Someone I Used to Know

chapter Twenty

Adley


Back in the car with Alfred, my restless hands showed my inner turmoil where my silence did not. I had nothing to say, and everything to know. Did Declan’s irritability have something to do with me? Some twisted part of me wanted it to be true. I knew he’d cared for me, but I was also sure it had been a passing fancy. It was perverse to be delighted by the idea that my loss still hurt him, but I soaked up the possibility that I wasn’t the only one subjected to the agony of longing.

Absently I trailed Alfred’s charm, the Fish Bone Hook, along the palm of my hand, enjoying the distracting tickle. The bracelet jingled, jostled by my anxious movements. Alfred glanced at me pointedly, annoyed with my edginess.

“Madeline was right, you know.” I turned his charm over and over again, admiring the way it caught the lights of the interstate as we flew past. “I don’t deserve this…I’m a coward. That’s never going to change.”

He didn’t even blink, his focus solely on the road. I’d given up on him responding when he finally spoke, a familiar gruff edge scratching his deep voice, “Did I ever mention that I was adopted?”

I was not so shocked that I couldn’t cast him a look that said ‘when have you ever mentioned anything to me.’ I was still pretty shocked though.

“I left the hospital with my adopted parents. I never lived with my birth mother,” he continued.

“Do you hate her – your birth mother?” I blurted the same question that plagued me every day.

He shook his head.

“My mom spent her whole life thinking she’d made a mistake. Her regret consumed her. It was all she could think about. Her obsession pushed her past the point of rational. She worried constantly about me, convinced the family who’d adopted me was mistreating me or that I thought she didn’t love me. I met her when I was in my twenties, and she told me all of it, how she’d spent every moment since my birth dealing with the repercussions of her decision.”

“But you knew she loved you then.” I felt some subconscious need to defend the woman I’d never met. “You didn’t have to think that she just threw you out without a second thought.”

“Yes, any miniscule worries I’d had were cleared, but it didn’t make me feel any better. All that time I’d been growing up, having fun, making memories, loving my parents, and she’d been stuck in the past, unable to climb out…All meeting her made me feel was guilt and pity. Ever since I’d known I was adopted, there had always been this thought in my head that the sacrifice meant there was some higher purpose to the whole mess.

“Seeing her, the shell she’d become, it didn’t make me feel loved. It made me feel useless.”

“You think that’s what I’ve done? You think I’m stuck in the past?” I demanded. There was no accusation in his voice, but it felt like my own fingers were turning against me, pointing back to me as he pointed them at his mother.

“I think that pretending your hand isn’t broken doesn’t make it any less broken. How can you heal if you won’t even accept that you’re broken?”

Somewhere in the back of my mind his words clicked into place, and I knew.

He was right. My daughter was the broken hand I refused to accept. I’d never let her be real to me. I’d never seen her; never heard her cry; never smelled her, or held her. I’d made her nothing more than a fantasy. I’d dissociated myself because it was easier, and in the process, I’d unknowingly sabotaged any chance I ever had of moving on.

How was I supposed to mourn something that had never been real?

“So what? I’m just supposed to move on? Forget it ever happened?”

“No,” he replied somberly. “I think you need to forgive.”

“Forgive?” I scoffed. I was past the point of caring how rude I sounded. “Forgive who? I wouldn’t even know where to begin…Cam? My parents? Thomas? The whole f*cking world?”

He didn’t flinch. He only shook his head before speaking softly,

“You have to forgive yourself, kaikuahine.”

It was the last thing in the world I expected him to say, and it left me stumped.

Forgive myself? Did I even deserve to be forgiven?

The thought jarred me further. Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized I was punishing myself. It had become an engrained part of my life. I hadn’t deserved happiness. I needed to suffer.

It was masochistic…It was twisted, and only faced with it, could I see that it was wrong.

The first sob took me by surprise. It welled up inside of me, bursting out of my tear ducts and chest. It gutted me, and left me unprepared for the second. I didn’t cry. I sobbed.

My body was expunging a poison, or maybe it was expelling a demon. It was rough and ugly and unapologetic. It went on forever, one tidal wave after another.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” I managed to say when I could speak. He made no move to comfort me, and for that, I was thankful. Pity was one thing I couldn’t take.

“You do it for the same reason you do when making up with an old friend after a long fight…You cry because you feel relief…and because it means peace.”

I didn’t know about peace, but I certainly felt relief. I’d spent so much time trying to make things right. I wanted to make the perils of my life worth something more. I thought my pain was a price my daughter deserved.

Alfred’s mother had wasted the sacrifice. I had no intention of doing the same. The only way I could keep that from happening was to forgive myself. I wouldn’t do it for me. I’d do it for my daughter.

But peace was not mine to have. How could it be? I was still scarred with a grievance that wasn’t mine to forgive. I could forgive myself for my daughter…But I’d never be able to forgive myself for inflicting the same fate on Cam.

Some things really were unforgivable.