Authors: Samantha Blair
I breathed her in and let the silent tears flow down my cheeks. I had so much to atone for.
I never did go back to sleep. I was afraid that letting my guard down might somehow allow Kat's nightmares to creep back into her subconscious. I would keep a constant vigil over her if it would ease her mind.
Some time later I heard my mother in the kitchen. I was reluctant to leave Kat, but she showed no more signs of waking so I slid out from under her and quietly moved down the hall.
"Good morning, David," my mother said. She had a pot of coffee made and was cracking eggs into a bowl.
"Morning, Mom. How'd you sleep?"
"It was odd, being alone in bed."
"Did you have nightmares?"
"No. Did you?"
"No, but Kat did."
"I guess that's to be expected. I've lived with horror and violence for a long time. I think my subconscious processes it differently."
I was taken aback. The mother that I was used to was not typically so blunt. I just nodded, not really knowing what to say.
I pulled a mug from the cabinet and went to pour myself some coffee.
"I'll get that for you, dear," she said, reaching for the cup.
"No, I can get it. You're busy with breakfast."
She studied me for a moment and then turned back to the eggs.
"You know? I made your father breakfast every morning for the last thirty years, with the exception of the days that he was away on business. Not once did he get his own fucking coffee."
I spit the coffee that I was sipping all over the floor. Did my mother just say fuck?
She turned to me and smiled. "Didn't think I knew that word did you?"
I just shook my head. Apparently there was a lot that I didn't know about my mother. I wiped the coffee of off the floor with a paper towel and then took a seat on one of the stools by the counter. I didn't think that I would be able to sit at that table ever again.
"I think, Mom, that we have some catching up to do. It seems to me that we've missed a lot in each other's lives."
She poured the eggs into a pan. "You go first," she said.
"Okay, um Kat and I have known each other a lot longer than I've let on." I wanted to break it to her as gently as I could. There was no easy way to tell your mother that everything she thought she knew about you was a lie.
"How long?"
"We met my first day at Harvard."
"Wow. Have you been romantic all that time?"
"No, but we were lab partners and then friends. We started seeing each other, as a couple, during sophomore year."
She turned away from the stove and faced me fully. "You hid a serious relationship from us for five years?"
I ran my hands through my hair. "I didn't want to, Mom, but I had to. You saw how Dad was. Imagine if he'd known about her for years! Our relationship would never have survived."
"So all those things that you told your father about the women you were seeing..."
"Lies, Mom." I looked at my coffee, embarrassed. "Only my freshman year was true. When I met Kat, my whole life changed."
"I'm afraid it will take me a while to wrap my head around that."
An uncomfortable silence filled the room.
"Mom?" I finally said.
"Yes?"
"I'm so sorry that I let him do that to you all of these years."
She flipped the omelet over in the pan. "It wasn't your fault. You were just a child."
"But when I met Kat, when I first realized, I should have..."
"No, David. It's over now, and I don't want you to spend one more minute of your life worrying about what you should or shouldn't have done with that man."
It got quiet again. I had so much to say and no idea where to start.
"You know I'm going to give you the money, right? He should have left it all to you in the first place."
"I don't want his money. I don't want this house. I don't want any of it. I just want to get past the funeral, and then get on with my life." She pulled two plates down from the cupboard as she talked. "I would like to get to know you and Kat, though. I hope you'll consent to having me as a part of your life."
"Of course, Mom, and we'll sell the house, if you want, and you can go somewhere new. He left a ton of money. We won't need to worry about anything."
"That’s the only good thing that I can say about your father. He was financially stable."
She set two omelets on the counter, leaving a third portion for Kat on the stove and then moved towards the pantry for napkins, as I had seen her do a hundred times. She paused part way there and turned around. She looked at me for a moment, and then grabbed two paper towels from the roll by the stove instead.
"I can't tell you how long I've wanted to serve breakfast without formal fucking napkins."
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Who are you and what have you done with my mother?"
She burst into tears, and I got up to comfort her. Her hugs still felt the same as they had when I was a small child. She just seemed a little shorter now.
"God, David," she said against my shoulder, "I feel like I can finally breathe. It's terrifying. I spent the whole night awake trying to figure out what I wanted to do now. I haven't had my own opinion in so long; I don't even remember what kind of ice cream I like best."
I couldn't help it. I laughed. "After the funeral, we'll go get some. You can try every flavor." I thought hard. When I was little I always thought that she liked mint chocolate chip, same as my dad. I guess that's all he'd let her have. How fucked up do you have to be to not let your wife pick her own damn ice cream flavor? Kat would have kicked my ass if I had tried that outside of role-play. Even then, I would have known what to pick for her according to her preference. Unless it was really something bad that had become habitual, I would never dictate to Kat what to eat.
"Come on, breakfast will get cold," she said, giving me a last squeeze and wiping her eyes.
A moment later a sleepy-headed Kat padded softly into the kitchen. Out of instinct my mom got up to fix her a plate, but Kat waved her away and did it herself. I could see that my mom had to physically restrain herself to stay in her chair while someone else worked in her kitchen. She was going to have some adapting to do.
"So," my mother began after Kat was seated, "David was just telling me that you've been together a lot longer than I thought."
Kat blushed beside me.
"Actually, Mom," I said, "I um… I wanted to tell you this with Kat present. So I guess now is as good of a time as any..." I looked to Kat for confirmation, and she smiled up at me affirming. "Kat is my wife. We were married over last spring break."
My mother's jaw dropped open and tears filled her eyes.
"Married?" she whispered. "I knew you were in love, but... married?"
"I'm sorry that you couldn't be there," Kat said. "We felt, at the time, that it was better..."
"I understand, dear. It seems that staying with Richard meant that I had to miss a lot of important developments in my son's life, but I understand why you did it. I hope I can see the pictures at least?"
"We video taped it for you, and we were planning to have a big wedding here for you and dad, but it would have been just for show. We'll still do it, for you, if you want." I picked at my eggs. I wasn't really hungry anymore.
"We have plenty of time to figure that out later."
I nodded. "Not to change the subject too abruptly, but we should probably be discussing funeral plans."
Kat called all of our friends and acquaintances and told them the publicly accepted story of my father's death. I went to the funeral home to go over the arrangements with the funeral director. I asked my mom if she wanted to come along, but she said she'd rather stay home with Kat. I guess she wasn't too concerned that he would get the wrong color of casket.
We were expecting quiet a few people. Everyone in the community knew him. It was going to be an exhausting couple of days.
I made the arrangements, and then drove back to my mother's house. I noticed as I pulled up the drive that the Mercedes was gone. The wrecking company must have come to get it already. My mother was just full of surprises.
We had the first viewing that night. As I stood in line shaking hand after hand of my father's colleagues and neighbors, I began to wonder how a man could live such a two-sided life. They told me wonderful stories of selfless, generous, and compassionate things that he had done. If I wrote them down, it would be like the biography of a saint.
I was so conflicted. I wanted to be proud of the man that these people knew as my father, and I wanted to hate the man who sexually abused my mother for years. How could they even be the same person?
The next two days followed in the same way, more strangers telling me what a wonderful man he was, more patients whose lives he'd saved, more causes he'd donated to, more emotions that I didn't know how to process.
The detective who had worked my father's case came to the viewing the second day. He did not speak to me, but simply stood in the corner and observed for a while. He looked at Kat repeatedly. I wondered what he was looking for. I hoped that he would not find it. If he'd suspected anything, I would have expected him to speak by now.
I was relieved when my father's body was finally laid to rest. I buried a lot with that coffin, and most of it, I never wanted to dig up again.
I offered to bring my mom home with us for a while, but she insisted that she wanted some time alone. We were only a week away from Christmas break as it was, so Kat and I went home, promising to call every day and come back as soon as school let out.
It felt like the closing of one chapter and the opening of the next.
The nightmares didn't stop. I woke up nearly every night covered in sweat and choking on my own screams. I wished that I could control it. I knew that it was upsetting David, but there didn't seem to be anything that I could do about it.
David and I had been home for a few days, and I was back to work. I hoped that the return to normalcy would eventually work its way into my subconscious, removing the night terrors, but so far, it hadn't been very effective.
David scheduled meetings with Richard's lawyers and accountants. There was still a lot of business to take care of with regards to his father's estate. Everything was transferred into his name, but he chose to leave most of the investments alone.
We discussed at length what to do about Ellen. We both agreed that everything Richard had left behind should rightfully go to her. She had paid her dues with that man, and now she deserved whatever part of his legacy she wanted to keep. However, she didn't want to have anything to do with his estate, despite David's efforts to involve her.
It wasn't wise to just leave a couple million dollars in a checking account earning little or no interest, but if Ellen would not be involved in the investments than she would need a simple cash account. David didn't want to monitor her accounts. She had been watched and controlled enough for one lifetime, and David refused to give her a budget or a supervised spending account.
Finally, he settled on setting up an account for her, in her name only, that was essentially bottomless. The money was fed into the account from a range of Richard's investments. If the liquid amount of cash in the account ever dropped below $250,000 money would be taken from another investment to replenish it. It was the most bizarre money management system that I'd ever seen, but it made sense in a way.
He also set up an account for me, although it was not so complicated and used less funds. We'd both become a bit paranoid over the last few days about a worst-case scenario. David wanted to make sure that our wills were up to date, and that we had backup plans for everything. He had inherited some of his late father's obsessive-compulsive nature along with his fortune.
Ellen wanted to sell the house, so David made arrangements for her with a Realtor. She planned to sell as much as she could and donate the rest. It became clear quickly that she loathed everything in the house. It was as if she needed to rid herself of every physical reminder of her old life.
David and I were considering moving as well. Our living arrangements had always been controlled by what we could and couldn't tell his father, and now we had the freedom of both parental permission and finances. David wanted to hire an architect and build a house. I wasn't sure what to think.
David and I spent very little time together that week. He was extremely busy between his schoolwork and managing his father's affairs. I was looking forward to the Christmas break, which would allow us a little more time to reconnect.
The bruises had faded from my hips, and I had tried to let my memories fade as well, but I knew deep down that I was not recovering. I kept telling myself that it had only been a few days. I couldn't be expected to heal within the week. I wasn't very convincing.
David had not touched me physically since that night in the car. We slept in the same bed, of course, but even then he seemed reluctant to hold me. I told myself that he was just tired. He probably was tired, but that didn't keep my hurt feelings at bay. Didn't he know how much I needed him?