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Ninety percent of the dishes are loaded into the dishwasher when I hear a crash in the bedroom, and Emily yells a string of expletives. “I’m okay, just dumped a shelf,” she calls.
I dry my hands off and make my way to the walk-in closet to make sure she hasn’t killed herself, and sure enough, the top shelf has all but collapsed. There are shoes, boxes, a couple helmets, clothes, shit everywhere on the floor.
She’s kneeling on the carpet trying to clean it up, apologizing like it’s her fault, while I try and fix the shelf above our heads.
I’m so focused on the shelf I don’t even notice when she goes quiet. It isn’t until the I register the change in her tone, the breathy whisper of her voice, that fear and panic race up my spine. I don’t even have to turn around to know how much I’ve just fucked up.
“Cole, what is this?”
Don’t turn around. This isn’t happening.
“What. Is. This.” Her whisper isn’t just surprise, fear, or panic now. Anger is seeping into her, her voice is shaking.
Despite every cell in my body willing me to keep my back turned and not acknowledge what I know she’s looking at, I let the shelf continue to dangle and turn my body toward her. I position myself in the doorway so she can’t run.
I force myself to glance down and see what she has in her hands.
Dozens of letters spill out of an overturned shoe box. Articles, photos, and printed emails cover the floor, Emily’s hands flipping through them all, trying to make sense of it all.
I wish any of it made sense, that I could explain it away. But there is nothing I can say or do to chase these demons away, this time.
“What the fuck is this, Cole?” She rages at me.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” I manage to creak out.
“What are all these letters, why do you have letters from my mother?” She rips one out of its envelope, her hands shaking. I want to pull it away like it’s a hot pan that’s going to burn her fingers, but there’s nothing I can do.
The portal to her hell has just opened up.
I don’t even know which letter she’s reading right now, and it probably doesn’t matter—they’re all terrible. She looks at me, her head jerking back, and her face twisted up in confusion, her eyes growing glassy.
“I, I don’t understand,” she whimpers.
“I never wanted to leave you, Em. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
“You love me? What the hell is this? Why do you have this?” She holds up a copy of an award she got at MIT for building a mini eco-friendly thermodynamic engine.
“It was,” I hesitate because fucking hell, there is no right way to say it, “it was part of the deal.”
“The deal?” She says the word like I’m the biggest piece of shit on the planet. “And this?” She holds up a framed photo of her graduating from MIT, her wearing a black gown and waving her diploma proudly over her head on stage.
“I took that picture,” I mumble as I stare at the carpet wishing it could swallow me up. It’s framed because it sat on my nightstand for so many years until I had to put it away when she showed up at my door.
“What do you mean you took it?”
“I was there.”
I was always there, no matter how much it killed me to be so close to her, to watch her, to not be able to be a part of the life she was excelling at. I had to stand back and watch because at every opportunity, there she was, succeeding at everything she ever did because I wasn’t around to drag her down. “I was so proud of you,” I mutter, and, for the first time that I can remember, I feel my eyes watering.
“You were there, like, like some sort of fucking stalker? And you didn’t say anything? Why? Why would you do that?” Emily is shaking, and her face is red. She’s breathing hard. All I want to do is hold her and make it go away. Fix it. But it’s going to get worse.
“I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing,” I hang my head.
She keeps rifling through the box and pulls out packets of “research” her mother sent me. She holds up a psychology paper entitled Reality Check: Sex Crimes are Genetic, and then another titled Sex Offending is Written in DNA, Studies Find. There’s dozens of them. “Where did you get this crap?”
And here’s where it’s going to get worse for Emily, and thus, for me.
“Your mother sent them.”
