Page 48 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
Still, I wasn’t done with my story, and I wanted it finished. I didn’t want to be blindsided ever again by the question of what my mother had done to me.
“This might sound twisted, but the grate, the spatula, the slapping, the pinching, the hair-pulling, all of that, it wasn’t the worst of it. That stuff hurt, but only until it healed. The worst of it was simple. But the hurt was constant, and I think the damage was permanent. My mother never bothered to even attempt to pretend that she didn’t hate me—and I’m not exaggerating. Shewas very direct with me from as young as I can remember: she had not wanted a child, she most certainly had not wanted a daughter, and I was nothing to her but a burden hanging on her neck. I don’t remember any day of my childhood when I thought my mother cared about me at all.”
Still focused entirely on me, leaning in over the table with laser-sharp attention, Roman looked stricken. He also looked like he was about to say something, and if I was interrupted I knew I wouldn’t finish, so I hurried on with my story.
“When I was thirteen, she decided I was old enough to start taking care of myself, so she stopped paying for the things I needed. I earned room and board by cleaning the cottages, and anything else I needed was up to me to figure out. Erin and Jessie helped a lot, giving me their hand-me-downs and making up dumb reasons to have bake sales in Jessie’s front yard, or in O’Grady’s, or whatever, then giving me the proceeds. I worked in the office at the high school for a little bit of money, and Mrs. Wong let me go through the lost and found at the end of each semester. But the worst thing my mother did to me wasn’t make me beg for clothes or tampons or toothpaste. The worst thing she did was hate me and make sure I knew it. That’s the scar that really fucked me up.” I finished the rest of my wine. “So ... yeah. That’s why I ran away on graduation night. That’s why I’m glad she’s dead. And that’s why I want the Sea-Mist to finally be my home. It never was before, and I want to have what she denied me.”
I met Roman’s eyes and held. “You can’t know what it’s like to grow up when your mother hates you so ...loudly. You can’t know how much that fucks up everything you perceive about relationships.Istill don’t know how fucked up I am.”
Now I was finished. I’d gotten to the real point of my story.
Sadly, there wasn’t any wine left.
NINETEEN: Atonement
Isat back in my chair and faced Roman, fighting off an ancient instinct to be defensive and cynical.
The night sounds of the forest and the faint hiss of the tide filled a long silence as we stared at each other. The stalemate stretched into unbearable awkwardness, until I reached for my glass, forgetting I’d drained it already.
Roman stirred and stood. “I’ll get another bottle.” His voice rasped unusually, as if the words had climbed over craggy stone on their way to his mouth.
“It’s okay. I should get going.” I didn’t actually want to leave; my limbs felt dull and heavy, the way they did after a hard workout. It was like my ... description, explanation, confession, whatever it was ... had been a literal weight I’d been carrying for my whole life, and I’d just set it down for the first time.
Maybe that’s more than a metaphor. Psychically speaking, at least.
Roman didn’t head to the house for another bottle of wine, but he didn’t return to his seat, either. Instead, he came to me and crouched beside my chair. He set a hand on my arm and looked up at me, the deep, dark orbs that were his eyes fixed on mine.
I studied his face, the lines of age it had gained while I was away, the dusting of silver in his scruff of beard and at his temples. Those lines made rays from his eyes and parentheses around his mouth—the signs of a man who smiled often. There was no crease between his brows.
He was a much more real person to me now than he’d been when I was a girl. That Roman had been the equivalent of a teen idol poster a girl (not me; my mother would never have allowedit) might pin to her bedroom wall. A dreamy crush from another world. This Roman was a flesh-and-blood man. Kind and calm.
As far as I knew. But what, really, did I know?
“I am so sorry, Leo. God, I should have—”
“Don’t,” I said, and he stopped.
I knew what he would have said:I should have known. OrI should have done something. Or some other variation of the same.
Okay, yeah. Telling that story in one go for the first time in my life, and telling it to someone who’d known me during those years, had stirred up some thoughts and questions. Like whyhadn’tanyone known, why hadn’t anyone picked up one of their thoughts about the strangeness of my life and dug deeper? Why had a whole town noticed that my life seemed unpleasant and unusual but not wondered if it was worse where they couldn’t see?
Those are all valid questions. I understood that. But I didn’t really care about the answer. If someone had asked if I needed help back then, I would have denied it. If someone had offered that help, I would have refused it. If someone had tried to go around all that and filed a report, started an investigation, I would have done everything in my power to thwart any discovery.
I had been deeply ashamed of my life, and for most my years living with my mother, even after I’d understood I could do nothing to make her care about me, I’d blamed myself. When I was little, I tried to figure out what made me so bad and detestable and stop being that way. When I was older and understood that there was no way I could be that she wouldn’t hate, I stopped trying not to upset her. In fact, I started poking the bear on purpose.
Either way, in whole or in part, I blamed myself.
That’sthe scar of being raised by hate: if it’s the first thing you feel, if it’s all you know from your first formative moments, you believe, all the way down to your very cells, that you deserve it.
I set my hand on Roman’s. He turned his hand and wrapped it around mine.
I watched his thumb brush lightly back and forth over my knuckles. His hands were a bit scarred and callused, his palms and the pads of his fingers firm but not rough.
“I don’t want your apology for when I was a kid,” I told him. “The way I feel about younow, the thing that feels like it’s happening between usnow, I don’t wantthento be any part of it. I told you about how it was for me because you asked—and also because I don’t want it to be a black hole between us, something we try to avoid but get pulled toward anyway. And it would be, because yeah, being raised like that gave me some weird ideas about relationships.”
“Was your husband ... abusive?” he asked after a beat.
“No,” I answered without hesitation. “Micah loved me and showed it.”
