Closer to the Edge

by Tara Sivec

  Cole kisses the top of my head and laughs at her.

  “You two make me sick,” she mutters.

  For a minute, she seems really disgusted as she stands there staring at the two of us, and it confuses me until her face lights up with a smile.

  “Well, I’ll let you two get back to it while I find a bottle of bleach to dump in my eyes.”

  Caroline turns to leave the room but pauses, looking back at Cole. “Mom and Dad are going to be home later today. Just a heads-up.”

  I feel Cole’s body tense against mine as silent communication flows back and forth between the siblings.

  “Anything you want to clue me in on before they get here?” Cole asks.

  Caroline glances at me before her eyes go back to Cole. I always thought Caroline was clueless about the things that happened around her, but maybe I was wrong. She looks guilty and I instantly feel bad for her. She’s in a tough situation. It’s not like she’s had time for a heart-to-heart with Cole, but if she knows something and didn’t tell him right away, it’s going to kill him. My own guilt rushes through me, but the things I’ve kept from him are honestly just suspicions. It’s not like I have any proof. How could I possibly tell him what I suspect when I’m not even sure myself? I don’t want to be responsible for pulling him away from his family even if I believe with everything inside of me that they did something wrong, something immoral and evil that can never be erased. It’s my word against theirs and, even though I know Cole trusts me and knows I wouldn’t lie to him, he’s a man who believes facts. Hard evidence and solid proof are the only things that he can count on and I can’t give him either one of those. I know that he would go against everything he believes in to side with me, but how can I put him in that situation? I need the proof, and I need it fast.

  “You’ll be happy to know we’re mending our relationship. I think maybe it’s time you do the same,” Caroline tells him.

  I don’t have to look at Cole’s face to know there’s shock all over it. Caroline and Vivien have never gotten along, so hearing something like that come out of her mouth is a little alarming and doesn’t sit right.

  “Just call me after you talk to her, okay? Promise me? You’ll come to me first, right?” Caroline begs him, her voice taking on that of a petulant child instead of a grown adult.

  Her words irritate me because, before anyone else, Cole should come to me. I get that she’s his sister, but this is our problem, not hers. Even if Vivien is going to admit what she did and Caroline knows all about it, Cole and I need to work that out with Vivien, not with her. I know Cole. He won’t blame her for this, even if she withheld information from him. He knows that she loves him and anything she did was only to protect him, unlike his mother.

  Cole nods his head at Caroline, but doesn’t reply. She smiles at both of us and quickly leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

  After we hear the front door close, Cole lets out a huge sigh. “I want you to come with me when I talk to my parents.”

  I move out of his arms and turn to face him. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He puts his hands on either side of my face and stares into my eyes. “Listen to me. No matter what, it’s you and I. Nothing else matters. Nothing she says to me is going to make any difference.”

  Accept for the fact that she just might tell you she gave me money to have an abortion. And she’ll ruin any inkling of good you thought she had in her when she admits that I didn’t just lose your baby, he was taken from me.

  Maybe this is finally it. Maybe that woman has finally had enough of the lies and the secrets. Her husband might be losing his mind and her daughter obviously knows something, so what she’s done HAS to come out at some point. Maybe Vivien finally realizes that her son is a Navy SEAL and he can ferret out the truth no matter what happens. Even if she tries to lie her way out of this, Cole is smarter than that and she knows it. I only wish he didn’t have to be hurt to get to the truth.

  I was honest with him about the pregnancy, just not about everything that followed. My skin pebbles with goose bumps just thinking about reliving that nightmare again. Knowing what I went through while he was thousands of miles away would only hurt him more. The guilt would eat him alive and I couldn’t do that to him. I can’t do that to him. He doesn’t need to know the gritty details. He doesn’t need to know how I screamed and cried for him with each wave of pain that wracked my body. He doesn’t need to know that I almost died. Correction—that I did die. I felt nothing but peace, free of my pain and heartbreak for thirty whole seconds before I was shocked back to life and forced to relive the horror again and again, every single day since that moment.

  He’ll find out the truth about his family today, it will hurt him and there’s nothing I can do to make it better.

  “I can’t be in the same room with her, Cole. I just can’t. I’m sorry,” I tell him softly, resting my hands on top of his against my face. “She took something from me that I can never get back and I can’t forgive her for that.”

  He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against mine. I wish I could tell him more. I wish I could tell him how much I despise that woman. How many times I wished her dead, but I can’t. He needs to find out the truth straight from her, it’s the only way. I can’t let my opinion of her sway his feelings. If I told him about all of my suspicions right now, it would cloud his judgment and he would never speak to her again. As much as I would love nothing better than that, she is his mother and he needs to do this on his own. He needs to see what kind of woman she really is for himself and the only way for that to happen is to let him speak to her without me there as a distraction.

  “I’ll be here when it’s all over, I promise. I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, repeating the same words he’s said to me the last few weeks.

  Cole pulls me back down in bed and holds me close, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I never allowed Garrett or Parker to look into things after I got out of the hospital. I didn’t care about anything at that point. I just wanted to be left alone with my misery. They argued with me every day for a week, only stopping when they saw that they were just making things worse. The more we fought about it and the more I relived everything that had happened, the deeper I fell into a hole of depression. As soon as Cole goes to talk to his mother, I’m going straight to Garrett and Parker to tell them I’m finally ready for their help. If Vivien tries to poison Cole with more lies, I’ll be prepared this time.

  I’M WAITING IN my father’s office when I hear the front door open and my mother speaking in a low, murmured voice to Martha. I’m sure she’s telling my mother that I’m here and that I refused to leave until I spoke with her. I guarantee she’s informing her that, for the first time in her employment, I raised my voice. I assume when I hear my mother’s gasp that Martha’s relaying my choice words over her suggestion that I go back to the guesthouse and wait for her to send my mother over when she arrived home.

  As I hear the squeak of shoes against the marble floor as she makes her way down the hall, I wonder what’s going through her head, about what kinds of lies she’s trying to conjure up before she opens the door and stands in front of me. She can’t ignore me any longer. I’m not leaving until I get every bit of the truth from her, once and for all.

  I left my crutches back in my bedroom, not wanting anything to make me appear weak when I face her. The pacing I’ve done while I waited hasn’t done my knee any favors and it throbs like a bitch, but I refuse to sit down. The squeaking shoe sound abruptly stops when she steps onto the plush carpeting in the office. I don’t turn around and I hear her take a shaky breath as she walks by and turns to stand in front of me.

  Her appearance throws me for a loop and I momentarily forget about my reasons for coming here. Her usual slicked back, severe hairstyle looks like it went through a wind tunnel. There are messy pieces sticking up all over the place and I watch as she brings a shaking hand up to her head to try and smooth some of the wayward pi
eces back and tuck them behind her ears. While she’s busy with that, I look her up and down and my shock grows tenfold. Her normal daily uniform of a perfectly pressed three-piece suit has been replaced with a pair of black yoga pants, tennis shoes without shoelaces in them and a plain white tee shirt that looks like it’s two sizes too big for her. She looks like she escaped from a mental institution and I have to cover up an inappropriate laugh with a cough. She looks crazy and I feel crazy. What the fuck is going on?

  “I’m sorry. Let me just start this off with an apology, okay?” she finally speaks.

  She stops trying to fix her hair and wrings her hands together nervously in front of her.

  “What exactly are you apologizing for? I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you admit what you did.”

  Olivia never came right out and said it, but it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines. My mother got her fired from her job and she did something to make Olivia lose the baby. Even if it was just the stress of being fired, it was enough. Olivia has every right to be pissed at what my mother did to her.

  “You’ve spoken to Olivia then?” she asks.

  I roll my eyes and scoff at her. “Of course I’ve spoken to her. I love her, how many times do I have to tell you that before it sinks in? Did you really think she wouldn’t tell me everything? Did you really think she’d keep something like this from me?”

  I don’t mention the fact that she didn’t tell me everything. I don’t want my mother to think for one second that Olivia was doing anything to protect her. I want her to know that, despite the threats she obviously made, nothing could scare Olivia away from me for good. Olivia had her reasons for withholding the truth about how fucked up my family really is, and I can’t blame her for that. The blame lies solely with the woman standing in front of me, not looking quite as regal and commanding as she always used to.

  “Oh, Cole. I was afraid this would happen. I knew if you two got back together she would turn you against us.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me with this? Olivia did NOTHING wrong. You ruined everything. YOU,” I shout, pointing directly at her. “You just couldn’t handle the fact that I fell in love with someone you didn’t approve of. That didn’t give you any fucking right to play God with her life and the life of my child!”

  My mother winces when I mention the baby. Her grandchild. Her fucking grandchild! I could maybe understand her need to push Olivia out of my life. I could never forgive it, but I could understand. This was a baby, though. An innocent child, her own flesh and blood, and her actions started a chain of events that took that child away from all of us. She deserves every bit of my hatred.

  “I was wrong to give her that check, I know that now, believe me. It was stupid and I overreacted. You have to believe me when I tell you that I honestly never thought she’d actually cash it and do what she did. It was just a gesture. A stupid, selfish act that I thought would prove to her how different she is from us and force her to move on and start a new life. It was meant to disgust her, not for her to take seriously.”

  My mother finally stops rambling and I stare at her in confusion.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? What check?”

  She looks at me with pity and it takes everything I have in me not to get in her face and scream at her like I did with Garrett the other day.

  “I thought she told you. I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

  She quickly turns away from me and goes around to the back of my father’s desk and starts pulling out drawers, shuffling through files and papers.

  “I hate myself for what I did, you have to believe me, Cole. I can’t do this anymore and what happened today only solidifies that.”

  I shake my head at her. “You’re not making any sense. What the hell happened? Will you stop digging through the fucking drawer and look at me!”

  She jerks her head up and, for a moment, the mother I’ve always known is looking right at me. She purses her lips and raises her chin in defiance.

  “Your father, he’s not on a golfing trip. He’s been sick. He’s been sick since before you left and when Olivia came to me and told me she was pregnant, I didn’t know what else to do.”

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before looking at me again.

  “He hated her, Cole. I’ve never seen him act the way he did when her name was mentioned. He was so focused on you having the perfect life and following in his footsteps that it drove him crazy thinking you were going to screw everything up again. I don’t know what happened. One day he was fine and the next he just snapped.”

  She bows her head and speaks the next part so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear her. “The doctors think he’s schizophrenic with severe delusions.”

  My jaw drops and my eyes widen in shock as she continues.

  “He sees Olivia as a threat to you and this entire family. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted my husband back and I didn’t know what to do!”

  She’s sobbing now, the tears rolling down her cheeks in a way I’ve never seen in my entire life. Even at her own parents’ funerals, she never cried like this. I can’t even process what she’s telling me about my father because my stoic, perfectly poised mother is breaking down right in front of me.

  “He didn’t retire, I made him quit. He started making mistakes at work, signing off on the wrong surgeries, ordering the wrong medications and getting into screaming matches with the staff. I had to get him out of there. He’s had a few stays at some very good institutions over the years, but they never did any good. All of those trips we took? That’s where we were. Trying one new thing after another to bring him back. It never worked. NOTHING worked. I had him involuntarily committed a few months ago.”

  I sink down into the chair in front of the desk, trying to make the words come, but I can’t. I can’t believe what she’s saying and yet, it makes sense. He always seemed so strong and silent, but underneath it all was a bomb just waiting to go off. He was always so focused on my future and the mistakes he thought I’d made with my career choice. Instead of trying to listen to me and understand what I wanted out of life, he would walk away. He was always walking away from me and I finally understand why. The man who ran an entire hospital and was revered by everyone in this city was slowly losing his mind. I think back to all the times my mother stopped him mid-sentence. I always thought she was trying to sway his decisions, to get him to come over to her way of thinking, but maybe she was just trying to redirect his thoughts, calm him down and keep him from losing his shit and revealing what they’d kept hidden for so long. I resented every time my mother interrupted a private conversation between my father and I, blaming her for the breach in our relationship. I blamed her for my father’s disappointment in all of my choices. I blamed her for his anger and his refusal to listen to me when, all along, it was his own mind keeping us apart.

  I remember walking in on arguments between my mother, my father and Caroline. She always brushed it off and made jokes about how they were disappointed that she was soiling the family name. Did she know? All this time, did Caroline know what was going on with our father? I left for the Navy right out of high school and I was rarely home afterwards. Caroline was left behind to deal with the chaos. Of course she knew. She was the one who was here, day in and day out, not me. The conversation we had earlier about her and our mother mending fences makes sense now. They finally have something in common. All those years our mother spent trying to make her conform and turn her into a mini version of herself did nothing but make Caroline wilder and more defiant. Being the only two people in the house left to deal with our father as he deteriorated would obviously bring them together. My family is a mess, but I should have been there. I should have known. Caroline should have told me. I let her shoulder this all on her own and I know it couldn’t have been easy.

  My mother finally finds what she’s looking for in the drawer, pulling the folder up to her chest and hugging it to herself for a few moment
s before slowly pulling it away and holding it out to me.

  “I understood what you had with Olivia, I really did, even if you don’t believe that. In the beginning, I thought she would be good for you, a way to make up for the past and for the things we never gave you. For the love your father could never give you and for how preoccupied I was with his illness. I should have told you about him a long time ago. Maybe then, none of these mistakes would have been made.”

  I take the file from her hand and set it in my lap, opening it up and staring at the contents inside. My hands start to shake as I grab the photocopied piece of paper lying on top.

  “I never thought she’d take the money, Cole, I swear to you. I just wanted her as far away from your father as possible until I could figure out what to do. I didn’t know if you were ever coming back to us and I didn’t know what to do.”

  I hear her crying as she speaks, but I don’t answer her. I can’t give her the comfort I know she needs because I don’t understand what the fuck I’m looking at right now. It can’t be real, but it is. It’s real and the proof is in my hands.

  It’s a copy of the front and back of a cashed check. It’s made out to Olivia in the amount of ten thousand dollars, dated six weeks after I left for the Dominican a year ago. I want to shout and curse and throw the file at my mother and tell her it’s fake, but I can’t. Because it’s not. The back of the check has Olivia’s signature on it and it’s marked up with all of the numbers and codes that were stamped by the bank the day she cashed it. The day she fucking cashed it.

  “I never thought she’d actually cash it and do what she did.”

  My mother’s words echo through my mind. There has to be an explanation. There’s no way this means what she’s fucking implying. Olivia wouldn’t do this. She WOULDN’T. That nightmare she had was real, the guilt and the sorrow she felt was real. She couldn’t fake something like that, not with me.

  “You’re lying. You’re FUCKING LYING! Why can’t you tell the Goddamn truth for once in your life?” I shout.