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“We need to talk.”
I nodded. Here goes nothing.
We sat next to each other on the couch. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt. He stared at me with curiosity and interest.
“You know, don’t you?”
He nodded. “If anything has my name attached to it, I know about it, almost immediately.”
“I should have guessed.”
“So why don’t you tell me what this whole article is about?”
A shaky noise escaped my mouth. I never spoke about my mother to anyone really. My friends knew a little, but I had never shared all the details with them. It was one of those things I didn’t like to talk about.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“How about from the start?”
I nodded and looked down at my hands. I twiddled with my thumbs trying to take my mind back to those days. The days I had tried to black out from my memory.
“My father cheated on my mother,” I started. “My mother was an artist back in the day. She worked in an art gallery and she loved every second of it. She used to paint the most beautiful pieces.”
A lump formed in my throat and I was unable to speak for a moment.
Gabriel placed his hand on my knee and gave it a gentle squeeze, urging me to continue.
“My father was a photographer. He loved to capture beautiful things, particularly my mother. That was how they fell in love. They had a whirlwind romance and she ended up falling pregnant with me. They got married and moved to Los Angeles when I was two to pursue their careers.
Everything went well for the first few years. My mother’s paintings were selling and my father was being booked by some of the most high end magazines at that time. But things got hard when my mother’s paintings stopped selling. She wasn’t producing great work like she used to. She blamed me for her lack of creativity. She blamed me for losing her inner feminist and accused me of stealing her energy.
At the same time my father’s photography was taking off. My mom became miserable and resentful and started using drugs to escape. At first it was the small stuff like weed but then she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and was introduced to the harder stuff. She became difficult to deal with. More irritable and angry. That was the beginning of the end for my parents. I was twelve at the time.”
I could feel the unfamiliar sting behind my eyes. I hadn’t cried over this for a long time.
“It was on my thirteenth birthday that my dad threatened her. He said that she either get the help she needed or he was leaving her and he would never return. She agreed and decided to go into rehab. She went away for three months.
“I came home from school one day and found my father in bed with one of the models from his latest shoot. He had told me that things had gotten too hard with my mother. Her addiction had gotten to the point it was now affecting him mentally and he couldn’t connect with his work anymore. I remember I turned to him and told him that…that….” My voice trailed off. My heart felt so heavy I could barely keep it together. “I told him that he was the worst person in the world and I hated him for doing this to my mother. I ran out of the house in the middle of a storm. The one day in LA it chose to storm was the one day I caught my father cheating. He chased after me in the car and ended up getting into a car accident when a speeding truck t-boned him.” My voice broke at the end. “Those were the last words my father heard me say to him.
“It was my fault. If I hadn’t run out that day maybe he would have lived and my mother wouldn’t have relapsed. Maybe they would have been able to fix their marriage. Maybe I would have both my parents with me right now.” I sniffed trying to hold back the tears.
“Now she has been in and out of rehab more times than I can count. The last time I saw her she had ransacked my apartment and stolen all my savings. She took everything.”
Gabriel’s hand tightened around mine. “When was this?”
“The week you asked me to help you.”
“So that’s why you said yes.”
I nodded slowly feeling a little ashamed. “I had plans for those savings. I wanted to go and enroll in an art program in Europe.”
“Your drawings…” his voice trailed off as he went deep into thought.
“Those are meant for my portfolio. Art is a big passion of mine and probably one of the only things I share with my mother. I don’t want to live my life with regrets. I want to try it out and whether I fail or not, at least I would have tried.”
Gabriel sat silent, his composure unwavering.
He threaded his fingers through mine and looked me in the eyes. His hazel gaze infiltrating mine and I felt the last bit of wall around my heart crumble to the ground.
