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I know where this is going, but I don’t speak up. I don’t stop her and tell her it’s okay to keep the rest to herself.
This woman is just as fucking damaged as I am.
“She slit her wrists in that tub. My beautiful sister, my protector, my only friend, killed my father, something I found out later she’d been trying to build the courage to do for years. Years, Angel. That’s how long he was hurting her.”
I swallow, blinking slowly as I watch her face. She’s positively gorgeous in her pain, and maybe if I hadn’t witnessed so many terrible fucking things in my own life, I’d gasp and apologize for something I had no more fucking control over than she did at such a young age.
“I didn’t want Liana to be in trouble, so I tried to clean up the floor around my father. It was an impossible task. I didn’t call the police until the next day, and the detective who showed up couldn’t understand that. Maybe in his world 9-1-1 is the very first thought after a tragedy, but in my house, it was never an option. The only reason I called was because I was terrified they were going to turn into ghosts.” She chuckles, a humorless sound as she pours another drink. “I was terrified of facing my father even in death after what happened. I could literally imagine how angry he’d be about the stain his body left on the carpet.”
She doesn’t look back at me again as she drains her glass, only to refill it once again.
A friend would tell her to stop.
A friend would tell her that’s enough, and she’s going to regret her choice in the morning.
Only, I’m not her fucking friend. If anything I’m growing bitter by the moment with her confessions.
I don’t want this shit in my head. I don’t want to know what terrible things happened to make her the way she is.
I fully fucking understand her now. It’s clear to draw a line from what she witnessed and the guilt she must’ve felt and how it led to her punishing herself in the way that she does.
Maybe if her father hurt her instead of her sister, then Liana would still be alive.
Maybe she feels like she should’ve been raped back then and since that wasn’t her reality, she can go through the motions having that done to her now.
The mind is a fucked-up thing. Dealing with tragedy and trauma make us do even more fucked-up shit.
I shake my fucking head. There’s no fucking chance I’m going to mentally withdraw and become goddamned Dr. Phil in my head.
“I hid her diary before calling the cops. I took her necklace off and hid it, too. Those are the only two things I have left of that part of my life. I keep them in a safe deposit box in my hometown of Dighton, Kansas.”
She yawns without even bothering to cover her mouth, but she’s still energetic enough to lift that fucking glass to her lips.
Her confessions shouldn’t bother me, but they do.
Pieces, memories, regrets from my own childhood start to seep in.
I can take a step back and understand how fucked up my life was back then.
I know what my father did was wrong. My mother didn’t deserve the way she was treated, the way she was murdered. I know I could’ve done more to help her. I also know that I was a child, looking through a lens, learning how to behave. Maybe it was selfish of me to sit back and let her take the brunt of every blow, to agree with my dad about her wrongdoings because it protected me. What could I have done? I couldn’t square off with my father and come out victorious.
What took me so long to admit was that I didn’t want to die like she did. It was intrinsic for me to survive.
The other side of that same coin was that I was taught from such a young age that women are less than men. They don’t hold the same value as we do. That’s a hard cycle to break and clearly something I struggle with even now.
But children?
They’re to be protected, to be taught.
That’s what makes me wish I was the one to put Lauren’s father down like the sick, rabid dog that he was.
She never should’ve suffered that way. Her sister never should’ve had to deal with a man creeping into her bedroom at night.
I push away thoughts of blaming her mother. She didn’t mention what happened to the woman, but that engrained part of me will always blame the woman first, to point a finger and say Liana suffered because her mother wasn’t enough.
I scrape my hands over the top of my head, annoyed that I even fucking care to begin with.
I don’t want to think about Lauren’s life choices and how they probably all lead back to the way she was raised. It lends an element of culpability to something she couldn’t control, and at the end of the day, choices have consequences.
