Chapter 17
My mouth went dry as cotton. This was it, the piece of the puzzle I had come all this way to find. Was I ready to know it?
Hesitantly, I reached into the bag and pulled out a stack of sketchbooks. The pages were old and frayed around the edges. I took a deep breath and drew back the cover on the top book. The pencil lines were smudged from having been compressed, but the shape they made was unmistakably that of a sleeping child.
“Who is this?”
“You,” she said.
I turned the page. There I was, around age two, in duck-themed pajama bottoms, then again, curled around a stuffed clown fish. Me wrapped in moon-and-star sheets with one foot off the mattress, my head just south of the pillow. I closed the first sketchbook and moved on to the next, then the next. It was the same thing. Sketch after sketch of me asleep in my old twin bed, from the time I was little to around the age of eleven.
“My dad drew these?”
She nodded.
I watched myself grow up across the pages, saw my limbs lengthen and my hair darken, my face and figure sharpen. My father couldn’t always afford the safest or most spacious living arrangements, so rather than set me up on his couch, he’d crash on the sofa-sleeper in our den. He would”ve had to have been slipping into my room every weekend, quiet as a ghost, for almost a decade to capture this progression.
My mother wrung her hands like she was trying to squeeze the blood from them.
“I knew you were sitting for him during the day,” she said. “I thought that was the extent of it. I got up to use the bathroom one night and noticed your door was closed. You always left it cracked. When I peeked inside, I found Henry sitting by the foot of your bed with a sketchpad. The thought of him alone with you in the dark while you were helpless made me…uncomfortable, to say the least.”
The bottom sketchbook was only halfway full. I recognized the sheets in the first drawing from the year I’d turned twelve—the same year my father had left without so much as a Catch you later.
“I asked Henry how long he’d been going into your room at night. He said not long, a few months. I told him I didn’t want it to happen again and he assured me it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, I stopped over at his place to pick something up and I found these. He’d lied to me.”
I flipped to the very last drawing: me on my stomach with my arm dangling off the edge of the bed and my hair fanned out across the pillow. Obviously, my father had been coming in to draw me a lot longer than just a few months, but that wasn’t enough of a reason to banish him forever. “I don’t see what this has to do with him leaving.”
My mother closed her eyes and pressed three fingers to her lips. She looked fragile, more so than usual, like she’d shatter if I tried to pick her up.
“Henry and I didn’t grow up like normal people. We didn’t have proper role models to teach us what a supportive family was supposed to look like.” She pressed a hand to her stomach, then took another bite of granola bar, chewed, and swallowed. “I was eleven the first time my father raped me. I told my mother and she refused to leave him. A doctor noticed the vaginal scarring. That’s how I ended up in the system.”
My whole body revolted at the thought of my mother being violated by the man who was supposed to protect her. I reached across the table. She let me take her hand. This was the most forthcoming she had ever been with me, and I could tell it had taken a lot for her to even share that much.
“It didn’t happen all at once. It started early, the slow chipping away at my boundaries.” She withdrew her hand from mine and flattened it over the pile of sketchbooks. “When I found these, I realized what I had thought was a healthy fascination was actually the makings of a sick obsession. I became afraid for you. I gave Henry an ultimatum. Either leave immediately and cut off all contact with you, or I would take these sketches to the police.”
Glancing back at the very last drawing, I tried to see it as anything other than a charcoal study of a sleeping figure. But I could find nothing sinister in this portrait, or in any of the others, nothing to differentiate them from the kind of drawings I’d be making in art school. It had to be the sheer volume of them—pages upon pages of sprawled limbs tangled in Hello Kitty sheets—that had struck a nerve.
To the untrained eye, these drawings could have looked criminal.
“Henry told me I was reading too much into things because of what my own father had done to me,” she said. “I told him, even if he hadn’t touched you, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t someday.”
My thoughts swirled like water circling a drain. As far as I could recall, my father had never abused me. If my mother was to be believed, the possibility had always been there, lurking in the dark beside my bed. That’s what she hoped to convince me of by showing me these drawings.
“You say genetic sexual attraction happens when relatives meet after they’ve been separated,” I said. “In theory, wouldn’t that mean the separation is what causes the attraction?”
“Are you suggesting this is my fault? That you and Henry wouldn’t be having sex now if I hadn’t made him leave?”
“We aren’t having sex.” I stacked my expression like bricks; no way was I going to let her talk me into a corner. Not even when I was slowly coming to that exact conclusion: in forcing my father out, my mother had made us mysteries to one another, and mysteries needed solving. Yes, I blamed her, and then I felt awful for blaming her, and then I didn’t know what to feel, so I felt nothing and then everything. I was a mess.
I closed the last sketchbook and stacked it on the pile. “Maddox told me the same thing earlier?—”
“Whatever Maddox said, I don’t want to hear it.” She rubbed her brow, her dark hair shrouding her face like a curtain. “Did he tell you I was barely fifteen the first time he asked me to take my clothes off for his stupid camera? No, I suppose he would’ve left that part out.”
My mother began to pace, scuffing her boots with each sharp turn. She appeared to be deep in thought, like she’d fallen down a rabbit hole inside herself.
The next time she spoke, it was like a levee had burst, and the only way out was through her mouth. “We were broken people, Henry and me. Maddox took advantage of that. He had his own twisted ideas about morality that have no foothold in the real world. Right and wrong were subjective concepts as far as he was concerned.” She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “I couldn’t raise a child around that, so when I got pregnant, I decided it was time to leave. Henry wanted to come with me, and I let him, on the condition that he wouldn’t tell Maddox where we were going or that I was carrying his child.”
My heart plummeted twelve stories.
“Are you saying…Maddox is my real father?”
“God, no. This was before you were born.” She ate the last of the granola bar and crumpled the wrapper into a ball which she kept curled in her fist. “Ultimately, we decided to give the child up for adoption. Henry and I weren’t ready to be parents. We were one paycheck away from homelessness and still very much children ourselves. I wanted to give that boy a fighting chance at a normal life, so I let him go.”
That boy… Maddox’s son.
“My brother.” The word tasted strange in my mouth, yet sweet and fresh all the same. “Do you know where he is?”
She closed her eyes. “He reached out to me a few years ago. I never responded.”
“Does Maddox know he tried to contact you?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea if he’s spoken to Maddox. He would’ve had to have gone through Henry, since it’s his name on the adoption records. Frankly, I’m surprised Henry and Maddox are even on speaking terms. But then, I suppose their mutual hatred of me gave them something to reconcile over. In their minds, I’ve stolen a child from each of them. But parenting is about more than just being there in person. It”s about making impossible decisions, even when it breaks your heart.”
My own heart cracked down the center for this boy—now a young man—snubbed by his birth mother and presumably still in the dark regarding his birth father, not that I had much faith in Maddox as a person, let alone a parent. Regardless of whether my mother had made the right decision for her son back then, this more recent rejection of my surprise sibling hit far too close to home.
“What’s his name?”
“You don’t need to know that,” she said.
“Of course I do, he’s my brother.”
“No, Paige. He’s a part of my past and that’s where he belongs. You act like I’ve done you an enormous disservice. Every decision I have made was for your protection. I banished my oldest and dearest friend to keep you safe. I’m not asking for gratitude, but could you at least respect my sacrifice?”
“You forced my dad out of my life based on a hunch. I’m sorry for what happened to you. Really, I am. But it sounds to me like he made the bigger sacrifice.”
“Oh, yes. Becoming a single parent overnight was a real walk in the park for me. Meanwhile, Henry walked away from you to save his own skin.”
“Because you threatened to use his own art against him.”
She pinched the spot between her closed eyes. “Can’t you see that Henry is just using you to punish me? That painting is a slap in the face. My face.”
I scoffed. How typical that she would try to make his painting of me about them, as if our relationship were merely an offshoot of something they’d started. “You weren’t even supposed to see it.”
“Paige, wake up. Of course I’m supposed to see it. Everyone is going to see it! Shining a light on things that should be kept private is what Henry does.”
I needed to stand, to remind myself that I wasn’t as trapped as I felt and that I still had a choice. To believe her or not. To remain here or not. Though, after what my father said earlier about me living on campus, it was possible he’d already made that decision for me.
“You won’t understand,” my mother said. “Not until you have children of your own. Not until you have to look into the face of the man you love and wonder if he’s really a monster.”
I stared her down.
“My dad is not a monster. He loves me. You’re wrong about him now, just like you were wrong about him back then.”
She leaned forward, as if gazing into her murky brown eyes might help me see things clearly. “For your sake, I hope I’m wrong. Because if I’m not, if he shows that painting to everyone, it will haunt you the rest of your life. You’ll forever be known as the girl whose father presented her cunt to the world. And your own work, all that potential, will sink into obscurity.”
Her bottom lip trembled. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother cry more than a few solitary tears before tonight. Now it was as though the floodgates had opened, allowing a rare glimpse at the multitudes inside this person I’d spent my whole life struggling to know. I saw the defenseless child and the hardened, distrustful teen, burnt by the past and terrified of the future. She stood before me adamant and exposed, as she must have the night she told her own mother what her father had done.
The night her mother had chosen to feed the monster rather than fight him.
She shouldered her purse, took one last plaintive look at me, and then crossed the room to linger in front of the door.
“I had hoped to bring you home with me tonight, but now I see that was never an option. If it’s not too late, if he hasn’t already fucked you, please, save yourself the humiliation. Because once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no going back. And after he’s sucked every drop of inspiration from you, the shame is all you’ll have left.”