Shadows and Lies

by Karen Reis

  “I can’t believe I hang out with you,” Genny said in laughing exasperation.

  “I love you too,” I replied sweetly.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “Just a minute!” I yelled, drying my hands on a towel. It was the next day and I had only three hours before my “date” with Dan. I was doing the dishes, a chore I detested, and had been thinking of home. The house I’d been raised in was a dump, but at least it had had a dishwasher. And a washer and dryer. And a backyard. And rooms separated by real walls.

  Studio apartments are not all their cracked up to be.

  Curious, I went and looked out my peephole, not knowing who it could possibly be since I didn’t get that many visitors. In the back of my head I wondered if perhaps it was Sean come to call. The notion made my heart begin to race furiously and I started to sweat.

  But it was just Nancy.

  Oh, God, it was Nancy.

  The sight of her made my heart start to beat to a different stressful tune, and I sucked in a breath of surprise, braced both hands against the door frame and studied her for about 30 seconds. She appeared to be in an amiable mood. She was frowning, but that was normal. The fact that she wasn’t red in the face and didn’t have a stick in her hands boded well for whatever had prompted her to visit. Feeling only a moderate degree of apprehension as to my safety and future mental health, I opened the door.

  “Hello Nancy,” I said warily, quickly reaching behind me to belatedly turn off my radio, which I often listened to while I did chores. Nancy disapproved of most music. She figured that if it wasn’t played on the Lawrence Welk Show, it was trash and something to be automatically criticized and banned.

  My stress level kicked up a notch as memories of radios being thrown out my sisters’ bedroom windows paraded across my mind. My parent’s house was two-stories high, with the bedrooms upstairs. The radios had not survived, nor had they ever been replaced.

  Nancy looked at me as she stood outside on the landing. “Are you going to invite me inside?” she asked, sounding only slightly annoyed with me.

  I shook my head. “Why are you here?”

  My voice was firm, but I was curious. I had been dead to Nancy for eight months and two weeks. Something big must have happened for her to suddenly show up at my door like this.

  Nancy shuffled her feet and adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder. She actually looked uncomfortable. “I came here to apologize,” she said gruffly.

  I could of course only stare at her for a moment, not able to believe my ears. “Apologize?” I asked dumbly.

  “It was brought to my attention by a certain person that I have been acting very childish lately – his words, not mine – and I was persuaded to agree,” she said stiffly. I could only stare with wider eyes. “I’ve come to realize,” she continued, “That I said some very hurtful words to you when you left – moved out – and I’m sorry that I told you that you weren’t welcome at home. You are. And I’m sorry for other things I’ve said and done in past few months.”

  The apology sounded sincere, but frankly I was unconvinced. Nancy had been apologizing to me for most of my life, but it didn’t change how she continued to act. Should I let her in? I wondered. I studied her face, looking for clues there because it was entirely possible that she had an ulterior motive in apologizing. But instead of finding an answer, the only thing I could see was that she looked older, and it hit me that it had been eight months since I’d last seen her. She had more gray hair, more lines on her face, and she looked tired and worn out. I felt a crack in my emotional defenses open up, and I felt pity for her and how her life had turned out.

  “I’m going to try to have more control over my temper,” she added when I continued to say nothing.

  Against my better judgment, I opened the door wider and gestured for her to come in.

  “Thank you,” Nancy said, accepting my invitation with uncommon grace.

  We stood awkwardly in my entryway for a moment. “How’s thing’s going?” I finally asked.

  “As well as can be expected,” Nancy said vaguely, which didn’t tell me a thing, of course.

  Want the ten cent tour?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  I had made strides in decorating my apartment. I showed Nancy my two used armchairs and the little wooden coffee table that I’d refinished. These, along with a bookcase and some art picked up at garage sales made up my “living room” area. A little glass topped bistro style table sat in my “dining area” with two mismatched chairs. My “bedroom” was hidden behind a Japanese style screen I’d found outside my complex’s dumpsters. Nancy ignored the screen, which I’d painted to look like new, inspected the art without enthusiasm, but looked critically at the contents of my bookcase.

  “Star Trek,” she muttered, obviously displeased.

  There weren’t just Star Trek books there, but also some Star Wars and many non-TV based science fiction novels. Nancy just called all sci-fi Star Trek because she thought it was evil and thus all sci-fi was evil. Most of the books she was inspecting I had bought when I was still at home; I had secretly stashed them away in boxes where Nancy couldn’t see their titles and throw them away. Now they were all proudly displayed in that bookcase, and Nancy didn’t like it.

  “What a waste of money,” Nancy grumbled. “If you ask me.”

  “Well, it’s my money,” I couldn’t help but snap. “And I didn’t ask you.” God, but couldn’t she just be nice and positive for once?

  “It must be nice to be so rich,” Nancy replied acidly. “If you ever come back home, I guarantee that you won’t be able to bring this useless crap into the house.”

  If I am so rich, why am I living in a studio apartment? I wanted to yell. Instead I smiled sweetly and shook my head. “I’m not coming back, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  Nancy looked like she wanted to slap me, but walked away instead, aimlessly opening my linen closet, which was right next to my bathroom. I had incidentally not cleaned my bathroom in a while, another cardinal sin in Nancy’s book, and I hoped she didn’t decide to peek inside.

  “If you folded your towels the way I taught you to, you’d have more room in here,” Nancy said caustically. I didn’t say a thing so she added snidely, “But now you’re away from home, I guess you think you know better.”

  I didn’t reply. I suppose that I could have just told her to leave at that point, because I knew for sure that she had not come there looking to make peace. I was curious about her real reason for coming though, which as I said before would have to be pretty big for her to pretend to be repentant. I decided to wait her out, because Nancy was terrible at pretending, and saying nothing would make her get to the point faster.

  Nancy continued to poke around my apartment, and eventually ended up in my kitchen. It was there that her aha! moment came.

  Her eyes zeroed in on a letter that was stuck on my refrigerator door.

  But she didn’t immediately pounce. “At least you keep this place clean,” Nancy said with obvious contempt in her voice as she reread the return address label on the letter’s envelope:

  Barbara Vitagliano

  4591 E. Craig Rd. #2101

  N. Las Vegas, NV 89121

  “When your sisters had their apartment, they lived in filth,” Nancy continued. “They also wasted their money on frivolous things. They still have most of their junk piled up in the storage shed behind the house. I feel tempted sometimes to go out at night and put a torch to it all.”

  It was a completely empty threat due to the fact that she’d get arrested if she ever tried it, but it was still a hurtful thing to say nonetheless. It was true that my sisters weren’t the best people at saving money, but then who’s perfect at it? Besides, fate did them in. Lindsay’s hours at the store had been cut and Vanessa lost her job. They moved back home, and Vanessa went to work for my dad and Nancy as their secretary in the mess he called an office. It was a thankless job where she was browbeaten by
Nancy every day for not being good enough. Lindsay was in school so she could get a job at a doctor’s office.

  When she got her degree or certificate or whatever they gave people for graduating from administrative courses like the one she took, Lindsay would be able to get a good job and hopefully she and Vanessa would be able to move out again. To hear Nancy talk about it though, you’d think that this schooling was the end of the world. Really, it just meant job security. Vanessa and Lindsay wouldn’t ever have to move back home again. They would be out of Nancy’s control once more, but she hated that almost more than she hated having them there.

  “Well,” I said, feeling like poking the proverbial tiger with the proverbial stick. “Hopefully they won’t be there much longer. Lindsay will graduate soon and-”

  “Do you know that these classes are taking Lindsay away from church?” Nancy fired at me. “She has missed four Sundays in a row now, and Wednesday night worship too. I keep telling her to drop out – she needs to keep her priorities straight – but she just won’t listen to me. She’s as stubborn as you are, Carrie.”

  My family is very religious. We never missed church throughout my childhood unless we were sick, and even then the well members of my family went while the sick stayed behind. I have always liked going and listening to the discourses, even if I was the one relegated to sit next to Nancy, who insisted that I had to sit absolutely still. I couldn’t move a muscle. Before and after the sermon though, I was up and about playing with my friends and talking with older people who I liked and being sociable in general. Nancy, however, just sat in her seat and pouted, frowning like a beast. She had no real friends, though some people tried to be nice to her. On the way home afterwards, she spent each trip dissecting the faults of all the people I and my sisters liked. I swear, for all the time we spent at that church, she never once paid attention to anything the preacher said. And certainly, whenever he talked about imitating Christ in our manner of speech and action, she must have totally zoned out. Even then, standing in my apartment, I wanted to open a Bible and wave Ephesians 3:31, 32 in her face.

  “Let all malicious bitterness and anger and wrath and screaming and abusive speech be taken away from YOU along with all badness. But become kind to one another, tenderly compassionate, freely forgiving one another just as God also by Christ freely forgave YOU.”

  Nancy hardly ever forgave, and she certainly never forgot.

  She was such a hypocrite.

  But waving a Bible in her face wouldn’t do any good. Instead I pointed at the letter on my refrigerator. “You curious about that letter?” I was tired of waiting her out.

  Nancy took a deep breath as if to fortify herself. “I see IT has written to you,” she finally said in a disgusted tone. “I got wind that she might contact you. I wanted to find out for sure.”

  I suppressed a sigh. IT was my biological mother, the writer of the letter on my refrigerator. IT was the name my Dad and Nancy had given to Barbara Vitagliano because they were not the sort of forward thinking parents who didn’t talk badly about the ex-parent. They had, in fact, been downing Barbara to my face for as long as I could remember.

  I asked casually, though I was seething at Nancy’s attempt at manipulation, “How did you get wind of this?”

  Nancy waved my question aside. “That doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not you’re going to open that letter and see what IT wants.

  “I’m not sure whether I’m going to open it or not,” I said carefully. “I assume that Barbara wants to get in contact with me the same way she did with Vanessa and Lindsay once they were of an age…”

  Nancy threw her hands into the air as if she thought I was crazy. “You know, if she really cared for you, she would have had contact with you girls when you were growing up. Despite the fact that your father had custody she was never banned from seeing you, but after a few years she got tired of you girls and stopped coming around. I don’t understand why you’d even think about giving her the time of day when she never did the same for you.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Maybe it’s because she gave birth to me, and even though she made some mistakes, I don’t hate her,” I said evenly.

  “Well, you should,” Nancy said bitingly.

  “Why?” I asked curiously.

  The subject and events surrounding my parents’ divorce was a state secret as far as Dad and Nancy were concerned. I was so young at the time of their split up that I had virtually no memories it. What tidbits I did know came from adult conversations I’d eavesdropped on. I do remember that one time when I was watching TV in my parent’s bed I was told to leave because Mommy and Daddy had to talk. I now know they were talking about divorce. The only other memory I have from that time is of my dad, my sisters and myself sitting down to dinner. It was just the four of us and I remember wondering where Mommy was. Other than that, I remembered nothing. Barbara had just been gone. Neither Lindsay nor Vanessa would talk about it, and the subject was otherwise forbidden by the adults.

  “Why should I hate Barbara?” I repeated when Nancy didn’t answer me right away. I stepped casually between her and the letter so that she couldn’t rip it up, an action that I wouldn’t put past her.

  “Because she didn’t want you, Carrie!” Nancy said in a rush. “She signed a paper at the divorce saying that she forfeited all custody rights to your father! That’s why! She didn’t want you; you three were a burden to her! She doesn’t deserve contact from you now; she doesn’t deserve a second chance!”

  Nancy had raised her voice, yelling at me, her eyes bugging out the way they always did when she got a little amped up. However, if the news of not being wanted was supposed to shock me into obediently ripping the letter up and tossing it in the garbage, Nancy was sorely mistaken.

  “I already know about that,” I told her quietly. “Lindsay told me a while back.” She’d told me about it when I was still in middle school. Lindsay had done so to make me cry when I’d accidentally on purpose cut up the hem of her favorite dress with pinking shears. She hadn’t offered any extra details, though she did succeed in making me cry.

  “Oh,” Nancy said, suddenly deflated. Then, “Well, you still shouldn’t read it. It’s probably going to be full of lies about your father.”

  I cocked my head. “What sort of lies?”

  Nancy pursed her lips. “That’s none of your business. Are you going to open that letter or throw it away as you should?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure if I’m going to read it. I’m still thinking about it.”

  “She’s untrustworthy,” Nancy bit out.

  “She’s my mother,” I retorted harshly.

  I regretted my words immediately. Nancy, for all her faults, was a woman who wanted to be loved. She was abusive, she was temperamental, but she was also a step-parent from an abusive background herself with a loser for a husband. She had raised me to be at the very least a moral person, even if she had screwed me up emotionally. So I added, because I had to show her that I was loyal to her despite her abuse, “But you’re my mom.”

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed. “Not good enough, Carrie. Not good enough.”

  “Too bad,” I shrugged. “You don’t control me.” I was starting to get a headache though.

  Nancy raised her hand to me this time, fully intending to slap me I was sure, but I just glowered at her and stepped out of her reach, my heart beating wildly. “Get out of my home,” I said in a menacing voice. “Or I will call the police and have you arrested for assault.”

  Nancy lowered her hand, but the look in her eyes was murderous. She left without another word only because she knew I was serious. I followed her out my door and watched her as she descended the stairs, shoving past Sean, who was coming up them in his dirty coveralls. He was home from work early.

  “Hello,” he said congenially, but Nancy ignored him. He shrugged and then turned to look up at me as if I should give him an explanation for the actions of my rude departing guest, but I couldn’t. />
  My face crumpled as he looked at questioningly, and the tears came. I couldn’t stand to cry in front of him or risk having Nancy look back and see me, so I whirled inside and slammed the door, bolting it shut. I sat down in front of my door on the floor and sobbed, letting all the pent up rage and hurt that had accumulated over the last few minutes out. A soft knock sounded at my door, but I just ignored it, though it was likely Sean. I hoped it was Sean.

  No one knocked again, and I made myself stop crying after a while and finish doing the dishes. I couldn’t help but rerun that horrible confrontation through my mind over and over, which made want to start crying again. I had accumulated a huge pile of soggy tissues in my garbage can by the time I was through.

  I couldn’t cry forever because I had a date to get ready for, and so I ate some chocolate, took a shower and tried to think positive thoughts. I liked Singin’ in the Rain. It was a happy, up-building movie and I was going to go see it with a man who, while weird, seemed in general to be mentally well-balanced.

  I still couldn’t help being depressed by the time I was ready to go, despite giving myself a pep-talk. When I opened my door to leave for my date I couldn’t help but smile though, because laying on my doormat was a little bouquet of yellow daffodils.

  I bent over, picked them up, and smelled them. Sweet perfume, I thought. I glanced backwards to my kitchen counter, where my bouquet of white daisies sat, and then I glanced at my next door neighbor’s door.

  Sean. They had to be from Sean.

  Dear Dad,

  I remember you once commenting that I ate so fast I was like a squirrel or a rabbit gobbling up my food. You thought it was because I didn’t have a lot of time at school to eat my lunch and that I just formed a habit of eating quickly. But that’s not why. As the youngest, I was the one stuck sitting next to Nancy at the dinner table. Gee, but I remember supper times with great fondness. There was no conversation because the dinner table was a place to eat, not talk, and I had to eat the food on my plate in a certain order. God forbid I eat all my mashed potatoes at once without touching my corn or chicken at all. I had to eat my food all at once, rotating foods with each bite. Jesus, do you realize that Nancy had to control everything I did, down to way I ate?