“Well, you can’t,” she says, sitting back down with her water.
“Tell me something, Tori. Give me a piece of what your mind is comprised of right now.” My legs are getting tired from standing inside this one kitchen floor tile for so long. All I want to do is go back and find Cammy and Ever so I can ask them the millions of questions that have been popping into my head over the last few hours, as well as share a birthday cupcake with Ever.
“Giving you a piece of it, AJ, would cause me another emotional disruption. Is that what you want?” she asks calmly.
“Maybe that’s what you need, Tori. Have you considered that keeping all of your shit bottled up for so long might be what’s actually destroying every single part of you?”
“Look, just because your past has come back to grace you with its beautiful presence just to show you that dreams really do come true, you don’t get to sit here and act all holier than thou for it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Great,” I say, pushing myself away from the counter. “That’s fine. We’ve dealt with the baggage from your past since the day Gavin was born, but I guess it’s too much to ask you to deal with mine for one day.” I grab my coat from one of the dining chairs and drape it over my shoulder. “Don’t wait up.” Nothing is going to stop me from being with my daughter on her birthday. Nothing.
“Where are you going?” she snaps. “Have you forgotten you have a child?”
Her words piss me off like nothing else she has ever said to me. Have I forgotten I have a child? “You’re kidding me right now, right?” I turn to her with anger coursing through me. “How about for once, you take responsibility for him?”
Her face turns red, and her eyes widen as if she’s about to unleash. With my next thought, I run up the stairs to Gavin’s room and take him from his crib, where I find him awake and gazing up at his mobile with a smile on his face. I can understand, considering I put him to bed an hour early tonight. I change his diaper, load up the diaper bag, dress him for outdoors and scoop him up into my arms. I sling the bag over my shoulder, take Gavin, and walk back down into the kitchen, past Tori. “Where are you going?” she snaps.
I continue toward the front door as I inform her, “To be with the people who want to let me in.”
“You want to go sleep with her, is that what you want?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Tori?” I shout. “Have you lost your damn—” I choke with a quiet laugh. “Never mind. I already know the answer to that.”
She chases after us, trying to pull the baby bag off of my shoulder. “Why are you so mean to me?” she shouts.
I place Gavin down in his high chair behind me, handing him a toy in hopes of shielding him from whatever wrath she’s planning for the moment. “You know what’s funny, Tori? You hear these stories all of the time about men and women flipping some invisible switch after they get married and they let their true selves finally show. It’s a joke. People make fun of these stories. If I had any idea you were going to act or become the way you are today, I never would have started anything with you. You tricked me. And it’s disgusting.”
“Tricked you?” she cries out. “It must have been the same as when my mother tricked my father into having a second child. She tricked him good, AJ. Let me tell you. She tricked him so fucking good that he got up and left us the day before my sister was born.”
I close my eyes, trying to digest the middle of a story she’s giving me. “Hold on, are you talking about Millie and Ralph?” Because up until a year ago, I thought those two were her birth parents. I know now that they aren’t but she calls them Mom and Dad.
She laughs, that laugh I hate, the one that tells me she’s falling into a dark hole again. “No, I’m talking about the two people who put me on this sick earth and gave me my messed up life.”
“Tori,” I utter, placing my hand over her trembling arms. “Talk to me.”
“Why?” she cries. “It’s not going to change the past. That’s why we don’t talk about the past, AJ. Remember? Our pact?”
I shake my head in disagreement. “Talk to me,” I press.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says through her locked jaw.
The memory of finding those weird crumpled notes in the back of our closet last year plays through my head. I never felt it was safe to bring them up to her, but I’m at a breaking point right now, and I’ve decided I can’t live, hanging in the wind of Tori running from whatever she is mentally running away from.