by Kelley York
There’s an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway with Nevada plates, and Brett casts me a curious look, which I can only return with a shrug as I thank him and get out. I watch him roll away down the street and have to fight the urge to chase after him so I’m not trapped here with whatever is waiting for me.
Inside even smells strange. Like floor cleaner and vinegar or something. For that matter, as I step into the living room I notice everything is surprisingly clean. I mean, Mom and I are clean people, but I wouldn’t say we’re spotless. This level of clean doesn’t reflect either of us.
I head for the kitchen where I hear the water going and dishes clinking as they’re being washed. At the sink, Aunt Sue stands with her hair tied back and yellow dish gloves on, hunched over a cake pan and scrubbing it with steel wool. I linger awkwardly in the door. What is she doing here? She hardly ever visits.
Eventually she turns off the water and swipes her arm across her forehead before turning around. Her gaze brightens immediately when she sees me, and she plucks off her wet gloves and discards them on the island countertop. It dawns on me now more than ever how much she looks like Mom. The same slightly frizzy hair texture, the same almond-shaped eyes. Aunt Sue is a little plumper, a little shorter, and she’s never looked as hollow as my mother has.
“Oh, Victor! Look how tall you’ve gotten, you handsome boy.” She crosses the distance between us, cupping my face in her soap-scented damp hands and drawing me down a few inches so that she can plant a kiss on my cheek.
“Hi, Aunt Sue,” I say politely, aware that I wasn’t exactly the nicest to her on the phone when we spoke. “Uh… W-what are you doing here?”
“Can’t I come visit my sister and nephew?” She releases me, still smiling, and ushers me over to take a seat at the dining table. I stare at her because I don’t know how to answer that, and she pulls up a chair beside mine, which says a lot about Aunt Sue because most people would sit across from you to have a conversation, but she likes to be as close as possible, like she has to make sure she hears every word you say. She’s the exact opposite of Mom, who always subconsciously puts anything she can between herself and other people. I wonder if I do that without realizing it.
“It’s just…um, unexp-pected.”
“It was a bit last-minute.” She wipes her hands on the bottom of her summery dress. “But I’ve been trying to talk to your mother and even if she wouldn’t admit it, I thought she could use someone here. For support. For both of you.”
My gaze latches onto my hands folded on the table. “I d-don’t know why. There’s n-nothing to be supportive of now. I was cleared.” More or less. For now.
“I know. She called me when she found out.” Aunt Sue sighs a little and places one of her hands atop both of mine. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t more going on here, dear heart. You finding out about your dad…I’m so sorry. Maybe I should have told you myself instead of you finding out the way you did.”
I study her hand instead. Each neatly filed nail painted a pale pink. Mom paints her nails, too, but then she bites at them when she’s anxious. “I d-don’t know what you mean.”
“She told me you two got into an argument and it just came out. Not the way I’d hoped she would approach it.”
“I s-sort of pushed it until she blurted it out,” I admit guiltily.
“But that’s the thing, you shouldn’t have had to push.” She gives my hands a squeeze. “You’re old enough, and in light of what you’ve been going through it would’ve been helpful information for you to have to understand why this was difficult for her, too.”
She puts into words exactly what I wish I could have articulated to Mom. It wasn’t that I cared about tracking down my dad or whatever, just that I wanted to understand why she hated me. Why she didn’t believe I was innocent.
I don’t have a chance to find words for these thoughts. The front door opens and shuts, and a moment later Mom is entering the kitchen with a paper bag in her arms. She treats the sight of Aunt Sue and me casually, as though this is what she comes home to every day.
“I bought stuff to make omelets for dinner,” she announces, placing the groceries on the counter.
Omelets are my favorite. I can’t remember the last time Mom made them for me. As Aunt Sue gets up to help Mom put things away, I stay at the table, fingers wrung together and staring at them anxiously. They didn’t just call me home to have dinner with them. Unless this is Aunt Sue’s attempt at making Mom and me play nice with each other and get over this wall of tension that has built between us.
Yet while they cook and I set the table, Aunt Sue chats to us—at us, really—about her cats and work and other casual things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of what’s going on, but Mom asks the occasional question and makes commentary. I’m too nervous to manage any kind of conversation.
We eat in silence, Mom and me across from each other and Aunt Sue to my left. As I take the first few bites, the flavors of peppers and egg and bacon lure me back to a memory of a birthday years ago.
My tenth, maybe. Or eleventh. I can’t recall. But I do remember Mrs. Mason picking Brett and me up from school and dropping us off at my house. I remember coming inside to find a birthday cake on the dining table and Mom at the stove, flipping omelets and melting cheese over the top. There were a few presents—from Mom, from Aunt Sue, from Brett and his family—stacked beside my cake and I stood there in the doorway, smiling because it felt a little surreal to me. Like…these people cared about me enough to celebrate the day I was born. That my mother loved me enough that she took time off work to come home and bake something just for me, with my name written across it in blue icing.
“Delicious, Victoria,” Sue says appraisingly.
For the sake of trying to get along, of perhaps reaching out to Mom, I smile across the table at her. “It’s really good, Mom. Thanks.”
Mom doesn’t give either of us a response beyond an acknowledging noise, so I don’t attempt to converse anymore. I’ll keep quiet and we’ll eat, and afterward I’ll get up to clear the dishes from the table. On the rare occasion Mom and I have dinner together, that’s sort of the deal. Whoever doesn’t cook, does dishes. It had a lot more weight when I was younger and we ate together almost every night.
“Now that we have full stomachs,” Aunt Sue begins, rising to her feet and patting her belly, “why don’t we go talk in the living room?”
I glance at Mom, who stands and walks wordlessly out of the dining room. Talk about what? What is going on? My mouth is dry. Aunt Sue beckons for me to follow with a smile. She and Mom sit on the couch and I pull up the old recliner to avoid sitting right between them. No one makes a move to turn on the television, which means…we really are here to talk about something.
Aunt Sue looks from me to Mom and back again like she’s expecting one of us to say something. When we don’t, she takes a deep breath and kicks things off for us. “All right. Well, Victor, we’re here to talk about your father.”
I glance at Mom, who has her hands in her lap and is staring at them intently. “I th-thought we already had.”
“Not in the best of ways. And I—we—thought you deserved a little more information.”
Somehow I don’t think this was really Mom’s idea at all. She still hasn’t said anything. Though with Sue and me staring at her, she meets my gaze briefly and then nods to a shoe box I hadn’t noticed sitting on the coffee table. I lean forward to pick it up and draw it into my lap. Slowly, like I’m worried she’ll change her mind and lash out at me.
Inside the box is a collection of things: police reports, greeting cards, newspaper clippings, photographs. I scan over them so quickly that for half a second, I think I’m looking at photos of myself, except—
I pick up one of the pictures. It’s faded and a little worn around the corners, but not in bad shape. I’m staring at my mother seventeen years younger, smiling brightly at the camera with a man standing beside her. A man who looks exactly like me
. I’m staring into my own thin mouth and eyes and jawline, sharp features, thick lashes…the same thin, lanky build and curly dark hair. Nondescript but not bad-looking. The only thing different is the color of his eyes. His are dark but mine are bright blue, like Mom’s.
All at once, I want to throw the box aside and run away. How am I supposed to feel? In awe of finally getting a glimpse at my father? Horror that my mother has effectively spent years having to look at my face every day and seeing the person who raped her and left her with a child?
I feel like I’m going to throw up.
Mom says quietly, “We met at a bar after a friend’s wedding rehearsal dinner. All the other girls were prettier, and yet your father only seemed interested in me. He was a truck driver, so he was gone a lot, but he would call me from the road every single day just to let me know he was thinking about me.”
I have to put the picture back. It feels too heavy in my hand. I look at Mom to let her know I’m listening, but I don’t say anything.
“We dated for about four months, but we didn’t see each other much because of his work. He could be…incredibly thoughtful and sweet, but he was also a very overbearing man.” Mom plucks fuzz from her shirt, lost in the memories. “We weren’t intimate. I had been raised to think I needed to wait until marriage, and Don was all right with that…for a while.”
Aunt Sue takes Mom’s hand to give it a reassuring squeeze. I have to wonder how much Mom has talked about this over the years, if at all. She’s never gone to therapy as far as I know, and I would think after going through something so traumatic, it would be needed. Sue lets Mom stay quiet this time, and I don’t really need her to say anything more; I can guess where the story goes from here.
“Your mother called me after the fact,” Aunt Sue says. “I drove out and picked her up, brought her home. We filed a police report right away and they arrested him right before he left on his next route.”
Some of the words from the newspaper clippings jump out at me. Local Trucker Arrested for Rape. Other Crimes Begin to Surface. “Th-there were others?”
“Two exes of his stepped forward,” Mom says. “They didn’t have any proof because they waited so long, of course, but their stories did back mine up and help get him a longer sentence.”
“Fifteen years.” If he went to jail around the time I was born, then I was fifteen years old when Don Whitmore was let out of prison. I wonder where he went after that, if he’s still in town, if he’s even alive, if I could find him. And if I could, what the hell would I say to him? “Does he know about me?”
“He was notified during the course of the trial, yes. He tried to write for the first few years, but I never responded.”
I blink back the sudden onslaught of tears filling my eyes. Everything I’m feeling, every wave of emotion that sweeps over me is different. I want to sob and throw something at the same time. “I l-look like him. That’s why you hate me.”
Mom’s head snaps up, her eyes wide and round in shock. “What? Victor, I don’t hate you.”
“She’s your mother, Vic. How could she do anything but love you?”
“That’s a good question.” I toss the box back to the coffee table and stand up, running a hand over my face. “I love you, Mom, and th-there are no words for how sorry I am you went through what you did. But you’ve spent the l-last few years treating me like I’m the one who did s-something wrong, and I don’t forgive you for that.”
Her jaw tenses, lower lip quivering briefly. “Victor—”
“I don’t want excuses. I just…just don’t.” The tears are coming freely now and I feel like the world’s biggest baby because of it. Everyone else is going through so much and here I am, crying because oh, boo-hoo, Mommy doesn’t love me. And yet the words are pouring out of me with no filter before I can stop them. “I’ve gone through all of this alone. I didn’t hurt Callie. I never would have, but you labeled me guilty without even listening to my side of the story. B-because, why? Because I look like my dad? B-because you were so unconfident in your ability to raise a good person that you would question whether or not I was capable of something like that?”
“Vic—”
“I’m your son and I needed you and you didn’t care!”
My shouting leaves the room in silence. My chest aches and it’s taking everything I have not to sob openly, to blink back the tears enough that I can storm out of the living room to my own bedroom because, now? I don’t care. I don’t care about her excuses. I don’t care how she might point out that she’s made sure I’ve had what I need and kept a roof over my head—because in retrospect, all these years everything I’ve needed that Mom hasn’t given me has been emotional. The one thing I wanted was a hug, a smile, an “I love you” from my mother. Apparently that was too much to ask.
Chapter Seventeen
No one tries to follow me. Mom and Aunt Sue talk quietly among themselves for the next few hours while I hide in my room, not wanting to leave even to use the bathroom. I’d rather suffer in silence than risk running into either of them in the hall.
It isn’t until I’ve started getting ready for bed—and texted Brett to let him know not to bother picking me up tonight; I’m not in the mood for company—that someone knocks on my door. I’m expecting it to be Aunt Sue, trying to smooth things over with Mom and me, and while I’m not really in the mood to hear it, I feel like it would be cruel to ignore her. She didn’t have to come here to help us with our issues. She wanted to, because she cares.
But it isn’t Aunt Sue who opens my door when I say, “Come in.” It’s Mom. She steps inside with the shoe box of Dad memorabilia and I stare at her from over the top of my phone, wary. I might feel like I should be nice to Aunt Sue, but I’m still not in the mood to talk to my mother.
She stops at the foot of my bed and gingerly places the box down. “You were right.”
Those are words I don’t think I have ever heard come out of my mother’s mouth. They do the trick of getting me to slowly lower my cell to give her my attention, but I still don’t say anything. I’m just giving her a chance to elaborate on that thought.
Mom folds her arms, taking a deep breath. “When I found out I was pregnant, everyone told me not to keep it. Not to keep you. They didn’t think I could handle it emotionally, and maybe they were right. Sue was the one person who coaxed me into making my own decision, and…I chose to have you and to raise you, even without a father.”
I draw my legs up a little and sit straighter, giving Mom room to slowly sit down on the bed at my feet. This is the first time in years she’s come into my room to sit and talk with me, and the scenario feels both surreal and achingly familiar. “Is that why you d-don’t talk to anyone else in the family?”
“More or less. It drove a wedge between us that never really healed itself.” She stares at her hands resting on the tops of her thighs. “Part of it was my fault, I suppose. I distanced myself from everyone. I refused to talk about what was really happening. It was hard enough to talk about being raped, but to discuss that I was carrying that rapist’s child inside me…I couldn’t do it. The words wouldn’t come out.”
Abnegation: the act of renouncing or rejecting something; self-denial.
Funny, I learned that one from my dictionary the night before Aaron’s party.
Mom continues. “I threw myself completely into raising you and shoved everything else aside. But the older you got, the more and more I saw him…” She lifts her head to stare at my face, a haunted expression drifting across her eyes. “You look just like him.”
I avert my gaze, wanting to curl into myself as small as I can, or to hide under the bed until she goes away.
“When the police showed up here, I just…I panicked. I don’t know.” She takes a deep breath and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. This is taking a lot out of her, I can tell. But I won’t give her a free pass by saying it’s okay, Mom. These are things she needs to say, and these are things I need to hear.
&
nbsp; “I’m not him.” I tuck my chin to my chest.
“You’re right,” Mom agrees. Two times in one night; guess we’re going for the gold. “You’re not him. You’ve always been a sweet, thoughtful boy and I…I want to try to make things better between us.”
I force my gaze to lift. Are these sincere words coming out of her mouth or the result of Aunt Sue’s coaching? I want to believe them. Oh God, I want to. But we don’t have the best track record for working things out, especially lately, so I’m reluctant to hold on to much hope for it. If I’m honest, though… “I’d l-like that.”
Mom actually manages a ghost of a smile. She pushes the box in my direction. “You don’t have to look at any of it if you don’t want to, but it’s yours now. Keep it, get rid of it, whatever you want.”
Then she gets up and leaves me alone to stare at the shoe box. It’s a totally nondescript box. I may have seen it a hundred times and never once stopped to realize what was really inside it. All I’ve been asking for is the truth about my dad, and now that I have it sitting right in front of me…do I really want it?
Can I handle it?
Slowly I draw the box closer and pull off the lid. The picture of my parents is staring straight up at me and I pluck it out to examine it again. It’s a captured memory of happier times, and I wonder how it makes Mom feel when she looks at it. If it makes her reflect back and wonder what changed in him to make him do what he did. Not just with her, but with the other two women who stepped forward, too.
I set the picture on my nightstand. If I don’t keep anything else in this collection, I will keep that. Maybe I’ll tuck it away in a box of my own where I won’t see it again for years, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away.