Page 104 of Lovesick
Was all that wasted?
“Mama,” I whispered, voice thick with emotion. “Mama, how dare you? How dare you give me false hope? How dare you make me like you?”
A tear rolled down my cheek. I shook my head, my hand falling to the side.
“You destroyed everything you touched. You’re still destroying. I don’t even know who I am now.” My fingers fanned the smoky pages of the book, blackened along the edges. The words blurred through my tears. “I don’t want to be like you, but I’m afraid I already am. That you’ve ruined me, even though you’ve been gone for so many years now.”
I pressed my back against the wall and slid to the floor. Snowflakes fluttered by outside, thick as confetti pieces in the growing storm. A sob peeped out of me. I pressed my face into my knees and cried.
“I hate you, Mama! I hate you for what you did.”
In a desperate move, I grabbed several pages of the book. The temptation to tear each one of them in half, throw them across the room, and scream my rage was almost overwhelming. But I couldn’t. This wasn’t the book’s fault. This wasn’t even my fault.
This was Mama’s fault.
“Put it down, Lizzy.”
The voice came from just behind me. My head jerked up. Bethany stood in the doorway with a concerned expression on her face.
“Bethie?”
“I followed you as soon as Maverick returned. I would have been here sooner, but I had to grab something from home.”
Slowly, I stood up. She shuffled into the room, a coat hugging her torso. Her eyes were more bloodshot and determined than I’d ever seen. She wore a pair of boots she’d clearly shoved on in haste.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you arenotMama, and Mama wasn’t your enemy. Actually, she may have saved your life with all the romance she shoved into you. We have an hour to hash this out before I have to leave to feed Shane again, so get reading.”
She threw a folder to the floor in front of me. Papers spilled across the ground, harshly white in the damaged room.
Before I could ask, she kept talking.
“I knew this moment of reckoning with Mama would come for both you and Ellie, so a few years ago, Mav and I paid a private investigator to dig up everything she could on Mama. I wanted her to build a picture of Mama’s life from the very beginning.”
Oh no. This didn’t feel good.
Bethany nodded toward the papers. “Pick them up. She can’t hurt you from here.”
My hands shook as I gathered the sheaf together with soot-stained fingers. In the dim light from the window, the words were difficult to make out.
Bethany leaned against the doorframe with a weary sigh. “No need to read it,” she said. “I’ve read it so many times I have it memorized. Kat St. Martin. Born four weeks premature in a small city in South Dakota. Her mother didn’t survive the emergency C-section. She died from complications related to a drug overdose minutes after they pulled Mama out.”
Ice formed inside me. A long, cylindrical, pulsing thing that spread cold through every vein in my body. I paused to listen.
“Things didn’t improve from there. Mama went right into foster care. By the age of five, she’d been in three different homes. Can’t imagine a five-year-old knowing three different mothers. Can you imagine Shane in anyone else’s arms but ours?”
The thought made me quake from the inside. My body felt sluggish, my throat thick. “No,” I whispered fiercely. I pushed off the floor, papers in my hands.
Bethany kept going. “By fifteen, she’d been in seven different homes and arrested twice for various minor charges. Petty theft. Some graffiti. That kind of attention-getting stuff. Apparently, and of no surprise to anyone in this room, she was a lot to handle.
“This is where things get interesting. Men from two of the foster homes she’d lived in—the one when she was five, and one when she was eight—were arrested on charges of sexual misconduct with minors after she was sent away. I’ll let you fill in the blanks. The horrifying unknowns of her story. Can you imagine what she must have gone through at five years old?”
“Bethie,” I whispered, chin trembling, “why are you telling me all this?”
Perhaps I’d always assumed Mama had no history. Or perhaps I’d just been too horrified by the possibilities to let myself think about them. I knew she’d grown up in foster care, but she’d never spoken in specifics of her time in the system. Never allowed questions about it.
Bethany watched me steadily. “Because we only knew Mama as the adult who was supposed to protect us and didn’t. We saw only the survivor. The desperate one. The one so broken she broke everything else. Really, she was just a little girl looking for love. Like you. Like me. Like Ellie. Lizbeth, romance was what gotherthrough. She was giving you a gift when she gave it to you. The only gift she had to give.”
