attempts to justify what she’d done.
She didn’t want to see it. When she realized what her family had done to him, the man she had loved with every ounce of her being, to the point that she had been more than happy to walk away from her family, she understood why her family had done what they had done.
She couldn’t condone what they did, but she understood why they did it.
She let out a long sigh. She would be dealing with this for a very long time.
It had taken her forever to forgive her sister, but still their relationship wasn’t anywhere near fully healed.
Yet years ago the sisters had come to some joint agreement against Riley, and Gail realized now just how much she had been justifying her position.
A wrong position, not only wrong but horrific.
She was ashamed and embarrassed that she had done it in the first place.
She didn’t even know how to find peace with her own actions, but finding peace with all the actions of her family was something she didn’t know if she could ever even begin to deal with either.
How could Riley even stand to look at her?
How could he have even agreed to meet her for coffee?
She thought she had been looking for closure, and now she realized it wasn’t closure she needed but redemption.
She had to admit feelings were there, but now she couldn’t imagine something would ever be between them again, simply because of what she herself had done to Riley.
As soon as she thought about that, she closed her eyes against the hot wave of tears and the self-hate again winding its way through her.
When a knock came on her door, she ignored it, and then the text messages began.
It was her mother outside the door. Open up. We need to talk.
She wasn’t sure there was any way to talk her way through this, not when she felt as raw as she could get and couldn’t take any more. Then this surge of anger pressed her to deal with whatever this was because it wouldn’t go away in her heart otherwise.
Yes, some of this would ease, but not by hiding like this. Not with so much anger inside and with the new realizations stabbing her own heart over and over about what had really happened.
She opened the door. Her mother, surprised that she had actually done so, looked up, took one look at her daughter’s face, and winced. “You look like hell.”
Gail immediately went to shut the door.
Her mother called out, “Wait. I’m sorry.”
Gail snorted at her mother’s apology. “I will never believe you. Everything’s about appearances to you. There’s no substance, no reality that will ever be something that you care about beyond the superficial. Nothing inside you even resembles common decency, does it?”
Instead of slapping back at her, Mom took a deep breath and asked, “Is that what you really believe right now?”
“Yes,” she stated. “Now that I know what everybody has done, I do. At least I hope this is all you and Dad have done. It was one thing to deal with my sister, but it’s all of you together.”
“What about you? You immediately believed Debbie and jumped on board the same train.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve had time now to take a good hard look at my role in the whole thing and am hating myself for everything that happened. So, if you came here to add more guilt onto my shoulders, it won’t do any good because there’s no damn room.”
She went to shut the door again, and her mother stuck out her foot and used her hands to pry it open. “Stop. You’ll end up making yourself sick.”
“Yeah, well, I deserve to be,” she snapped.
“I deserve to be beyond sick. I deserve to be shot actually, but then so do all of you. You, for following dear old Dad, and Debbie, for scheming and plotting to get out from under you, at my expense, and Dad? … He did something so unspeakably evil, but you knew all about that.”
She hesitated and then asked, “How did you know?”
She laughed. “I didn’t actually. I just guessed, but now you’ve confirmed it, so thanks for that.”
Her mother’s face paled, but her lips firmed. “Look. We need to talk. This is not helping you at all.”
“You are absolutely right there,” she confirmed, trying hard to control the panic coming in waves.
“All this guilt and horrible awareness is not helping. I’m not sure what you thought would help me in all this because it’s not something I can just turn around three times and click my heels together and get over. ”
Her mother just looked at her, and, for the first time, Gail saw a crack in her mother’s “perfect facade.” Her mother was never without the absolutely perfect makeup, the absolutely perfect look that defined the perfect world she and her husband lived in.
Her mother whispered, “We need to talk, but I’m not doing it in the hallway.”
She shrugged, stepped back, and added, “As long as you leave when I tell you to leave.”
Her mother hesitated, then nodded. “Agreed, but you have to give me a chance to explain.”
“Explain what? That you were totally okay sending the man I planned to spend the rest of my life with out onto the front lines of a war zone? You know he got badly injured, right? But that’s probably nothing to you because what you really wanted was for him to die, preferably blown to bits so nobody would ever see or hear from him again. ”
Her mother just stared, her eyes wide, and asked, “You’ve heard from him?”
“Oh yeah, I had coffee with him,” she admitted.
Her mother’s breath came out in a very slow, heavy exhale. “I see.”
“Oh, I’m not sure you do,” she countered, with half a laugh.
“You see everything from a skewed perspective,” she pointed out.
“You were just seeing the tip of the iceberg as I realized what a shitty family we are and how ugly we really are on the inside. You always called us the beautiful people, but we’re not beautiful at all,” she snapped.
“We are the ugliest, shittiest people I have ever had the misery of knowing.”
“Stop it,” her mother snapped. “Enough of that.”
“Then you can leave,” Gail declared immediately. “The door’s right there. Go ahead and use it.”
Mom took another breath and repeated, “Doing this isn’t helping.”
“Maybe not helping but it sure makes me feel loads better.”
“Feeling better?” she asked. “How on earth can you feel better sitting here, castigating yourself? You’re the one who immediately jumped on board.
You’re the one who wanted him destroyed, remember, for what he did to you?
” Her mother snapped again, her tone turning hard.
“Yes, we did send him out into the most dangerous area possible, and, yes, I guess a part of us hoped he would not return. If he has come back, and he’s injured, I guess we probably had a part to play in that,” she conceded, “but not a direct part to play in his accident. Men go out into the battlefield all the time. And it’s not as if you cared about any of them.
” She laughed, but it was a broken sound that rattled the air around them.
“You’re right, and I should probably be doing something for all those poor soldiers who didn’t have much choice beyond, you know, needing a job or wanting to serve their country or dealing with decent people, versus those like Riley who were sent there out of spite or God-only-knows what other reasons you and Dad had for doing such a vile thing. ”
Gail continued. “You also knew how badly hurt I already was at what I thought was a terrible betrayal. You didn’t have to try to kill Riley, particularly when you knew that Debbie was lying.
You knew long before I did that it was all a lie,” she declared, staring at her mother, and this time Gail felt a coil of hate for her mother.
Her mother took a step back, trying desperately to retain some semblance of control.
“Yes, I did know because your sister contacted me and told me what she’d done.
I knew, and I didn’t tell you. There. Are you happy now that you know I knew and didn’t say anything?
I did tell your father, and he was like, It doesn’t matter.
We don’t want him in the family. He’s not our people. ”
“He’s not our people,” Gail repeated, “and you also said that about our Debbie’s Simon, that he wasn’t our people either.”
“No,” she agreed, “he’s not.”
“Oddly enough, he’s turned out to be a decent guy,” Gail pointed out to her mother.
“And you weren’t even willing to give him two seconds to have a chance at being deemed good enough to be considered our people.
How can you look in the mirror in the morning, playing with people’s lives like that?
Knowing how wrong it was to do what you did, and then not even telling me when you found out Debbie was lying the whole time?
And you didn’t say anything to me because …
why? Was it because you wanted me to suffer longer? ”
When her mother didn’t respond, Gail’s tone turned cold and hard. “That’s what gave you your kicks back then, wasn’t it? And here I thought you were my mother and you loved me. Wow, what a bogus thought that was.”
“Stop it,” her mother spat, holding up a hand. “That’s not fair.”
“Yes, it is. You knew. You knew Debbie was lying. You knew all about it, but you let the lie go full speed ahead because you were hoping it would break us up, and it did,” she snapped. “Congratulations.”