Gaia's Secret (4 page)

You could’ve left out the part about hating
him. You know that’s not true.

But I’d wanted him to hurt. Hurt how he’d
hurt me. Guilt dug into my chest, deeper and deeper.

Alex’s gaze bore into mine with a fire I
didn’t understand.

The sound of footsteps echoed down the
hall.

Alex didn’t look at me as he walked to the
door, his movements sharp. With his back towards me he hesitated,
fingertips lingering on the doorknob. He turned it and left, the
door closing behind him.

I stared at the door. The room suddenly felt
empty and cold as a mass hardened in my stomach, the weight pulling
down my heart. What had I done? I should’ve been happy—happy that I
just let the world’s biggest jerk have it.

So why did I feel so guilty?

Cicero and Sonya entered the library,
followed by my dad. Their eyes darted around the room, probably
expecting Alex to be with me. But thanks to my unfiltered words, I
doubted he’d ever come near me again.

But that was what you wanted.

“Ready to go?” Dad asked.

“Yeah. Sure.” I heard my own words as though
someone else had spoken them. I flipped off the lamp near my
window-seat and returned the flashlight, ignoring the curious looks
on their faces.

Cicero and Sonya escorted us to the front
door where we all hugged and said our goodbyes. Sonya insisted I
visit her more often, and with honest intentions I said I’d try. We
both knew “try” was all I’d do, but she had to say it, so I’d know
how much she cared.

As Dad and I walked out into the drizzled
night, I glanced back, searching the windows. But all of them
remained dark and deserted. There was no sign of him, not one.

Our drive home was silent and contemplative.
Dad seemed preoccupied with thoughts of his own, his jaw fixed as
his eyes focused on the road ahead. I was fine with that because I
had enough to think about, like that room. The spinning globe and
strange manuscripts and portraits. What did it all mean? And what
had Alex wanted me to find? Better yet, why hadn’t he told me about
any of it when we were kids?

Regret crept upon me. I didn’t know why,
because I had done what I’d planned all these years: told him
exactly how I felt. That should’ve been my closure—my vindication.
But I felt even more unsatisfied than before I’d assaulted him.

You didn’t give him a chance to explain.

He’d had plenty of chances.

Maybe if you‘d kept your mouth shut, he
would’ve explained everything.

Dear conscience, shut up.

But what if that was his intention, seeking
me out in the library? Maybe he wanted to explain, or maybe I
could’ve confronted him about it. Gotten some real answers about
that day once and for all.

The day I was fifteen and he was
seventeen.

It had been a slow progression, but I’d
sensed it. I’d known him like I knew myself—better in some ways. We
had shared everything, talked about everything, and depended
entirely on the other as an accomplice in the small world we’d
lived in. There had never been any barriers between us. Not until
he had started creating them.

At first I thought it had been a figment of
my imagination. Then one day, reality punched me in the gut. Dad
had been off to the Andersons and I had the grand idea to go and
surprise Alex. When we had arrived, I crept up the hardwood
staircase, careful to skip the seventh, creaky step, all the way to
Alex’s room. It had been tough catching Alex off-guard, but I’d
mastered it after years of practice. Not telling him I would be
coming over was the key ingredient. It had been the one time I
could get him in a chokehold so secure even he couldn’t break
free.

His door had been cracked open just a few
inches and he had been talking to someone. I had peered through the
crack. He was on the phone. This would be simple. Just as I had
adjusted my stance to lunge, I froze. He’d said my name.

“Yeah, my mom said she’s on her way, but I’m
not supposed to know,” he had said to the person on the other end.
“No, she still has no idea…it’s hard for me…I’ve been pretending
since we were kids…my parents are making me.”
Pretending
?
About what?
I had been afraid to keep listening but I
couldn’t pull myself away. “I’m trying to figure out a way to tell
her before I leave…I go insane when I’m around her…”

The floor had creaked beneath my foot as I’d
shifted. Alex had spun around in his chair. I could still see his
face: surprise, guilt, fear, worry. He had hung up the phone and
hurried to me, his true feelings already masked by tenderness, but
it had been too late.

“What’s wrong?” he had asked, searching my
face.

He had been prodding, trying to see if I’d
heard what he said. I had told him I didn’t feel well, and he had
believed me. After a hasty goodbye, Dad took me home.

I didn’t cry often. With a dad gone most of
the time, and no real mother figure, I never learned how to deal
with emotion. I walled it off, burying pain deep inside, but that
night the pain was so immense that even the Great Wall wouldn’t
have been able to contain it. My tears came, and came. The entire
night.

Once my tears dried up, I built an
impenetrable barrier around my memories of him, tucking them away
far from reach. I never saw him again. I never heard from him
either. To me, that only confirmed the fact that he had never cared
about me, our friendship, our conversations, our time together. He
had pretended because his parents made him. But he had pretended so
well, and I had been a fool.

That was the first time in my life I ever
truly felt alone. Sure, I had been left alone most of the time, but
this had been different. It left me empty and hollow, the shell of
a human. If someone had punched me, I doubt I would’ve felt it, and
I had wanted someone to punch me, to take the focus off the
invading emptiness inside. Anything but what I had felt then.

Dad would sometimes talk about Alex, even
though I never asked. Alex had gone to study abroad, far, far away
from here, while showing great success in ventures unknown to me.
His parents—and my dad—were so proud.

After that incident, I stopped going to the
Andersons. It brought back the happiest moments of my life, which
were now tainted with the poisons of pain and bitterness.

“What’s going on over there?” My dad broke
the silence.

I realized we were almost home, winding past
the empty fields that encased me all my life. “Nothing.”

“Oh, really?”

I was twirling my hair again. I dropped my
hand. “Did you know Alex was going to be there?”

Dad licked his lips as he flexed his grip on
the steering wheel. “Last minute.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“If I told you Alex was going to be there,
would you have gone?”

I opened my mouth to argue and then glared
out the window. “No.”

“Then do you blame me for not telling
you?”

“Of course I blame you! There was no reason
for me to go.” Dad opened his mouth to speak but I cut him off.
“And don’t say it was because of Sonya. I barely got to talk to
her.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I
wanted…or hoped, that you might talk to Alex. Move on from whatever
it is you’re still upset about. He’s not the same person, you know.
Neither are you. You could at least give him a chance.”

Without a doubt, when it came to issues
between Alex and me, my dad took Alex’s side. That was where my
conscience learned it. “I did talk to him.”

Dad arched a brow. “Maybe we need to have a
discussion on the definition of ‘talk’, because you hardly spoke
all evening.”

“We talked in the library,” I said. “When you
were busy with Cicero and Sonya.”

“Must have been quite the conversation since
he didn’t meet us at the door when we left.”

I shut my mouth and stared out the window
again. It was useless. I loved Dad, but he inferred way too much
about things and I wasn’t in the mood to talk about what happened.
“Look,” I started. “I’m sorry. It was…hard for me, seeing him
again. It’s been so long, and—”

“Princess.” His tone turned soft like it
usually did before he was about to lecture me on something. I
braced myself. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t hurt from the past.
Pain isn’t unhealthy, but if you keep it too close it fathers
bitterness, and bitterness will eat away your soul like poison.” He
paused. “Your mother always told me that, and she knew from
experience.”

The moment he said the word “mother”, I
forgot about the lecturing and looked back at my dad. I expected to
see pain etched across his face, but instead the deep creases in
his forehead vanished and his lips held traces of a smile. I
studied him, waiting for him to revert to his usual state of
despondency when it came to my mother, but it didn’t come. Instead,
he kept talking about her.

“You look just like her.” He glanced at me.
“And I don’t need to remind you that she was a beautiful woman, but
it was her loving and honest heart that made her the loveliest
woman I’d ever known. To this day, I’ve never met her equal.”

That hurt a little. I prided myself in
honesty, but loving? My track record wasn’t looking so hot, this
evening included.

His next words were so quiet I almost didn’t
hear them. “I was a changed man after I met her.”

Considering his unusually nostalgic mood,
maybe he’d tell me this time. “How did you meet her?”

My dad shifted in his seat. “Traveling. But
that was a long time ago.”

His smile disappeared, his forehead
re-crinkled, and he focused back on the road ahead.

Or…maybe not.

My dad ended every discussion about anything
important to me during, well, my entire life, and now I was
starting to reach my threshold for dealing with it.

The clouds huddled over the mountains, as if
they were ready to attack. We turned down our long country road in
silence, while my irritation amplified. We couldn’t talk about my
mom; we couldn’t talk about my future. He, and my conscience,
always took Alex’s side, like I was the problem.

Frustration simmered beneath my skin. He
wouldn’t tell me anything. He wouldn’t let me go anywhere. He was
gone all the time. And because he was so overprotective, I had been
forced to live in the middle of nowhere my entire life without
prospects of an exciting future—any future. Worst of all, I was
forced to admit all that to Alex—the boy who'd just spent the past
three years studying abroad with friends so interesting he had no
need of me. What a successful life I'd led. And what a bright
future.

All of the anger and resentment I had kept
submerged burned. It burned so hot that it melted the little filter
I had.

“We need to talk,” I blurted as we pulled
into our driveway.

“You suddenly remember what it means?”

“Dad, I’m serious. I’m eighteen! I just
finished high school—alone. I don’t have college plans. I don’t
have any plans because
you
refuse to talk about it.”

My dad pulled the Subaru into our driveway.
The low thrum of the engine came to a halt, and the evening
listened in silence.

“Fair enough,” he sighed. “I know I haven’t
said much to you on the subject.”

“Much? You haven’t said anything.”

He continued saying nothing, his strong hands
holding the steering wheel, and then he looked at me. I knew that
look. I wasn’t going to win, not this time. Not ever. “Dad,
please
.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give you my reasons
yet.”

“But—”

“We’ll talk about this in a few years…”

“This is ridiculous!” I couldn’t take it
anymore. “A few years? You think I’m going to just sit…in this
house until
you’re
ready? Until you install thermal sensors
throughout the world? You can’t protect me forever. I’m tired of my
life revolving around yours. I’m leaving, whether you like it or
not. This summer.”

He studied me with suspicion in his eyes.
“Does this sudden outburst have anything to do with Alexander by
chance?”

I threw open the car door and jumped out of
my seat.

“Daria.”

I glared back at him. I couldn’t believe it.
He was smiling.

“Where are you going?”

“To see Cadence,” I called over my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, you can keep an eye on me through your video
cameras.”

I had to get away. I felt Dad’s eyes on my
back as I leapt over the fence and into our neighbor’s yard. And
then there was nothing. Nothing but an expanse of brown grasses
before me.

What was wrong with me? It wasn’t like my
monotonous life was a new thing. I’d been dealing with it since I
could say the word “cow.” It just took someone like Alex—doing all
the things I’d always dreamed of doing—to expose my life for what
it was, to illuminate my own misery, to remind me that I was a
boring, mundane farm girl. Worse than that, I technically didn’t
even live on a farm.

Cadence whinnied with excitement when she saw
me. It seemed my taking Cadence for a ride was the only freedom
either of us had. Her hooves pounded the ground, clumps of earth
kicking up behind us as we ran. Air whistled past my ears as my
braid whipped my back, my eyes watering from the chilled air. I’d
always found peace through riding, but even riding couldn’t take
away the strain this time.

I pushed Cadence harder.

We ran to the farthest corner of my
neighbor’s property, the only side without a fence. It didn’t have
a fence because it ended with a steep cliff. We stopped at the rim,
and Cadence panted as I sat, breathing in the cool, damp air.

Reaching in my pocket, I pulled out Alex’s
letter.

“
I need you to do something—something that
may help you understand.”

Understand what? And how was that room
supposed to explain anything? All it did was form more questions,
reminding me that he’d known all these years and never told me. But
why would he? He wasn’t even honest with his feelings. Being
reminded of his lies when I’d trusted him more than I’d trusted
myself hurt all over again.