Chapter 19 #2
“How come you’ve never talked to us about Bellamy? You must have seen how it affected us—Josh especially.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t raised to talk about that kind of stuff. It just wasn’t done. And I don’t think I have the...” He waved his hand in front of his chest, searching for the right word. “The emotional skills to do it justice. I was scared I’d make it worse.”
Well, I guess I know where I inherited my emotional capacity from. “I can relate to that feeling,” I said, following his gaze onto the manicured backyard. Was Charlie shaping the trees now too? I’d never seen them look so good.
“Do you want to?” Dad exhaled. “Tell me about what happened to you there? Because you can.”
My heart galloped, and water filled my eyes unexpectedly.
I blinked it away as something long coiled in my stomach unfurled.
He'd lifted the dam by opening the line of communication about what I’d been through, and it felt like he was acknowledging it for the first time.
I didn't know if I’d share anything with him, but knowing I now had the option to created an ease within me I hadn't expected.
“Is this the only time you’re going to allow me to speak about it?”
Dad linked his fingers together and stared at the ground.
“No. You can talk to me anytime. If it feels important to you.”
He nodded as if he were telling himself, not me.
“Thank you,” I might do that. But I’d rather save it for another day.”
That was for my benefit, not his—but he still looked relieved.
“Can you think of anyone who might have left me the house?” I asked, changing tack. It didn’t matter as much anymore—not for me—but it might still hold something for Olivia.
Dad shuffled in his chair. His heart suddenly thundered loudly enough for me to hear.
That caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected him to have more of a reaction to that question than he had to my comment about Josh.
He looked... panicked. The sweat gathering along his hairline, the shift in his posture, the silence thickening between us—something wasn’t right.
“Dad?” I asked, my hands shaking involuntarily.
He covered his face with his hands and hunched over in the chair.
Oh god. Was he crying?
“Dad?” I said more urgently. Now he was freaking me out.
He reluctantly pulled his hands away. His face was flushed, his posture still folded in on itself like he’d been gut-punched.
“Do you remember anything from before that time?” His voice was hoarse.
I shook my head. He knew I didn’t. I was the youngest. I had no memories from before Bellamy. June had a few—fleeting images of Mum. Her singing a song, washing her ears in the bath, holding hands in the park.
Sometimes I used to shout at her and tell her she was making her memories up, otherwise I’d remember too.
But part of me knew she wasn’t. She cherished those memories, and I was jealous of them.
There was a hole inside me that longed to be filled, even by a glimpse of my mother.
It didn’t even have to be a full memory.
Her face would be enough. And to know she loved me.
That she’d looked at me with the same smile that June remembered so clearly.
Of course I’d seen photos of her, even though Dad didn’t like to keep them around the house.
There were the scrapbooks that sat on the dusty bottom shelf of the sewing room that retired when her body did from cancer treatment.
There was a scrapbook of her and Dad's dating years and one each for Josh and June’s early years.
I guess she'd expected she had more time to get to the one for me. She’d only started them a year before her death.
Dad cleared his throat again and stood, rubbing his chest as he began pacing the patio. The distress on his face had deepened.
“Dad, stop!” I stood up too. “You’re freaking me out.”
He leaned on his knees, panting. I didn’t know what a heart attack looked like, but he didn’t look far off. I reached out to steady him, but he shook me off.
How long would an ambulance take to get here if I called one? How would I explain this? Death by question?
“No. No...” he wheezed. “Let me finish.”
Ahh okay, I wasn’t aware this meltdown was the beginning of his story. It was easy to see why I had so much trouble getting emotions out.
The fear bloomed fast and wide inside me like one of those monsters with three heads that, when you chop one off, three more appear.
“I decided to bury this with me. I didn’t…” he panted again, like he was trying to catch his breath but couldn’t. Panic attack? I’d never had one myself unless you counted my meltdown in front of Dax at the children’s home.
“Take some breaths, Dad,” I said, scooping my hand under his elbow and trying to steer him back to his chair.
If I could get him sitting down, I’d be one step closer to not having to roll him into the recovery position.
I could think of many more people I would rather practise my mouth-to-mouth skills on before I picked my father.
Any of the guitarists from Metallica or Kinicki from the original Grease being a few. But Dad refused to budge.
“If you won’t sit down, dad at least make it look like you’re not dying.” I threw my hands in the air.
He looked up at me from his bent-over position for the first time, his mouth tilting.
“Okay,” he wheezed, as his spine slowly straightened and I could see his face again.
“I meant to take this to my grave,” he puffed.
“A bit of a dramatic choice of phrase, don't you think?” I said before I could stop myself.
He shot me a glare, and I shut up.
“Not because I wanted to keep anything from you. But because I never wanted you to feel any different from the others.”
He still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
My eyebrows bunched.
“I’m not following,” I said, shifting my hands to my hips.
He sighed again, like it physically pained him that I couldn’t decipher his morse code of disjointed words and bizarre body language.
“Sorry, Dad, but you’re actually going to have to talk for this one.” I tried to keep it gentle, but my patience was slipping fast with every new alarming behaviour. I’d never seen my father look so small. It was unnerving.
“I didn’t want you to feel you were different from Josh and June,” he said, tugging at the loose skin around his neck.
“Still not following…”
Dad’s eyes pierced mine, pleading.
Part of me regretted coming now. A whisper of gut instinct—a voice I was learning to recognise—told me there would be a life before this conversation and a life after.
And not in a happily ever after kind of way.
But I couldn’t stop now. Not if it led to anything that could help Olivia.
What did I have to lose? What’s another skeleton in my path?
“When I went to Bellamy Children’s Home after Mum died, I dropped off Josh and June,” he said.
“And me,” I corrected.
He shook his head.
“Dad, I know I was there. I remember that part,” I replied, eyes narrowing.
He shook his head again. “No. I dropped off Josh and June. You were already there.”
“What?” My mouth dropped open. “So, you’d fobbed me off there earlier?”
That little voice—the one that always said I wasn’t as good as June—started clawing at the box I’d locked it in.
“No,” he said quickly, shaking his head, and his pleading eyes misted over.
“Then what? Dad, it doesn’t make any sense.”
He held his hand lightly over his mouth as if it could catch the words he was about to speak.
“You were already there. Someone else had dropped you off.”
His words slammed into me like a tornado of bricks. I felt momentarily off-kilter, like a giant was swinging around the earth and I was staggering to get my bearings.
“But why would another person drop me off first?” I asked, desperately trying to cling to the reality I had known before. There had to be a simple explanation.
“Because your mum died. Of ovarian cancer, similar to Josh and June’s. But you—” he hesitated, “—you didn’t have a father listed on your birth certificate. Or any other family that could be located at that time.”
Ice spread through my chest.
I shook my head and staggered back to my chair.
Was he saying I had another family?
“But you’re my father. It says so on my birth certificate,” I said, barely recognising the hollow sound of my voice.
“I’ll always be your father,” he replied, his voice thick with emotion. “But that’s not your original birth certificate. I’ve got it somewhere…”
His voice trailed off as he tried to read my face. He stepped forward and reached out, trying to cradle my shaking hand in his. I snatched it away, and my nose wrinkled with disgust.
“Then who are you? Who was Josh? Who is June?”
The man who I’d believed was my father until five seconds ago sagged under the weight of decades of pain.
“We’re the people who adopted you,” he said. “We’re your family. I couldn’t leave you there, not once I knew. You and June had become so… attached.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “No. No, June would’ve told me.”
She would have. If not as an adult, she’d have used it to torment me as a child. He had to be lying.
“Everyone was so young. You and June—five and six. You’d both been through so much.
It was a murky year, and everything seemed to blend.
It felt like you’d always been part of our family.
Your memories before being in the home were inaccessible to you, and so I didn’t pry.
As June’s memories of her mum faded and you and her were so close, you used to play an imaginary game where you had the same mother who’d died.
Eventually, I guess you thought you did, and I didn’t correct it.
I realised somewhere along the line that wires were crossed, but it seemed like a better outcome. You didn’t have to feel any different.”
“Except that I always did feel different!” I shouted as disbelief filled me. “What about Josh?”
Dad’s eyes dropped to the ground. “I made him promise not to tell either of you. That was… a mistake.”
My eyes burned, and I stood, my entire world teetering as I sucked air through my teeth.
“You killed him!” I yelled.
Dad looked up, startled. His eyes darted sideways, no doubt calculating which neighbours might overhear.
I didn’t care. Not one bit.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and grabbed my bag to leave.
“Please, Riley. Sit down. Let me explain.”
I stared him down, erasing every trace of softness that had ever existed between us.
“You don’t need to explain. I’m not your daughter. June isn’t my sister. Josh wasn’t my brother. At least I won’t have to carry any grief about his death anymore, he was nothing to me.”
The words came out like missiles. They weren't true. Josh’s death still sat like a sorrowful longing on a little shelf in my chest. But why should it?
He was nothing but a forced brother. Keeping my secret for Dad probably ate him up inside, the way that I could tell that it was eating Dad up now to bring it out in the open.
That’s the problem with snaring things in boxes in your mind; the contents are ugly when they escape.
Josh likely resented me every bit as much as I resented Dad right now.
“Goodbye, Colin,” I said and stayed a moment to watch his name hit him like a slap in the face before I turned on my heel and stormed out.
I would never look at his lying ass face again.