Page 128 of The Kiss of Deception

The past is what it is—I can’t change it, but I can’t ignore it anymore. I can’t close my eyes to the ghosts that I pushed down and trapped inside a bottomless black hole.

In the end, it sucks me dry from within.

In the light of the day, eye to eye, they don’t look bigger than me. It’s time I learn to stop fearing them. It’s time I learned to let go of what I can’t control and refocus on all the little things I can change.

And that begins and ends with myself, and all the ways I deal with life.

The plans in my head take form. Mental exercise never stops and I know my route before I’m out of my old room. Unwrinkled, the bed bids me a final farewell.

It’s a new morning, and my footsteps are no longer stealthy in the light of the sun. At the bottom of the bifurcated stairs, my mother glances up in her pressed pantsuit to discover who they belong to.

“Oh. Zoe, darling, you’re here.” She rummages through her briefcase, pulling out papers and more papers. “I didn’t hear you come in last night.”

“You weren’t home when I got here.” My tone is harsher than I intend, an accusation. It lands like a slap in the face, and I’ve never snapped at her before.

Her head whips up to look at me—actually look at me, this time.

Wrinkled clothes, dark globes under red-rimmed eyes, and the kind of pain I couldn’t conceal if I wanted to. That’s what she finds.

Dropping her things with a clatter—or maybe they fall from her fingers—she dedicates all her attention to me. “Why are you here, Zoe?” she asks, gaze lingering worriedly on my scar.

The time is now, to start facing the hard things. I descend the last three steps.

“I love you, Mom.” She takes a sharp inhale of air, just as I let out a sigh so long it feels like it’s been trapped for years. “But you haven’t always been a good mother to me.”

“I know. I know, Zoe,” she says, guilt written across her face in wrinkled calligraphy.

Suddenly, she looks older than her years. It takes me aback a little, seeing the time that passed in the lines of my mom’s face and comprehending I wasn’t there for so much of it. I did to her what she’d done to me. I mimicked her choices and doubled the distance between us. As much as we’ve bridged over the past months, there will always be a gap of time that we can never recover. It still feels like we stand either side of the Atlantic.

She makes her way to me. I’m almost sure she intends to hug me. I shake my head. I need the distance to keep myself together—and upright.

She stops in the middle of the entrance hall, wringing her hands. “I’m sorry.”

I know she is, but her apologies don’t do much for me, right now. I’m losing the men I love, and with realization and resolution came a fervent urgency to start my fight for them against my own helplessness and against all odds.

“You were right. My father left. One day, he was gone, and it was like the dad I knew was a product of my imagination. Life went on as always, as if nothing had happened—except it didn’t. I never understood where my dad had gone. Or why. I still don’t.”

While I can rationalize my grandfather’s narcissism, and its impact on me, my father's abandonment remains a question mark that won’t dissolve.

Why?

One day, the sweet devoted father from my childhood vanished.

How?

How can I heal from something so far beyond my comprehension? How can I fight the damage if I can't see reason behind it? How can I find a cure without closure?

“The only logical conclusion is that it was me,” I whisper, not that it’s a secret or a confession. My voice simply fails me. “It must have been.”

“No.” Her denial is clear and concise through her thick throat. “No.”

The last thread of effort snaps soundlessly, and the tears take me silently again.

“It feels like it was.” My voice shrinks to rasps and croaks, “Why?”

Maybe sometimes, there is no reason or logic behind human behavior. Maybe sometimes, there is no closure.

Some things just are, and that’s okay, too—such a simple concept, so difficult to grasp.

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