“Do you know what my father would have done to me if I’d tried to insert myself into his business?” she whispered, and the harsh set to Yiorgos’ features behind her confirmed the insinuation.
“No,” I said, shaking my head as tears burned my eyes. I just wanted Mommy to love me for who I was and who I wanted to be.
Not the porcelain doll she wanted to mold me into.
Not her.
“He’d have reminded me of where little girls belong. Do you know where that is, Irina?” she asked, tilting her head to the side as her face twisted cruelly and her top lip peeled up in a snarl. With her nostrils flaring, she scoffed as if I was an idiot when I shook my head. “For all the ways you want to act like you’re grown, you’re such a fucking baby. Your place will be beneath whatever man your father—”
“That’s enough, Maya,” my father interrupted, his voice lower than normal and throaty, as if he had a frog in it and he couldn’t get it out. He stepped up behind me, taking my back in quiet support. As much as I wished I didn’t need it, it meant the world to me.
Even when it left me feeling like I was caught in the middle of the tug-o-war they liked to play over my future. They decided who I should be. I wasn’t even sure I knew who I would choose if it weren’t for their pushing.
“She needs to learn what will be expected of her. She’s already ten! By ten I already knew who I would marry, even if it changed later on,” she said, rolling her eyes toward the sky. My body stilled, confusion taking over me.
Mommy had almost married someone else?
“And how did that work out for you?” Daddy asked, his voice cold. “Have you had a happy life, spending all my money and living a lavish lifestyle, or are you still as miserable and jilted as the day they brought you to my doorstep?”
My mother deflated at his words, her shoulders slumping as if she couldn’t believe he’d dared to voice her unhappiness. My mother always smiled. She couldn’t let anyone see her as anything but perfectly poised.
To see her look so broken, so exhausted, rattled something inside of me.
“I’ll go shopping,” I said, taking a step forward and away from the rigidness of my father’s frame at my back.
“No.” Mom nodded her head as she pursed her lips. “You’re right where you belong,” she said, biting the corner of her mouth. Her lipstick smudged, sending a shock through me when she didn’t immediately reach up to fix any potential flaw. She gazed at me for a few seconds in silence before she turned to look at my father. “The problem is that I never belonged here. This marriage...” She sighed, never continuing with her thought.
Instead, she turned on her heel and lifted her shoulders high once again, acting with the perfect poise I’d come to expect of her as she walked out the door with Yiorgos trailing after her.
The door closed, thumping through my body with a finality that just felt different from her other tantrums. “Daddy,” I whispered, moving to the door and pulling away from his firm grip on my shoulders.
“She’ll be back, Iri. You know that,” he muttered, turning me away from the door, but something in me couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t leave the last place I’d seen her.
The burn in my eyes became unbearable, my throat clenching around the silent tears that built until they fell down my cheeks in streams. I spun out of his hold entirely, rounding on him with all the rage I felt.
Why couldn’t they just love each other? Why couldn’t they just love me enough to get along?
“Why did you have to be so mean?!” I screamed, ignoring the way the housekeeper who worked to clean the banister at the top of the spiral staircase jolted and hurried to walk away.
“Irina, don’t start. Not today,” Daddy said, turning his back on me and walking toward his office. I couldn’t bring myself to follow, even with my previous desire to help him with the fundraiser. I stood, glancing back and forth between the hallway where he’d disappeared and the front door.
Eventually, a soft hand settled on my shoulder, offering a gentle reassurance as I turned my tear-stained face up to my nanny. Penelope smiled down at me softly, reaching down to cup my cheek in her hand. “Let’s go make you some hot chocolate,” she said, nodding her head toward the kitchen.
I shook my head, glancing at my father’s favorite vase where it sat on the console table next to the stairs. The image of it shattered into pieces on the floor flashed through me, tempting me to break it the way he’d broken my mother in their last moments together.
“She’ll be back, sweetheart,” Penelope said, reassuring me as she guided me toward the stairs. Sadness overcame me, chasing away the rage that was building as she led me to my bedroom. To the bed they hid me away in every time I got in one of my “moods,” so they didn’t have to watch me cry or rage against the furniture.
She helped me change into a nightgown even though it was barely noon and tucked me in while she settled into the chair beside my bed with a book to read.
I stared at the ceiling until my eyes drifted closed. Sleep was a welcome embrace into darkness, where my feelings didn’t matter and there was just nothing. Where I wasn’t sensitive and overreacting to everything around me, and where people didn’t hurt or reject or leave.
There was just nothing, and sometimes that nothing was all I wanted.
Mommy never came home that night. Penelope smiled at me sadly when I woke up, and I knew. She confirmed it, but I’d known the truth the moment I saw Mommy’s pretty eyes go empty.
She wasn’t coming back.
Daddy’s voice trickled in through the open door, the anger in it enough to jar me out of the haze of sleep that I never wanted to leave. “I’m telling you; there is something wrong with her,” he said, putting words to everything I already felt. Everything I’d tried not to be for years.
I was wrong. I was unstable and emotional and couldn’t make sense of why I was any of those things.
“She’s coping with her mother’s abandonment, Judge Ryan. It’s to be expected that she would be upset,” a woman said, her voice soft despite my father’s rage.
“I know my daughter. You think this is the first time she’s behaved this way? She can’t even go to school because her mood swings are so unpredictable. Find what’s wrong with her or find me somebody who will,” he snapped, heaving out a sigh. His eyes connected with mine briefly through the cracked door, shock registering, and I felt his moment of shame that I’d heard every word he said about me.
I was wrong.
“It isn’t fair to her that she has to live like this. Help her. Please,” he said, turning back to the woman who looked at me sadly. She met my eyes and let out a deep breath before she nodded to my father.
Her lips moved, but she spoke softly enough that I couldn’t hear the words.
My father’s echoed in my head, a constant nagging as I closed my eyes and let that nothingness swallow me whole again.
I was wrong.
I was damaged.
And I always would be.
4
SCAR
Sixteen years ago
The money in my pocket felt like it would burn a hole through me if I didn’t find a safe place to put it. Usually, the odd jobs I managed to pick up for the dealers in Garfield Park left us with just enough cash for some food for a few days. Maybe a bed for the night if I’d been lucky, and it was cold enough that sleeping in the park wasn’t feasible.