Page 52 of The Truth About Love

Chapter Thirteen

Auden

My parents split up when I was five. Dad was never around much anyway and, looking back now, I actually think he was cheating on my Mama a long time before they finally divorced, so his absence at mealtimes didn’t come as too much of a shock.

But it was still a big change for a child of that age to deal with. Especially as all of a sudden, I found myself having to care for a woman whose mental stability was declining by the day. And though Mama has never admitted it, I’ve always suspected that her condition was the reason for him leaving.

Shit got hard and Dad bowed out.

He couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t find it in himself to support his wife when she needed him. So, like a coward, he divorced her. Found a woman somewhere who didn’t have a mental health disorder, stood at the alter for a second time and promised to love her in sickness, health and irony. Then he left his five-year-old son to pick up the shattered pieces of the broken woman he’d left behind.

It’s a young age to realise that you hate the man who raised you. Even then, I couldn’t see past his betrayal. Though I was barely old enough to tie my own shoelaces, I knew that I didn’t want to grow up to be like him.

So, I haven’t seen him since the day he left. I only know he remarried because he had the carelessness to send a wedding invitation to his ex-wife’s house, not six months after their divorce was finalised.

That’s when things got really bad.

For the first time ever, Mama struck me during one of her episodes. She started drinking heavily, stopped taking her medication and would scream this awful piercing cry into her pillow at night.

It used to terrify me.

For a long time, I’d cry alone in my plastic racing car bed, wishing my stuffed toys would come to life and take care of me the way my parents should have been. Every night, it was the same. She’d scream for hours like she was being murdered and I’d sob in petrified silence underneath my covers.

Until one day, it just stopped.

Not the screaming, but my fear of it.

I acclimatised. Learnt how to block out the noise until I could sleep through it. No five-year-old child should have to deal with that. And truthfully, I’m not sure if the screaming ever really stopped or if I just stopped being able to hear it.

But the experience shaped me, I guess.

Because of it, I’ll never be a man who breaks his promises. I’ll never leave when things get tough or abandon someone when they need me.

I willneverbe my father.

And that’s why, despite how broken I am over what she did, I’ve texted Summer-Raine every day since I left her on the sand four days ago. Once in the morning to wish her a good day and once before I go to bed to tell her that I love her.

But I miss her so much.

It physically hurts to be away from her for so long, but I don’t want to see her until I’ve moved past what happened. Don’t want to risk hurting her with something I could potentially say in anger or without really thinking it through.

Mama’s sitting in the living room sipping from a cup of coffee as she sifts through an old magazine when I go downstairs to get myself a drink of water. The smile she gives me as I pass is brighter than I’ve seen from her in a long time. So much so, that I stop in my tracks and just look at her.

She’s always been beautiful, my mother, but years of alcohol abuse and mental torture have worn at her features, making it easy to forget the woman she is underneath all the darkness.

The torture that usually screams in her eyes, eyes that were once as blue as mine but long ago turned a lifeless grey, the barrenness of her figure from weight loss, the slow, drawn out way that she speaks. I’ve gotten so used to seeing her that way that her skeletal face and translucent skin are as familiar to me as the sound of my name.

But right now, I don’t see any of that.

For the first time in years, I just see her.

My Mama.

I fill two glasses of water before taking them through to the living room and passing one to her. She accepts it with a grateful smile and the two of us settle into silence, her reading whatever trashy magazine she found in the wastepaper basket and me staring quietly at the wall, plagued by thoughts of Summer-Raine and the darkness that haunts her.

“So, you gonna sit there looking all suicidal or tell me what’s on your mind?”

I turn to Mama with wide, surprised eyes.

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