“Just something stupid,” I told her. “A dumb joke.”
She blinked at me as if she found it surprising that I could still have a capacity for enjoying jokes. She’d seen me cry a lot, but she couldn’t know the extent of those tears, or their motivations. I was sorry, sure, about the way things had ended with Peter. It was personally devastating. But it was even worse that I’d ruined my own mother’s relationship. I found myself crying over that more and more often and less over Peter.
An older text from him, for example: “Very mature, Gemma, ignoring all attempts at communication. I guess I should’ve expected as much from a twenty-three-year-old.”
When could I be done with twenty-three? I’d thought that this was going to finally be my year, the age when I’d come into my own, a job, a penthouse, a wonderful boyfriend. Instead, it had been a travesty. I was eager for twenty-four, if only to leave this entire year behind me.
Case in point, the first text Peter had sent me after I’d left his office forever: “Don’t think you’re going to get to keep on living in the penthouse. I’ve learned my lesson with charity cases.”
Such a prince.
And yet here I was, agonizing over each character of each of those three messages, wondering if there was something hidden there, something I couldn’t discern. Maybe there was something I was missing, some meaning that could only be read between the lines.
I was pathetic.
“Don’t contact me again,” I typed, then sent it. I felt an odd finality when the indication that my message had been delivered popped up. But then I panicked when it changed to “read,” meaning that Peter was holding his own phone in this very minute, examining the words I’d sent him to divine their own meaning. I worked swiftly as another icon popped up, showing that he was writing a message back to me. I tapped on his contact and punched the block button with my finger. Instantly, his name grayed out, a red warning icon informing me that Peter Bly had been blocked from contacting me.
I realized I’d been breathing hard during this entire encounter, as if I’d been running away. Whatever. It was done. I deleted Peter’s number, deleted those messages, as if doing so would scrub him from my brain. All I wanted to do was forget all of this and move forward.
And I knew that I couldn’t do it without telling my mother the truth.
“Mom?” She turned to me, and I almost faltered, but I steeled myself instead. She deserved this truth, and I deserved whatever consequences stemmed from its revelation. “I have to tell you something, and it is really hard.”
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” she asked, sounding tired.
“No. It’s worse than that. I…I know why your relationship with Frank ended.”
“Gemma, I know why it ended, too,” she said. “Because of dishonesty on my part. Because of Peter and his private investigator. Because Frank couldn’t trust me.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It ended because of me.”
“That just doesn’t make sense,” my mother said, attempting to dismiss me by turning back to the television. Something had driven the lovers apart again on the program. It was as if they couldn’t ever get it right.
“It’s true,” I insisted. “Listen to me. Peter wouldn’t have been involved if it wasn’t for me. The private investigator wouldn’t have dug as deeply if it wasn’t for me.”
She smiled sadly. “Your presence in Peter’s life, your relationship with him, didn’t end my relationship,” my mother said. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I can, and you should, too. I…made a joke. A bad joke. I don’t know why I made it. It was the day you and Frank came into Peter’s office, the day you and I went out to make all the decisions for your wedding.”
My mother teared up at my mention of those joyful preparations, and I wished I could stop, wished I could avoid hurting her even more, but she had to know the truth. I had to tell it to her.
“I said to Peter, in an offhand way, that you were eager to spend Frank’s money.” I swallowed hard. “That you were a gold digger. And I made the joke again when you tried on fancy dresses. You know. The one you only tried on for fun. With all the tulle.”
“I remember the one,” my mother said faintly.
“It wasn’t until later, after you had called me with the news that the wedding was canceled, when I confronted Peter about it, that he told me it was my comment that had prompted him to make the inquiries.” My heart was beating rapidly, my breath coming and going just as quickly as it had been when I blocked Peter’s number from my phone. The truth hurt so much, but after it was out of my mouth, just hanging in the air between us, I felt almost a great relief. Now my mother could understand that I was the only one to blame, not her. Now she could move on from her own heartache, stop watching these damn movies that gave too much stupid hope and not enough reality. Sometimes, the hero and heroine didn’t end up together again. Sometimes, they had to just pick it all up and tell themselves that life had to go on. That was the truth.
“Do you really think I’m a gold digger?” my mother asked quietly.
“No, of course not.”
“Then why did you say that about me?” She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, and that hurt even worse. “That’s not a kind thing to say about anyone, Gemma. Especially about your mother.”
“It was just a joke.” It sounded like a weak excuse, and it was. If I hadn’t said it, maybe things would've been the same. Maybe we would’ve been making last-minute wedding preparations today instead of letting the shadows get long inside the house, neither of us interested in turning on a lamp.
“I know you and I weren’t very rich, when you were younger and still living here,” she said, drawing herself up with broken dignity. “But I like to think we had what we needed. And we had each other. That was the important thing. I know our lives were frugal, that we had to be careful with the money, but I resent the idea that you imagined I might throw myself at money, given the opportunity.”
“That’s not what I wanted to do,” I said. “And I agree. You gave me everything when I was young. I know…the sacrifices you made. And I’m thankful. It was a stupid joke. I was only trying to be funny, trying to impress Peter.”
“A lot of truth is said in jest, Gemma.”
“Nothing about this was true.” I shifted on the couch, thoroughly miserable now but embracing it. My mother deserved to be angry at me, to rake me over the coals, and it was up to me to take it. This was her right, just as it was my mistake. “I was just as uncomfortable as you to spend that money. Peter was always pushing me. Did you know he paid for everything? Every single expense I had was settled with his money. He said he wanted to do it because he had more money than he knew what to do with and I didn’t have any money at all.”
“What do you mean?” my mother asked. “You had money. You had a savings account. I asked you about it.”
“I didn’t have a savings account,” I said. “I was living from paycheck to paycheck. I didn’t make enough money to feed myself sometimes, and I was always late on rent. I worked two jobs until Peter gave me that one, and that wasn’t until we met you and Frank for dinner that night, on my birthday.”
“What?” My mother gaped at me.
I confessed everything. It seemed as if one hard truth had freed up the way for others. It was a catalyst for me to come clean about all of the lying I’d done since moving to New York City, all the false assurances to my mother that everything was, in fact, just fine, when nothing was. I told her about walking dogs, about cocktail waitressing, about the horrible apartment, the things I’d pawned to keep it even if I hated it, the way I’d scrimped and saved only to pay my bills, the utter despair I’d felt that I wasn’t living my dream, that I was barely surviving at all. I told her all of it, absolutely unloaded, and by the time I was done, I was hoarse and exhausted, emptied out.
Seeing my mother’s mouth work wordlessly in disbelief and shock undid me. I had hurt her so b
adly that suddenly the truth had come pouring out of me: all the lies I’d fed her over the past months about my successes in New York City detangled. I didn’t understand what I was trying to do in this moment, only that I’d confessed to ruining my mother’s wedding and relationship and life and I wanted a completely clean slate while I was at it. It was the only way either of us was going to move forward.
Maybe I was just trying to protect myself. And maybe it was a punishment.
“Gemma, I don’t understand why you thought you had to lie to me about all of this,” she finally said in a small, sad voice. “I’m your mother. You can tell me anything.”
And now I had to say the worst truth of all, the one buried at the heart of the world of lies I’d built.
“I would imagine that I told you those lies to protect you,” I said. “Much like you lied all those years to protect me.”
Chapter 14
Childhood had, overall, been a positive experience for me, but it was only through the intervention — and lies — of my mother. If I had known the truth of the ugliness of that period, I wouldn’t have such an ambivalent attitude toward everything.
It had been as normal as it could’ve been. I had gone to birthday parties my classmates held, played in the park after school in the kinds of quick and fluid friendships that form on monkey bars. From the outside, my little family looked normal. From the inside, from my perspective, anyway, it seemed that everything was normal. Sure, maybe the dads of all of the little girls I played with were more visible presences in their lives, but nothing else really seemed amiss.
And that was exactly what my mother had wanted to do: present the illusion of normalcy. The truth was, our family situation was far from normal. I would never have known if I hadn’t witnessed the truth for myself.
My father was absent often. When he was at home, he liked to exorcise whatever insecurities or frustrations he had inside himself by hitting my mother. I didn’t discover this until I was already in my teens — a child nearly grown — but it had been going on for the duration of their marriage. It was, perhaps, the reason why I played outside so often — if not in the park, then on the front lawn, the driveway. Why I attended sleepovers nearly every weekend but never hosted any of them myself. Why my mother skipped parent-teacher conferences or asked to conduct them by phone. Why she styled her hair to fall romantically over one eye. Why she caked on her makeup and kept the lights low throughout the house.
None of it was strange to me because she had made it canon. My mother had shaped the reality that we needed to embrace. She’d edited out all the ugly parts and put together happiness for me from the footage that remained. She was so careful to protect me that I only saw my father in glimpses and backward glances as I was shooed upstairs at his arrivals. I wouldn’t have been able to pick his face out of a lineup of other tall, dark-haired, mustached men. I didn’t even know, for sure, what he did for a living. Where he stayed when he wasn’t at home. I wasn’t to bother him. My mother made that much clear. And if anyone asked, he was a businessman — one who traveled almost constantly.
“Go up and watch TV,” my mother would tell me. I was the envy of all my friends because I had a television in my room — one that was secondhand and peppered its programs with static snow, but a television nonetheless. It was only there because it was a distraction mechanism. Something I could turn on to drown out the loud music my mother would play as a distraction from her own private hell.
My father would beat her to the tune of soaring gospel, golden oldies, sweeping classical arrangements, and whatever else the radio downstairs could pipe into our lives. She wasn’t picky about her music. He wasn’t picky about where his blows landed.
How did I make it through my childhood without realizing anything was wrong? It was a testament to my mother’s misguided resilience, her careful blocking — sitting on a couch for two straight days as if nothing were wrong when he’d broken a couple of her ribs and she couldn’t walk without limping or crying out in pain, or always standing on my left if her left eye was blackened, or employing a platoon of scarves when he’d left fingermarks on her neck. Or maybe it was a testament of my ability to firmly believe that everything was okay.
I wasn’t a rebellious teen, but I was very busy. My mother’s emphasis on spending as little time at home as possible translated into me signing up for all the extracurricular activities I thought I could handle. Academic teams and debate competitions and writing club deadlines kept me after school almost every afternoon into evening, or at the library nearby. My schedule was unpredictable. I could be home some days directly after school, or I could stay overnight at one of my girlfriends’ houses, preparing for a presentation the next day.
It got harder for my mother to schedule her own beatings based on when I would be home.
On one of those days when I returned to the house early, immediately after school, I meant to go right back out again. All I’d wanted to do was stop by and get a notebook I’d forgotten that morning that I needed for my activity that afternoon.
It was because of that lapse of organization that my reality was shattered.
I burst into the kitchen to find my father’s arm in the middle of a downward arc that connected to my mother’s face with a crack audible even over the show tune the radio blared. We looked at one another with equal horror — my mother because I’d discovered the ugliness she had worked for so many years to conceal, my father because he probably didn't even know he had offspring, and me because the first time I got a good, long look at my father’s face was while he was in the middle of hitting my mother’s face.
I was a smart girl. I knew that when she played the radio loudly, my mother wanted her privacy and I was to stay away. Now I knew why that privacy was so important to her. She hadn’t wanted me to see her getting hit. And she hadn’t wanted me to see my father doing the hitting.
I couldn’t explain my reaction to the bizarre scene. But all I could think of doing in the heat of the moment was flinging my backpack at my father and running for it as if I were the one getting hit. I didn’t slow down until I was out of breath, panting and sobbing at the same time, at an intersection in town that I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten to. I sat on a park bench until dark, then slowly picked my way home, my feet aching, my muscles sore from my impromptu sprint.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table without the lights on, the radio deafening in its silence. I flipped the switch at the door and she looked up at me, the welt on her cheek from my father’s hand still visible.
“He won’t be coming back here anymore,” she told me, and I couldn’t tell whether she was happy or sad. It was probably a mixture of feelings too complex for me to understand. I still didn’t understand it, to this day.
“Good,” I’d replied, smelly and disheveled, aware that I’d missed my extracurricular activity, hadn’t had dinner, and still needed to do homework for tomorrow’s classes. I dragged myself upstairs, took a shower, pulled on my pajamas, and put myself to bed.
My mother came to me at some point during the night and woke me up. Her words still seemed like a dream to me, even today.
“Your father did the best he could,” she said in a tone that made me question whether she was actually talking to me for my benefit or hers. “He wasn’t raised by good people. He did things he was taught to be right. He provided for our home, and that’s what kept us here. We wouldn’t have had money otherwise. We wouldn’t have been able to stay in this house, or this town. You would’ve had to go to a different school. And I don’t know what I would’ve done for work.”
“Are you going to tell the police?” I asked, bleary.
“No. Absolutely not. If the police know, everyone will know. People will pity you, Gemma, and that is the worst thing of all. Pity.”
I could’ve argued that getting hit by a person who was supposed to love you and care for you was the worst thing at all, but I slipped back into slumber.
It was the only time w
e’d talked about what had happened — until now.
My mother had been shocked into silence by my recollections and revelations, staring straight ahead, not even at the television. All of this had happened at this very house, and yet she continued to live in it. That was perhaps what puzzled me most of all. After my father had finally stopped showing up to use her as a punching bag, she’d never even moved on with her life, never tried for a fresh start.
I’d been excited for her when she’d announced that she was dating Frank, thinking that she was finally ready to move on with her life, but I ruined that for her.
“Why didn’t you leave this place?” I asked her, waving my hand around the room. “Doesn’t this house hold all of that drama still for you?”
“Lots of happy memories, too,” she said softly.
“Like what?” I demanded. “What could’ve possibly happened in this house that made a happy memory?”
“When you lost your first tooth,” my mother said, the corners of her mouth quirking upward for a brief second. “How it just popped out that morning when you were brushing your teeth before school, no blood or pain, just surprise. You screamed, and I came running. Had to pick it out of a puddle of toothpaste foam you’d spat in the sink before it went down the drain. I let you take it to school even though it wasn’t your day for show and tell.”
“Mom…” What was I supposed to say to that? It was only a vague memory for me, but it had been the first thing that popped into her head. How could that simple occurrence outweigh all of the other heartache that had taken place here?
My mother looked at me. “All I ever wanted to do was give you a happy life.”
“And you did.” There were tears in my eyes because there were tears in hers. “I would never dispute that.”
“Then why are you telling me all this?” she asked, the television program we’d been watching long since ended, some other story now the background music to our suffering. “Why would you want to rehash such unhappiness?”
CALLIE (The Naughty Ones Book 1) Page 62