Shadows and Lies (23 page)

If nothing else, she was an interesting distraction at a time when I felt I desperately needed one.

One day Vanessa called me up out of the blue with big news. She didn’t even bother saying hello, she was so excited. “Lindsay’s been offered a job through her school!”

“Great,” I said with a smile. My facial muscles strained, unused to such action, but they didn’t fail me. They were rusty was all, after weeks of disuse. I was genuinely happy for Vanessa and Lindsay too. I had been expecting this sort of news eventually, so it was easy to know what to say and to be enthusiastic. “That’s exactly what you guys need to get back on your feet. With her making money, you can start thinking about maybe going to night school; you guys can get an apartment…”

“The job is in Seattle, Washington,” Vanessa broke in. “We’re going to be moving there.”

That stopped me, but only for a moment. “Well, I’ll miss you guys, but I’m sure they have perfectly good community colleges in Seattle too.”

Vanessa scoffed at me. She actually scoffed like I was out of my mind. “Yeah, right. Me go back to school. Even if I knew what to take, I’d probably bomb out.”

That was Nancy talking, and I was overcome by the urge to slap my stepmother hard across the face. She had given Vanessa a hard time in high school, discouraged all of her artistic abilities and left her with no confidence as to her own talents. I myself would have killed to have some of Vanessa’s artistic talents.

“You’d do great, you just have to give yourself a chance,” I said fiercely. “You have to find something that you really want to do, like decorating or crafting or something. You could open a store or, or anything.”

“Maybe,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced.

I sighed. “So when are you moving?”

“In two months. Lindsay graduates in one month. We’ll have to go up and have a look around, find a place to live. We don’t want to live in the city. Maybe one of the surrounding towns, something small and a little slow. We’ve been looking at pictures online. Carrie, it’s so green there. It’s like a different world.”

I smiled, thinking of my email. I was still getting spam for trips to Seattle, and I had to agree that it did look very beautiful. “It sounds like you’ll be happy there.”

I could feel Vanessa smile back. “Yeah. I think so too.”

“You’ll have to let me help you pack,” I said, and then I grinned. “And let me glean off the things you don’t want to take with you.”

“We’ll be putting you to work, don’t worry,” Vanessa said, but then her voice lowered and became dull. “Dad wants to talk to you, too,” she said shortly.

“You’ve been in contact with our parents?” I asked with a frown. The last thing either of my sisters needed was to be talking with our parents. Knowing them, they’d try to talk, or rather bully, my sisters out of leaving the state. I personally thought that the farther away they were from our parents, the better off my sisters would be.

“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “They’ve had us over for dinner a couple of times. We’ve never gone alone; Clarissa is always with us. Dad keeps trying to get me to come back to work for him.”

I frowned. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him no. I got a temporary job through a placement agency as a receptionist at a car dealership.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s good. That’s real good.” And I thought, she did it, she told our parents no. She didn’t go back. “That’s wonderful. So what does Dad want to talk to me about?”

“He wants you to take my old job as the office manager.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Not in a million years would I take that job! I’m not getting back in their clutches for anything!”

“It’s not hard work…” Vanessa began lamely, but I cut her off.

“Nancy yells and Dad can’t manage a business if his life depended on it. I have to put up with Dad and Nancy because we’re related, but there is no way I’m going to become their employee and let them treat me like crap for slightly more than minimum wage.”

“Oh,” Vanessa said, taken back by my vehemence. “Well, Dad is still going to want to talk to you. You know how stubborn he is. He’s back to work, but I don’t think he’s taking his medication like the doctor wants him to.”

I sighed. “We can’t force him, and frankly, I don’t have the energy to police him. It’s not even our job.”

“I know,” Vanessa agreed. “But I still worry.”

“He’s our father. I suppose we’ll always worry,” I replied. “But our parents are poison, and I don’t want you to play Dad’s messenger anymore. If he has something he wants to say to me, he knows how to dial a phone. It isn’t up to us to cater to him and I’m certainly done trying to please him. I don’t think he deserves that kind of thing from me anymore.”

“I agree,” Vanessa said quietly. “I don’t think he deserves it either. But still.”

But still. I knew what she meant, even though I didn’t think she should think it. I dropped the subject though, and we chatted for a little longer about the move, and then we hung up. I shook my head. My father. God, he was such a user. Everything he did was done out of a desire to have as little personal contact with his children as possible, even as he used us for labor to further his futile businesses. Sometimes, he really made me want to throttle him.

Four weeks had come and gone by the time of Vanessa’s phone call. I was 7 weeks pregnant and I knew I needed to make a decision about it. The clinic’s website had said that a medical abortion would in total cost me about $500. At that point my savings account was in poor shape. I had spent more than $2000 dollars getting my car fixed up on the last two months, and then there was my short but oh so expensive stay in the hospital. I had a payment plan for that bill, but it would take me a while to pay off.

My main problem was I still wasn’t sure whether I really wanted an abortion, or if it was even the right decision to make. I had been taught my whole life that a person takes responsibility for her actions, no matter what they are, and a part of me just couldn’t help but think of an abortion as a way for me to run away from a problem that I had helped to create. I was getting to the point that I needed to tell someone besides Genny, who was frankly busy with her new husband and didn’t have much time for me, despite all her good intentions.

It was time for me and Barbara to meet face to face and have a serious talk.

I called her up and she was excited to finally take this step forward. We met at one of those restaurants that only serve salad and soup, which was okay since it was a Monday, and apparently Mondays were clam chowder days, which is my all-time favorite soup. I made up a huge salad with every imaginable topping and smothered the whole mess in blue cheese dressing. Barbara just had a little salad and fat free dressing. While we waited in line to pay for our food, she talked and I listened, and I looked her over very carefully.

She looked pretty much the same as she had in the few pictures I had seen of her when I was a kid, only she had a few more lines on her face now. She was maybe a little slimmer and definitely more sophisticated looking. In her pictures she had always had that tired mom look about her, wearing her clothes a little too big and her hair pulled back away from her face in a severe but functional style.

Now, she dressed like someone who was planning to sit in the audience of Oprah’s talk show: middle-aged hip, I called her look, which was complete with dress slacks, low heels, a dressy jacket and matching purse. Her hair was short and styled and it framed her face perfectly. Next to her I felt like a hobo in my ponytail, jeans and T-shirt, which were feeling a little tight because I’d gained about five pounds over the last few weeks. I blamed that weight gain on all the chocolate I’d been eating, but I couldn’t really be held accountable for that. I’d been under stress, and chocolate was my therapist.

Barbara was kind enough to pay for us both, and I found a table. After thoroughly checking the cleanliness of the tabletop and her silverware, Barbara finally sat down and began to eat with delicate, ladylike bites, using her knife to cut lettuce and vegetables into baby sized pieces. I was so nervous about what I wanted to tell her that I just shoved food in my mouth irrespective of size and chewed while she made conversation like a pro. She told me that I was beautiful, but that she could still see the little girl in me, and then rhapsodized over the years she’d had with my sisters when they were very young, which only made me feel very jealous of them and mad at her.

I couldn’t help but speak up then. She was too happy, too bubbly. “Do you realize that you left us with a man who turned us over to the care of a violently unstable woman – a woman who made us feel like dirt every day of our lives? All the while, Dad turned a blind eye and let us be abused because it was convenient for him to not have to deal with us!”

Needless to say, Barbara was shocked at my outburst, but not so much about what I had said as how I had said it. “Carrie, you shouldn’t raise your voice in public like this,” she hissed with embarrassment. I looked around myself. People were looking at us. I turned back to her with a feeling of shock myself, not over my outburst, but at her rejoinder.

I dropped my fork in my salad in shock. “That’s all you can say? I tell you that your daughters were abused, and you say don’t raise my voice because it isn’t ladylike?”

Nervously, Barbara took a sip of her iced tea. That was another thing Barbara didn’t believe in: straws. She thought straws were uncivilized and refused to use them. “Carrie,” she said, her voice somehow different, her mannerisms changed. “I know all that. I know how you were treated by Nancy.”

I stared at her dumbly. “You knew? How did you know?”

She seemed to grow even more nervous, and I wondered who the real Barbara was: confident, well-dressed, ladylike Barbara, or this person who sat before me who seemed to shrink into herself at my mention of the past?

“Lindsay told me,” she said, taking in a deep breath. “Years ago. When she was 18.”

“When she was 18,” I echoed numbly. Lindsay had spoken to someone about what had been going on? She’d opened her mouth and opened up?

Barbara nodded and took another sip of her tea. “She told me what had been going on. I was shocked. She wanted to come live with me, but I told her she couldn’t.”

My lips moved in horror for a moment before words could come out. “And why did you tell her that she couldn’t?” I asked, my voice sounding surprisingly calm to my own ears. My own problems were, for the moment, forgotten.

“Because Vanessa was only 15 at the time, and you were barely 7. Since I had rescinded all my custody rights to your father, you and Vanessa had to remain with him still. I thought that Lindsay as the oldest should stay and protect you both. I wasn’t doing too well financially at the time, either.”

My head suddenly felt like it was going to explode. “Lindsay suffered the most as the oldest,” I said stiffly, my temper held in check at that moment only because we were in public. “You should have let her come. You should have told Vanessa that when she turned 18, she could come too. It wasn’t Lindsay’s job to protect us.” I stabbed my finger at her. “It was your job.”

“I gave up all my rights…” Barbara began in a shaking voice, but I cut her off.

“And why did you give up those rights?” I demanded. “Were you tired of being a mother?”

“Oh, no!” Barbara exclaimed with tears in her eyes. “No, I loved all three of you.” Her voice was rather high, and she lowered it, conscious of eavesdroppers. “But your father demanded that I give you up. We had the same lawyer you see; that was stupid, I know that – now – but I was stupid back then. He was angry and I felt horrible about what I’d done, and I signed you away. I didn’t think I deserved to see you girls anymore.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Barbara,” I said with frustration. “You cheated on him. You didn’t commit murder. If not for you signing that paper, you would have gotten at the very least shared custody of all three of us, and we could have had much different lives! Better lives!”

“I know that now!” A blush stained her cheeks. “But I felt so guilty, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down, and then I asked the question I’d wanted to ask her for a long time. “Why did you cheat on dad?”

Barbara sighed. “It was a lot of things, Carrie. Your father was so stubborn. He never talked; he never discussed issues with me. He would just simply make decisions, and they were usually bad ones. When I would try to talk to him about our problems, he would become belligerent and leave the room. So we stopped talking. The house was constantly in a state of disrepair – it was as if he liked living in a dump. And he was bad with money. We argued constantly about it. I offered to go work to help bring in money, but he refused to allow me. Then we moved here to Vegas, into another dump, and things got worse. He went into business for himself, and by the middle of most months we were broke. I did go to work then, without his permission, and things got worse between us. It was horrible, and I just couldn’t stand being around him.”

She paused, and then looked down at the table and said in a voice so small I could barely hear, “There was this man at work, you see, and he was nice to me, and he talked to me. He listened to me. I told him about my marriage, my life, and he offered me comfort.”

Barbara raised tear filled eyes to me then. “And he got me pregnant,” she whispered.

I stared at her for what felt like ages, trying to register what she was saying. “Pregnant,” I repeated. This sounded strangely familiar. Wasn’t this what I was supposed to be telling her?

Barbara nodded. “Yes,” she said in a more normal voice. “You had a half-sibling.”

I rubbed my hands over my face at this revelation. “And what happened to it?”

“I had an abortion,” Barbara whispered. “I got rid of it before your father could find out.”

Silence reigned at our table for several minutes. “I assume Dad found out anyways?” I asked eventually.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. He found out. He found $200 missing from the checking account and demanded to know what I had spent it on. I had to tell him. He was furious.”