The Holding Place

Chapter Sixteen

Blaine gives the beautiful girl sitting at the table one last pained look before he fades away as quickly as he appeared.  His exit gives off a light breeze that makes the girl look up from her notebook. She looks around for the source of the wind and focuses her eyes on the vent that is not blowing any air directly above her. She gives the emptiness a knowing smile and averts her gaze back to the pen and paper before her.


John stretches out his hand expectantly to me. “Come now Abby, we are running out of time.”


I do not know what we running out of time for but I place my hand into his. He knows why we are here. There is more to this older man with poor memory than what meets the eye. I briefly entertain the memory he triggered when we both stumbled into the cleaning closet together. I stop frozen in my tracks and jerk my hand roughly out of his.


John goes forward a few steps before he registers that I have wrenched my hand out of his grip and he glances back to me with a questioning look. He turns fully so that we are both staring at each other with just a few feet in front of me. I cross my arms over my chest and stare at him, letting the silence continue to fill the air.


“Abby, we have to hurry,” John urges, still lost on the fact as to why I stopped.


“Why in the hell would you think that I’m in a hurry to go anywhere with you!” I cry angrily.


John cognizes the words I hurl angrily at him. He casts his eyes he his feet and with his hands in his pocket he takes on a defeated slouch. He is trying to find the right words to say to me to begin to explain to me the agonizing pressure of the mystery of him that has plagued my existence since I was a little girl.


“You knew the entire time! You lied to me!” I fling at him. “Was it even you that day? You seem to have gotten a lot older from then to now!”


Genuine pain floods his eyes as he takes in my accusations. My whole body is shaking with rage before me as I recognize the man standing before me to be my father. He is decades older than the young man we supposedly buried all of those decades ago. He lied to me. He left me.


All of those years I thought that my mother was hiding something awful from me. During my teenage years, after accepting that my mother would never fully tell me the truth of what had become of my father, I decided that ultimately he must have taken his own life. Had he just been in an accident she wouldn’t have been reluctant to tell me and she wouldn’t have gone all of those years going about like my father had never existed at all. She wouldn’t always have looked at me like I was the breathing reminder of everything she hated.


I do not remember there ever being a funeral because there never was one. Was I such a terrible burden to him that he had to leave my mother and me behind? I can only imagine the carefree life he lived until he died of old age. The thought that he lived somewhere far away from me while my mother tried my entire childhood to replace him with another man made hate burn dark inside of me.


“I am not going anywhere with you,” I spit savagely.


“This is why I couldn’t tell you,” John says pleadingly. “I knew there was all of this hate brewing inside of you. You would be confused by my age and jump to all of the wrong conclusions.”


“You couldn’t tell me that you were a deadbeat father? That you left me?” I shriek at him.


“I never left you, Abby. But I can’t be the one to tell you the truth. Just like you I’ve been waiting twenty five years for her to tell both of us.”


His ambiguity confuses me and unwillingly my rage softens considerably towards him. He is cautiously reaching out his hand for me to take. “We haven’t much time left. We have to go now.”


I do not take his hand but I follow him down the long hallway. He leads me into a small room that is sparsely furnished with plastic green couches and chairs. Sitting in the middle of the small room is an older woman, young child and young man. My heart almost wrenches in two when I recognize who they are.


“Daddy, you are going to come home soon right?” the little girl asks.


The young man gives the innocent child a tender smile as he hoists her up onto his lap. “I sure do hope so honey. I sure do hope so.”


A nurse peaks through the door with a stuffed animal to entice the young child and says, “Come on Norah, let’s get some dinner for your father and grandma. You can pick the dessert.”


Norah climbs off of Michael’s lap and goes towards the smiling nurse, before leaving the room she turns quickly towards her father. “I promise to bring you back something good, Daddy.”


“I’m counting on it.”


I cannot conceptualize what I am feeling but the pressure of these new emotions of forcing me to my knees. My eyes are burning with the salt of tears as John places a hand gently on my shoulder. “I think we are finally about to get what both of us came here for.”


When Norah leaves the room my mother rises from her seat to take one closer to Michael. She gives him a warm smile, warmth that actually touches her eyes. She does what I always thought was the impossible and takes his hands into hers. She looks at him for a moment before pushing a lock of hair out of his eyes.


Michael is staring brokenly back at her and tears are welling into his eyes as he lets Catherine hold his hand. I do not understand what is happening here or even how my mother came to be here. My recollections tell me how perhaps Michael came to be here. Claire is nowhere to be seen and it does not take me long to figure out that she was not the one who brought Norah here to see Michael.


Catherine tells Michael how wonderful Norah has been for the past few weeks and that she is eager for Michael to come back home. She has already enrolled Norah in a private school near her home and she loves her first few weeks of kindergarten and her teacher has been more than accommodating and understanding towards the situation. Michael is smiling and nodding as Catherine continues to tell him that Claire is doing wonderful with her treatments and that the doctors expect to declare her cancer-free very soon.


My mother is being patient and gentle with Michael, a way that she never was with me when I was a child.  The moment that I left home at eighteen was the moment that I swore to myself that I would leave behind me the drove of memories that weighed me down, yet here I am watching a woman who I don’t know who is supposed to be my mother telling her son-in-law how she has lovingly cared for her granddaughter.


There is no anger in me towards Claire for relinquishing the care of my daughter to this woman. I completely understand that she had no choice. I know enough about disease to realize that it is a time for her to focus on herself if she is every going to be able to focus on Norah again in the future. The sacrifices Claire has made for her brother and my daughter are unparalleled by anybody that I know.


John knows exactly what is going through my mind as we stand here and observe the scene that is playing out in front of us and he grasps my hand tightly. I need to hold his hand as much as he needs to hold my own. All of my anger and accusations just a few moments earlier are entirely forgotten as the words of this woman take paramount to everything else that my mind may want to think about.


I’m picturing Norah living with my mother and whatever man she has decided to make her paramour for now and my cheeks flame all over again. I staunchly swore to myself the moment I found out that I was pregnant that Norah would always know who her father was and she would never have to question the role of any man in her life. I squeeze the hand holding mine as an outlet and I realize for the first time just how poorly I have kept that promise to her.


She doesn’t know either of her parents. She lost me when she was only six months old and Claire became her surrogate mother. There is no argument that Claire tried as hard as she could to accommodate a rambunctious little girl at the same time trying to raise two boys who were always five steps ahead of her. Claire gave her whole life to Michael and Norah, if not more than that.


It is hard to decide who has suffered more for the past five years, Michael or my daughter. He carries with him the blame of my death, attempting to drink away my memory and the reality that with my departure from this world I left him with a little girl to raise all on his own. Norah looks at him with those big green eyes of hers and instead of melting Michael freezes every time.


She is more astute than most children would be at her age, knowing that something about her makes her father repel her even if she doesn’t completely understand why. She goes out of her way to make sure that he never has any reason to be cross with her. She never leaves a toy in the hallway or a dirty plate on the table after meal time. She relishes every interaction that she has with her father because she is never sure when the next one will be. She has known her father to go weeks without acknowledging her. It is during those times where she hurts the most.


She doesn’t know how to tell her friends that she doesn’t have parents and as a result she has very few. It is difficult for her to fit in with children her age despite Claire’s best efforts to make sure she socialized. Teachers at her various preschools were always sympathetic but it never could change the fact that at that tender age children could be cruel. It was never my wish for Norah to grow up with the same childhood that I had.


It is the worst part of my existence, watching my loved ones go on as they do day in and day out without any option to help them. The half spin that Michael has recently taken is a mystery to me. I do not know what has brought about this change within him. I want to understand it more than anything.


John gives my hand a gentle squeeze to bring me back to the conversation between Michael and my mother. Through the slit in the curtains that shadow the room from the hallway right outside I observe the nurse that took Norah for something to eat is taking her down the hallway to a different area, prolonging the time that Catherine and Michael have together to speak alone without fear of tender ears. There is so much more between them that needs to be said.


“She never talked about you,” Michael says when he too realizes that Norah isn’t coming back anytime soon, taking what might be his only chance to learn about a part of my life that I kept so well hidden from me.


My mother does not need to ask him who he is talking about. She slowly draws her hands away from his and leans back deeply into the chair that she is sitting in. She breaks her gaze and looks towards a corner of the room. The glaze that is creeping over her eyes is almost imperceptible but I have known my entire life that this is her way of letting the tears flow. I can hardly recall a time that I saw my mother tear up about anything. The only times she ever let herself go is when she thought that she was entirely alone.