Page 69 of Seduction
I felt as if she were giving me an out.
“I won’t judge you if you’d prefer not to know,” she said.
Then I closed my eyes and nodded, although I was sure I would rather have shaken my head.
* * *
Aunt Christine startedwith where they’d been born. I hadn’t known they were originally from Toledo, Ohio. Our grandparents, who were both dead, had been extremely religious.
“They swore—and they never swore, but they did swear that your mother and I were going straight to hell. Our sin was breathing, and they felt we had to spend every waking hour of the day repenting for being alive since we were conceived in sin and shaped in iniquity. I mean…” She sniffed and rolled her eyes. “That was a lot of sin.”
I chuckled.
She smiled warmly. “I only told you that because I want you to understand the rejection and emotional abandonment your mother and I faced. The fight for our sanity and individuality began on day one.”
I hoisted my legs onto the couch and hugged them, resting my chin on my knees. “Mom never asked me to be anything but myself. Nor did she make me shoulder her pain. It was as if we were living in two different spheres, even though we were in the same room.”
“May I speak frankly?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She sat up straighter. “Your mother didn’t want to fuck you up, even though she was fucked up. She…” Christine clamped her lips together, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply through her nose. After a moment, she opened her eyes again. “At the age of twelve, your mother ran away from home. She was starved for love, like many children in her… our… position. And that was why she fell into the wrong hands.”
“I never knew that,” I said past the tightness in my throat.
“I’m six years older than your mother. She ran away a month after I went off to college. Our parents never looked for her. They believed that like the prodigal son, their twelve-year-old daughter would come back beaten and ravished by the world and ready to conform.” She set her unfocused gaze on the window, seeing off into the night. “It took me years to forgive them. I first had to understand them so that I could acquire empathy toward them.”
I was captivated as she went on to tell me how whenever she wasn’t in class or studying, she tried to find my mother. For many years, it was as if my mom had fallen off the face of the Earth. They’d never had the same friends, but during summer vacations and spring and winter breaks, she would return to her hometown without visiting her parents and question all my mother’s friends, asking if they’d heard from her or knew where she might be. No one knew anything. Then during her sophomore year in college, Christine was in her dorm room, studying for finals, when a knock came at the door.
“I’ll never forget who it was.” Her eyes filled with happy tears. “Penny Carter was her name, and she said to me that I had a guest. Mary wouldn’t tell Penny her name, but Penny said that the girl was young, pregnant, and looked like me. I knew exactly who it was.”
I pressed my hand over my heart. “She was pregnant with me?”
As Christine nodded, I did the math in my head. “Then she was only…”
“Fourteen,” Christine said.
My jaw dropped, then I buried my head in my arms as tears streamed out of my eyes. “I didn’t know,” I whispered past my thick throat.
My aunt remained quiet while I cried. I recognized the silence that lingered in the air. It was the patient sort of space that those in the medical field allowed for expressing grief. After all, Christine was a psychologist.
I pulled it together the best I could while she went to retrieve a box of tissues. When she returned, I blew my nose and wiped my eyes.
“Better?” she asked.
I cleared my throat and nodded.
She leaned forward to make full eye contact with me. “Tears are restorative, so cry without restraint.”
I chuckled as I smiled, and so did she.
“Would you like for me to continue?” she asked.
I took a cleansing breath then pulled my shoulders back. “Yes.” I felt stronger and closer to my mother and aunt than ever.
“Okay.” She sighed. “Well… Mary Louise looked older than a fourteen-year-old girl because what she had endured aged her considerably.”
“Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.
