by Harper Bliss
Sheryl drank more, finished her glass; Kristin had barely touched hers. Then she let her head fall into her hands. Kristin caressed her back, squeezed her shoulder, listening for sounds of her crying, but didn’t hear anything.
“I could have gone the rest of my life without thinking about him. Now he has given me no choice,” Sheryl said as her face reemerged.
Kristin sidled up to her, put her arm more firmly around Sheryl’s shoulders. “Maybe it can be a good thing. Maybe you can get some closure.” The barely broached subject of Sheryl’s family always threw up a certain distance between them. Because Kristin didn’t know that much about them, only the bare minimum facts. Maybe she should have pushed more in all the years they’d been together, perhaps even taken advantage of Sheryl’s more frequent bouts of drunkenness.
“I always believed I already had closure.” Sheryl put her head on Kristin’s shoulder. “They put me in therapy after it happened. My dad was supposed to take me twice a week, but he forgot half of the time. He refused to go himself. He even told me once, when I asked him about it, pointing at the six-pack he was putting away, that it was all the therapy he needed, because my mother had been seeing a therapist for years and what good had it done her?” She finally put her glass down, keeping her head on Kristin’s shoulder. “I stopped going. Between everyone’s distress, and me splitting my time between living with my dad and living with my aunt, I was hard to keep track of. My dad didn’t care. Didn’t seem to at least. Then he didn’t have to pay for it, I guess. More money for booze.”
Despite never talking about it much, Kristin had often wondered, mostly while staring at Sheryl sleeping it off, what such neglect would do to a twelve-year-old girl. Sheryl might have had her aunt, but she no longer had her mother and the attention she needed from her father. To her surprise, Sheryl had always seemed so utterly composed. If she hadn’t told her about her harrowing family history, Kristin would never have guessed.
To her dismay, she then realized it was one of the reasons why Kristin had never gotten too much on Sheryl’s case about her ever-increasing thirst for alcohol. Sometimes she even caught herself thinking that if anyone deserved a drink, it was Sheryl. Sheryl who always held it together. The respected professor. The LGBT rights activist. The woman who believed in so much with such fervor, it had surprised and charmed Kristin in equal measures when they’d just started dating.
“There are people you can see now,” Kristin said. “You don’t have to go through this alone. You are not alone anymore.” Kristin held her tighter, as if the closer she pressed Sheryl against her, the more she could bring this point across.
“I have you.” Sheryl’s tone, though injured, was resolute.
Kristin couldn’t help but wonder if she could ever be enough.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Five days had gone by, and Sheryl hadn’t done anything with the piece of paper. She’d stashed it away in a drawer in her desk, but out of sight was not out of mind.
She taught her classes, pretended to do research but nothing really got through, had meetings with her colleagues and office hours with her students. She sat around in The Pink Bean, watching people, and every time the door opened, with a flutter in her chest, she wondered if her father would walk in again. With all her might, she wanted life to continue the way it had before, but she couldn’t shake the sight of him, and the memories it had ignited.
So, she drank. In a cruel reversal of everything she had believed in in her twenties. The only wish she’d had as a child—apart from being able to go back in time and being enough for her mother to not want to leave this world—had finally come true, now that her father had finally gotten sober. The irony didn’t escape Sheryl, but what was she meant to do? Go to AA meetings with him?
Every night, after Kristin went to bed, Sheryl stayed up and easily polished off a bottle of wine, on top of the one she and Kristin had already shared over dinner. After the wine was finished, she turned to the bottle of vodka she kept in her desk—in a different drawer than her father’s phone number.
Only after a few units of that, the liquor burning hard in her throat, its heat spreading through her, could she cope with the darkness of her bedroom. With the warmth of another person next to her. A woman who loved her. Her. How was it even possible? It all felt like such a sham. In between knocking back shots, Sheryl asked herself the same questions over and over again: how had she managed to fool herself and everyone around her for so long? How had she found a woman who loved her? How could she respect a woman who could find it in her heart to do so when Sheryl had been utterly convinced, because the facts were so clear, since the age of twelve, that clearly she wasn’t meant to be loved.
Most of all, though, she wondered how on earth she had managed to keep it together for so long. The will to survive, perhaps? Human nature? The surprising resilience of the mind and its ability to stash away in a dark corner what it doesn’t want to remember?
Sheryl remembered now. She remembered her mother’s arms around her, her voice always so sweet and low, when she said, “I should stop kissing you on this cheek. It will start showing on your skin.” The love and warmth she had taken for granted, even when it became harder for her mother to muster an easy smile, and to get up to go to work in the morning.
Sheryl had been too young to understand any of it and perhaps too absorbed in her selfish early-teenage world, thus she’d had no way of bracing herself, of preparing herself for the worst.
Who did her father think he was, showing up like that? To him, it might have looked like an attempt to make amends; to Sheryl, it was the opposite. She had already made amends with her past. She had done the best she could with the hand that life had dealt her. She had found ways to forget, mechanisms to cope. Moreover, she had love. Stability. A beautiful partner. She had much more than she’d ever dreamed she’d have. And then this man walked into The Pink Bean… destroying it all.
She took another sip, while thinking of Kristin asleep in the other room. How could she explain to her how an old, deep wound, that had taken years to heal, had been brusquely torn open? And did she even have to? She slammed the glass down, noticing how sorry she was feeling for herself and hating the notion of it. This was not how Sheryl had picked herself up. When she was a child, wallowing in self-pity didn’t even occur to her. So what the hell was she doing now? And why? Because nothing had changed. If it weren’t for that persistent little voice in her head—her father’s gruff baritone asking, “Please think about it.”
“Professor Johnson,” Martha said. “May I take a moment of your time?” She smiled disarmingly.
The last student hadn’t closed the door, giving Martha ample opportunity to walk right in.
“Hey.” An arrow of pain, which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside of her, burrowed its way up to Sheryl’s temples. The headaches never stopped. “Sure.” Sheryl gestured at a chair.
Martha closed the door. “You’ve been looking a bit pale of late,” Martha said. “You know I have dibs on the fairer complexion.” Her lips drew into a wide smile.
When Sheryl didn’t reply, Martha’s smile faded. “I’m officially worried now,” she said. “Is it your health?”
“Not my health,” Sheryl scoffed, then waved her hand. “Anyway, nothing for you to worry about. It will all blow over soon enough.” That was the first time Sheryl allowed herself to wonder whether she was just waiting for her father to die, so she didn’t have to make a decision anymore.
“Come on, Sheryl.” Martha shifted nervously in her seat. It reminded Sheryl of that time she’d come into her office, much in the same way as today, and told her that she, too, was a lesbian. “I’ve never seen you like this. People are starting to talk.”
“Who is people? Your ex-husband, the vice-chancellor, by any chance?”
“Colleagues who are just as worried about you as I am.”
“How nice of them to worry.” Sheryl ached to open her bottom drawer—the one where she hid
another bottle of vodka. At first, she’d bought a bottle of Belvedere, because she wasn’t going to get off her head on cheap, trashy booze, but the bottle was too long and didn’t even fit into the cabinet under her desk. She’d soon switched to Absolut, a more modest brand of which the bottle fit neatly behind a stack of papers in her drawer.
“Hey, it’s me you’re talking to,” Martha said. “Though I’m not entirely sure who I am talking to.”
“I’m sorry,” Sheryl said. “I’ve been going through some personal stuff.”
“No kidding.” Martha inclined her head. “And isn’t that what friends are for?”
Sheryl considered this, and the friendships she’d had over the years. She had only ever briefly mentioned her family situation to Caitlin. Kristin knew more, but Sheryl refused to go into details. Was she really going to start now?
“Is it Kristin? Did something happen?”
Sheryl shook her head, though she’d done her best to push Kristin away. Kristin who had never once asked her an inappropriate question about her past. Who had never displayed anything but the utmost patience.
“It’s something very personal.” Sheryl tried to remember how she had ever found the words to tell Kristin, and how exactly she had said them. It seemed impossible to reproduce them now. God, she was thirsty. Her headache intensified, as did the foul taste in her mouth.
“Something to do with my family. It’s complicated.” She gazed at her hands. “Well, it’s not really. It’s my father. He’s dying.”
“I’m so sorry,” Martha said. “No wonder you’re upset.”
Sheryl let her chin fall onto her chest. “It is actually more complicated than that.” She looked up again. “How about we go for a drink and I tell you all about it?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Look at them,” Kristin said to Josephine, pointing at Micky and Robin who sat huddled together in a corner. “Doesn’t young love look utterly silly at times?”
“I think it’s sweet.” Josephine gave her a smile. “And it’s all down to this place.”
“We should put it on the door,” Kristin went along with the joke. She had to get her laughs wherever she could. The atmosphere in their home had turned glacial. “Hot beverages and matchmaking opportunities abound.”
Josephine chuckled. “Their coffees are ready, but I almost don’t want to disturb them.”
“I’ll take them.” Kristin put the two cups on a tray and carried them over.
“One very wet cappuccino and one very dry,” she said, sitting down at the table with them without waiting for an invitation.
“You’ll never stop giving me hell about that, will you?” Robin said.
“No one ever will, babe,” Micky said. Her eyes sparkled with the wild energy of falling in love. Finding Robin had taken ten years off of her, making Kristin feel very old in comparison.
Did Sheryl really think Kristin could fall asleep when she went to bed as Sheryl retreated into her office? Did she really believe that Kristin didn’t know she hid a bottle of vodka in her drawer? Or was she waiting to be called out on it?
“Penny for your thoughts, boss,” Micky said. They worked together almost every day, surely she must have noticed something.
Kristin sighed. She was dying to talk about it, to have someone listen to her when she said something—Sheryl certainly didn’t. But it wasn’t for her to disclose. As far as Kristin knew, nobody but her and Caitlin knew about Sheryl’s family history. Sheryl would be livid if Kristin told anyone—and rightly so.
“I haven’t been sleeping too well,” she said. She cast another glance at Micky and Robin, at the way they sat together, their bodies angled toward each other. It felt as though her and Sheryl’s bodies were always pointing away from one another these days.
“Go upstairs and have a nap,” Micky said. “I’ll kick this one out—” She patted Robin on the knee. “—and get back to work. Josephine and I can handle things.”
“Hey.” Robin pretended to be offended. “I have to go, anyway. Diversity waits for no one.”
“Not a bad idea,” Kristin said, despite not being much of a day napper.
After saying her good-byes, she headed upstairs and walked around the apartment, where she went straight to Sheryl’s office, as though following a hunch. The door was closed but not locked. They never locked the doors in the house. They didn’t have reason to. An idea bloomed in the back of her mind—had probably been doing so for a while.
If Sheryl was going to be too stubborn, too depressed, or unraveling too much to do it, Kristin would do it for her. Sheryl wasn’t going to give her answers anyway. She was bottling it all up, drinking her pain away.
Kristin had been in Sheryl’s office when she’d seen her stash the piece of paper away in a drawer. She knew where to find Sheryl’s father’s phone number.
Kristin rang the bell. A thrill ran up her spine. Sheryl’s father, Trevor, lived in Strathfield’s Koreatown, an area she knew well. A second later, as if he’d been waiting on the other side, the door swung open.
“Kristin?” the man said.
“Yes.” Kristin extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Trevor.”
“Come in.” He opened the door and Kristin followed him into the apartment. The hallway was painted in an off-putting kind of brown and the small lounge, made up of what looked like secondhand furniture, didn’t instill a cozy warmth in her either.
“Can I offer you some water? I’m afraid I don’t have any coffee, turns out it’s pretty bad for the liver as well.” Trevor gave a rueful smile.
They sat down in a pair of knackered armchairs. Kristin tried to hide her nerves by sitting as still as possible. She only reached for the water glass after staring at her hands for a few seconds in silence and making sure they weren’t trembling. The sense that she shouldn’t be here made her jumpy. It felt like she was cheating on Sheryl by sitting across from this man, who looked nothing like Kristin had ever imagined him. Though, she suspected, time and substance abuse must have done a number on him.
Trevor Johnson’s skin was almost translucent, with purplish half moons underneath his eyes. Whatever he had left of his hair was combed backward but didn’t hide the liver spots dotting his skull. What Kristin noticed most were his hands, bony and thin-fingered, which kept fidgeting with nothing.
“How’s Sheryl?” he asked right off the bat.
“Not well.” Kristin examined his face, looking for similarities between it and her partner’s. Perhaps the eyes a little bit, though Trevor’s were watery and heavy-lidded and Kristin could barely see the blue shine through. “Not since you showed up.” She tried to keep any blame out of her voice. That wasn’t why she had come.
The only reason she had ventured all this way, risking Sheryl’s wrath, was because she was desperate to understand. To meet someone in Sheryl’s family, the woman she had spent the better part of her life with. The woman she had asked to elope with her to New Zealand to marry a few years ago, but who had refused on principle as long as the Australian government kept its head up its ass on the matter. A no that hadn’t hurt Kristin in the slightest because she understood the reason behind it.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to look Sheryl up.” Trevor’s head shook a little. “In the end, I felt I had no choice. If only to tell her that none of what happened was her fault. She was only a child when Maureen died, and I was so off my head all the time, I might as well have died along with her.” He stroked the stubble on his chin. “Do you think it was too selfish of me to contact her like that?”
Kristin was taken aback by that question. Not only because she hadn’t expected it, but also because Trevor seemed to possess the same inquisitive nature Sheryl had.
“Not really,” she replied. “But it shocked Sheryl and ripped open all those old wounds. Made her think of the childhood she could have had, perhaps. All the missed opportunities.” Kristin cleared her throat. She glanced at Trevor who looked at her intently, lips slightly pursed. �
��I’ve known Sheryl for a very long time, and she’s never done self-pity. Until you turned up. It has shaken her to the core, and for someone who is impossible to shut up at times, she’s being awfully quiet about it all.”
His lips drew into a smile. “That sounds like Sheryl all right. The not being able to shut up part. She was always like that. Always debating at the dinner table, ever since she was a little girl.” He shook his head. “All I wanted was some reassurance that she did okay in life. That I hadn’t messed her up too badly. I had one of the guys I share this apartment with, a younger fella, look her up on the internet, and I was very impressed when he told me she’s a professor. I could immediately see it, you know? Despite having been absent from her life for so long, if I had any working brain cells left”—a guileless chuckle—“that’s what I would have guessed. Smart as a whip, that girl.” His voice broke a little.
“She’s a wonderful woman.” Kristin hadn’t expected to be moved so much by the sight of this man’s emotions. She found it hard to be angry at him. Perhaps because most of what happened between him and Sheryl did so before they met.
“I let her down in every way. I couldn’t cope. I was a weak, weak man instead of the father Sheryl needed so much at that time. I don’t deserve even a minute of her time, I know that. But I don’t have much time left and… she’s all I think about. Time is rapidly running out for me. Ironically, when you’ve been a drunk most of your life and then become sober, time is all you seem to have. And I spend every second of it thinking about my daughter. Regretting the poor choices I made when she needed me most.” He drummed his fingers on the armrest. “Does Sheryl know you’re here?”
Kristin shook her head. “No, but I will tell her. We’re not the sort to keep secrets from each other.”
“You seem like a lovely woman. I’m glad Sheryl found someone like you. Nothing can ever make me feel better about how I behaved, but knowing that she’s with someone as kind and understanding as yourself gives me a little bit of relief from my regrets.”