Page 69 of Collin: Episodes 13-15
“I can’t say, for her sake, but I do. There are people keeping her safe.”
She blinked hard, looking away, dashing tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I know I’m the parent, Collin. But I am out of answers. And I’m not okay. Not even a little. And I don’t know why you are okay.”
Collin laughed. “I’m far from okay, Mom. But I am anchored. I survived. And everyone I cared about who was there survived.”
“Except your dad. Roald. I did love him. That’s the awful thing, Collin, I did. But now…to know he married me…” She squeezed her eyes closed and clenched her hands together as if praying. A muscle twitched in her cheek.
“You shouldn’t be alone, Mom. Get your friend to come out. The one who asks too many questions and makes me always go to bed early when she visits and I’m home.”
“Theresa.” She dashed more tears off her face. “She’s probably busy and…”
“Is she your friend or not, Mom? If she were here, she’d yell at you for not calling her, so I’m going to do it for her. Go call her. Linda or Ellisandre can help you get a ticket tonight.”
“I couldn’t ask that…”
“You aren’t. I am. And I can pay them back. You… Mom, listen. I’m not the only one who got hurt.”
“You got shot.”
“Yes, among other things that actually hurt more than that. Like hearing my grandfather fantasize about killing me. That shit hurts worse than the gunshot wound. At least I knew it was coming. You just…you just got hit with all of it. You need help, too. You’ve lost something, too.”
“I didn’t—” Her hands curled into fists. “Have I lost you?”
“As long as you aren’t too ashamed to have me, then you have me.”
“I’m not—” Again, her voice broke. She clenched her jaw. “I’m not ashamed of you. I’ve never been ashamed of you.”
“I wasn’t talking about you being ashamed of me. I was talking about you being too ashamed of where we came from.”
Her head snapped up, and her eyes flared.
Collin gentled his voice. “Mom, he’s not a reflection of who we are. You and I. Alice. We’re our own people, not his. We don’t belong to him.”
Her tears hovered on the brim of falling, but she kept looking at him.
He held out his good hand, palm up. “We, you and I, are not to blame for being born to a person who used us. We can choose to belong to ourselves.”
Her tears spilled over, but her hand came up, the ends of her fingers resting against his. “A mother’s supposed to protect.”
“A mother is also a daughter. He was supposed to protect you. How can you protect me when he never had your back? When he killed Dad, who had your back?”
She curled in on herself. “That still leaves me being a terrible mother.”
“You’re so many things, but first, you are a person. And I think you’re a pretty good person.”
She sniffed. He pointed toward the box of tissues, and she blew her nose even though there was no stopping the crying.
He put a hand on her arm. “I know it feels like our family is broken and that makes us feel broken. That we can’t have normal. That there’s no center. But we don’t have to be that kind of family. We don’t have to be our own center. If we were refugees in a new country, we’d build something new.”
She nodded.
Collin swallowed, hard “I think we’re refugees. I think it’s okay, with everything that Mikhail did to us, to not be okay and to not look like a good family. I think it’s better that we be good people. I think…” Collin blinked back his own tears and looked up at the ceiling, pushing down his emotions so he could speak. “I think that you have the right to be an amazing, interesting, educated woman, with friends, and dreams, and goals of her own who just happens to have two curious, interesting, crazy young people who call her Mom, who survived something with her at one point in time and who don’t care if you do all the normal good Mom things as long as you love us and are happy for us and are okay if we also can’t be and do all the normal kid things.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
