Page 72 of Tell Me Softly
“I’m not having this discussion in front of my girl,” my father said, taking a bite of his sausage.
“Kamila, go to your room! Your father and I need to talk about adult stuff,” Mom said.
“Anne, don’t shout.” I’d rarely seen my dad so serious.
I got up and walked out, but I didn’t go to my room as Mom had ordered me. Instead, I just hid behind the door to eavesdrop.
“If this goes on, I’m asking for a divorce. I’m tired of living this way,” my father said. His words terrified me. I knew what divorce was. Some of my classmates had told me about their parents’ problems at home. I prayed I wouldn’t have to go through that too.
“Oh, so you’re threatening me now? I can’t believe you,” my mother screeched. “Look how low you’ve fallen.”
“I can’t stand living with a woman who prefers going with her friends to the spa over spending time with her own daughter. A woman who’d rather slurp margaritas than be with her husband. And in the meantime, I’m working like a goddamn dog…”
“Don’t you even! I’m a far better parent than you! At least I’m actually here every day…”
“Please!” my father shouted. “Tomorrow our girl’s got a play at school and you’re going to be off at some stupid resort. Four days you’re going, and I told you I had a business trip! How many weekends this year has Kamila spent with the babysitter?”
“I deserve my free time too!”
“I don’t have any free time! I’m constantly at work! In themeantime, you’ll use any excuse you can find not to raise our child…”
“Are you calling me a bad mother?”
I held my breath in the ensuing silence. Strangely calm, my father said, “Yeah, I guess that is what I’m insinuating. Honestly, if it weren’t for how much I adore Kam, I’d regret ever having her with you.”
My mother laughed bitterly, and I heard her chair scraping on the floor.
“It’s a little late to change the past, big man…but go ahead and get your divorce and see who ends up with custody. Because I’ll tell you one thing: if you get a lawyer, I will do everything in my power to make sure she never spends another day in her life with you. If you don’t believe me, try me.”
I remember hiding in the hollow under the stairs as she stomped out of the kitchen. Then I heard her footsteps above me.
That night, I looked up the wordcustodyon the internet. I remember the definition perfectly:The protective care or guardianship of someone or something.That didn’t sound so bad. But as I looked around more, I found accounts of divorce, people posting on message boards about how their parents wouldn’t stop fighting, horrible things that had torn families apart.
The more I read, the more frightened I got.Custodymeant you might not see a person you loved ever again. And people got divorced for so many reasons. One of them was adultery. I didn’t know what that was either, so I looked it up.
That night, I must have learned all there was to know about cheating. I read real-life accounts. I read articles by therapists talking about how cheating was bad. I read about people lying and sleeping around who had traumatized their partners forever. I read about how divorce could turn your life into a nightmare.
And then there was something I saw on one of those pages where you ask strangers questions.
Would you prefer to live a lie or know the truth?
That made me reconsider whether I should tell my parents. That was the start of the nightmare—that nightmare that made me want to scream and wake up so everything would go back to normal. But I was so scared. I was terrified my mother would separate me from my father. A lot of people online said judges tended to rule in favor of mothers. I knew how she was––if she’d told him she intended to keep me away from him, I was certain she meant it.
In a sense, it was all their fault. Somebody should have put some controls on what I was doing online. But there were no filters, and no one thought to come to my room and ask what ten-year-old Kamila was doing up at two a.m. on a Thursday.
And that was the beginning of the end. The end of our friendship with the Di Biancos. My parents’ near-divorce. The end of Thiago’s parents’ marriage. And the end of her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kami
I reached the yellow bridge between Carsville and Stockbridge and squeezed the hand brakes, almost skidding. I heard thunder again and looked up into the sky. It was going to rain, no doubt about it. A drop or two hit my face, wetting my cheeks, like tears squeezed out by the sky.
I remembered the balloons, the kids playing, the bounce house no one wanted to get out of, Taylor and me jumping inside it… I remembered my parents chatting with the rest of the guests. They’d done it up that birthday; the Di Biancos always did. There were clowns, there was an artist painting the kids’ faces, there was a chocolate fountain you could dip donuts into—at least, it was supposed to be just donuts. But the brothers and I were such chocoholics that we ended up dipping fruit and candy, then Cheetos, fries, olives, anything we could think of. It was gross, but we had a blast.
I had still been trying to pretend nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t said anything to my father the night before. He had been so nice. He’d told me not to worry, that they’d always love me and no one would take me away from him, that our family wastoo strong to break apart. And then he’d asked me to tell him what I’d seen and what Thiago had told me when we were up in the tree house. And I did. I told him because I’d been frightened, because most people on the internet had said they’d rather know the truth than live a lie, and because, if they did get divorced, I wanted my father to fight for me and take me with him. I told him because what kind of mother would cheat on her husband with the next-door neighbor? I told him because I couldn’t keep carrying that weight. Because every time I got in bed, I wanted to cry. Because every time my father tried to fix things with my mother, all I could think was that it wasn’t worth it.
But I never thought of the consequences for the other family: for Thiago’s mother, for my family’s friendship with theirs. I didn’t think of Taylor, who didn’t even know what had happened.
