Shadows and Lies

by Karen Reis

  I wanted someone who would respect me.

  Some scientists did a study many years ago about women and the type of men they choose to have relationships with, and most of them were attracted to men who were like their fathers either in appearance or temperament, either for good or bad. I think it’s interesting that I wanted a man nothing like you. I’m grateful for that drive. From the stories she had told me, Nancy chose a man who was just like her father, and look where that got her.

  Not only have I chosen a man who is nothing like you, but I believe that he is a better man than you. If this insults you, I’m sorry. But the point of my writing these letters to you is to get a decade’s worth of pain off my back.

  Like I’ve said before, the older I get, and the more experience I receive in life, the more I see how you failed me and my sisters. I don’t want to hate you, so I need to tell you these things. If you end up hating me I figure that’s okay. We’ve never really spoken before anyways.

  With Much Confusion,

  Your Daughter

  Chapter 13

  There is a lot of information on the Internet about abortions. There are pro-abortion sites and anti-abortion sites. Each of them says that the other is evil or unreasonable or religiously or politically motivated. I finally looked up the addresses to a few actual abortion clinics in Las Vegas, all of which offered to either abort the fetus or help you keep it. The first thing I learned was that abortions are not cheap. The second thing I learned is that there are coupons for everything under the sun. Seeing a printable 20% off coupon on one clinic’s website made me feel a little sick, but then I read the details about how an abortion is done. The description was nothing graphic or scary, just a calm, medical explanation of how a pregnancy could be gotten rid of, depending on how far along a woman was.

  An abortion of a pregnancy between 5 and 8 weeks could be achieved by taking two medications in pill form, one in the office, and the second a day or two later. That was called a medical abortion. The first medication stopped the development of the fetus, and the second caused the uterus to contract and induce a miscarriage. For women who were 7 to 15 weeks pregnant, suction aspiration was used. A doctor would use a straw-like instrument called a cannula to suck away the pregnancy.

  For pregnancies 6 weeks or less however, abortion was not generally offered. I sat back in my chair and took a deep breath. I was at that time just barely 3 weeks pregnant. I would have to wait another three weeks to get an abortion. If I was going to get one. Reading the details of the procedures used did not turn me on to the idea, but again, I was alone. If I chose to keep my baby, I would have no family support.

  I didn’t know one way or another, and truthfully, I was grateful for the fact that I couldn’t make a decision at that moment. I wished with all my heart that I could see Sean and ask him what he wanted. He was of course nowhere handy, but that didn’t keep me from having pretend conversations with him in front of the bathroom mirror in my apartment.

  “Sean, I’m pregnant,” I said to my reflection that night. I wondered about all the things he could say in reply.

  “That’s horrible,” I said for him, my brow wrinkling.

  “I’m not ready,” I said, making my eyes go round with fear. Then I smiled. “I hope it’s a girl,” I said for Sean, and the idea of him, if he knew, really wanting our baby made me deliriously happy and so sad at the same time.

  “Should I get an abortion?” I asked myself/Sean in the mirror. “Would you be alright with it? Would you understand?” I touched my reflection. “Would you hate me forever?”

  Then, “How could you have used such faulty condoms? How could you have gotten me pregnant?”

  “And how come the FBI never even came and knocked on my door? You did tell them about me, didn’t you? They should have contacted me and questioned me about why you were suddenly in danger after having spilled the beans to me.”

  That question was one that I had no pretend answer for, and that bothered me because maybe Sean had never gotten around to telling them about me. Maybe he’d been whisked away so fast he hadn’t gotten the chance, and then by the time he did, it didn’t matter because the truth was his life was in danger and he was too much of a hero to want to draw me into his life again.

  Under the circumstances, I could only hope that that was the case. I had to keep believing that Sean wasn’t a rat bastard. I had to keep believing that he really did want me; he just couldn’t have me at that moment.

  “I wish you were here to let me know what’s going on, Sean,” I said aloud as I stood back from the mirror. “I miss you terribly. I could really use your help right now, too. Even a phone call would be welcome.”

  I got no answer. Not that I’d been expecting one.

  I wasn’t crazy, you know.

  I did however feel some guilt for even thinking about having an abortion, so I went to church the next Sunday. Ironically, the sermon was about parenting, with scriptures taken from Proverbs and Ephesians. Children are a gift from God was the main message, and should be treated accordingly. That made me feel even guiltier about having an abortion, and I got up and walked out halfway through because I just couldn’t take listening to that sermon anymore.

  While I was busy trying to make my mind up, Genny and Isaac left on their honeymoon to British Colombia, came back, and started setting up house together. Barbara and I corresponded back and forth, getting to know one another, sometimes talking on the phone, but not meeting yet. We spoke of inconsequential things, like how she was deathly afraid of mucus, blood, sneezes, the smell of rotten eggs, poop and in general anything that might offend her olfactory senses or come out of the human body. She constantly ranted about how despicable people were nowadays and how evil those despicable people’s kids were, but then told me that she loved children. I would always point out that children are a prime source for mucus, blood, poop and sneezes. She would always ignore me.

  Not a word was said about the important questions I wanted answered. It seemed she wanted relations between us to move forward at a civilized pace, which was actually fine with me. I’d had enough drama in the last few weeks that I was almost loathe to start more.

  All in all Barbara seemed like a nice woman, though she annoyed the pants off me sometimes. She was a nervous person who laughed after every sentence she spoke and had the tendency to cut me off in the middle of all of mine. She was also very wasteful and obsessed with expiration dates on food. She never kept anything, even water, in her house past the expiration date and when it did come, she would promptly throw it out.

  If nothing else, she was an interesting distraction at a time when I felt I desperately needed one.

  One day Vanessa called me up out of the blue with big news. She didn’t even bother saying hello, she was so excited. “Lindsay’s been offered a job through her school!”

  “Great,” I said with a smile. My facial muscles strained, unused to such action, but they didn’t fail me. They were rusty was all, after weeks of disuse. I was genuinely happy for Vanessa and Lindsay too. I had been expecting this sort of news eventually, so it was easy to know what to say and to be enthusiastic. “That’s exactly what you guys need to get back on your feet. With her making money, you can start thinking about maybe going to night school; you guys can get an apartment…”

  “The job is in Seattle, Washington,” Vanessa broke in. “We’re going to be moving there.”

  That stopped me, but only for a moment. “Well, I’ll miss you guys, but I’m sure they have perfectly good community colleges in Seattle too.”

  Vanessa scoffed at me. She actually scoffed like I was out of my mind. “Yeah, right. Me go back to school. Even if I knew what to take, I’d probably bomb out.”

  That was Nancy talking, and I was overcome by the urge to slap my stepmother hard across the face. She had given Vanessa a hard time in high school, discouraged all of her artistic abilities and left her with no confidence as to her own talents. I myself would have killed to have
some of Vanessa’s artistic talents.

  “You’d do great, you just have to give yourself a chance,” I said fiercely. “You have to find something that you really want to do, like decorating or crafting or something. You could open a store or, or anything.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced.

  I sighed. “So when are you moving?”

  “In two months. Lindsay graduates in one month. We’ll have to go up and have a look around, find a place to live. We don’t want to live in the city. Maybe one of the surrounding towns, something small and a little slow. We’ve been looking at pictures online. Carrie, it’s so green there. It’s like a different world.”

  I smiled, thinking of my email. I was still getting spam for trips to Seattle, and I had to agree that it did look very beautiful. “It sounds like you’ll be happy there.”

  I could feel Vanessa smile back. “Yeah. I think so too.”

  “You’ll have to let me help you pack,” I said, and then I grinned. “And let me glean off the things you don’t want to take with you.”

  “We’ll be putting you to work, don’t worry,” Vanessa said, but then her voice lowered and became dull. “Dad wants to talk to you, too,” she said shortly.

  “You’ve been in contact with our parents?” I asked with a frown. The last thing either of my sisters needed was to be talking with our parents. Knowing them, they’d try to talk, or rather bully, my sisters out of leaving the state. I personally thought that the farther away they were from our parents, the better off my sisters would be.

  “Yeah,” Vanessa said. “They’ve had us over for dinner a couple of times. We’ve never gone alone; Clarissa is always with us. Dad keeps trying to get me to come back to work for him.”

  I frowned. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him no. I got a temporary job through a placement agency as a receptionist at a car dealership.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s good. That’s real good.” And I thought, she did it, she told our parents no. She didn’t go back. “That’s wonderful. So what does Dad want to talk to me about?”

  “He wants you to take my old job as the office manager.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “Not in a million years would I take that job! I’m not getting back in their clutches for anything!”

  “It’s not hard work…” Vanessa began lamely, but I cut her off.

  “Nancy yells and Dad can’t manage a business if his life depended on it. I have to put up with Dad and Nancy because we’re related, but there is no way I’m going to become their employee and let them treat me like crap for slightly more than minimum wage.”

  “Oh,” Vanessa said, taken back by my vehemence. “Well, Dad is still going to want to talk to you. You know how stubborn he is. He’s back to work, but I don’t think he’s taking his medication like the doctor wants him to.”

  I sighed. “We can’t force him, and frankly, I don’t have the energy to police him. It’s not even our job.”

  “I know,” Vanessa agreed. “But I still worry.”

  “He’s our father. I suppose we’ll always worry,” I replied. “But our parents are poison, and I don’t want you to play Dad’s messenger anymore. If he has something he wants to say to me, he knows how to dial a phone. It isn’t up to us to cater to him and I’m certainly done trying to please him. I don’t think he deserves that kind of thing from me anymore.”

  “I agree,” Vanessa said quietly. “I don’t think he deserves it either. But still.”

  But still. I knew what she meant, even though I didn’t think she should think it. I dropped the subject though, and we chatted for a little longer about the move, and then we hung up. I shook my head. My father. God, he was such a user. Everything he did was done out of a desire to have as little personal contact with his children as possible, even as he used us for labor to further his futile businesses. Sometimes, he really made me want to throttle him.

  Four weeks had come and gone by the time of Vanessa’s phone call. I was 7 weeks pregnant and I knew I needed to make a decision about it. The clinic’s website had said that a medical abortion would in total cost me about $500. At that point my savings account was in poor shape. I had spent more than $2000 dollars getting my car fixed up on the last two months, and then there was my short but oh so expensive stay in the hospital. I had a payment plan for that bill, but it would take me a while to pay off.

  My main problem was I still wasn’t sure whether I really wanted an abortion, or if it was even the right decision to make. I had been taught my whole life that a person takes responsibility for her actions, no matter what they are, and a part of me just couldn’t help but think of an abortion as a way for me to run away from a problem that I had helped to create. I was getting to the point that I needed to tell someone besides Genny, who was frankly busy with her new husband and didn’t have much time for me, despite all her good intentions.

  It was time for me and Barbara to meet face to face and have a serious talk.

  I called her up and she was excited to finally take this step forward. We met at one of those restaurants that only serve salad and soup, which was okay since it was a Monday, and apparently Mondays were clam chowder days, which is my all-time favorite soup. I made up a huge salad with every imaginable topping and smothered the whole mess in blue cheese dressing. Barbara just had a little salad and fat free dressing. While we waited in line to pay for our food, she talked and I listened, and I looked her over very carefully.

  She looked pretty much the same as she had in the few pictures I had seen of her when I was a kid, only she had a few more lines on her face now. She was maybe a little slimmer and definitely more sophisticated looking. In her pictures she had always had that tired mom look about her, wearing her clothes a little too big and her hair pulled back away from her face in a severe but functional style.

  Now, she dressed like someone who was planning to sit in the audience of Oprah’s talk show: middle-aged hip, I called her look, which was complete with dress slacks, low heels, a dressy jacket and matching purse. Her hair was short and styled and it framed her face perfectly. Next to her I felt like a hobo in my ponytail, jeans and T-shirt, which were feeling a little tight because I’d gained about five pounds over the last few weeks. I blamed that weight gain on all the chocolate I’d been eating, but I couldn’t really be held accountable for that. I’d been under stress, and chocolate was my therapist.

  Barbara was kind enough to pay for us both, and I found a table. After thoroughly checking the cleanliness of the tabletop and her silverware, Barbara finally sat down and began to eat with delicate, ladylike bites, using her knife to cut lettuce and vegetables into baby sized pieces. I was so nervous about what I wanted to tell her that I just shoved food in my mouth irrespective of size and chewed while she made conversation like a pro. She told me that I was beautiful, but that she could still see the little girl in me, and then rhapsodized over the years she’d had with my sisters when they were very young, which only made me feel very jealous of them and mad at her.

  I couldn’t help but speak up then. She was too happy, too bubbly. “Do you realize that you left us with a man who turned us over to the care of a violently unstable woman – a woman who made us feel like dirt every day of our lives? All the while, Dad turned a blind eye and let us be abused because it was convenient for him to not have to deal with us!”

  Needless to say, Barbara was shocked at my outburst, but not so much about what I had said as how I had said it. “Carrie, you shouldn’t raise your voice in public like this,” she hissed with embarrassment. I looked around myself. People were looking at us. I turned back to her with a feeling of shock myself, not over my outburst, but at her rejoinder.

  I dropped my fork in my salad in shock. “That’s all you can say? I tell you that your daughters were abused, and you say don’t raise my voice because it isn’t ladylike?”

  Nervously, Barbara took a sip of her iced tea. That w
as another thing Barbara didn’t believe in: straws. She thought straws were uncivilized and refused to use them. “Carrie,” she said, her voice somehow different, her mannerisms changed. “I know all that. I know how you were treated by Nancy.”

  I stared at her dumbly. “You knew? How did you know?”

  She seemed to grow even more nervous, and I wondered who the real Barbara was: confident, well-dressed, ladylike Barbara, or this person who sat before me who seemed to shrink into herself at my mention of the past?

  “Lindsay told me,” she said, taking in a deep breath. “Years ago. When she was 18.”

  “When she was 18,” I echoed numbly. Lindsay had spoken to someone about what had been going on? She’d opened her mouth and opened up?

  Barbara nodded and took another sip of her tea. “She told me what had been going on. I was shocked. She wanted to come live with me, but I told her she couldn’t.”

  My lips moved in horror for a moment before words could come out. “And why did you tell her that she couldn’t?” I asked, my voice sounding surprisingly calm to my own ears. My own problems were, for the moment, forgotten.

  “Because Vanessa was only 15 at the time, and you were barely 7. Since I had rescinded all my custody rights to your father, you and Vanessa had to remain with him still. I thought that Lindsay as the oldest should stay and protect you both. I wasn’t doing too well financially at the time, either.”

  My head suddenly felt like it was going to explode. “Lindsay suffered the most as the oldest,” I said stiffly, my temper held in check at that moment only because we were in public. “You should have let her come. You should have told Vanessa that when she turned 18, she could come too. It wasn’t Lindsay’s job to protect us.” I stabbed my finger at her. “It was your job.”