Angel Reborn, page 32
After a smooth flight that morning, we arrived at the store early because Nick wanted to scope out the location and ease his worries that it might be some kind of trap.
I didn’t plan to introduce my mother to him since I had no interest in involving her in my life, but even I could agree that it was too risky in our current state of events for me to meet her alone, so we determined Nick would stay but keep his distance.
He picked a table for himself with a clear view of the stairs, the elevator, and the store, and then I sat a few tables away toward the back, putting him between me and the only entrances to the cafe loft.
I felt like I was sitting on pins and needles as I waited for Mom to arrive. I had so much anxiety over just seeing her again that I couldn’t spare any worry about what she intended to reveal.
I’d been up much of the past two nights, unable to sleep, and I hadn’t been able to keep food down since breakfast the day before.
“You nervous?” Nick asked before he left me to sit at his table.
“Yeah. I am.”
“It’s gonna be fine. No matter what she tells you today, you’re going to be all right. We’ll work through it.”
“I know. But I feel like my stomach’s in my throat right now. I just want this to be over with.”
“It will be soon, and then you’ll know what she wants you to know, and we can go back home.”
“What do I do when she walks in? We haven’t been together in years, but I can’t see myself hugging her. But it’s not like I’m gonna shake her hand either. Do I just stand here and wave? This is so freaking awkward.”
“Do whatever feels natural. Trust your gut.”
“My gut feels like I’m gonna throw up.”
“Well, maybe try not to do that when you see her.” He gave me an encouraging smile, and then he reached to cup the back of my head as he bent to press his lips to mine. I breathed in the scent of him, wishing I could stay in that moment without having to move to the next, but then with a kiss to my forehead, he released me. “I should get over there and get seated so she doesn’t see us together. I’ll be able to hear you with no problem from over there, so if you need me…if anything feels off, anything at all…or if you feel like it’s getting to be too much and you might lose control, you just call my name, and I can be to you in seconds. Less than a second, even.”
“I know. I’ll be okay. I love you.”
“I love you too, Angel.”
“Thanks for coming with me.”
“There is no place I’d rather be.”
“Right…because these grocery store cafes are where it’s at.”
“I hear they’re all the rage,” he said, walking backwards toward his table.
“I don’t think anyone says that anymore, babe.”
He grinned and turned away to pull out his chair and sit, and though he was only a few tables from me, I immediately felt his absence.
I had begun to tremble, and my stomach felt like it was twisted into a big, thick, braided knot.
Laying my hands flat on the table to steady them, I drew in a deep breath and tried to quell my internal instability. I’d learned that the key to managing that glowing energy was to take charge before it became so powerful that it could overcome me, so I needed to get it under control before the stakes got even higher.
Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl as I shifted my gaze back and forth between the elevator doors and the top of the stairs, watching for her arrival.
Inhale.
I wonder if she’ll look any different.
Exhale.
I wonder what she’s going to tell me.
Inhale.
I need to think about something else.
Exhale.
I need to think about nothing.
Inhale.
Why can I never figure out how to think about nothing?
Exhale
Oh, hell. I think I am going to throw up.
Inhale.
No. Do not throw up. You’ve got this. You’re okay. You do not have to be here. You can get up and leave at any time.
Exhale.
Exhale again, more forcefully this time. Get it all out.
Inhale. A little more. A little more. A little—
The elevator doors opened, and my breath caught in my throat as Mom stepped off.
I’d been so fixated on dreading this moment that I hadn’t realized a tiny part of me wanted to see her.
I started to stand, thinking maybe I would go to her and throw my arms around her in a huge hug, but then her eyes met mine and her frown was twisted so tightly that I stood where I was.
It was best for me to stay guarded. There was no way to know how this was going to go, and I’d been betrayed before by thinking things between us were something they were not.
“Hi,” I said as she approached me without even a hint of a smile.
“Hello.” She looked up at the ceiling and frowned more deeply. “You sat under a draft.”
“Oh.” I followed her gaze upward. “Do you want to move to another table?”
“No. This is fine. I can’t stay long. Your father will be worried if I’m gone too long.” She pulled out a chair and sat, placing her purse on the table along with the box she was carrying. “You look good. So grown up.”
“I am grown up, Mom. I’m 27.”
“Well, last time I saw you, you looked a lot different. That’s for sure.”
“Yeah. I imagine I did. I was a pregnant teenager who was scared out of her mind. My life is much different these days.”
“That was a horrible night.” She looked away and moved her purse back to her lap to fidget with the handle. “I can’t believe you left in that condition.”
Anger flared in my gut, burning away the nausea and taking any calm I’d managed to achieve with it. “Like I had a choice? I left because you kicked me out.”
“I didn’t kick you out.” She had the gall to look offended. “That was your father’s decision.”
“You could’ve stood up to him. You could’ve stood up for me.”
“I tried to get him to let you stay until morning.”
“Oh, because daylight was so much better?”
“You know as well as I do there is nothing that can be done when he makes up his mind. And even if I had stood up to him that night, what then? He would have made you give her up. You know he would. And even if he didn’t, would you really have wanted to bring a child under his roof? Under his thumb?”
Her words reminded me of how much better off Sage and I had been by my leaving. They also reminded me how sad her existence was…and likely always would be.
“You’re right.” I gave a nod of acknowledgment. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. None of that.”
“Then you agree it all worked out for the best?”
I knew she wanted absolution, but it felt much too bitter on my tongue to give her that. My anger simmered just below the threshold of what I could manage, and I looked away from her to keep from losing control.
My gaze found Nick’s, and he mouthed the word, “Breathe.”
I did as he instructed, and in that breath, I remembered there was only one reason I was here.
“Yes,” I said, looking back to my mother. “It did work out for the best. But I didn’t come here to rehash the past or to ease your guilt for the role you played. You said you had information about our family that you thought I should know. So, please…tell me what was so important I needed to come all the way to Florida to hear it.”
This time, she was the one who took a deep breath. And then another.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she finally said. “I’ve practiced it a million times in my head over the years, but now that you’re sitting here and the time has come, I can’t seem to find the words.”
“Just spit it out. Please.”
“When I first met your father, he was the most popular boy in the school, and I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. He made me feel like I was the belle of the ball. I had never had a boyfriend before, and here I was, dating the most handsome, most charismatic boy in school. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.”
“You’ve already told me all this, so where’s this going?”
“I thought I’d hit the jackpot, because his family had a bit of money, you know, I don’t have to tell you, my family didn’t.”
“No, you don’t have to tell me. I already know all this. Please, just get to the point. Why did you ask me to come here?”
“I’m getting there, but it’s important that you understand why I made the decisions I did. I thought I’d found a fairy tale. And it was, in the beginning. But then it wasn’t. Tommy and his dad never did get along too well, you know that. Tommy was too proud to ask his father for money, and his daddy was too stubborn to give it, so we had some lean years there in the beginning when we first married. Tommy was trying to get his career started. He wanted so badly to establish himself and his business separate from his family, and he’d lose his temper now and then, but who could blame him?”
I scoffed at the lunacy of that question, but she continued.
“He was working long hours trying to make a name for himself, and he’d taken that position up in north Nebraska. We didn’t know a soul there, and it was lonely being so far away from our families and everybody we knew. We were living in a tiny little apartment, and we didn’t have money to go out and do things or meet people. So, when I found out I was pregnant, there was a part of me that was overjoyed. I’d always wanted to be a mother, and I was thrilled to learn there was a little baby growing inside me who I could love and who would always love me. I wouldn’t have to be lonely anymore. But I was also terrified of what might happen to that baby or to me when Tommy found out. Or what might happen after the baby was born. Because it certainly was not a good time to have another mouth to feed.”
Though I’d heard some version of this story before, it struck me for the first time how similar her situation with my father had been to mine with Mike when I discovered I was pregnant. But that only served to make me more angry, because if she’d lived my story, why hadn’t she been more understanding when I found myself walking that same path?
“Tommy doesn’t mean to be the way he is,” she said. “He just gets upset, and he can’t control his emotions.”
And her defending him after all this time was making it harder for me to control mine.
“Everyone gets upset, Mom. Dad goes beyond that. He gets abusive. The man has mental issues, addiction issues, and a raging anger management problem. Don’t make excuses for him.”
“I’m not. I’m just saying that I thought maybe having a baby would make him happy, and then maybe he’d be the way he is when he’s nice, you know, all the time. Because he can be nice.”
I fought against the urge to roll my eyes, which I would have done as a teenager. “In the history of forever, having a baby has never turned an alcoholic abuser into a loving and devoted father and husband.”
“Sure, it has,” she protested. “Plenty of men—women too—say having a baby changed their lives, and they cleaned up their act when their baby was born.”
“Okay, maybe, but that was certainly not the case with Dad.”
“No, it wasn’t, unfortunately. But at times, he seemed excited about the prospect of us being parents. He helped me pick out colors for the little bedroom we were using for a nursery, and he painted the walls himself. He even had a list of names he liked.”
“I’d sure love to know what happened to that list.” I shifted to tuck my foot underneath me to try and get more comfortable. “Because for some ungodly reason, you picked Ariadne, and he has told me my entire life how much he hates that name and that he wishes he’d never agreed to it. Speaking of which, you never have told me why you chose it. I still say they must have been giving you strong pain meds in the hospital when you signed my birth certificate and saddled me with that one.”
“It’s a beautiful name.” Her eyes got glassy, and she looked down to retrieve a tissue from her purse.
As they always had, her tears tugged at my heart and made me feel helpless.
“It is,” I said. “It’s a beautiful name. It was hell throughout elementary and middle school, but it’s a beautiful name.”
After wiping her eyes and her nose, my mother looked down at the tissue in her hands and continued. “We’d gone out that night to celebrate him landing a new account. He had a little too much to drink, but again, we were celebrating. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have just given him the keys when he asked for them, but I was worried about the baby. I refused to hand them over. We had a bit of a tussle, and well, I won’t go into all that, but I ended up going into labor and going to the hospital.”
I froze, and the temperature around me seemed to drop. I had never heard this part of the story before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“He didn’t mean to hurt me,” she whispered. “He wasn’t himself.”
The flare of my anger was immediate. “He was himself, Mom. That’s who he is. Evidently, it’s who he’s always been. At some point, you must accept that and stop making him out to be a great guy when he’s not. You’ve got to stop defending him.”
Propping my elbows on the table, I placed my hands over my face and struggled to find any measure of calm when the last thing I wanted in that moment was to be calm. In fact, I wanted the opposite of calm. I wanted to rage. I wanted to lash out. I wanted to push all the negative emotions inside me outward so I could get relief from their grip on me.
But to lash out would make me like my father. And that I wasn’t willing to do.
Nick cleared his throat loudly, and I dropped my hands and looked right at him. He raised a brow in question, perched on the edge of his seat like he was about to come and get me to take me out of there, but I shook my head slightly and faced my mother once more.
“I don’t know why you thought you needed to tell me all this—” I started, but she cut in.
“They had to perform an emergency C-section, but my baby didn’t make it. He never took a breath. They said it’s possible he wasn’t alive even before that night.”
I stared at my mother in bewildered disbelief. Had she had a baby before me? Had I had a brother who was stillborn?
“What are you saying, Mom? I don’t understand.”
She dabbed at her eyes again as she sniffled.
“I was devastated, as you can imagine, and your father…oh, Tommy was distraught and wracked with guilt. I think he would have done anything to make it right. So, when the doctor who delivered my baby boy came to us…he, uh, he came to Tommy…and he said there was a mother who was in trouble. She was in a bad situation and needing a home for her baby. A perfectly healthy baby girl.”
I felt like someone had thrown ice water in my face. I sat up straight and cocked my head, unwilling to believe I’d heard her correctly.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Nick move to the table closest to us, but I couldn’t focus on anything other than replaying her words.
“What are you saying?” I repeated.
Edie took in a ragged breath, and then she met my eyes. Hers were filled with tears.
“When Tommy first approached me, I couldn’t fathom even considering it. But I was out of my mind with grief, and I couldn’t bear the thought of going home to that empty crib without a baby. Tommy had the doctor bring you in so we could see you, and just one look into those big green eyes of yours, and I fell in love.”
She managed a bit of a smile and then swiped at her nose again with the tissue.
“The doctor said it had to be a private adoption, and that we weren’t to ever tell anyone that you hadn’t been born to us. He said he’d handle the birth certificate, and there would be a sum of money to help with your care, which, of course, we were grateful for, but that wasn’t why we agreed to take you. We wanted you. We both did. But we needed the money, so we took the money, and we signed the agreements. One of which stipulated that your first name had to be Ariadne. The doctor said the mother was firm on that, and if we couldn’t abide by it, the whole agreement would be off.”
Somehow, my befuddled brain latched onto that fact. “So…you didn’t pick that name? That’s why he hated it so much.”
“He wasn’t a fan of it, and to be honest, neither was I, but a deal was a deal, and I was so thankful for you that I didn’t care what your name was. And we shortened it to Aria, which I have always thought is much softer than Ariadne.”
My brain was starting to catch up, and I had so many questions.
“So, who was my mother?”
“I don’t know.” She spread her hands wide. “We never met her. Never spoke with her. Her name wasn’t listed on any of the papers your father and I signed. It simply said Jane Doe.”
I shook my head to try and clear the fog. “And all this time, you let me think it was me who was born during that C-section?”
“We had to. We couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t even grieve the baby I lost because no one knew he died, and I had a newborn to contend with. It was a lot. You wouldn’t sleep, and you wouldn’t nurse, and I couldn’t sleep either, and I just…” She was looking past me now, and her eyes had gone unfocused and cloudy. “I just remember being so exhausted that I couldn’t function. It was such a horrible time.”
She went quiet then, and my mind was too jumbled at first to find words, but then another question flew out of my mouth.
“What was your baby’s name?”
“Thomas Marvin Anderson, III. He would have carried on the Anderson family name.” Edie looked at me with a haunting but genuine smile, and then the smile faltered. “You know, you’re the only person who’s ever asked me that.”
Even though my mind was reeling with the revisions to my own life story and what it all meant for me now, my heart felt broken for what she’d gone through. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry that happened to you. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been.”
Edie closed her eyes with a sharp huff, and when she squared her shoulders and opened them, her tears were gone.
