Chapter 24 #3
How broken his confession is. It’s more than I can bear. It cleaves through me, cold and merciless. My insides bleed from the pain I’ve caused as such a horrible mother. A hollow ache claws across my heart, etching a newer, deeper grief that will go to my grave.
He paces again.
A trapped animal searching for an exit that doesn’t exist. His chest heaves, and he grips the mantle like he might tear it from the wall.
“I didn’t need more structure.”
Anguish seeps from him while staring into the dark fireplace.
“I didn’t need another tutor. Or some new diagnosis to explain me away. I needed my mom to lie in bed with me and hold me. Just once. I needed you to tell me I wasn’t fucked up.”
I stand, too upset to sit, yet too cautious to make the wrong move by touching him now.
The holding and comforting he once wanted are miles apart from where we stand.
Hollister’s thumbs press into his eyes, collecting tears, and then glancing up at me before looking out the window.
It would have been better if he weren’t here for this.
I don’t know why he is. I thought for myself.
Now I’m realizing it was for Dominic. Needing a friend when confronting his mom. It rips my heart into pieces.
“I know that now,” I whisper, clutching the handkerchief and hovering close to him.
“I don’t remember everything about you. I don’t remember how you spent your days.
Or what friends or events you went to, but I remember that fucking hallway at Barrettmoor.
I remember sitting outside your door for hours and staring at the wood.
Leaning my face into the crack at the bottom in hopes of seeing you.
Fucking waiting and hoping. Thinking if I stayed out there long enough, maybe you’d come out and see me.
Pick me over the darkness that I couldn’t see past. I wanted you to come out, scoop me up, and cuddle me. Just once.”
My entire body trembles.
Hollister reaches for my hand. Offering comfort when our fingertips touch.
It’s fleeting and mostly out of reach. The simple act alone causes the lump in my throat to grow suffocatingly bigger.
If anyone should be reaching out, it’s me to my son.
Not his friend to me. Everything about this situation is wrong.
“I’m so sorry. If I could do everything over again . . .”
The rest hangs in the air between us as I wipe the tears from my face and take in a shaky breath. Reaching for him. Keeping it safe by gently resting my palm on his shoulder.
He flinches.
His muscles twitch in response. Caught off guard, yet he doesn’t move away. I don’t breathe, holding everything in. Waiting for him to lash out and push my hand off.
“I don’t know how to fucking forgive that.”
He turns around. My hand returns to my side. His face is wrecked. Bloodshot eyes. Stained tear tracks and a bruised jaw. His busted lip trembles even as he tries to steel himself.
“I don’t know how to fucking forgive you.
I get that you were young. Alone. Depressed.
But I was a kid, and I needed my mom. You could have poured into me.
But you didn’t. You chose yourself over everyone, and instead, I got a checklist of things to accomplish by a drill sergeant nanny and a weekly schedule full of experts.
I felt like a problem everyone had to solve but didn’t want to.
No one wanted me. Not my asshole father.
Not my depressed mother. Not even my fucking disaster of a sister. Hell, even paid people didn’t like me.”
His voice breaks completely, having said everything that he’s been carrying for years. Transferring the rejection, then heartbreak, and devastation to me. Its rightful owner. The cause and end of everything.
“I still feel that way sometimes.”
He collapses in the chair. Exhausted, destroyed, and so tired of everything. The silence afterwards is complete. Sacred as he stares at the rug, and I stare at him. With trembling knees, I clutch the arm of my chair and slowly sink onto the embroidered fabric to sob once again.
“You’re not a problem, Dom,” Hollister rasps thick with emotion. “You have us who love you. Like Diego said, we’re a family. You have four brothers who are always there for you.”
Hollister leans forward, his fist taps against Dominic’s forearm, and a show of solidarity. My son’s eyes slide to his friend, half suspicious, half accepting. Otherwise, he sits completely still, listening intently. He clears his throat and continues.
“And you have your woman now. She must love your ugly ass enough to accept you, faults and all. Especially if she got you working on quitting cussing.”
He huffs at Hollister’s injection of a bit of humor. Something only friends can do when things get too heavy and stale.
“Said the guy fucking my mother.”
And there it is.
The vulgarity of his words.
It cheapens how I feel about Hollister and what we shared. This time it’s said with less anger and venom, but it’s still something we can’t get past. Hollister stiffens and moves away. I quietly exhale. Both of us look at each other, in our shared guilt and possible remorse.
“No? Too early? Did I read the room wrong?” Dom’s gaze bounces from me to his friend and back. “We’re only taking potshots at me? Fucking figures.”
Then he’s back, the bitterness and anger surging forward.
Eclipsing the vulnerable child, he let out, letting me glimpse and speak to him for a few fleeting minutes.
Back into protection mode. Behind the hard shell of a man, protecting that boy who sat with his head pressed into my bedroom door, calling for me.
“I can’t rewrite the past. Not the one with you and me years ago. Nor the one from this weekend with Hollister,” I say quietly, gentle enough to bridge the gap between where we are and where I hope to get us.
Enough of a start repairing our relationship that we can move forward.
“But I want to do better by you. I want to work on things if you are willing. Repair what I have broken and be the mother you need now. However, you need me. But I can’t do that alone.
I don’t know what you want or need from me, but I am here.
Present. Trying to be better for you.” He looks at me. Really looks at me.
A man calcified by bitterness and resentment.
Holding on to a narrative that might no longer work. Challenging him to try something new. Step into the unknown with me and forge a different outcome to our story. Not wrapped in brilliance or a depressive state, but out of friendship and potential understanding.
“Yeah, sure,” he relents when I want more.
He articulated his feelings so well that I now want more of it.
More commitment to work on this with me.
More conviction that he wants this too. The flippant response is rough, hard to digest, but probably deserved after everything I’ve done to him.
It’s a casual answer wrapped in steel to guard his heart from me once again.
I don’t get the privilege of much more than that, but I’ll take it.
“Okay.”
I nod, sniff, and wipe my nose as the heavy emotions move out of the room.
“Just don’t fuck it up this time.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I’m not sure if there is a response to that, but when he stands, Hollister and I do too. The anxiety that had abated slightly rears forward, twisting the handkerchief in my hands.
He doesn’t hug me.
Let’s his gaze sweep over me and then his friend, looking on edge. As if preparing himself to take action should anything shift the wrong way.
“You two do whatever the hell you want,” he suddenly says, as an afterthought.
“Just don’t flaunt it like that fucking bastard does with his prostitutes, and I don’t want to see it.
I don’t like the idea of you two together, but Marlowe said I shouldn’t judge.
It’s hard not to. It’s weird. Fucking grosses me out, but whatever. ”
He stares each of us for a few seconds, shakes his head, and walks out of the room. Sucking the air out along with him. I blink, staring after him and trying to absorb everything that has just occurred.
“That was . . .” Hollister mutters, moving closer to me.
I don’t look at him. Don’t even know what to say to him after all the emotional revelations spewed forth. Leaving us standing in the wreckage after the storm, bewildered as to how to begin picking up the pieces.
“Dominic,” I finish, breathing in his cologne that makes me a bit relieved.
“I meant you.”
His voice drops lower, rougher, almost reverent.
“I don’t even have the words for what that was, Barbara.”
I finally lift my eyes to his, having nothing left in me to hide behind false pretenses. He witnessed everything firsthand. Looks completely wrecked and tender in a way I didn’t expect. No humor left. No smirk to defuse the tension. Just him. Stripped down and serious.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
He steps closer, slow and careful, like I might shatter under the weight of one more word.
“You didn’t flinch. You sat there and took every blow he threw, and you didn’t run. You didn’t deflect. You didn’t make it about you. You just stayed.”
I try to speak, but I can’t. My throat burns from the hurt in my chest. Tears well again.
“You’ve been carrying all that. All of it. Alone.”
His brow creases, jaw ticking as he searches my face. I press my lips together, trying not to fall apart completely. Not to collapse on the chair and bawl like a baby.
“Damn, Babs.”
He shakes his head, eyes glassy. As if he’s about to start crying too.
“Dom has plenty of people who love him. He might not see it that way, but he does. But who do you have?”
Something inside me breaks. A dam thrown open for all the years I had to go it alone, single and in my marriage. Relying on others, I pay to be there for me, therapists, doctors, my staff, hell, even my daughter’s allowance.
If I didn’t pay people to be in my universe, would they still be here? Who, aside from my friends, cares about me? And even they don’t know the tsunami of pain and sorrow between my son and me. His question is so dangerous, leading me down untraveled roads I’ve never wanted to traverse.
“And I don’t mean in bed,” he says gently, treading lightly as if he’s afraid to press me. “I mean, with situations like this? When you’re carrying everything yourself, and it gets too heavy. When you’re scared, worried, or lonely?”
His voice breaks a little.
A plea.
“Who’s holding you, Barbara?”
“No one,” I whisper, through a watery gaze that I can’t blink away. They are swelling and falling so fast. His knuckle slides across my cheek to wipe them away. I lean into it, needing whatever sliver of comfort he’s providing.
“I want to. If you’ll let me.”
He doesn’t reach for my hand or my waist. He just stands there, offering himself. No conditions. No demands. Not even asking me to say yes. Just waiting for me.
My whole body trembles. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t have to go through this alone.
“What about Dominic?”
He reaches for me, wrapping me so tightly into his body, and I sigh. My arms tuck into the space between our bodies. My cheek against his chest, wetting the material.
“We figure it out. Together this time.”