Till Death Us Do Part

by Cristina Slough

  Mimi swallowed. She had hoped that she wouldn’t need to see Sara again. She wanted to ask why Jake had come to live with his uncle and not his mother. The whole situation was riddled with craziness.

  Chapter 12

  Mimi

  She woke in the middle of the night. Her wrist was throbbing.

  Her mind spun back to the day before, when Austin confirmed Joel knew Jake was his child. She wondered if Joel would’ve ever told her the truth. She had been in Texas longer than the two weeks she had planned. She had placed her entire life on hold to be here. England seemed a lifetime ago.

  Back at home, life continued moving forward, as it always had. A temp would have been sitting at her desk at work. Mimi was now a ghost herself; drifting, lonely, and desperate to find closure. She thought about Austin and the way he had paid her medical bill. He hadn’t questioned it. He had just done it.

  Was that how it was when Jake was born? Did he just assume responsibility?

  Something about the story wasn’t adding up. What seventeen-year-old voluntarily takes responsibility of a newborn that isn’t his own? Alone in the dark, Mimi decided she had to find out the truth. Once she did, she would return back to the UK. Beyond that, she had no idea how to live her life as a widow

  At some point during her deep thinking, and after another strong painkiller, she fell back to sleep.

  A few hours later, she woke again and pulled back the curtains to blazing sunshine. It was 12.06 p.m. The tablets must have knocked her out cold. She felt embarrassed to be a guest in somebody else’s home and have slept for that long. She searched her brain to try and remember what day it was. Sunday. Austin would be at home, and so would Jake.

  After she got ready, she headed down to the kitchen. Austin was making lunch.

  “I’m sorry. I never sleep in this late,” Mimi said.

  “You needed it. Rest is the best thing to help heal broken bones. I should know; I’ve had enough of them.” He smiled.

  “Thank you…for everything”

  Austin cleared his throat. His hands rested on the kitchen countertop. “No, I’m sorry, Mimi. You deserve the truth. Are you ready to hear it?”

  Mimi froze. Her heart pounded. Am I ready for the truth?

  She said, “I’m not ready. I doubt I’ll ever be, but I need to know.”

  The water in the pan boiled over, spilling all over the stainless steel stove. Austin quickly turned the knob off and picked up a dish cloth to wipe up the mess.

  Despite the worry in her mind, Mimi knew little more could hurt her unless she were to be told that Joel had been in contact with Sara whilst they were married.

  Jake was going to a friend’s house for the day. Austin decided to give up making lunch. He asked Mimi if she wanted to go for a drive and talk.

  “Before I begin,” Austin said with seriousness, “you must understand that Jake is not to know a thing about any of this. He’s a child. I will not have his world turned upside down.” Austin’s eyes darkened as he continued, “and if you so much as breathe a word suggesting I am not his father, I won’t even let you pack your bags. You will be out of here.”

  “I understand, and I won’t say a word,” she said, feeling the threat in his words.

  An hour later, Mimi was back in Austin’s truck. He pulled out of the gravel driveway and drove away from the ranch. Mimi cracked the window open enough to let her dark hair fly. Austin gave her a sideways look. He pulled up to a dead-end road. The grass was overgrown and wild. There was a beaten pathway that looked like it hadn’t had any foot traffic in months.

  “We can’t go any further. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way. Do you feel well enough?” he asked. Mimi nodded and carefully stepped down from the truck. Austin was quickly at her side, offering her his hand to steady her.

  After walking for a good ten minutes, the craggily rocky path opened up. A stream flowed into a beautiful body of water. The air was still and calm. Mimi removed her shoes and stepped into the shallow, cool water. She moved her feet in circles and took in the rugged scenery.

  “Joel and I used to swim here as kids.”

  It was the first time Austin had mentioned his brother’s name voluntarily. It stopped Mimi in her tracks and Austin seemed nervous. He kept pausing in-between speaking to catch his breath. He reached into a backpack he’d brought from the car and laid out a large picnic blanket.

  “So here we are,” he said, his eyes blazing.

  “The moment of truth.”

  “Yup.” He walked across to her, helping her sit.

  “Where do you want me to start?” he asked, looking down at his hands. His confident stance disappeared as he allowed himself to dig deep into his emotions and his feud with his brother.

  Mimi felt lightheaded. She’d craved to know the truth for so long, but now her hands felt clammy and her heart felt like it was wedged in her throat.

  “As brothers, we were different,” he started. “There was only a year between us. Our father was our rock, our hero. He was the head of the family, and he was the one that kept us in line. One day he was here and the next he was gone, just like that. I have gone over it in my head a million times. I’ve replayed a thousand different scenarios in my head. Joel took our father’s death the hardest. We both had our own way of dealing with things. My dad died because of an unavoidable accident. That is the thing that tore my family apart. It should have never happened. After he was gone, my memory gets a little fuzzy. I remember bits, but I was so young, I’m not sure which are real memories or the blanks I have let myself fill in.”

  Mimi cleared her throat. Austin’s version coincided with the story Joel told her. She was grateful that he at least wasn’t a total liar. She saw a water bottle sticking out of Austin’s bag.

  “May I?”

  He took the bottle and twisted the lid off for her. She took a sip and fixed her gaze on him. She searched his eyes for emotion, but there was nothing—just a darkened expression.

  He recalled how life was difficult after their father died and how they almost had to grow up overnight. They were expected to be responsible from a young age. They had help from other family members, but life had turned a corner and they were thrust into an adult world neither of them were ready for.

  “Sara came into my life when I was sixteen, soon to be seventeen.”

  Mimi’s ears pricked up. She turned to her side, ready to hear all about this mystery woman that had carried her husband’s baby inside her for nine months.

  “So, Sara…she was your girlfriend?”

  “She was. Man, I was hooked on that girl. She transferred from out of state. I asked her out on a date and that was that. We spent all our time together—after school, on weekends. I’d sneak her into my room after my mom had gone to bed. She was my first. I was totally in love with her.”

  Mimi was trying to piece together the picture in her head.

  “One night, Sara was meant to come over. She told me she wasn’t feeling well, so she cancelled. I was disappointed, but I understood. I heard a noise coming from the outhouse. We’d already had an intruder before.”

  “The intruder that Joel caught in your house when he took your father’s gun.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Naturally, after that, we were all pretty nervous. I looked around the house, and everything seemed fine. I grabbed a butcher’s knife from the kitchen. I crept into the outhouse. There was somebody in there. I could hear rustling and grunting. I managed to find the light switch after fumbling ‘round in the dark, and that’s when I found my brother with my girlfriend. I don’t need to fill in the blanks, do I?”

  Mimi’s face was white. She imagined how devastated Austin must have been. She was immediately furious with Joel. She felt sick to her stomach at the image in her head.

  “What did you do?”

  “We got into a fight. Joel was enraged when I called Sara a bitch.”

  “Did he love Sara?”

  “I doubt that. He was always angry ab
out something. He was out of control. I took the first punch and he got hold of the knife. He slashed it across my chest. He didn’t want to kill me—that much I know—but he wanted to hurt me.”

  “That’s where your scar is from? Joel, he did that to you?”

  “Yeah. That’s not really important.”

  “What was Sara doing during all of this?”

  “She was screaming, crying, and saying how sorry she was. We eventually stopped fighting. I broke up with Sara. She tried to call, and she begged me to go back to her. When I didn’t hear from her for a month, I thought she finally got the message. It was during summer break. Joel and I didn’t speak. It broke our mother’s heart. She didn’t want us fighting over a girl, least of all Sara. She couldn’t stand her.”

  “How did you and Joel go on living together and not talking? Was he ever sorry?”

  “No. He never apologised, and we didn’t talk again. Our mom was the one to tell me he enlisted in the Corps. She’d encouraged it; she felt he was lost. I was happy he was getting the hell out of the house and out of my life.”

  Mimi’s mind flashed back to Valentine night in her flat. She’d burned incense and lit the room in candles. Joel had said that his brother was furious that he’d left to go to the Marines. Her head started to throb as she tried to digest all this information. They say the truth hurts, but this was killing her.

  “After he’d enlisted, Sara showed up at the ranch, three months pregnant.”

  “Well, I am going to have to ask. How did you know you were not the father?”

  “I didn’t at fist. For the next six months of her pregnancy, I believed I was. Until after Jake was born. He had anemia and needed a blood transfusion. I thought I was the obvious choice, but it turns out the hospital had a policy that close relatives can’t donate. I loved Jake, but I had a nagging feeling he wasn’t mine. Sara claimed she and Joel had slept together only once and they had used protection. Something inside of me couldn’t shake this feeling, so I insisted on DNA testing.”

  Mimi tried to remember what being seventeen felt like. She hugged her arms around her chest, almost like she were trying to protect herself from the truth that was finally bursting free.

  She thought about Sara and how she played these two brothers against each other, how she destroyed a family bond that should have lasted a lifetime. Now it was too late.

  “Joel came back on leave. He was tested and that was that. He was gone again. A week later, the lab results confirmed that Joel was the father. The results were 99.9% accurate. Those kind of numbers don’t throw you into any more doubt. It simply gives you the cold, hard truth.”

  Austin continued with the rest of the story. Mimi listened. He told her how Sara’s parents disowned her. She couldn’t cope with being a teen mother, so Austin and Joel’s mother stepped in to raise Jake. Slowly but surely, as the infant cried into the depths of the night, Austin stepped into a fatherly role. He explained that it wasn’t a choice as much as it was a calling. With Sara and Joel out of the picture, he wanted to ensure somebody was there for this child, even if his own parents had run scared. After their mother passed away, Austin raised Jake alone.

  “Did Joel not want anything to do with Jake?”

  “No. Last year he relinquished all of his parental rights and I became Jake’s legal adoptive parent.”

  “Last year?” Mimi said as she thought, Last year is when we got married.

  “Yes. I knew he was married. I’d assumed, at one point, you could have been behind it, but the truth always rises to the surface. So that’s everything, Mimi. That is why Joel and I didn’t have that brotherly love.”

  Chapter 13

  Austin

  Austin rode his horse hard. He had not been thinking straight since he told Mimi the truth. He rode for miles, off into the peaks and valleys of the ranch. He liked the freedom he felt as he rode as well as hearing nothing but the sound of Troy’s neighs and his hooves stomping on the ground.

  He took a deep breath and, for the first time, thought about Joel and the fact he was dead.

  For so long, Austin had treated his brother like he’d died a long time ago, but he was not prepared to feel the way he did now that he understood it was reality. There was something about Mimi he felt drawn to. Perhaps it was her sincerity, or maybe it was the way her deep brown eyes looked at him as if she understood him.

  Twenty-four hours later, Mimi looked like she’d taken several punches to the gut. When he had finally told her the truth, she hadn’t said much. She hadn’t even cried.

  Austin wondered why his brother had lied to his wife. He suspected it was because he wanted to be her perfect man. Austin had no idea if Joel had loved Mimi, but he’d married her and seemingly, for no reason, to serve himself. She had come from a normal working background, so Joel hadn’t used her to marry into money.

  Austin needed to get away from Mimi for a few hours. He needed distance from her to reflect. Now that she knew the whole story, he suspected it was only a matter of time before she returned to England.

  He knew it was best if they parted ways, but there was something about her he couldn’t explain. He felt the need to look after her. He wanted to look after her. Austin almost laughed out loud at himself when he thought about wanting to make Mimi happy; it was as if he were a guardian angel for the people Joel had touched and damaged.

  Now that he processed his thoughts, he decided it was best if Mimi left. If she had not yet made her departing arrangements, he would ask her to do so. Nothing good could come out of Mimi staying longer. Jake already had taken a shining to this mystery British stranger—a woman he mistook for being somebody significant in his father’s life.

  It was safer to send her away so that he and Jake could go back to a normal life with no complications and nothing to upset or distort their perfect harmony.

  ***

  Mimi

  Mimi was back at the ranch, sitting in the guest room that overlooked the green grounds. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two out buildings. She had never noticed them before.

  She knew everything now. There was no need for her to remain in Texas. She knew that she must head back to England and start her life over.

  In a way, she was grateful she and Joel didn’t have a home picked out together. She would go back to her flat in Finchley that wasn’t their marital home. She didn’t want to go back to her job. She wanted to find herself, her true self, away from the grief, drama, lies and deceit. She wanted to rediscover herself, and she knew the only way to do that was through art. She needed to paint and keep painting until the picture before her showed her where she needed to go—a path she needed to travel, alone and without Joel.

  Mimi sat on the bed and let her body sink into the soft mattress. Her mind was strained and her body exhausted.

  You lied to me, Joel. Beyond that, you deceived me. Who are you?

  Who did I marry?

  Do you know how stupid I feel? How angry and disappointed? Why did you never tell me you had a child?

  I’ve tried to come up with a million different reasons as to why you withheld the truth, but I’m hitting blanks—a big fat zero. I have stayed awake at night, loving you, missing you, but now I stay awake hurt and angry. I still love you, at least I think I do, the you that I said, “I do” too.

  What worries me is I have no idea if you really loved me. You had a whole other life, one that was never a reflection of the truth, and I can’t wrap my head around that.

  And now you’re gone. My heart is in a million confused pieces and they can never be put back together without you here to answer the questions I have. You have missed out on your son. Jake is a smart, wonderful little boy. You turned your back on him. How could you?

  If we had a child, would you have turned your back on us too?

  Who are you?

  Mimi wrote furiously, her pen denting the page, the ink dark and angry, and her handwriting scribbled and messy, like her head.

  She lo
oked at her wardrobe, at the hanging clothes waiting to be packed and moved back to England. Only she wished she could stay here longer, even though there was nothing keeping her at the ranch. Her entire family and friends were back in the UK, missing her and wanting her back. She knew that Austin wanted her to move on. He hadn’t said it, but her being there was a constant reminder he was to lying to his son.

  She set her pen down, crossed the room, and looked out the bedroom window. She watched the sun as it started to set and paint the clouds pink. Austin was on his horse, the jet black stallion that looked just like Black Beauty. He hung his head low, his Stetson covering his face. She watched him, the lone cowboy—a good man keeping his family legacy alive and watching over a young boy with the love of an amazing father. He was worthy of being called Daddy.

  Mimi quickly straightened herself up. She applied a quick touch-up of makeup and ran her GHD flat iron through her hair to make it shiny and sleek.

  A few minutes later, she entered the kitchen, where Austin stood. He was shuffling through some mail.

  “Hi,” she said with uncertainty.

  Austin stared at her. His face looked tired, as if he had been up all night, thinking.

  “How are you doing?” he said without conviction.

  She handed him Jake’s birth certificate.

  “I’ve been keeping hold of this. I had no right to. I’m sorry.”

  He took the document without reading the content. He knew what it said. He’d read it a thousand times. The truth is the truth, but he didn’t need a piece of paper to give him the right to be Jake’s dad. The adoption papers mattered to him. Nobody could take Jake away from him.

  “Thank you,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

  “For what?”

  “For your honesty. And for giving me the truth, letting me stay—for everything, Austin. Thank you for everything.”

  He looked at her lips, soft and full. He wished he could take her in his arms and kiss her.