by Alona Jarden
"Hey," I swallowed hard. "How was your session?"
"It was excellent." I sat at a safe distance from her and believed she meant it.
"You sound good, Kate. You sound happy."
"I am, Andrew."
"Did you find out more? Is there any interesting progress? You know I understand better than any therapist you go to, so please share something with me."
"I know, Andrew, but she's great. You have nothing to worry about."
"I'm not worried. I just don’t understand why you insist on not letting me be the one that..."
"Stop," she interrupted, "I'm not having this discussion with you again."
"You never had any discussion about this with me. You decided and that was that."
"And my decision stands."
"All I know is that I haven’t seen you in three months."
"But in those three months, I've seen myself, Andrew. I'm getting stronger by the day. You should be happy for me, not angry."
"I'm not angry, I'm sad. I miss you, Kate." I could hear the sound of my heart breaking again.
"I miss you, too. I really do, but... This is not the time. Not yet."
"Then when will I see you again?"
"As soon as I know who you will be seeing." She refused to set a meeting and hurried to find a reason to cut off the conversation with me.
That was the moment I realized what I had to do.
I pressed the accelerator and drove away as a new plan of action got built in my head.
If distance was what she needed, I was willing to give it to her, but not for long. I opened the doors of the cabin like a storm and rushed to write everything that went through my mind.
"Yes, psycho. What do you want this time?" her quick answer to yet another call of mine hinted that she was happy to receive it.
"I want you, my psycho."
"Andrew, I..."
"I know," I cut her off in a dismissive tone. "I know and I'll wait, but not forever."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I have a new plan."
"You and your God damn plans."
"That's right. I have a plan again and you're the star of it."
"Well spill it. What should I expect from you now?"
"Not now. Not yet. But next year, you will be mine."
"Andrew, I can’t heal under an ultimatum... I have to..."
"My love," I decided not to let either one of our egos control our conversation. "You'll do whatever you need to do, but know that I'll do whatever I need to do as well."
"Come on… Are you going to kidnap me again?"
"There's no way of knowing what I'll do, Kate. If that's what it takes for you to realize we're meant for each other, then that's what I'll do."
"Andrew, stop talking nonsense."
"One year, Kate. I'll be happy if you get there in less, but I won’t wait any longer." I hung up without giving her the chance to respond and for the first time in a long time, I felt I was moving in the right direction.
I would. If I had to, I'd grab her again, but I would no longer sit still while my whole world was taken away from me.
Epilogue
Katarina
A little over four years have passed since the day my eyes opened.
Sitting on the cabin's balcony, which I love so much, I look out into the thick forest. I have a glass of whiskey with some ice in my hand and do the best I can to sip it. I never got used to the burning sensation in my throat, but I learned to enjoy the dizziness that followed it. A dizziness that made it easier to handle hard moments, when the memories returned to haunt me.
I knew I would never be able to identify with certainty which of the things I had taken for granted in my life were there because they were planted by my father, and which were the truth that had been erased from my mind. Never the less, my life as a whole seems like a clearer picture now.
In the years that have passed since I discovered who I was. I’ve undergone profound psychological treatment as it was important for me to identify all the memories that had nothing to do with reality, but that wasn’t enough.
Even after many months of accompanying professionals and care, I found myself claiming that I had always acted in a certain way, only to discover that those were my father's words and not my conclusions about the way I really used to live, or even wanted to live, my life.
I think that, more than anything, it was hard for me to understand that he was the one who shaped me. It was only after I understood it completely, that I managed to reach the turning point in my rehabilitation.
He shaped me as if I were his prized possession when, in fact, I was his biological daughter, and nothing more.
At first, when all the information was new and confusing, it was hard to believe that Andrew was wrong and that the man who had murdered my parents was actually my biological father. The laboratory results presented to me by the police weren’t enough to ease my mind, and although the repeat test I demanded proved that I was actually his daughter, I requested another one after that, and still found it hard to accept its results wholeheartedly.
As it turned out, Uncle Christian was never my uncle. He was my father.
He loved me and my mother with all his heart and I couldn’t find it in me to hate him, even after learning the terrible things he had done.
Something changed, and I really did mean the things I said to him in that interrogation room. I remembered all the years he had proven himself to be my father and I remembered the good days. With the great love I had for him, I managed to understand the distress he was in, but still, it was hard to look straight in his eyes.
For quite a while, I avoided meeting him. I refused his repeated attempts to contact me out of the same fear that had caused me to distance myself from Andrew.
At that time, I had to focus on me and me alone, without listening to the background voices and opinions that surrounded me. But, my selfish phase was over.
As I sat at his hearing and listened to his testimony, all the missing pieces came together and helped me find it in my heart to forgive him. It wasn’t long after that, that I agreed to visit him in prison.
I came out very upset from the first visit, but as time passed, I realized that with every additional visit, I was only getting stronger.
I asked him about my parents and my heart shrunk when I saw the spark in his eyes at the end of yet another childhood story I'd never heard before.
Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t a five-and-a-half-year-old child anymore. I sat on the other side of the glass as a grown woman, holding the phone to my ear and watching the truth spill freely out of his mouth, as if he didn’t understand why he’d tried to hide it from me in the first place.
With tears of pain, he shared how the love between him and my mother took off. He spoke of a terrible betrayal from a brilliant woman. He explained how it was still hard for him to believe that she had lied about her feelings for him and told me how his apartment was a refuge for her from the prison my father had placed her in. He also quoted some words from a letter she wrote and claimed to have had to destroy, but at that stage, I wasn’t sure if I could believe him.
I could see how he came to life when he spoke about her. He really did love her. It was clear that he’d believed that he would spend the rest of his life beside her, would raise their beloved daughter together, and was made a fool.
Just as he came alive when he began to talk about her, life seemed to run out of him as he shared the intensity of the pain he suffered. It felt like, for the first time ever, he actually spoke to me openly.
I would sit opposite him on my visits to the prison and listen. He told me how he had to make do with a formal invitation to see me and to ask permission if he wanted to take part in my life. According to him, my mother would sneak him some pictures and memories of the two of us together, out of guilt, which later on were used for the album we used to look at together.
Although I never accepted his actions, I could u
nderstand his pain. Another man embraced his daughter in his arms and she called him Daddy. He talked and talked, but I didn’t weigh in. I just listened. Especially when he tried to justify his actions.
I preferred to keep on seeing him as the man who dreamed of giving me a good life and, thus, repressed my other thoughts of him, because the alternative was more difficult to handle and demanded that I erase all that we shared. If I had to take into account the major mistakes of the past… Who among us wants to be judged time and again for the mistakes we made, really?
"Do you need a re-fill for that, my little drinker?" Andrew asks me, sticking his head out of the cabin, to the balcony.
"No, thanks. I already hear the forest answering my questions, so I think I’ve had enough."
"Can I join you guys or is this a private conversation between you and the forest?" he sits down on the rocker beside me and laughs.
At the beginning of my new way, I’d asked him to stay away.
I couldn’t relate the boy he used to be to his older self.
I wanted to know who I was looking at when I looked at him and was afraid I would never be able to find an answer to that question.
It was actually my visits to my father that caused me to realize how none of that was relevant to my new path in life. Only after seeing how much the details he revealed didn’t change my feelings toward him did I realize that the full picture didn’t even matter.
Andrew the boy, wasn’t for me. I remembered vividly how he’d kept on proposing to me despite my constant refusals and I also remembered how I’d looked at him with contempt. A look that was light years away from the way I looked at Andrew the man, who had opened my eyes, freed me from my abductor and captured my heart.
"Wait a minute, why are you sitting here? Did you put her down already?"
"My specialty isn’t putting little girls down. If you remember correctly, I specialize in knocking grown women out."
"That doesn’t sound good, Andrew."
"And who do you think will get the wrong impression? Your judgy friend, the forest?"
From the moment he announced that he had built a plan to bring me back to his arms, I knew that I had no choice in the matter and had breathed a sigh of relief.
He must have thought he'd said the last word when he hung up that call, but he was too reckless to hear that I actually accepted his ultimatum with a hopeful smile.
Slowly, as my emotional therapy grew deeper, I realized that I was more Katarina than Kate. Just as he hadn’t needed two weeks to bring me back to myself, he didn’t need a year to make me say yes to one more of his marriage proposals.
"Mom? Dad?" our daughter's delicate voice sounds behind us from inside the cabin. "You guys are making a lot of noise again and I won’t be able to fall sleep like that."
"I'm sorry, Kate." I stretch out my arms and invite her to climb up and sit on my lap. "Your father made me laugh again."
"He makes me laugh a lot, too." She looks at him. "Maybe I should marry Daddy, so he'll make me laugh all night for the rest of my life."
"That's not a bad idea, my darling," my heart starts pounding fast. "In a few months you'll celebrate your third birthday. How about we turn the celebration into a wedding party for you and Daddy?"
"Mom! You're being silly." She shakes her head in disbelief at the words I just uttered. "You can’t marry a parent!" She stands up snarkily, as the queen of drama she has always been, and goes back into the cabin, muttering to herself, "Me marrying daddy... what nonsense!"
Although many years have passed since I was a child, and even though a lot of the details I had forgotten have since come back to me, I still don’t feel that I know much about myself. But I know the basics, and that’s enough.
I know that I remained Katarina, I know that the child who was the landscape of my childhood was Andrew and I know that forever, he will be my whole world.
A note from the author
The idea for the plot of this book came to me while driving with my family to my mother's house. I can't recall the exact trail of thought that made me think of the specific details, but I remember the exact moment I took my phone and started typing names, dates and events, so that nothing will be erased from my memory.
At first, I thought that this book was written for fun. I thought that although each of the characters dealt with some very challenging life events, I had no major message or social issue to convey to my readers, but I guess that's exactly what my message was.
I guess what I wanted the readers to take from this book is that there are two sides to every story, if not more .
We all know the saying, but few of us actually manage to implement it in our daily life.
When anger kicks in, we tend to jump to conclusions and the unlikely possibility that we don’t know the full picture never comes to mind.
I find myself repeating this sentence to my boys, whenever they get furious about some wrongful injustice that was made toward them. In fact, just today, before writing these words, I had a chat about it with my eldest.
He was sulking due to a collective punishment one of the teachers gave the whole class, while I tried to make him see things from a different perspective, one he had no interest in looking from.
I tried to tell him that behind every shouting teacher there's a class full of students that drove her nuts, but still, it was hard for him to see past his own frustration.
If these are the words I chose to end this book with, I guess that's what this book is about for me. Different perspectives to different situations in our lives. In my experience, different points of views are revealed only in retrospect, when it's too late to change our initial reaction, and more often than not, they supply explanations that we never thought of.
To my kids, I advise to react to everything in a contained manner, so that they can avoid being sorry for things they said or done after the full picture will be revealed. You, on the other hand, are not my kids. You're old enough to make your own mistakes and learns from them, so I won't advise anything to you on that matter.
I will, however, hope that comes a day when you think you know another person's motives, my words will come back to you, and you'll ask all the relevant questions before passing judgment without having all the evidence.
Giving Thanks
Just like in all my books, I want to thank the people who helped me while writing it or in the process of publishing it.
First and foremost, as always, I want to thank Guy, my sweet husband, who read, commented, corrected, advised and tickled me fiercely when my spirits were down. You are the love of my life and I thank you for making everything so easy.
Second on my list of gratitude are my four boys. Thank you for bursting out dancing with joy when I said I had finally written a book you could read and thank you for understanding that you guys are too young to read most of my other books.
I also want to thank my good author friend, Aviva Gat, who bent over backwards to explain the world of Amazon to me and quickly became a very important person in my life.
Thank you for not giving up on me and demanding only the best, which you were so sure I had in me.
A special thanks to Shannon Eversoll, my editor and the most positive woman I know. Thank you for falling in love with my words and for going above and beyond what you initially took upon yourself.
The last step I took before releasing this book, was to send it to Adina Krasna, and this is the time to mention her tremendous support. Thanks, Adina, for taking the time, for reading through all hours of the day (and night), for supplying me with you honest review and for proofing my words so punctually. You have no idea how impatient I was to hear your opinion and how at ease you made me, when you said you believed it will be well received. As a fellow mother, I know how precious our sleeping hours are, so I want to thank you for investing them in my Katarina and end with the wishes that your will sleep quietly in the nights to come.
Last, but not least, I want to thank y
ou, my readers. I am sending you a massive smile (you'll have to trust me that indeed, that's what is stretched across my face right now) and am inviting you to let me know what you thought of this book in the reviews (you have no idea how much that matters to me).
I'm thrilled to know you've made it this far and am filled with hope that we'll meet-up again, in the final words of my next book.
Love,
Alona Jarden