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I can’t change any of it. I can’t disown my family and as far as I’m concerned at the most basic level, we’re all victims of one person’s God complex. But, if Matty could see it, that means I chose not to.
I came to the belly of the beast today, not even sure what I was looking for. I don’t know what, if anything at all, from all those years ago would even be here.
So far, I’ve looked through the filing cabinets built into the desk. But there’s nothing, at least nothing that means anything to me. My mother has only let the cleaning lady in here to dust and vacuum since he died.
The book he was reading the morning he had his stroke lays open on the wood lacquered side table next to his dark brown leather recliner.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But there’s no one left to ask. Dan, his assistant, retired to Costa Rica, the year my grandfather died and hasn’t responded to the email I sent him. I want to have some answers before I call Matty. Or maybe, I’m just putting it off because I don’t know how to apologize for the wrong I’ve done.
I shove away from his desk and walk over to the bookshelf, where dozens of sterling silver frames line the shelves, with as much prolificacy as the books they were built to house.
Most of the photos are of him and me. There’s only one of him with my father. I used to think it was because he found looking at him painful. The truth of it makes bile rise in my throat. I pick up the picture and look at it through this new lens. It’s from the day of my father’s high school graduation. I run a finger over my father’s broad, handsome smile. Remi, minus the blue eyes, is his spitting image.
I wish I’d known him. So much so now that I know that he was brave enough to do what I haven’t been able to - choose his happiness over everything else. And in letters he left for Remi, ones that Gigi has held on to all these years, he said he was coming back for us. Was it selfish of him to leave us? Yes. But it’s not like he left us in a ditch to die. Not the way his own father did to him.
He may have loved Gigi, but he loved us too. And he would have been there for us if my grandfather hadn’t seen to it that he wasn’t.
I drag my eyes to the face of the other man in the picture.
Emotions batter my chest with the blunt force trauma of a steel-toe boot. I can’t believe the man who raised me so gently, who plucked me out of trouble, who literally saved my life, could do the things that we know for certain he did.
His smile is full of a smug pride that he always wore when one of us accomplished something. He saw them as his accomplishments, too.
I start to put the silver framed photo back on the shelf when the shadow of something on his wrist catches my eye. My chest tightens like it’s been placed in a vice grip and I grasp the edge of the bookshelf to steady myself.
I bring the picture closer to my face.
There’s a tattoo on his wrist.…one that wasn’t there when I was growing up.
A flaming blue lightning bolt.
Like the ones on the wrists of the men who held me down while my body was used in ways that transformed my very soul. Like the one above the nightclub where his assistant was seen by Matty and Jack.
I barely make it to the bathroom before I lose the contents of my stomach.
In the last few years of his life, when he couldn’t do it for himself, I dressed him. I fastened the burgundy leather straps of his Piaget watch to his wrist every single morning. There was nothing but his smooth, freckled, freakishly unwrinkled skin in the space underneath it. It didn’t even leave a scar. Or was it just that I wasn’t looking?
Because, there it is. Clear as day on the wrist of the arm he has slung over my father’s shoulder.
Before I know what I’m doing, I raise the frame over my head and slam it down with as much force as I can gather and nearly howl with satisfaction when it shatters.
I spent my whole life without a father. I was distinctly aware of what I was missing by growing up without him.
And to know that the man who pretended to offer me succor was the one responsible for my sorrow - My rage is going to burn me alive and I want to let it. I want to burn away my old life, my old hurts, my old mistakes and start over.
Blindly, I grab one frame after the other and smash them, too. There isn’t a single memory here that deserves to be preserved.
Suddenly, I’m engulfed by a pair of arms and the scent of Chanel No. 5.
I sink into her, let her body cocoon me, and let the frame I’m holding slip out of my grasp and lay my head on her breast, and even though she hates tears, I let them fall. Because goddammit, she owes me.
“Shhhh, Reggae Queen…” she calls me by the name she used to, before she started hating us all. That thought makes her arms feel like restraints, and I struggle to break free of her.
She lets me go with an “Oomph,” and I realize I’ve elbowed her in the side.
I meet her wide-eyed stare with an incendiary glare. “Why didn’t you protect me when it actually mattered? It’s too late. You knew what he did, and you let him get away with it.”
I expect her to slap me. Or maybe even punch me. Tina Wilde does not suffer insubordination, and she certainly didn’t let it go unpunished.
