Authors: Shari J. Ryan
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I FEEL THE
appropriate thing to do is let Tori yell at me at the top of her lungs for however long she finds it necessary. I peer down at my watch, noting it has been four hours since we stepped into our house and two hours since she started yelling at me. Besides a few pausing breaths and a brief break so I could put Gavin to bed, there hasn’t been a lack of words for her to hand me the piece of her mind I deserve.
She hasn’t allowed me the chance to get in a word and if she did, I would only tell her that we agreed to keep our past in the past, and we never had a conversation about breaking that commitment.
I was beginning to think she wouldn’t stop, but she has finally dropped down into a seat at the kitchen table. It’s now six at night and I never even got to work today. I haven’t had a moment to digest the fact that my daughter has stepped back into my life, or that my high school sweetheart, her mother, showed up out of the blue today. I haven’t had a chance to tell Tori I’m not sorry, but I don’t think it would be wise to tell her that right now.
I left Cammy and Ever at the pizza shop without a promise to follow up, or any word for that matter. I don’t have Cammy’s phone number, and I realize now that beyond showing up at her hotel room, I have no way to find them again. Not that I’d be allowed to leave this house long enough to do something like that right this second anyway.
Tori’s been quiet for a long three minutes, and she’s staring through the tiled floor as if it were glass. I’m not sure if I should wait to hear her next thought or if this is the time to speak up.
I walk over to the countertop and rest my hip against it. “I never thought I’d see either of them again,” I tell her. She doesn’t respond, so I continue. “Those two made me who I am today, love me or leave me, and I just left them in the middle of a goddamn pizza shop because my wife and I, who know nothing about each other, needed to come home and have this fight. How fucking normal is that, Tori? Oh, and just to make things worse, it’s my daughter’s birthday today—the first one I was going to be able to celebrate with her since the day she was born. This, though, this is way more important.”
“They made you who you are?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at me. Of course, that would be the only part she heard.
“Yeah, Tori, that’s not something you’re going to hold against me. And you want to know why?”
She stands up from her seat for the first time in hours, and my nerves cringe with the thought of what she might be doing. The last time we had an argument this big was last year, to the fucking day. “I don’t know what you want me to say or do, AJ.” She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of water. “Do you want me to reopen my wounds so you can see the blood for yourself?”
Her words are sharp and unexpected, and while I would like to say yes to her question, the way in which she worded it would make me sound like an asshole for agreeing. Though, it only seems fair to let me in, even if it’s just a little, now that she knows about my past. “I want to help you,” I offer.
“Well, you can’t,” she says, sitting back down with her water.
“Tell me something, Tori. Give me a piece of what your mind is comprised of right now.” My legs are getting tired from standing inside this one kitchen floor tile for so long. All I want to do is go back and find Cammy and Ever so I can ask them the millions of questions that have been popping into my head over the last few hours, as well as share a birthday cupcake with Ever.
“Giving you a piece of it, AJ, would cause me another emotional disruption. Is that what you want?” she asks calmly.
“Maybe that’s what you need, Tori. Have you considered that keeping all of your shit bottled up for so long might be what’s actually destroying every single part of you?”
“Look, just because your past has come back to grace you with its beautiful presence just to show you that dreams really do come true, you don’t get to sit here and act all holier than thou for it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Great,” I say, pushing myself away from the counter. “That’s fine. We’ve dealt with the baggage from your past since the day Gavin was born, but I guess it’s too much to ask you to deal with mine for one day.” I grab my coat from one of the dining chairs and drape it over my shoulder. “Don’t wait up.” Nothing is going to stop me from being with my daughter on her birthday. Nothing.
“Where are you going?” she snaps. “Have you forgotten you have a child?”
Her words piss me off like nothing else she has ever said to me. Have I forgotten I have a child? “You’re kidding me right now, right?” I turn to her with anger coursing through me. “How about for once,
you
take responsibility for him?”
Her face turns red, and her eyes widen as if she’s about to unleash. With my next thought, I run up the stairs to Gavin’s room and take him from his crib, where I find him awake and gazing up at his mobile with a smile on his face. I can understand, considering I put him to bed an hour early tonight. I change his diaper, load up the diaper bag, dress him for outdoors and scoop him up into my arms. I sling the bag over my shoulder, take Gavin, and walk back down into the kitchen, past Tori. “Where are you going?” she snaps.
I continue toward the front door as I inform her, “To be with the people who want to let me in.”
“You want to go sleep with her, is that what you want?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Tori?” I shout. “Have you lost your damn—” I choke with a quiet laugh. “Never mind. I already know the answer to that.”
She chases after us, trying to pull the baby bag off of my shoulder. “Why are you so mean to me?” she shouts.
I place Gavin down in his high chair behind me, handing him a toy in hopes of shielding him from whatever wrath she’s planning for the moment. “You know what’s funny, Tori? You hear these stories all of the time about men and women flipping some invisible switch after they get married and they let their true selves finally show. It’s a joke. People make fun of these stories. If I had any idea you were going to act or become the way you are today, I never would have started anything with you. You tricked me. And it’s disgusting.”
“Tricked you?” she cries out. “It must have been the same as when my mother tricked my father into having a second child. She tricked him good, AJ. Let me tell you. She tricked him so fucking good that he got up and left us the day before my sister was born.”
I close my eyes, trying to digest the middle of a story she’s giving me. “Hold on, are you talking about Millie and Ralph?” Because up until a year ago, I thought those two were her birth parents. I know now that they aren’t but she calls them Mom and Dad.
She laughs, that laugh I hate, the one that tells me she’s falling into a dark hole again. “No, I’m talking about the two people who put me on this sick earth and gave me my messed up life.”
“Tori,” I utter, placing my hand over her trembling arms. “Talk to me.”
“Why?” she cries. “It’s not going to change the past. That’s why we don’t talk about the past, AJ. Remember? Our pact?”
I shake my head in disagreement. “Talk to me,” I press.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says through her locked jaw.
The memory of finding those weird crumpled notes in the back of our closet last year plays through my head. I never felt it was safe to bring them up to her, but I’m at a breaking point right now, and I’ve decided I can’t live, hanging in the wind of Tori running from whatever she is mentally running away from.
Making my way upstairs and into our bedroom, I tear open the closet door and remove all of the shit from the top closet shelf until I find the box that has been hidden. I place it down on the bed, grabbing as many crumpled balls of notes as I can and bringing them down to her. “Start with these. What is this?”
She grabs them from my hands, as half of them fall to the floor. Salvaging what she can, she squeezes them against her chest. “Where did you find these?” she asks, as her face drains of color.
“In the back of our closet. They weren’t hidden all that well if that was your intention,” I tell her.
“I don’t want to see these,” she cries. “Take them back. Put them away.”
“Why don’t you throw them away if you don’t want to see them?” I shouldn’t be pushing like this. I saw what happened last time I pushed.
“I can’t,” she continues, her voice now escalating into a higher pitch.
“Why, Tori?” I match her volume.
“Because then I’ll remember what it looked like when I found my mother hanging from the ceiling beam in her bedroom. I’ll remember what starvation looks like in a five-year-old. I’ll remember what the people I loved more than anything looked like the moment they died in front of me.” Tori’s words are quiet, firm, and shattering all at the same time. She falls to her knees, with the papers flying out of her hands, and curls up into a ball on the ground. The time it takes for me to process what she said feels like I’m trying to figure out a difficult math equation. Or as if someone were to tell me the sky is actually orange, and my brain receives the coloring in a malfunctioning sort of way. I don’t understand and I can’t comprehend. Yet, the words make perfect sense. I can’t think of one thing to say right now, and by the looks of her mentally shutting down, I should be saying a whole lot. Though, the things I want to say won’t help. It’s not going to be okay. It will never go away. She will never be okay. And then there’s “sorry”. That word does nothing for anyone.
“Have you told anyone else?”
“No,” she breathes out through heavy sobs.
Her father left. Her mother committed suicide, and her sister starved to death.
“Tori, I need you to take a deep breath, babe.” She’s going to hyperventilate herself into passing out. She doesn’t hear me. Or she chooses not to respond. The speed of her breaths increase, and I know this isn’t going to end well. I pull her heavy body up into my arms and bring her up to our bedroom where I lay her down on the bed, propping her up to help her breathe better. “Look at me.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “You’re going to pass out if you don’t calm down. Tori, look at me.”
“They blamed me,” she gets out. “They told me it was my fault.”
“Who?” I snap. “Who the hell would blame a child for that?”
“My grandparents,” she says between hiccupping breaths. “They told me I drove my mother insane. They told me it was my fault that my sister died.”
I climb up on the bed and I grip her shoulders within my hands. “You know that isn’t true.” The resentment against her grandparents and father is pouring through me, making my chest ache. “No one should have blamed you for what happened.”
“It
was
my fault,” she says. “I was awful. I should have called 9-1-1 when I found my mother hanging. Just an hour before, I had been mad at her for not letting me buy something so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was. She kept telling me we were running out of money, but I didn’t understand what she meant by that. We never had money problems, not until my Dad left us I guess. I pushed her too far that day.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes for a pause. “I stared at my dead mother for the longest time, watching as the blood drained from her face while trying to convince myself she was only sleeping. I was too scared to call 9-1-1. I knew my sister and I would be taken away or handed over to my grandparents who hated me—if they would even take me. Turns out they wouldn’t.”
The images breezing through my mind are hideous and scary. I don’t know this woman sitting in front of me, not that I haven’t said this to myself a million times in the past year. The truth is, I have only known her outer shell. Instantly, I realize why she has never told a soul the truth. She would be judged, labeled, and marked. The truth can’t be taken away or changed. It can only be accepted.
“We need to get you help,” I tell her. Because what else is there to say? I don’t remember being twelve, or what my thoughts were like back then, how much I loved or how much I hated. I had a good life, with two healthy parents who kept me safe and sometimes in a bubble. So, how can I understand? How can I agree or disagree that what she did was normal or abnormal? What I do know is, shock can cause a mental disruption, which apparently is exactly what happened to her.
“No one can help me,” she says. “I thought when we met and agreed to only move forward from the place we were standing, I could finally leave everything behind me.” She takes a few quick, pausing breaths before continuing. “Having a child, though, has reminded me every single day of my sister, how I watched her die too. I couldn’t keep her alive, so I could never risk being in the situation to care for someone, ever again. It is destroying me. I see my mother in me whenever I look in the mirror—the cowardice and weakness, and whenever Gavin cries, my chest tightens. I feel like I can’t take another second of crying or I might lose it.”
“You never hurt anyone, Tori,” I tell her, feeling that sickness grow in my gut.
“My sister cried for days and days, because she was hungry. I couldn’t take it anymore, AJ. I couldn’t take another minute of her crying.”
“Tori,” I interrupt her. What the hell is she about to say?
“I knew I needed to get her food, and I had no money, so I brought her to the local church and left her there so I could try to figure out what to do next.”
“Why didn’t you just call the police? You were two innocent children.” I don’t understand.
“I was afraid they would have separated my sister and me. We would have been thrown into some kind of orphanage. She was so scared, and I couldn’t do that to her. My sister was all I had left, and nothing was going to take her away from me.” Tori pulls her knees into her chest and wraps herself up like a ball, rocking back and forth as she continues to cry.
I suppose I can understand, but if she brought her sister to a church…how did she die? “Then what?” I press.
Tori looks up at me for a long minute, appearing to look back on that time, putting together pieces in her head. “She was crying on the front steps of the church for me. She was in her favorite pajamas with kittens on them, and her hair was a big mess. I tried to fix it the best I could, but she was fussing too much to make it easy.” Her eyes are open wide, staring through me as she continues. “She was reaching out for me as I crossed the street. I was planning to steal food from the local store, and I didn’t want her to be a part of that.”