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3
IRINA
Sixteen years ago
Mommy stood at the front door, holding her purse in her hand as if she needed an entire bag to carry what she’d need today.
All she really needed was Daddy’s credit card, and she’d have what she called a fulfilling day of stuffing her closet with more clothes that she’d never be able to wear. Every so often I went through, pulling out things with the tags still on them and taking them to my room.
If she didn’t notice they were missing within a week, I snuck them to the staff so they could donate them. Better they clothe a homeless person who had nothing than waste away in Mommy’s mess of a closet.
“Let’s go, Irina,” she said, not even bothering to glance back at me as Yiorgos opened the front door for her. He’d been my mother’s security for as long as I could remember, the one remnant of her life before she married my father.
A throwback to her life before Chicago.
“I don’t want to go shopping,” I argued, stomping my foot against the marble floor. Daddy was working in his office, plugging away at the numbers for the fundraiser he was organizing for the children’s center he funded. Fresh Start was his charitable contribution to the city that had taken a lawyer and made him the most respected judge in Chicago.
I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. Giving back to the people, not consuming material things like they didn’t cost more than most people had to feed their families.
I loved my mother. When she was home, when Daddy spent time with both of us and wasn’t working, she was loving.
She was warm. Like her fresh-baked cookies on a snowy day.
But when Daddy was busy, she was just...different.
Cold. Aloof. With something mean hiding behind the lines of her face, which she did everything in her power to hide. She did not want to be ignored, and she stripped away her affection to punish me when she felt that way. Especially when I chose Daddy.
I had only met her side of the family a few times, since they still lived in Philadelphia, but meeting my Uncle Eugene even once was enough to know why she was that way.
He wasn’t mean, not really. He was just empty. Like there wasn’t even a person remaining inside him.
“This is what girls like us do, Irina,” she said finally, turning around to give me a tight smile. It was the forced one that she did when she wanted me to know she wasn’t happy but was controlling her temper. I knew the day would come when she didn’t anymore. It always did.
She’d yell. She’d scream and lock herself in her bedroom, and then come out the next day like nothing had happened and she hadn’t drowned herself in Daddy’s favorite Scotch.
I didn’t want Mommy to be angry with me, but I looked back toward the office and wanted to go there. I wanted to help. I wanted to matter.
“Maybe I don’t want to be like you,” I muttered, pursing my lips and glaring at her. Her green eyes widened in shock, her eyelashes fluttering as her irritation rose.
“Do you know what my father would have done to me if I’d tried to insert myself into his business?” she whispered, and the harsh set to Yiorgos’ features behind her confirmed the insinuation.
“No,” I said, shaking my head as tears burned my eyes. I just wanted Mommy to love me for who I was and who I wanted to be.
Not the porcelain doll she wanted to mold me into.
Not her.
“He’d have reminded me of where little girls belong. Do you know where that is, Irina?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as her face twisted cruelly and her top lip peeled up in a snarl. With her nostrils flaring, she scoffed as if I was an idiot when I shook my head. “For all the ways you want to act like you’re grown, you’re such a fucking baby. Your place will be beneath whatever man your father—”
“That’s enough, Maya,” my father interrupted, his voice lower than normal and throaty, as if he had a frog in it and he couldn’t get it out. He stepped up behind me, taking my back in quiet support. As much as I wished I didn’t need it, it meant the world to me.
Even when it left me feeling like I was caught in the middle of the tug-o-war they liked to play over my future. They decided who I should be. I wasn’t even sure I knew who I would choose if it weren’t for their pushing.
“She needs to learn what will be expected of her. She’s already ten! By ten I already knew who I would marry, even if it changed later on,” she said, rolling her eyes toward the sky. My body stilled, confusion taking over me.
Mommy had almost married someone else?
“And how did that work out for you?” Daddy asked, his voice cold. “Have you had a happy life, spending all my money and living a lavish lifestyle, or are you still as miserable and jilted as the day they brought you to my doorstep?”
My mother deflated at his words, her shoulders slumping as if she couldn’t believe he’d dared to voice her unhappiness. My mother always smiled. She couldn’t let anyone see her as anything but perfectly poised.
To see her look so broken, so exhausted, rattled something inside of me.
“I’ll go shopping,” I said, taking a step forward and away from the rigidness of my father’s frame at my back.
“No.” Mom nodded her head as she pursed her lips. “You’re right where you belong,” she said, biting the corner of her mouth. Her lipstick smudged, sending a shock through me when she didn’t immediately reach up to fix any potential flaw. She gazed at me for a few seconds in silence before she turned to look at my father. “The problem is that I never belonged here. This marriage...” She sighed, never continuing with her thought.
Instead, she turned on her heel and lifted her shoulders high once again, acting with the perfect poise I’d come to expect of her as she walked out the door with Yiorgos trailing after her.
The door closed, thumping through my body with a finality that just felt different from her other tantrums. “Daddy,” I whispered, moving to the door and pulling away from his firm grip on my shoulders.
“She’ll be back, Iri. You know that,” he muttered, turning me away from the door, but something in me couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t leave the last place I’d seen her.
The burn in my eyes became unbearable, my throat clenching around the silent tears that built until they fell down my cheeks in streams. I spun out of his hold entirely, rounding on him with all the rage I felt.
Why couldn’t they just love each other? Why couldn’t they just love me enough to get along?
“Why did you have to be so mean?!” I screamed, ignoring the way the housekeeper who worked to clean the banister at the top of the spiral staircase jolted and hurried to walk away.
“Irina, don’t start. Not today,” Daddy said, turning his back on me and walking toward his office. I couldn’t bring myself to follow, even with my previous desire to help him with the fundraiser. I stood, glancing back and forth between the hallway where he’d disappeared and the front door.
Eventually, a soft hand settled on my shoulder, offering a gentle reassurance as I turned my tear-stained face up to my nanny. Penelope smiled down at me softly, reaching down to cup my cheek in her hand. “Let’s go make you some hot chocolate,” she said, nodding her head toward the kitchen.
I shook my head, glancing at my father’s favorite vase where it sat on the console table next to the stairs. The image of it shattered into pieces on the floor flashed through me, tempting me to break it the way he’d broken my mother in their last moments together.
“She’ll be back, sweetheart,” Penelope said, reassuring me as she guided me toward the stairs. Sadness overcame me, chasing away the rage that was building as she led me to my bedroom. To the bed they hid me away in every time I got in one of my “moods,” so they didn’t have to watch me cry or rage against the furniture.
She helped me change into a nightgown even though it was barely noon and tucked me in while she settled into the chair beside my bed with a book to read.
I stared at the ceiling until my eyes drifted closed. Sleep was a welcome embrace into darkness, where my feelings didn’t matter and there was just nothing. Where I wasn’t sensitive and overreacting to everything around me, and where people didn’t hurt or reject or leave.
There was just nothing, and sometimes that nothing was all I wanted.
* * *
