Letter Twenty-One #7
“Not hurting myself.”
“Not eating is a form of hurting yourself, Elliot.”
“If I don’t eat, will you send me to that place in Arizona?”
A pause. “No. But I made you an appointment for an emergency therapy session later today, and I’d like you to attend.”
“Nope. Not going.”
“You need to talk about what’s going on. Either you talk to your therapist or you talk to me. Those are your choices.”
“What if I choose neither?”
“Then you’re going to therapy.”
“Good luck dragging me down three flights of stairs,” I told him, “because that’s the only way you’ll get me there.”
The bed shifted underneath Nic’s weight. “Whatever this is, you can talk to me about it, you know? I’m here. Please tell me what’s wrong.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. Michael thought my obsession with the mystery woman stemmed from wanting to forget my assault. Was he right? Was my subconscious trying to protect me by making me focus on the mystery woman instead?
I turned over in bed, propping myself against the headboard. “Why won’t you tell me my mom’s full name?”
Nic’s eyes drifted closed. “Elliot, don’t.”
“You said I could talk to you about it. This is me trying to talk to you about it.”
He shook his head. “Her full name isn’t important.”
“Would you let me meet her? If she came back and asked to see me, would you let her?”
“No,” he said quickly—emphatically. “Never.”
I leaned forward. “So you have been keeping me from her.”
“Elliot, you have to trust me when I say this. Meeting your mother would only hurt you.”
“In two years, when I have access to my trust fund, and I have the money to track her down myself, how are you going to stop me?”
Nic’s jaw clenched. He didn’t like that question. “Tell me,” he said roughly, “what good would meeting her do? What do you think you’d get out of it?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, frustration bubbling up in my chest. How did he not get it?
Why didn’t he understand? This fundamental need to know the woman who’d formed me inside her body?
The desire to see, with my own eyes, the person whose DNA made up half of who I was?
Whose face looked so freakishly similar to mine?
“I would finally have a better idea of who I am—of where I come from.”
“You come from me,” Nic said, like his contribution was the only half that mattered. “You’re my daughter.”
“That’s only part of who I am. That doesn’t tell me everything.”
“What do you think you’d learn from her that I haven’t told you already?”
The truth. “Why I’m the way that I am, Dad! Why I’m so fucked up! Was I born this way? Or did her leaving make me this way? I’ve already learned—after years of googling it, not to mention all the therapy—that I’m at least partly screwed up because she left.”
“You aren’t screwed up.”
My voice cracked as I said, “Of course I am. So I’d also want to ask her a few questions. Why did she leave me? Why has she never reached out? Why doesn’t she care? Was I not lovable? Not good enough for her to stay?”
Nic took my face in his hands. “Baby, I’ve already told you why she didn’t stay: she’s selfish.
It was never about whether or not you were good enough.
She wasn’t good enough. She was never fit to be a mom.
” He brushed a strand of hair out of my face and tucked it behind my ear.
“You have so many people in your life who love and care about you. You have me, and absolutely nothing is more important to me than you. I could lose everything—this house, the firm, all the money I have—and I wouldn’t give a damn about any of it as long as I have you. ”
They weren’t the answers I desperately wanted.
They never were. Just the same ones, recycled over and over—his usual way of shutting the subject down.
She doesn’t matter. She isn’t important.
You have me. And while I definitely wanted to press the issue, it would only make me angrier when the answers didn’t change.
And when I got angry, I wanted to hurt myself.
And I’d promised him I wouldn’t do that anymore.
And I really wanted to keep my promise. Forget being shipped off to the desert.
Besides, in two years, when I had access to my trust fund, he wouldn’t be able to stop me from hiring someone to find her. This knowledge, more than anything else, gave me the comfort I needed to drop the subject altogether.
For the time being, at least.
After I finished wiping away my tears, he handed me the sandwich he’d prepared for my lunch, and we chatted about random stuff while I ate. Twenty minutes later, Nic carried my empty plate downstairs while I hopped in the shower, having agreed to go to my emergency therapy session after all.
Fresh out of the shower and still in my bathrobe, I walked over to my window, curious to see if the mystery woman happened to be watching the house that day.
And what I saw, Casey, caused my heart to leap to my throat.
I saw the woman—with her big sunglasses and ball cap—standing on the corner of the sidewalk, alright. But I saw my dad down there, too, talking to her.
Talking isn’t the right word, though. Not for what they were doing.
They were arguing—hands gesturing wildly, heads shaking, fingers pointing back at the house.
This woman walked up to my dad, stood on her toes, and got in his face.
He looked down at her, said something in response to what she said, and she laughed.
My dad backed up, turned away for a moment, his head tossed back, hand clamped tight over his mouth, like maybe he was trying not to lose his shit in public.
Then my dad turned back to the woman, and he got in her face.
Whatever he said caused that woman to stop laughing immediately.
She mumbled something in response, lips barely moving.
He stepped even closer, presumably to intimidate her, which must’ve worked, because she backed up, hands balled into fists by her side.
As Nic walked away and headed back to the house, she stared after him.
It didn’t look like an interaction between two people who were strangers.
It looked like an interaction between two people who knew each other very well.
It led me to believe that, in all likelihood, my dad had lied to me about that woman, and I couldn’t understand why unless she actually was my mother.
Had everything he told me about her the night before been a lie?
Did she care? Was she trying to make contact with me, and he wouldn’t let her?
If so, why didn’t she just…approach me when he wasn’t around? Why follow me? Why watch me from afar and keep her distance?
None of it made sense.
That day, I decided it was time for me to approach that woman. Next time I caught her loitering near our house, I’d sneak out, confront her, and hopefully get some answers.
Screw waiting on my dad to give me those answers himself.