by Nicole Trope
As it was, she looked at me like I was a stranger, like I was just anyone.
She looks so similar to my mother, and her daughter looks just like she did as a child. Small, delicate, fragile, easily hurt, easily broken. The same curly brown hair and soft green eyes.
I’ve been watching her husband as well.
He left his car door wide open the first time I visited. I had to run when I heard the police siren but I wanted to see the chaos I had caused, so I hid and waited. I watched him come speeding into his street and screech to a stop outside their house and then just leave the car door open, as though he didn’t understand that a threat was nearby. I couldn’t resist gifting him one of the dolls. And then I left him the picture as a clue. I wanted him to show it to her, to ask the question, because I don’t think he knows about me and my father. Or, at least, he doesn’t know about me. I know that my mother made a deal, a deal to erase me from her life. I know Rachel just went along with it. I know she never expected to hear from me ever again.
I wondered if seeing the picture would make him angry. If catching her in a lie would make him furious. He’s an average-sized man but even an average-sized man can inflict pain and suffering if he chooses to. I know that patterns of abuse are repeated. I know that women who grow up watching their mothers abused, or who grow up abused themselves, will sometimes unconsciously choose someone who repeats that pattern. I wondered if she did that. If the man with the brown curly hair and square jaw drove off to work every morning and then came home at night to beat the crap out of her. I know he doesn’t look happy. He’s lost his job and I know that because I watched him load the sad cardboard box filled with his things into the trunk of his car. It was easy enough to get into his office and walk around, easy enough to leave the photo for him to find.
I gave her every chance to recognise me.
It’s unfair of me, perhaps, to have expected anything from her. I don’t recognise myself sometimes.
Her little girl is sweet to look at with a big smile and dimples. When she smiled at me, I didn’t get the sense that she was secretly worried, but you never know. I think my sister and I smiled plenty throughout our childhoods. I never had any obvious bruises and we both seemed to function just fine – up to a point. For me, I was fine – a little difficult, a bit of a loud mouth, but fine – up until my anger, the black sludge, gained control. By the time they started sending me to see the school psychologist in high school, I knew enough to just shrug when they asked me why I was so angry. I don’t know if the school even knew my mother had left us. If they needed to speak to my parents, my father went, always lying that my mother was travelling or at work. I never contradicted him. You can live a whole life in secret if you choose to.
‘Just go to your room. Go to your fucking room and stay there. You’re absolutely pathetic,’ he said to me when he brought me home from court, where I had been granted bail.
‘I don’t think I want to go to my room.’
‘You know what,’ he spat, coming right up to me, right into my space, ‘I shouldn’t have agreed to stay away from them. I shouldn’t have accepted you as the fucking consolation prize. I should have told her to come and get you and then at least I could have had my daughter with me.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked and I stepped back, away from him, even though I was looking down at him and I knew he couldn’t really hurt me. I stepped back.
He laughed, a wheezy old man laugh. ‘Didn’t know that about your precious mother, did you, Kevin? She gave you up in exchange for our little girl. As easy as clicking her fingers,’ he said and he snapped his finger and thumb together. ‘She didn’t want you at all – she probably never did.’ His eyes were dark with the thrill of the pain he knew he was causing. Even though I hated her, even though I understood she had betrayed me in the worst possible way, there was still always some part of me that hoped she missed me and thought about me. That they both did. I was family, after all. But I knew he was telling me the truth and the black sludge moved so fast I didn’t have time to even think about stopping it.
I don’t think he was expecting me to hit him. There was a look on his face after I landed the first blow. It was a punch to the stomach. He bent over double and coughed. And then he looked at me and I could see the shock on his face but I also saw something else. Fear. He was afraid of me. I am strong, stronger, strongest. He wasn’t expecting me to hit him but I wasn’t expecting to not be able to stop. Nothing could have stopped me. Forty-one years of mental and physical abuse rushed out of me through my hands and I went until I was sweating, until my chest was heaving, until I had justice.
In the end, I was exhausted. I don’t think anyone would believe how tiring it is to beat another human being to death. I slumped down next to him and dropped my head in my hands.
‘Kevin,’ his voice rattled and I jumped and moved away from him. He was still alive.
He reached out a blood-covered hand to try and grab me, and I moved further away from him.
‘Read the letter, Kevin,’ he wheezed. ‘Desk drawer, read it. She never… never wanted you. I was the best… best you had. I was…’ And then he stopped speaking. And he stopped moving. And he was still. Even at the end, right at his end, he couldn’t resist hurting me. He couldn’t resist it.
I showered and cleaned up and then I went to look for the letter. If I hadn’t found it, I would simply have run. I would just have left and kept running.
That was the plan. I had my justice. He was lying in the living room, covered in blood, with his face puffing up and the hands that had hit and punched and smacked finally stilled.
I know his banking details. I have a passport and I was just going to run and keep running for the rest of my life.
But then I read the letter.
His desk drawer was locked and I couldn’t find a key so I beat it open with a hammer. It took four blows, and on the final one the wood cracked and splintered and I pulled it open, spilling its secrets onto the slate-grey carpet of his pristine office floor.
It was mostly filled with the buff-coloured envelopes that Inspector Gadget brought over the years, and I tore a few open to read where they had gone, where they had run to.
16/22 Greenview Terrace, Kilburn, Adelaide. Rachel attends Kilburn Public School. Veronica is a cleaner for an office complex.
24/23–27 Hurstville Place, Essendon, Melbourne. Rachel attends Essendon Girls School. Veronica is working at Essendon Books.
43/124 Valley Road, Erskineville, Sydney. Rachel attends Erskineville Public School. Veronica teaches at the primary school.
There were endless addresses, endless schools, and then they were in Sydney and that’s where they still are.
I found the last envelope that detailed Rachel’s wedding to a man named Ben, and Veronica’s job in a primary school in Sydney. I learned my sister is a teacher as well.
They did fine. They just went on and lived their lives as though I had never existed.
I folded the last sheet from the last buff-coloured envelope my father had received, just two months ago, and shoved it into the pocket of my jeans. It told me my sister and her husband were planning to move into a new house on a new housing estate. She created her own picture-perfect Christmas card life – a life that doesn’t include me.
My eyes were gritty with exhaustion, and everywhere was beginning to hurt as blood pulsed into bruises and cuts. He had fought back as hard as he could.
But I needed the letter he was talking about. I knew there would be a letter. I knew it would be a letter that would break me. I knew that because otherwise he wouldn’t have told me. I am strong, stronger, strongest, and he couldn’t defeat me physically but he could still maintain his psychological hold, his control, his power over me.
I scrabbled through the envelopes on the floor and finally found it. A small, pale blue envelope with our address, written in my mother’s neat, square handwriting. I held it up to my nose, my bloody nose, and inhaled its scent
, as though it might possibly still smell like gardenias, like the perfume she used to wear, but there was no trace of her. I liked that she had chosen blue for the envelope, that she had not chosen the white he would have approved of. And I knew, as I held it, that I didn’t want to know what she had written, that it would break the heart of thirteen-year-old Kevin, break it completely.
I ripped open the envelope, noticing how my hands were shaking, and then I sat down on the floor of my father’s office to read it.
The letter was dated one week after they’d left. One week after I’d come home and found them gone, just gone. I read the letter that is twenty-eight years old and I could see her writing it, how she would bend her head to the paper, how she would hold the pen to her lips as she thought. I could see her writing it and I felt her next to me as the horror of the deal she made became clear. My mother, my mum.
Dear Leonard,
I have thought about how to begin this letter for days, hoping to somehow find the perfect words to reach you. But I realised last night, as I watched Rachel settle into another strange bed in another motel, that I can never reach you with just words. I would have done that already if I could have.
I imagine you are looking for us already. I’m sure you will hire a private investigator and find us quickly enough. And I know what will happen if you find us, Len. I know.
Peg Jackson told me to file for divorce over and over again. She told me she would help me, that Rachel and I could live with her and Barry, and that she would help me find a lawyer and go to the police about your abuse. She used to paint a picture for me of a life lived without you whenever she came over for coffee, but I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. I remembered your words, you see, the words you used after the first time you hit me: ‘Run from me, try to leave me, and I will kill you.’ I knew you meant those words and I knew you would kill me.
I couldn’t let that happen to Rachel. The thought of her being raised only by you was beyond devastating. You broke my spirit but you had yet to break hers, although I know you were looking forward to doing that.
There is something wrong with you, something terribly wrong, and even though I have encouraged you over the years to try and find a way to fix what is broken inside you, and I have accepted the beatings that came with those suggestions, you don’t want to be healed or get better.
You left me no choice, Len. I knew what you would do to her after what happened that night. I knew what you would do to me and so we ran.
I know you will find me but I am writing to ask you to leave us alone.
I remember the day that Kevin was born. I remember how your eyes filled with tears I had never seen you shed before. I remember you held him in your arms, that tiny, perfect bundle, and then you leaned down and kissed me and said, ‘Thank you for giving me my legacy.’
So, this is my offer to you. If you leave me and Rachel alone, I will never try and contact Kevin. I will not go to the police and I won’t try and get him back. I will leave you your legacy.
I will accept the deep and despairing heartbreak that comes with this choice. I will accept the guilt that I know will simply become part of my soul because I will always feel it. I will accept the terrible suffering of losing my boy, my son, if you leave me and Rachel alone. I hope that the suffering and the guilt I will endure as I think of my child every day for the rest of my life will be enough for you, Len. I pray it will be.
Just leave us alone.
I know you will find us and you may decide that killing me and taking Rachel is easy enough, but you may also get caught, Len. You will get caught. And that would ruin your tidy life in your tidy house.
Just leave us alone.
And if you can bear to do it, let my son know that I love him, that I have always loved him and that my heart is broken in two to have to make this choice. He is still my little man, my baby boy, no matter how big he gets, and I will miss him with every part of me.
Let him know and leave us alone.
Veronica
She traded me for Rachel. She gave me up to save my sister. I tore the letter into two and then I kept tearing it into smaller and smaller bits as I cried like a fucking baby and then I roared my pain so loudly, I knew the neighbours would come.
Then I understood that I didn’t just want justice, because I am and have always been just like my father. I wanted revenge. Good old-fashioned revenge.
I needed to find the women who had left me behind, who had just upped and left me, and make them pay for that choice.
The bedroom where he slept alone no longer smells of my mother. He threw out everything that belonged to her soon after she left. But my sister’s room was still exactly the same – until I was done with it. I ripped, tore and broke everything in there, even as my bruises grew and my nose dripped blood everywhere. And by the time I was done, by the time I was sitting on the floor, holding her pink blanket to my nose, I had a proper plan for revenge.
The moment I left the house I knew the clock was ticking. No one would miss him for a while but eventually someone would wonder where he was, why the mail was piling up, what the smell was. And part of my bail conditions is that I check into the local police station every day. They would be out looking for me. I was glad I had let my beard grow in the hospital, glad that I wouldn’t look exactly like the mugshot they took before I went in.
I took his car, his precious ‘don’t you ever touch it’ car. And as I drove, I thought about what I would say to my mother and to my sister, and I practised an accent, settling on Canadian because I wanted to make it as hard as possible for them to recognise me. I wanted them to be able to see through the beard and the accent to the son and brother they abandoned because maybe then I would know that they had thought about me, had imagined me growing up and living my life without them.
But it was too late for my mother, she wouldn’t even wake up to look at me. Maybe it was the cancer but it felt like it was denial as well.
I don’t know why I took the dolls. I think some small part of me wanted to give them to my sister as a gift, a kind of way to say, See, these are from your childhood just like I’m from your childhood. Remember me? I imagined saying. When I saw her, saw how she was just a carbon copy of my mother, I realised that any hope I had of some emotional reunion was ridiculous. She looked like her so she probably thought like her. Would she leave her child the way my mother left me? Probably. Would she care if her child was taken from her?
I wanted to force them to see me, to see what I had become because they made the choice to leave me alone with him.
When my mother left with Rachel, any hope I had for a life not governed by violence ended. Any hope I had disappeared because until then I had possessed just a little bit of hope. Just a sliver.
Every time he hit her or hit me, I would see something in her eyes, something that told me she wouldn’t accept this forever, that at some point she would make a change.
I had heard Mrs Jackson speaking to her and I kept hoping that the woman would get through to her, would convince her that it was time to leave him.
And the longer it went on, the older I got and the longer she stayed, the more I hated her. But it was a weirdly complicated hate, bound up with all the love, the intense love I had for her. I wanted her to stand up for me. I wanted her to love me more than she feared him. But instead, she took the child she actually loved; she took her and ran.
She left with the child she loved. She left me behind, at his mercy. I was hard work and I knew that but I thought she loved me. I was her son, wasn’t I? Her flesh and blood? Only after she left, only after I came home and found him holding a dishcloth over his bleeding face, did I realise. She didn’t love me enough to save me as well. She didn’t love me enough to take me with her when she ran away. She only took her precious Little Bird, her darling Rachel.
I was destroyed, broken, shattered. My father spent my whole life telling me I wasn’t worthy of being loved, and when she left, she confirmed that was the truth.
I wasn’t the kind of person anyone could love. I was the kind of person you hurt, you abandoned, you forgot about. I was barely worthy of being a person at all.
I want Rachel to feel that terrifying pain. Destroying Rachel will allow me my revenge.
Will losing her child destroy her? I hope so.
I wanted to do that to my mother first, to destroy her, but when I went to her flat a stupid neighbour told me about the cancer, told me she was in a hospice with only days left to live. She even gave me the name of the place. I told her I was Veronica’s nephew. She never questioned me and I went to the hospice and sneaked into her room. That took some doing. The nurses are everywhere all the time. But I managed. I didn’t recognise her when I saw her. There is nothing left of her now, just skin and bones. She is a shrunken old woman in a bed.
I sat down next to the bed and took her papery dry hand. ‘Mum,’ I whispered. ‘It’s Kevin.’
But she didn’t move.
I wanted to scream at her to wake up, to speak to me, to tell me she was sorry for leaving me, but I knew it would be of no use. She is dying. My mother is dying and I will never get an apology or a goodbye.
I sat in the car park of the hospice and I waited for Rachel. And then I followed her home. It was so easy, so simple.
And then I introduced myself one morning and she looked right through me.
I left those dolls everywhere, the dolls that were hers, that she loved and named. I know she wanted me to love her, to be kind to her when she was little, but I just couldn’t sustain it. Every time she got away with something that I wouldn’t be able to get away with, I hated her a little more. I knew it was an age thing. I knew it would stop when she was seven and then we would be in the same boat, but that never happened because they ran. They ran and left me.