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“Yes, so I can repair the emotional damage you bestowed upon me?” I wrap my arms around my waist and clench my fists so tightly my knuckles strain.
“What damage did we cause you?” Mom asks, clutching the T-shirt fabric over her chest.
I grit my teeth, trying not to groan. “See, this is why I have stayed away and avoided contact,” I tell them. “This conversation that we have repeatedly—it’s painful. It makes me go home and cry until I pass out because I feel guilty for wishing I had parents with a different history, ones who let me experience life the way I should have been able to. The guilt is never ending. It gnaws at me constantly and even when I get a break from feeling so much resentment toward you, I quickly realize there is no such thing as a break because…well, here we are, right back where we left off two years ago.”
Mom’s lips part and she stares up at the ceiling. “But you are the one who keeps coming back to us,” Mom says.
“I did not come back to you. I was dragged back to you by Dad.”
“That’s not true, Haley. You aren’t making any sense, dear,” Mom says.
These conversations with the two of them make the full circumference of my neck itchy like I’m having an allergic reaction. I scratch at my already sensitive and bruised skin. I shouldn’t have come here just to remind them how detrimental their decisions were to my childhood. Just because I saw it all happening to another child today doesn’t mean I can undo what they’ve done to me already. It’s too late for me. It’s not too late for Madden.
“I’m just going to say this to you…you cannot raise a child by making them believe the sky is orange when it’s blue. You can’tcontinuously say you are someone, when you are truly someone else, leading me to believe this until I was thirteen. Do you know what that felt like?” I shout. “Thirteen, Mom.” My body feels like it’s on fire with the rage running through me. “Thirteen, when I found out that you and Dad escaped from a long-term behavioral health facility, ran across the country, changed your names, and started a new life here where your past couldn’t find you.”
“Haley, lower your voice,” Dad says. “I can’t believe we’re back to this again.”
I sniffle, feeling the familiar pain creeping up my chest. “Why, are you afraid someone will hear me say you’re ill and in denial about it? Or that you need serious help?”
“Haley,” Dad snaps. “What you’re accusing us of is not true. It has never been true and will never be true. There isn’t much more we can do to convince you of something you refuse to believe.”
“Avoidance doesn’t make the problem go away,” I shout back.
“We aren’t avoiding anything,” Mom says, dropping her shoulders with a look of defeat.
“All the kids in school found out about you, and that’s how I came to learn how you two met, despite the stories of falling in love on a beach in Newport one summer. How easy it is for a kid to believe something so fictional.”
“Of all people, I would think you’d be a bit more careful about labeling people, especially while going to school to study psychology.”
“I’m not labeling you,” I argue. “I would never do something like that. However, you and Mom are not well, and forgoing treatment for the sake of convincing yourself that you’re in fact healthy, isn’t going to help any of us.”
“We are healthy, Haley,” Dad says with a groan, dropping his head back to highlight his annoyance, continuing to fight back.
“Sure, that’s what you’ve always wanted people to think. When you ignore a problem, it gets worse, not better. You didn’t want to help yourselves, even for my sake. You were more concerned with everyone believing you were two people who didn’t run away from forced confinement. Forced confinement means you were either a danger to yourselves and/or others. Of course you wouldn’t want anyone to know that. That’s why you had to be so kind to people, even those who weren’t so kind to us, right? I even bet that’s why you let people live rent-free, too.”
“What—?” Dad grapples his hand around his forehead as if he’s confused about something he knows quite well about. “What are you talking about?”
“The Hoyt family. They lived in our complex rent-free until the whole place suddenly burnt down one day.”
“Haley, the Hoyt family? What do they have to do with this? And yes, they did pay their rent.”
“And to which of your personalities was that rent paid to because I remember hearing you two argue about this matter. I remember it as if it was yesterday.”
“I only have one personality,” he says with a heavy huff from his nose. “And you must have overheard something incorrectly.”
“Gary…” Mom says, holding her hands up for him to stop. “Let’s leave the Hoyt family out of this discussion. Haley, what exactly do you want from us?” Mom asks, looking over at Dad as if she needs his support for asking me this question. “You came back here today for something, did you not?”
“She needed to remind of us how awful we were,” Dad says.
“Gary, let her talk.”
“No, I’m done. I can’t take this anymore. I refuse to sit here while she tells us we’re mentally ill because we escaped from some psychiatric facility, which apparently ruined her life. We didn’t!”
“Gary, please stop. This is not helpful,” Mom says, raising her voice.
Watching the two of them have this conversation stirs up memories I have tried so hard to forget during the years following the fire—the two of them blaming each other for everything that went wrong. “And this is why nothing I ever say to you will change anything between us. Until you come to terms with the issues you both have, your disorders, and obsession to keep everything you love locked up and safe, nothing will ever be resolved. I want parents, even at twenty-seven—I just want parents who I feel like I know. But we’re still strangers. Maybe we always will be.”
“We are your parents, and we love you very much, no matter what.”
