Page 82 of Games We Play
“I doubt she knows who her mother really is right now.”
“Well, it’s not you, either, now is it?”
Leah sat back in her seat. “What do you mean by that?”
“You weren’t the one who raised her. You…”
“I was here the whole time, wasn’t I?” Leah had more than one chance to move out of the house and live a completely independent life.I didn’t, because Karlie was still here. I couldn’t do that to her.She couldn’t do that to herself. Not after everything she had been through. “I changed her diapers. I nursed her when I got home from school. I got up every night to rock her to sleep, though I had school in the morning.”
“Yes, you did those things, but you still weren’t her mother, were you?”
“How can you…”
Janet shot her daughter a razor-lined look. “At no point in her life did she think of you as her mother. I was her mother. You were her big, protective sister. Nothing more.”
Leah stood from the table. For the second time that day, she turned her back on someone she claimed to love and forged forward with her life.
Right now, forging forward meant going upstairs, though a suitcase remained unpacked in the living room.
“Karlie?” She lightly knocked on her sister’s bedroom door. “Can I come in? We can talk.”
Karlie didn’t respond. Leah helped herself inside, where she encountered her sister – no, her daughter – curled up on her bed.
Leah approached the small collage of photographs on her daughter’s vanity. Most of them were of her friends and the few birthday parties she had over the years. Yet there was one, of her infancy, when Leah held baby Karlie so close to her that Janet could almost be heard on the other side of the camera, scolding her for smothering the baby.
“I remember when this picture was taken.” Leah picked it up, her thumb tracing the letters spelling “SISTERS” at the top of the frame. “It was your first Easter. I found this adorable pastel blue dress to put you in, but you screamed so loudly because you hated the fabric. You remember how itchy it used to be?”
Karlie said nothing.
Leah sat next to her on the bed. Karlie curled up into a tighter fetal position, her tears still streaming down her face.
“I’m sorry, Karlie. We should’ve never kept this from you.”
She sat up with a large enough start to likewise frighten Leah. “How could you? I thought you were my sister! You were going to keep that from me forever?”
“No. I wanted to wait until you were out of college. I didn’t want it hanging over you while you studied. I…” She sighed, remembering these same conversations with her own mother.What we were going to do when I was twelve and pregnant.“Honestly, I wanted you so badly, Karlie. The moment you were born, you were my baby.” She pressed the picture frame against her chest. “Except we had all decided… no. Mom was the one who decided. Mom decided to say that you were her baby, so I could save face at school.”
“You’re kidding, right? Why would Mom… that woman… do something like that? She’s the one always harping about personal responsibility! It would’ve been more like her to force you to quit school to raise me!”
“She’s like that because of me.” Leah wanted to push the curls away from Karlie’s face, but refrained from touching her. “I should start from the beginning. It’s a really long story.”
“I thought you were gay,” Karlie said, changing the subject. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been this big lesbian that wants nothing to do with men. Oh my God.” Her eyes lit up in fearful understanding. “Were you… you weren’t… who is myfather?”
Leah lay a reassuring hand on her daughter’s cheek. “It was nothing like that, sunshine. I was simply a stupid kid who didn’t know what she was doing. It… like I said, you should let me start from the beginning.”
Karlie looked as if she would rather get a root canal.
“Your father is a man named Daryl Beers.” Leah remembered him sitting in the bookstore with his younger children. She also remembered him sitting in middle school history class, one of the most popular boys in their wing of the school. The class clown. A boy going through puberty long before his peers. Leah had been an early bloomer as well. What a dangerous combination when he happened to ask her out to a dance. “He was my classmate back in middle school.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Karlie counted on her fingers. “How old were you when you… had me?”
“I was much too young to be doing that, yes.” Leah couldn’t help but laugh now. Karlie may not understand, because this was too raw for her, but Leah had years to think back on the night she conceived this little girl.I was a little girl myself.How had Leah gone from playing with the Barbies Karlie would soon own, to making out with a boy in the custodian’s closet at school? “The short story is that we were too dumb to be having sex, but we did it anyway. The long story is… well, actually, that’s the long story, too. Kids having sex and having kids. Tale as old as time. Never thought I would be that kind of statistic, but here we are.”
Karlie threw herself back onto her bed. “I’m the child of two middle schoolers. I can only imagine how Mom took it.”
“She was livid, of course. I thought she was going to throw me out of the house when I showed her my pregnancy test.” Leah shuddered to remember those long-ago days. “But you were born a few months later. I couldn’t change that fact.”
“Why in the world would Mom say I was hers?”
