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Then he put his cup of gelato down, turned to me and admitted, “After we lost your mom, I should have found someone for us to talk to. On our own and together. So we could figure out how to go forward with our family cut in half.”
“By then, she’d convinced you it was all your fault.”
He shook his head. “Don’t make excuses for me, Raye.”
I put my cup down and turned to him. “I really want to say let’s bury all of that and move on from here.”
Before I could finish my thought, he said firmly, “We can’t do that, sweetheart. And we shouldn’t. I need to make amends. And your sister and mom are a part of us, they always will be.”
“I wasn’t finished,” I said gently.
He lifted his chin for me to go on.
“I’m not a mom, so I don’t know how hard it was on her to not know where Macy was, to have her gone and then not have her come back.”
I took a sec to see how he responded to me bringing up what happened to Macy, but his expression didn’t change from intent on what I was saying, so I kept going.
“But if I’m honest and let myself feel it, I know it’s rage I feel that she didn’t think about me before she took herself away from me.”
“She thought about you,” he said quickly.
“Dad, I remember how we were before Macy was taken. Maybe it’s idyllic now because of what happened, but we were happy. She was a good mom. And you loved her…a lot.”
“I thought she was the love of my life,” he whispered.
“Until Deb?” I asked.
He lifted a shoulder. “You can have two loves of your life, Raye. It doesn’t make the feelings you had for one or the other any less. I didn’t leave your mom, even as bad as it got. She didn’t really leave me either. She was just in so much pain, she couldn’t handle it anymore. She died. And it took too long, but I moved on. That doesn’t have any bearing on how much I loved her.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, but she didn’t just die, Dad,” I replied.
“I understand you see it that way, I do, darlin’. If I was in your shoes, I would too. But we both lost our daughter, so I get it. And she sent her to Deb’s, so I get that too. She might have blamed me through words, but she never stopped blaming herself. She didn’t kill herself because she missed Macy and forgot she had another daughter who she loved, Rachel…very much,” he stressed that last to drive it home. “She killed herself because she shouldered the blame Macy was gone, and she couldn’t live with it.”
He studied me after he said that, and kept on.
“If you need to hold on to your anger, that’s your prerogative. I won’t judge. I had a lot of anger at her too, before I decided her doing that was all my fault. But I hope you find it in you to forgive her. I still love her, and I want that for her.”
I might get there.
I might not.
But right then, I was having ice cream with my father.
“I think that might be part of why the spark was ignited for Deb,” he admitted. “Because I’ve been lucky enough to have two loves of my life. And yes, that’s what I had with your mom, and it had a very unhappy ending, but I still feel lucky I had her, and not just because she gave me you and your sister. We had a lot of good years before we lost Macy, and she made me very happy. But I’m the only one Deb has had. And honestly, sweetheart, being that for her feels really freaking great.”
That almost made me cry, I was so thrilled she gave him that.
“Does the, uh…Macy thing…?” I couldn’t finish.
He got me.
“At first, yes. And I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, and where my life is at right now, I can’t find it in me to spend too much time thinking on it, but it melted away. Not that I forget what I lost in Macy, or how, or what came after, just that, Deb played absolutely no part in it. Your mom and I would let you two girls go to that playground without thinking a second about it, and we couldn’t even see it from our windows. It’s something Deb and I share, but it isn’t part of who we are. Does that make sense?”
I nodded.
Then I got into more of the meat of it.
“I hate it that you spent your whole life worrying about me, Dad.”
