“What the fuck are you doing?” I scream in disbelief. “Why are you defending her?”
“I’m not defending, I’m being rational.”
“You can’t rationalize what she did,” I throw at him. “She sold me! What if the police had never found me? But she didn’t care what happened to me as long as she got what she wanted.”
“You don’t think it’s worth making sense out of? To find any semblance of understanding?”
“Are you kidding me? No! What she did was wrong! People like her don’t deserve understanding!”
“You mean people like you?” he throws at me.
“What?”
“How is what she did any different than what you did?”
His assumption that I’m anything like the woman who sold me pisses me off, and I snap, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m talking about you. Why did you marry Bennett? Why did you make me fall for you? Why did you lie?”
“It’s not the same,” I state, refusing to believe I’m of the same vile nature as my mother.
“Because you wanted something to make you feel better. Because you were only thinking of yourself and you didn’t care what happened to the people who came in your path or that you destroyed,” he answers for me in growing rage.
His words shut me up. I don’t want to acknowledge the parallels, but it’s there, unmistakably. He just threw it in my face.
“She knew better,” I poorly argue.
“So did you,” he affirms.
“I can’t forgive her for what she did.”
“No one is saying you have to. I just want you to face the facts and deal with it. I don’t care how you deal with it as long as you do something with the information instead of hiding from it,” he says. “And yes, what she did was awful, and it makes no sense, but neither do your actions.”
“And neither do your actions, Declan,” I condemn, and he knows exactly what my words imply.
“No, you’re right. I can’t make sense out of the things I’ve done to you. But I do know enough to recognize that ever since I took a man’s life, I haven’t been the same. I carry an appalling amount of animosity inside of me that I don’t know how to deal with.”
“So we’re all just screwed up?”
“To some degree, yes,” he responds. “I don’t want to downplay what your mother did, that’s not what I’m trying to do. I just want you to face the facts and do something with it.”
And I see his point, because it doesn’t even take me a second thought to know I don’t want to resemble that woman in the slightest. I don’t want that hostility living and breeding inside of me anymore. I want to let go of the resentment. I want to let go of the blame. I want to let go of the constant fiending for payback. But sometimes we don’t get what we want, and even though I want to be without it, a part of me will probably always want to hang on to it.
I AIM MY foot to land on the small patch of snow just to hear it crunch under my rain boot. The sound brings me a tiny piece of joy as I walk the grounds. The snow started to melt away yesterday when the sun finally peeked out from behind the heavy blanket of grey clouds. But today is another dank day, cold and damp.
Declan still has me here at his house. He took me back to the Water Lily to pack some of my belongings, but I’m still paying for the room because he told me this arrangement was simply temporary until I was well-rested and feeling better.
This is my second day here, and I’ve hardly seen Declan. He spends most of his time up on the third floor where his office is. When the sun came out yesterday, he suggested that I soak up the vitamin D, so I decided to enjoy the grotto. I spent hours inside the clinker structure. He has a small round table with two chairs set in the center under the glass ceiling. Even though the temperatures were in the thirties, the sun warmed the room where I sat and daydreamed like a little girl. As if that grotto was my palace, and I, the princess captured, waiting for my prince to save me.
And now, as I walk the grounds, stepping from snow patch to snow patch, I feel myself imagining this fabulous property as my magical forest. Winding through the trees, up small hills, passing flower gardens bedding the blooms that will emerge in the coming months, as well as benches and manmade stone and pebble creeks. I wish for one of the creeks to be the mythical Lethe that Declan and I could drink from to vanish the past into a vapor of vacuity. To eradicate the sufferings of our souls.