Chapter 19 #3
I look at the table, set for three, then to Anna and my mum. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’
My mum crosses the kitchen, looking immaculate in her blouse and tapered trousers. How could he have cheated on her? How could I have grown to hate her for something that wasn’t her fault? She lifts my head to face her, and my chin quivers.
She didn’t just leave me. All these years…
‘You’re never intruding. This is your home whenever you want to be here. Anna, get a placemat, please, darling.’
I feel as if I’m having an out of body experience. Have I had this wrong all these years? Am I the reason for the divide between us?
But Mum rarely reaches out to me either, not even on my birthday. Though if I’d been on the receiving end of my frostbite, unduly so, for all these years, maybe I’d behave the way she does.
I don’t know what’s certain or true, what’s right or wrong any more. But I think maybe this is all I have. The only place I can be right now.
I smile meekly in thanks at Anna and take a seat next to Richard at the table, glancing around the farmhouse-style kitchen and wondering if I should have been here all my life.
‘You look like you could use wine,’ Richard says.
I laugh, a short-lived break. ‘You have no idea.’
We eat spaghetti bolognaise with salad and garlic bread, and I listen to the easy conversation around the table, joining in occasionally.
I catch my mum staring at me more than once, but no one mentions my swollen eyes, my bed hair, my lazy clothes or my red nose.
They just eat, like a family. A family I never had. A family my dad took from me.
Richard tops up my glass, and as much as I want it, I tell him, ‘I’m driving.’
‘You’ll stay the night,’ my mum says, not meeting my eye, giving me no opportunity to argue.
Richard finishes topping up the glass, and I lift it to my lips, acquiescing to my mum’s instruction because wine is exactly what I feel like having.
After dinner, Anna excuses herself to video call her new boyfriend, kissing our mother on the cheek and Richard on the scalp.
‘’Night, Dayna.’
‘Sleep well, Anna.’
Richard makes a sharp exit next, saying he has business to check up on, despite the fact it’s Friday night.
‘Let’s go to the lounge,’ my mum says, already out of her chair and leading the way.
The log fire is roaring in the sitting room.
Chantelle must have kept the logs topped up while we were having dinner.
She appears from nowhere with another bottle of the same red wine and sets it on a coffee table.
My mum sits in the corner of the sofa closest to the fire.
She pats the cushion next to her, and I sit beside her with my glass of wine.
It’s alien and uncomfortable. This isn’t us.
Yet as I breathe her in – cooking, wine, her perfume – I have an urge to rest my head on her shoulder.
I don’t, though, because two decades of absence rest in the gap between us.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s got you upset and visiting me out of the blue?’
I take another sip of wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Then I look at my mum’s face, a reflection of my own. Her brown eyes, her dark hair, her soft skin.
I feel guilty but I also have questions, which she can clearly vibe because her brow creases expectantly, and I ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell me he had an affair?’
She inhales sharply, pupils dilating. ‘How do you know?’
‘It doesn’t matter. All that matters is I do know, and I’d like to know why you didn’t tell me. I always thought you just left. I thought you didn’t want me. Then you had another family, and after that one, Richard and Anna and this perfect life, and I just didn’t fit.’
‘Only through your choice, Dayna. You’ve always been welcome here.’
I shake my head and wipe my sore nose again.
‘You let me think you left us both, but he pushed you away, and you didn’t tell me.
I thought you had an affair.’ And with my words, I realise that I can wear all of this on my own shoulders, but no, I was just a girl, caught between two adults and stuck in a web of lies.
We are all to blame.
She sighs and pulls one knee up to the sofa, twisting to face me.
‘He loved you, and you adored him. Your father and I ended, and you cried for him. You wanted to stay with him, and whenever you visited me, you were unhappy. I couldn’t shatter your illusion of him.
That would have been crueller than what he did. You were a child.’
‘But why not now? Why not when I got older?’
‘Oh, honey, there’ve been times I’ve come close to telling you. Every time you’ve grunted at me down the phone or pushed me away for trying.’
‘When I’ve been an arsehole.’
She laughs, a soft ‘pfft’ of humour. ‘Sometimes, yes, but I’ve always known that I could have told you the truth and at some point, it became easier not to.
But you worked with your father. He couldn’t do wrong in your eyes.
Why would I break that? What you had with your father, that bond, it was special. ’
‘It was built on lies.’ And part of me thinks it was an easy way out for my mum, too. Yet, sitting here, I want her. I need her.
‘No. Not everything. He loved you, and he made a mistake.’
‘How can you say it like that, as if it’s nothing?’
‘I couldn’t for a long time. I was bitter.
But I’m happy with Richard, and we have Anna.
We’re a family, and you’re part of this family, if you choose to be.
’ She puts down her glass then takes me by surprise when she holds my face in her warm palms. It’s unfamiliar but welcome.
I lean into her hands. ‘Look at you. We made you, so something good came of us. I love you, darling, whether you want it or not, and I think I’ve always hoped that this day would come. ’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘I’m sorry for what he did. And I’m sorry for who I’ve been to you.’
‘It was my decision not to tell you. For that, I’m sorry, too.’
I nod. Not letting her off the hook but, I think, ready to make peace with where we are. Ready for my life to be simpler.
‘I just can’t put everything together,’ I admit. ‘I’ve had him on this pedestal. Then I find out he did that to you, and he could have told me. He knew how I felt about you leaving.’ I look up sheepishly – I’ve loathed her for abandoning me. ‘He could have stopped it with the truth.’
‘He was afraid of losing you.’
I close my eyes and my mother pulls me into her chest, holding me to her. I wouldn’t say this is the start of a new relationship for us but maybe somewhere to start from in building bridges.
‘It feels good to hold you, Dayna. Thank you.’
I think, surprisingly, it feels nice to be held by her, too.
My mind drifts to Clark and I sit back. ‘Can I ask you something? Do you wish you’d never met him? I don’t mean whether you should have had me or not, I just mean the two of you. Do you wish you’d never met Dad so he’d never hurt you?’
‘No. He made me happy once, and if I’d never married him, I’d always have wondered about what could have been. We were good together once, believe that.’
* * *
It takes me a couple of turns of my head and a few blinks to realise I’m lying in my bedroom at my mum’s house.
I don’t know what time we came up to bed, but I remember being so exhausted I just crawled under the duvet.
Now, as the sun streaks through the open blinds and across my face, I regret it.
With a groan, I lean down to the floor where I dumped my phone and see it’s after nine already. The screen is full. Missed calls from Teddy. Missed calls from Rachel.
It really wasn’t a bad dream.
I type in my passcode and open my messages. I skim Teddy’s and Rachel’s names and land on Clark’s.
Clark
Just let me know you’re okay. Please.
I hold my phone to my ear and dial my voicemail.
‘Dayna, answer your goddamn phone. Clark told me. I need to see you.’
Fuck off, Teddy. Fuck off, world.
I drop my phone to the floor and lie back on the bed, staring at the ceiling until there’s a soft knock on the door, and my mother comes in with coffee.
‘Good morning,’ she says. I refrain from asking, Is it? ‘How are you feeling today?’
I push myself up to sit and pull the covers over the T-shirt she loaned me to sleep in. ‘I’d like to switch that coffee for something harder.’
‘You’ll have to settle for Guatemala’s finest beans, I’m afraid.’
She sits on the bed, looking pretty in a cerulean sweater that draws out the deep colour of her irises. I take the coffee from her.
‘Dayna, I know this is hard for you. I know it might change how you feel about your father, but you being upset and angry is what we tried to avoid.’
‘I know. I wish I’d known, though. Mostly, I wish I hadn’t blamed you, but it’s not just that, Mum.’
‘I figured as much, but I also figured if you wanted to tell me the rest of the story, you would have.’
I give her a half-smile. ‘I feel like I had this image of life, my life. Like I’d make you and Dad proud. I’d come home, and you’d swing me around because I’d made you both happy. And you’d be happy. I’d go to university, have a job I love. Find a husband, maybe have a child one day.’
‘Are you really so far off course?’
‘Oh gosh, I can’t even see the path, Mum.
I don’t know if I want to head up the company any more.
I don’t know if I even want to be in the industry.
And a husband?’ I laugh but feel my face contort as a pain I’m becoming increasingly familiar with strikes my chest. ‘The only man I ever thought I would want to spend the rest of my life with walked away.’
She rests a hand on my knee. ‘You’re loved. You’re intelligent and beautiful. You have everything going for you, darling. You just can’t see the sky for the clouds right now.’
‘How did you do it? How did you pick yourself up when everything you thought you had was taken?’