Page 65 of Love is Angry

I’m staring at nothing, only vaguely aware of the sunlight glistening off the pond, of the ducks chatting with one another as they skim across the water. Willow branches rustle, dancing to the light breeze in their autumn yellows. Rhue’s outraged noises crash through the haze, and the diary leaves my hands with violent suddenness.

“Hey!” Laura protests.

“Hey yourself! I’m not the one letting this homewrecker get her nasty paws all over mom’s...” he trails off as his eyes focus on the paragraph at the top of the page. I watch his face go red, then pale. His hands shake as he reads the horrifying log, entry by entry. I lean my head against the tree, gazing up throughthe shifting lights and shadows as I wait for my deepest darkest secret to be revealed to the last person in the world I ever wanted to tell.

Chapter 29

Rhue

I have spent an entire year resenting Madison, hating Madison.

Yet the image of her and my father was a lie all along—or, better said, a horrific misunderstanding. There are so many questions going through my head at this point, so many reasons to just kick and scream and boil over. I’m angry, red hot on the inside, but my heart aches and bleeds. I was almost ready to forgive her despite her perceived transgression--only for me to learn that it wasn’t a transgression at all.

My father lured her into the bedroom.

He raped her.

He raped the woman I was falling head over heels for.

If my feelings toward him had been complicated before, they’re incomprehensible now. I need to make sense of this, right now. I need to understand how I see this man. Laura has said it more than once—we don’t choose what family we’re born into. It’s a dreadful lottery. But we can choose whether to stay or to get as far away from the toxicity as possible. What do I do if I find out that my father is a fucking serial rapist?

I swallow the bile rising in my throat and let my eyes wander back to the top of the first page. I can hear my mother’s voicein the words she wrote, the crisp no-nonsense tone she used when recording her psychiatric notes. I used to sit outside her office door, listening to her break down the worst behaviors and conditions of humanity, parsing through chaotic emotional explosions until she has something usable. It always blew my mind how she could speak the darkest evils out loud without deviating from that clinical tone. Now I know she wasn’t only exposed to the darkness living in her clients; she lived with it every day, faced it down every night. She married a monster—and shestayed.Why?

Madison. Fuck, he even did it to Madison, and I can’t find the right words anymore. She’s traumatized, wounded; maybe even wounded beyond healing. Every acid-laced word I ever said to her rings through my mind, mocking me. I tore into her, punishing her for daring to be wounded. How much worse did I make it for her? Can I ever come back from that? The moment in the cabin comes rushing back to me, making my stomach turn and my head pound. Did she feel like she couldn’t say no? Am I a monster like my father?

I sit down hard, clutching the book as I read and re-read every instance of my father’s evil. It’s all there, written in my mother’s clear, concise voice, in her neat handwriting. There’s no room for misunderstanding. My father is a rapist. He always has been. The entries show a slow progression from potential misunderstandings to outright violence, a gradual emboldening of terrible behavior. There are years-long gaps between entries, and I wonder if those years were good for my mother—or if he just tried harder to hide his offenses.

Or maybe it has less to do with him, and more to do with the women he touched. How many of them hid the truth? My heart aches, guilt and disgust and rage all tumbling around inside of me.

“You let me think you had an affair with my father,” I say out loud. “You let mehateyou. You couldn’t have told me I was wrong? You couldn’t have spared me months of siding with a rapist? You let me think you were the fucking devil, Madison! Why? You could tell my mother, but you couldn’t tell me? I thought we were friends!” I’m back on my feet, shouting down at her.

“I couldn’t,” she whispers.

“Bullshit!”

“He threatened me!” Her voice is a wail, breaking her statement down the middle. Like a crack of lightning, clarity strikes. I’m doing it again. Is it her fault she couldn’t bring herself to go against him—when I can barely manage to openly defy the man myself? I raise my eyes to Steve’s. He’s frowning at me in silent disapproval. I’ve earned it and I accept it.

There are other people around, doing their shopping, walking through the park; they glance curiously in our direction at Madison’s exclamation. This diary is a powder keg. One wrong word with the wrong ears around to overhear it, and this whole thing will blow up in our faces.

“We need to talk. But not here,” I tell them.

“We can’t go home,” Laura points out. “I mean unless you want dad in on the conversation from the start.”

“No!” Madison and I say it at the same time.

“We can go to my house,” Madison says quietly. “We’ll talk there.”

This wasn’twhat I imagined when I thought about being in Madison’s bedroom for the first time. It’s exponentially worse—and exponentially more important. Madison’s dad wasn’t herewhen we got here, which was a relief. I’m not sure what excuse I could feed him for why we all look miserable.

Laura is sitting on the bed, having been carried up the stairs by Steve, who sits on a fuzzy pink ottoman nearby. She’s watching Madison with big, worried eyes. I’m by the door, as far from Madison as I can get in her small room; she looks like a wounded animal, and I don’t trust myself not to make it worse.

She leans against the window frame, hugging herself and staring at the fluffy white carpet. My mother’s words, written in the diary, seem to echo in the silence. Her description of Madison, of how she was behaving. I remember what I did and said that day. I remember how much of an ass I was, throwing her perceived affair in her face, calling her all sorts of things for being brassy enough to come back after I’d caught her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, my voice tight. “I’m so fucking sorry. For everything. For what he did to you, for how I treated you--fuck, especially for how I treated you.”

“You didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I glare at the floor, feeling like an absolute pile of shit. “I should have talked to you. I should have listened. You were only in my house because of me.”

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