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Ella sent a guilty glance toward Samantha. “Honestly, you don’t have to. I shouldn’t have asked. I—”
“Sit down, Ella.” Gayle spoke quietly. “This isn’t going to be easy to say, but it isn’t going to be easy for you to hear, either. Let me speak, and when I’ve said everything I want to say, you can ask your questions. And I promise to answer them. All of them. Anything you want to ask.”
Ella sat back down on the bed next to her sister.
Samantha couldn’t shift the sick feeling in her stomach. Was she the only one finding this uncomfortable? Her mother was about to make some sort of confession, but she couldn’t help thinking that they didn’t have a solid enough relationship to support that level of intimacy. It meant adding another dubious ingredient to the already unpalatable soup of emotions that were sloshing round inside her.
Gayle kept her hands in her lap. Fingers locked. Knuckles white. “There are things I haven’t told you.”
“About Dad?” Ella shifted a little closer to Samantha.
Instinctively she took Ella’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Looking out for her sister stopped her having to think too hard about her own feelings.
“Just tell us, Mom.” She wanted facts, so that they could deal with them and then talk abou
t the past. And she was determined that they would talk about the past.
“Your father died in exactly the way I described, but what I haven’t told you is everything that happened before that.”
Samantha held tightly to her sister’s hand as her mother started to talk.
Next to her, Ella gasped, reacted, made sympathetic noises, responded to everything their mother told them. At one point she stood up and poured her mother a drink, the water sloshing over the sides as she poured with a shaking hand.
There, drink something, take a break, this must be so difficult for you.
Still Samantha sat, feeling like an observer not a participant, not knowing what to say.
All these years when she’d pictured her father, she’d imagined a benign, loving figure. She’d imagined how her life might have been different had he lived. She’d thought that maybe she and her father might be close. That he might have been more approachable than her mother.
The clash between her childish dreams and the reality was so violent she didn’t know what to do with the pieces.
“I didn’t want the two of you to ever feel the fear I felt. I never wanted you to feel vulnerable. I wanted you to be self-confident.” Her mother blew her nose on a tissue Ella had handed her. “I wanted you to feel you could cope with anything.”
Samantha imagined her mother, pregnant and with a toddler, bruised physically and emotionally, walking out on the only security she knew.
All the times I blamed her, she thought. All the times I thought she was a machine.
“I wish you’d told us.” Ella was crying now, her arms round their mother. And Gayle hugged her back.
“I was trying to protect you. If he hadn’t died, maybe I would have told you the truth, but he did, and then I couldn’t see the point. It would have hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt my girls.”
“I understand.” Ella rocked her. “I understand all about wanting to protect your child. It’s what a mother does. In your situation I probably would have done the same. I’m grateful.”
Samantha said nothing.
How was it protecting a child to hide the truth? She didn’t feel protected. She didn’t feel grateful. She felt confused.
She should say something. But what?
I would have liked to have known, Mom.
What was the point of saying that when there was no undoing the past?
She felt so many different things it was hard to untangle them. She felt guilt that she and Ella had never questioned if there was more going on, and anger and frustration that her mother hadn’t told them, and therefore hadn’t helped them understand. Would her own relationship history have been different if she’d known about her mother’s past?
And then there was her father.
Samantha swallowed. She felt as if she’d lost someone. She tried to picture the man she’d imagined all these years, but this time her brain wouldn’t cooperate. He’d gone, the shadowy figure who had lurked in her imagination as absent as the real person had been. She felt a profound sense of loss, which was ridiculous because how could you lose something you’d never had?
