Chapter Three #2
The air inside her home was stale, the rooms crowded with an abundance of things. Unopened boxes from bouts of online retail therapy formed a wall near the entryway.
She closed the door, snuffing most of the light.
I blinked to adjust my eyes. Heavy drapes and endless piles blocked every window. “You didn’t sound well the last time we spoke,” I said. “I wanted to check on you.”
“I’m fine.” She crossed her arms, and the sweatshirt that fit her well not so long ago bagged dramatically in response.
When had I last visited? I tried to come every other week, but I’d missed our last visit when Robert ambushed me with guests.
He liked to grill lunch on our new patio for prospective clients and pretend he was a family man.
I played the role of traditional wife. After clearing the table of their meal, I’d presented them with a strawberry torte ringed in ladyfingers and tied at the center with a red ribbon.
A woman in my flower-arranging class had commissioned the torte, but I’d cracked under the pressure to impress and served it to Robert and his guests instead.
I spent the rest of my day making another torte to fulfill my order.
Mom coughed against a tight fist as she headed for the kitchen. The pallor of her skin and gauntness of her cheeks added further confirmation. She was far from fine.
I’d missed whatever she said but knew enough to follow.
We weaved along a narrow path between collections of old and new things, then stopped in the mostly uncluttered kitchen. She poured coffee into two mugs and passed one to me.
“How long have you had that cough?” I asked. Combined with her general appearance, I wondered if she’d somehow gotten pneumonia.
“Why?” she asked. “Afraid I’m contagious? Is that why you stayed away so long this time?”
My mind returned to the mental math I’d abandoned earlier. I hadn’t seen Mom in nearly a month, and it irked her. “I’m sorry,” I said, taking a seat at the table. “Different things kept coming up, and it’s harder to get away than you’d think.”
“That’s because you married an asshole,” she said. “Don’t bother defending him. I know an asshole when I see one. Robert knows I see him clearly. It’s the reason he never liked me.” She lifted the lid on a nearby soup pot and removed a flask, then poured the contents into her coffee.
I bristled. When had she stopped bothering to pretend she didn’t have a drinking problem? The child in me wondered when she decided I wasn’t worth shielding from her ugly truths anymore.
Another round of coughing hit, and she covered her mouth with one hand while bracing the other against the table. Pain marred her pretty face with each sharp exhalation.
“Mom?” I reached for her, but she stepped away.
She lowered onto the chair across from me and breathed heavily for several minutes as I watched.
We didn’t have the sort of relationship where we comforted one another. We didn’t hug or share words of affirmation. So I sat helpless, wondering what I could do other than feel utterly useless as my mother struggled for air.
I moved to the sink and filled a glass with water, then returned to her side. “Drink this. I don’t think whatever you put in your coffee is going to make you feel any better.”
“You’re wrong about that,” she croaked.
I set the glass before her, and she ignored it, raising the mug to her lips instead.
I returned to my seat, frustrated and angry. “How long have you been sick?”
“I’m not sick. I’m old.” She rose unsteadily and shuffled to the cluttered countertop, searching through the piles of things.
“You’re not old,” I argued.
“Then I’m just tired,” she said.
Me too, I thought. For a moment I imagined saying it aloud. Maybe even discussing the things on my mind with her. She could give me some motherly advice for a change, and we could find some common ground. A little camaraderie.
I hated how much I longed for that sort of relationship and how little she wanted it.
Mom returned to the table looking paler than before. She placed a cigar box on the table and didn’t take her eyes off the little container as she sat.
“What is that?” I asked.
What felt like unspoken fear filtered across the space between us and seized me.
I nearly leaped from my chair when she finally flipped open the lid.
A thousand miscellaneous buttons lay inside.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, unsure what to make of a box full of buttons.
She pushed her fingers into the contents, causing the little disks to slide and spill over one another. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “I should’ve done it long ago, but as you are keenly aware, I’m a coward.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about? I’ve never thought you were a coward.” Mean? Yes. Odd? Of course. Pointedly determined to remain alone and miserable? Clearly. But I’d never considered her anything less than hardheaded and steadfast.
Her searching hand stilled inside the box. “Your dad is in France,” she said. “Or he was. I don’t know where he is now.”
I folded my hands and silently questioned her mental health. Even drunk, she never forgot Dad was gone.
“Mom, Dad died when Camilla was three,” I said, gently.
“Maybe you should lie down. You’ve lost a lot of weight.
I don’t like the sound of your cough, and I think we should make an appointment with your doctor.
Just to see that everything’s okay.” I mentally ran through my schedule for the rest of the week.
I could coordinate the appointment, pick her up, and take her.
“Not necessary,” she said. The words floated from her mouth like a sigh. “I don’t want you to worry about me. I just want you to know he’s out there.”
“Dad is dead,” I said flatly, shamelessly thankful for that truth. The echoes of his angry words, and her screams, permeated the ceilings and floors, the walls, and my heart.
I blamed Robert for my infrequent visits, but in truth, I hated coming. It was too hard to be here.
“He wasn’t your father,” she said.
Her words pulled me back to the moment, and I felt puzzled. “What do you mean?”
She freed an old photo from the button box, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. Her gaze lost its focus, and she turned her attention to a nearby wall. “We were in college the first time he hit me,” she said. “Carl, not Bastien.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms. “Who’s Bastien?”
“Bastien Allard. Sébastien, I suppose.”
What were the early signs of dementia?
How could I get her the help she needed? What would that cost? How pissed would Robert be?
Could I get ahead of something this big and mitigate the fallout?
“We broke up,” she continued. “Carl and me. He loved to yell, and he’d pushed me once or twice, but I told him if he ever hit me, that was where I’d draw the line.
” She set the photo before me. Her expression tightened with anger, and she wiped a tear from her eye.
“I went to France for summer semester and time to heal. I racked up a ton of debt running wild for three months. Then I came home with you.”
“I was born at a hospital ten minutes from here,” I corrected. “I have an official copy of my birth certificate. Come on, Mama, let’s go upstairs and rest.”
She shook her head. “I was pregnant but didn’t know for nearly a month after my return, and Carl had wooed me back to him by then.”
My muscles tightened as what she said sunk in. She wasn’t delirious or delusional. She was telling me that she’d been with someone else during a breakup with Dad. “Holy shit.”
“I didn’t have a way to contact Bastien back then, so he never knew about you.
It was the nineteen seventies. Everything was casual,” she said.
“No cell phones. Long-distance calling cost a small fortune. No one around here could afford that. Letters took a month to reach a destination that far away. I didn’t know his home address anyway. ”
My gaze dropped to the photograph with its curled corners and faded image. “I don’t understand,” I said. But that wasn’t true. What she’d said was crystal clear, once I’d started listening. The tyrant who’d raised me wasn’t my father.
“Why did you marry Dad, then?” I asked. A burst of unbidden anger broke through my lips, and my grip tightened on the photo. “Why would you marry a man who hit you—and kept hitting you for my entire life? Why would you do that?”
“He didn’t hit me again until you were almost a year old,” she said.
“We made up when I got back from France, so I didn’t see a point in mentioning Sébastien.
Then I missed my period.” She looked sheepish for a moment before lifting her chin.
“I told him I was pregnant, and he proposed. He never questioned the timing of your birth. We just fell into step and carried on as if we’d never been apart. ”
My heart beat painfully as I absorbed this news. I wanted to scream or overturn the table. I wanted to cry. To demand a different childhood. But nothing seemed appropriate. Was any response to news like this appropriate?
“Mama, why?” I began again, more slowly this time, still unable to fathom her horrendous choice. “Why did you willingly live like that? Raise a child like that?”
Raise me like that?
“Those were different times,” she said. Her dismissive tone indicated the conversation was over. She’d dropped the bomb in my lap. And that was that. “You can keep the photo if you’d like.” Her frail body trembled as she finished the spiked coffee, then rose on unsteady legs for a refill.
My eyes traveled back to the faded image.
Mom was young and thin, wearing a bright smile and striped sweater with a denim miniskirt. Her long ponytails hung over her shoulders to her waist.
The man beside her was tall and narrow with a round baby face and mischievous eyes. His hair lifted on top, as if caught in a breeze, and he held on to my mother as if he’d won the greatest of prizes.
“Oh,” Mom muttered, drawing my attention to her as she took a wobbly step backward from the countertop.
I was on my feet before I’d thought about it, arms reaching to catch her as she collapsed.