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It was a joy to watch him take part in packing Soriya up for the trip. Watching him participate in fatherhood, rather than simply presiding over it as a man who was being forced to bear witness to it.
He was the one who packed her diaper bag. And bundled her up, ready for the trip. And on the plane, he was the one who held her.
“I’ve never held a baby before her,” he said when they were comfortably in the sky.
“Never?”
“No. I was... I was very isolated in my life.”
“Can you tell me more about your childhood?”
“Will you be charging hourly for the session?”
“No. But I just... I want to know. One of the things that I promised myself was that I would be a good mother to her. No matter what happened between us. My childhood was lonely,” she said. “We moved a lot. We had to, because we were dodging landlords. Creditors. Always. So I might make friends at school, but it would be for a small moment. And sometimes my mother didn’t even enroll me in school because we weren’t in a place long enough. It was very fractured, and it was extremely uncertain.”
“Tell me,” he said. “What were you planning on doing? Really. You didn’t tell me that you were still pregnant. You must’ve had a plan.”
“I didn’t tell you because you said you didn’t want a child.”
His jaw firmed and he nodded slowly. “I did. I’m not angry at you for that.”
And yet there was anger in his voice. But she wondered if it was mostly directed at himself.
“Well good, if you were angry at me for that, I would have to punch you in the stomach, because you don’t deserve to be angry at me for what I did to survive.”
“No.”
And somehow, that resonated inside of her. What she had done to survive. She looked at him, and she wondered how much of what he’d done was trying to make sure he survived.
It created sympathy where she hadn’t expected to feel it.
And she wanted to continue to press him about his childhood, not allow him to derail the discussion with her own stories. But maybe he needed her stories.
“I knew I wanted to give her stability,” she said. “And most of all love. Support. I was an afterthought to my mother. She dragged me along with her, and I think she often resented it. I made her life harder. I was very aware of that. I wanted... The reason that I was a virgin, Krav, is that I never wanted that life. I thought that I was smarter than her. And I met you, and I threw it all out the window. Because smart... There was no being smart. I just wanted you. And I threw everything I knew out the window for that. But when I found out that I was going to have Soriya... Well, then I knew I had to be better. I got a job in England. I decided that I would stay there. I didn’t want to go back to Georgia because I didn’t want to feel like I was living the same life my mother was. And maybe that was just a feeling, and something I did to make myself feel... Better. But I got a job, and it was a good one. I found a decent living situation. I was delivering baked goods when I got into my accident.”
“Do you remember the accident?”
“No. I still don’t. The last thing I remember is going in to work. I don’t know that I’ll ever remember the accident. It scares me, a little bit. That lost time. But I gained some of it back, so... Anyway, I did have a plan. But I think the most important thing wasn’t the plan. It was recognizing where my mother failed. And promising in my heart that I wasn’t going to let her decide my path. I want to decide it.”
“You are strong,” he said. “I’m grateful my daughter has such a strong mother.”
“Tell me,” she said. “What was it like growing up in that state?”
“It was a nightmare,” he said. “Mostly, my father only had oversight with me via tutors and nannies. They were told to be hands off with me. Not coddle me. But sometimes... He was a violent man, Riot. And sometimes there was a fury in him that could only be expressed on me. But even that... I found ways to survive it.
“The worst part was knowing I’d had something different. And losing my connection to that day by day. Bit by bit. Until love wasn’t even a memory, it was simply a picture in my mind, an impression of a feeling rather than the feeling itself.
“And as I moved further and further away from that... I moved further and further away from everything. It was how I survived. That distance.”
“Krav...”
“They aren’t pretty stories.”
“No. But life isn’t always pretty. And I want to know you. You can tell me. You don’t have to simply make broad sweeping statements about all the things that happened. You can tell me exactly what it was.”
“He once beat me so badly I thought I would die. So did my nanny. She took me to the hospital, but they had to hush up what had happened.” He stared off into the distance, his eyes dark. “And I remember it. Every blow. Every kick. Over and over again. And if you cannot escape physically, you go somewhere inside of yourself. I don’t know if I ever made it back out.”
Survival. Everything he was, was because of what he’d done to survive.
