85. Chapter 85
Chapter 85
Since Paige’s birthday fell on a Saturday this year, and she had to work a wedding that evening, it was decided that the ‘tradition’ with Jules had to be modified. So, everyone (Valerie, Jacob, Jules, Paige, David, Evan, and Dolly) met at Champagne, a ridiculously expensive restaurant downtown for brunch to celebrate. It was a good time, with delicious food, never-ending mimosas, and spirited conversation, much of which revolved around Paige and David’s engagement and up-coming wedding.
When it was over, and everyone had disbanded, Valerie offered to take Jacob for a few hours so Paige and David could spend some time together before she had to go to work.
Once inside her apartment, David proceeded to instigate a little make-out session in the entryway—which seemed to be a new favorite pastime of his—only to have it interrupted by a knock at the door.
“No,” David groaned. “No, no, no. I thought Dolores said she was going to run some errands after brunch?”
“Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Well, get rid of her. And that doesn’t mean talking about cat treats or your lemon squares or email spam, got it? We have less than two hours before you have to go to work, and I don’t want to waste a minute of it. I have plans.”
Paige checked her clothing and found it presentable before waving a hand in front of her face. “How’s this?”
She only looked slightly disheveled, but he fixed her hair a little bit, anyway. “You’re perfect. Now get rid of her.”
Chuckling, Paige opened the door only to freeze, her laughter dying and her expression turning to one of ugly shock. Not knowing what was going on, David took a step toward her, just as a woman’s voice said, “Hello, Paige.”
Instead of returning the greeting, Paige asked coldly, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Since she obviously wasn’t talking to Dolores, David stepped from behind the door to see who it was, only to stop abruptly at the sight of his former mother-in-law. He hadn’t seen her in over six years, but it didn’t stop him from instantly recognizing Claire. Her resemblance to Paige was strong enough that Claire looked like the sixty-year-old version of her daughter, with toffee-colored brown hair lightly streaked with silver and bourbon-brown eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, stunned to see her. “Claire?”
“David,” she replied, stunned to see him as well.
Paige stopped and waited for some sense of emotional connection or lingering affection to be felt, but none came; there was no feeling that she was looking at her mother, with whom there had once been the strongest of bonds. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she repeated, her voice now rock-steady.
“I came to see you and wish you a happy birthday and—”
“You came to wish me … a happy birthday?”
“Yes. And I apologize for showing up unannounced, but you haven’t answered any of my calls, or responded to any of my texts—”
“Well, I blocked you, so I didn’t get any of your calls or texts,” Paige said matter-of-factly. “And you can spare me the bullshit about my birthday, given how you’ve ignored it for the last three years, okay? Now, for the third and final time … what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I was … hoping we could talk for a few minutes,” Claire said quietly.
“You want to talk for a few minutes?”
“Yes.”
“You really have some motherfucking nerve, considering how our last conversation went down.”
Claire held up her hands. “Look, I know you’re upset with me—”
“Upset with you?”
“—and you have every right to be. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk about,” Claire told her, then asked in a beseeching tone, “May I please come in?”
After a lengthy pause, Paige finally said, “All right,” before stepping back to let Claire into the entryway and closing the door behind her.
It was then that Claire saw the engagement ring on Paige’s finger. “Are you and David … engaged?”
The question threw Paige for a second. “Yes. And no, you won’t be receiving an invitation to the wedding, in case you were wondering.”
Claire overlooked the obvious hit, and managed to produce a weak smile. “Well, congratulations to you both.”
“Thanks. That means a lot to us,” Paige replied, deadpan. “Now, say what you came here to say.”
Claire cut her eyes to David before looking at Paige with a pleading expression. “Could you and I sit down and talk in private?”
It was clear that Claire felt uncomfortable in the small space, with Paige and David both staring at her, nor did Claire want David to be a part of this. “No. We’re not going to go sit down, and whatever you have to say can be said with David present,” Paige said. “So, start talking. You have five minutes.”
“That’s not—”
“Isn’t that what you gave me? The day I came to talk to you?”
“Yes.” The word was filled with shame. “And I’m so sorry for what happened.”
Paige frowned at her, the apology not even landing. “You’re sorry for what ‘happened’? You mean throwing me out of your house like garbage?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you, and I’m even more sorry I didn’t believe you. It’s one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”
These apologies didn’t land, either. “Is that your way of saying you believe me now?”
“Yes.”
Paige didn’t say anything for several moments. Her mother’s admission didn’t really change anything, other than to make Paige wonder at the turnaround. “Why is that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why do you believe me now? What made you change your mind after all this time?”
Claire looked extremely nervous as she cleared her throat. “I was the executor of Carter’s estate after he … died. So, it fell to me to settle everything. To go through his possessions and sell what could be sold, like his cars and his house—”
“I know what it means to be the executor of an estate, so get to the point,” Paige told her rudely. “I don’t give a shit about his house, or his cars.”
“I came across a safe deposit box about a couple of weeks ago—the yearly premium was due and got mailed to me. All of his mail has been coming to me for the past year, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about it, because it wasn’t at his main bank, and he didn’t have any paperwork on it—”
“I don’t give a shit about his safety deposit box, either. Get to the goddamn point.”
Claire took a deep breath, then exhaled heavily, before saying softly, “I found pictures in it. Taken with one of those instant Polaroid cameras.”
David stared at Claire, who was clearly trying to hold back tears, her skin starting to take on a red, splotchy cast. His stomach churning with nausea, David put his arms around Paige and held her from behind, as he comprehended the underlying ugliness of Claire’s revelation. Pictures.
“I assume they were pornographic pictures of me?” Paige asked, her voice low and flat.
Claire nodded, losing the fight not to cry, and tears rolled silently down her cheeks.
“Well, that’s not very surprising. It actually explains why I’ve never liked having my picture taken—for any reason,” Paige said, looking at Claire pointedly, and saw the moment she made the connection to Paige’s aversion to being in pictures, and the moment Claire realized she’d been seeing symptoms of the abuse years ago. “Did you look through them?”
Claire wiped her hands across her face before answering. “Yes.”
“Were there a lot?”
“Yes. They spanned several years. Some were taken when you were … very young.”
“How young?”
“Paige …”
“I want to know. How young?”
“When you were around eight years old.”
Upon hearing that revolting and monstrous bit of information, David’s arms tightened around Paige even more, barely hearing Claire say the majority of the pictures were of Paige as a teenager.
“Hmm,” Paige mused, her voice still low and flat. “So Carter had a stash of Paige-porn he could bust out and look at whenever he wanted. Get turned on and probably jerk off to—”
“Don’t,” Claire choked out.
“Don’t what, Claire? Don’t speak the truth because it’s not something you want to hear? Because it’s disgusting? Because you don’t want to think about your brother jerking off to pornographic pictures he took of your daughter when she was a child? A teenager? Well, he probably did do it, Claire, and did it a lot, because he was a fucking pervert, but you can take solace in knowing that jerking off to pictures of me is actually the least horrible thing he ever did.”
“Please stop—”
“There was much worse,” Paige told her mother evenly. “Remember all those weekends I spent at his house? You’d drop me off and then go and do whatever you wanted to do, leaving me there alone with him—”
“I didn’t know. I thought he was—”
“Whatever you thought was wrong. Did you know sometimes he barely waited for you to back out of the fucking driveway before he was on me, pulling my clothes off? No, you didn’t. Well, now you do.”
Claire began crying in earnest, and David felt like crying, too, at the horrific picture Paige had just painted. Not for the first time, he wished Carter was still alive so David could kill him, slowly and painfully.
“Is this hard to hear? Tough. Shit. It was hard to be molested for thirteen years by a pedophile. That’s what was hard. Being raped, sometimes in the middle of the night, being forced to suck his uncircumcised dick starting when I was ten, while he stroked my hair and called me his ‘pretty little girl’ and destroyed every last bit of my childhood.” Paige shook her head. “Yeah, so finding out there were naked pictures of me isn’t that bad, relatively speaking.” Then, after a quick beat, she asked, almost conversationally, “So, what did you end up doing with the pictures?”
“I destroyed them.”
Paige gazed at Claire, seeing the misery on her face, not knowing if it was for what Paige had gone through or because Claire had been forced to face an appalling truth about her brother. “You know that day I came to your house and told you about Carter? I imagined you responding like this. With anguish and sorrow, because you were supposed to believe me.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire whispered, backing up against the door, as if needing the support. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve believed you then, but I believe you now, and that’s the main reason I wanted to talk to you—”
“You only believe me now, because you have to, since you saw pornographic pictures of me taken by your brother, with your own eyes. You shouldn’t have needed proof, though, because I was your fucking daughter, and I had no reason to lie to you. Had you believed me, we could’ve drawn strength from each other and healed together, but you didn’t believe me and I actually had to spend extra time in therapy having to deal with your betrayal and your vicious rejection, along with everything else.
“So the fact that you believe me now doesn’t count for shit, because I don’t need you to believe me anymore. I have people who did believe me and who helped me get through the worst hell of my life, so your trip here is completely wasted. Your belief is three years too late and your apologies will never be enough.” Paige gently pulled away from David and walked to the door, opening it. “Goodbye, Claire,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Paige, wait.” Claire’s voice was heavy with desperation. “I read your book.”
Paige tilted her head. “Was that before, or after, you found the pictures?” she asked softly.
Claire swallowed hard and her eyes widened at the question, not answering it.
“That’s what I thought.” Taking her mother by the shoulder, Paige pushed her out into the hall and without another word, closed the door and engaged the deadbolt for good measure. Then, pretending to dust her hands off, she murmured, “Well, that’s over.”
David briefly contemplated letting that truly be the end of it, but then found himself shaking his head. “Not quite,” he said, quickly unlocking and re-opening the door, then slipping out into the hall where Claire was still standing, as if she didn’t know what to do.
“You stupid cunt,” he said coldly, after closing the door, shocking her with his icy anger, as well as his words. “What the fuck were you thinking, doing this on her birthday?”
“I—”
“You could’ve just told her you believed her, without mentioning the pictures. You should’ve kept that shit to yourself. But you didn’t, and now she’s going to have to deal with knowing he took pictures of her—when she was a child, no less—so you’ve just given Paige something else to put behind her and she’s had more than enough to put behind her already.” He released an aggravated breath. “Stupid. Fucking. Cunt.”
“David, please. I know I’ve made mistakes—”
“What you’ve done doesn’t qualify as ‘mistakes’.”
“—but I want to try and re-build what I destroyed.”
For a moment, all he could think was that Claire was beyond delusional, if she thought there was a chance to ‘re-build’ anything with her daughter. “I’m usually a ‘glass-half-full’ kind of guy, but not on this, Claire. The glass isn’t even half-empty here. It’s totally empty. You’re too late. You were actually too late the minute you said reprehensible, unforgivable things to Paige and threw her out of your house like garbage.
“You should’ve believed her when she told you what Carter had done to her and not called her a lying bitch. You could’ve been a real mother and helped your daughter heal, but instead, you compounded the problem and took the side of her abuser.
“You need to leave her alone, Claire. I mean it. Please take Paige at her word when she said she doesn’t ever want to see you again. What you did to her was almost worse than what Carter did to her. Now get the fuck out of here and get used to not having a daughter, because Paige doesn’t have a mother.”
David waited for Claire to start walking away before going back into Paige’s apartment. She was standing in the exact spot where he’d left her, and with a gentle smile, he pulled her against him and held her tightly. “Now it’s over.”