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Her parents only knew their child. Their little girl who still liked to hold her dad’s hand on the long evening walks they took, and who let her mother kiss her goodnight. They didn’t know how to be around the woman who had her virginity ripped from her without her permission. Who knew what starvation tasted like, smelled like. Who knew what monsters looked like.
They were afraid of that woman. Terrified.
So, they catered to the girl they remembered, and they ignored the woman right in front of them, the one barely keeping it together.
“No, thank you, Mom,” Shelby said, clenching her fists. But she smiled. It felt fake, almost painful. She had never felt this kind of anger, frustration. Not even in The Cell. What did that say about her, that love and tenderness caused her to want to scream, but pain and torture had her withering up and submitting. Who had she become?
Her mom stood in front of her, forcing an easy smile onto her face, but her eyes filled with panic—she was all but wringing her hands. “How about I make you some mac and cheese?”
There was also the food. Her mother cooking all of her childhood favorites like it might do something. As if eating enough Hamburger Helper might erase what had happened.
She sighed, looking at her mom, at the almost permanent glassiness in her eyes, always a breath away from tears. Her mother’s tears once brought Shelby tears of her own, but she now found them to be grating, maddening. An insult to her own anguish. But she didn’t say what was on her mind, didn’t know how to.
“Sure, Mom. Mac and cheese sounds great.”
Her mother smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. It was a mask she wore around Shelby.
Her father was a little better because he didn’t try quite as hard. Men, as a rule, weren’t as practiced at hiding their true feelings as women were. At least, for women in the O’Reilly clan. They learned at an early age, in order to be liked, in order to please people, in order to survive, they had to play pretend sometimes . . . for the sake of the family, for the sake of her fragile sanity. They were masters of deception in many ways.
O’Reilly men were better at other things, like hiding their monsters but not their feelings. The Irish blood running through their veins, lubricated with a little whiskey and ale, made secrets and feelings and worries pour from their lips freely. Her father was no different. He didn’t drink like his father—her late “Grampops”—and he hid it from her for most of her childhood, but it never bothered her anyway. She liked the way it made him more open and honest.
That’s why she preferred being around her father. He didn’t hide it all quite so well, didn’t really even try to. And he didn’t make her feel like she was some breakable trinket, tiptoeing around her and speaking to her like a child. She felt more comfortable in the hideous honesty rather than the synthetic kindness and warmth her mother used as a shield.
But they were both trying. They both loved her. It was cruel of Shelby to feel such all-encompassing irritation toward the parents who loved her, had grieved over her, had never lost hope . . . specifically, her mother.
Jaclyn and Orion didn’t have that.
They had no one.
They didn’t have anyone to run them baths, make them food. All of their family was gone.
For a moment, a pang of jealousy rippled through Shelby. She knew it was a terrible thing to wish for that kind of aloneness, for her parents to just up and disappear. Even if it were just for a moment. It was stifling here, in this house that hadn’t changed a bit. In her room that was all but a shrine to the person she used to be. She lived in a neighborhood where the neighbors were anxious to see her, to chat her up, to drop off gifts while wearing their pitiful smiles. If she had to fake one more thank you to one more neighbor, she thought she might just kill them right where they stood.
Expectation pressed down on her from all directions, heavy, suffocating. Of course, her parents couldn’t see her desperation, her claustrophobia, her suffering. They were good people, good parents, if a little overbearing—she knew that. She saw just how loose the threads were holding them both together. Her mother had always been the strong one. Terse. The disciplinarian. She eschewed all stereotypes of the softness and grace a mother was meant to have. Her father was the soft one. Despite his stature—she had always thought him so large as a child, when in reality he was average height—his strong jaw, his moustache that was thick and masculine, he was the one she went to. He was the one who spoke softly, never raised his voice, and happily let his wife boss him around.
