The Fall(42)

I didn’t know whether to clap or f*cking shoot her. Did she really think I was playing? Because last time I checked, if you found yourself inside a room with a venomous snake you didn’t f*cking poke a stick at it.

“Do you want to die, Sofia?” I leveled her with my stare. “Because right now you are speaking like a woman who doesn’t value her life.”

“Who was she?” she asked again, completely disregarding anything I just said.

“Enough!” I screamed, my fingers grasping the top of the table and flipping it onto its side so that everything spilled onto the floor. “Get the f*ck out of my sight.”

She didn’t need to be asked a second time, running to where the bedroom was, the loud slam of the door confirming that’s where she’d gone.

“FUCK,” I yelled, kicking the table with the front of my boot.

Inside I was raging, pissed off and wanting to put someone’s head through a wall. Her f*cking father would be my first choice given it was his doing I was even dealing with this shit.

I was so f*cking mad, my skin feeling too tight against my bones as I paced around the room looking for something to destroy. And what pissed me off the most? That she had gotten under my skin.

Not Sofia, it was a different her.

And I couldn’t believe that any of it still affected me like it did.

It was too late now; I’d tipped my hand. And it was f*cking obvious that even I had something to hide.

Motherf*cking Rose.

That one word—a name—is what undid me.

Not the years of being tossed from family to family. Not being beaten within an inch of my life on the street. Not the f*cktards who had tried to ease themselves by concocting lies about who or what I was.

No, none of that mattered.

What threw me into a tailspin was the f*cking whore who brought me into this world when I hadn’t f*cking asked.

My mother.

Oh yeah, Jimmy had tried to play that card when I first met him. But if he thought I hadn’t already looked her up, then he was even dumber than I thought. I’d done some digging when I was in my early twenties. The nuns at the church where I’d been dumped all had wild cases of amnesia. Some not even remembering the night at all, others not having been there. They took that vow of silence shit to heart and gave me absolutely nothing.

Of course, me being me, figured there were other people who knew things who didn’t suffer from the same devotion to keeping their mouth shut. It was on one of my visits that I met Walter, a groundskeeper for the church and surrounding convent. Old Walter had been there for over forty years and would probably die tending to those f*cking topiary rose bushes that lined the front path.

It took some convincing on my part. Walter didn’t have a wife or kids I could use as leverage. Poor old dude didn’t even have a dog, so going in hard with a gun against his head wasn’t going to get me anything other than his brains on my shoes. And I really f*cking hated cleaning my shoes.

Nope, Walter needed persuading of a different kind. And I was more than happy to give him enough of the poor orphan routine; it played right into his bleeding heart. I think I even cried. Whatever it took to get that man to open up his trap and tell me what I needed.

And what do you know, a nun by the name of Rose showed up one day about seven months before my arrival. She was quiet and surprisingly beautiful—his words—and rarely spoke. She liked to spend most of her day in the privacy of the back courtyard in the garden, which is where he first saw her.

While the other nuns would chat with Walter, Rose would hide in the shadows. But even under that ridiculous black muumuu she and the other indoctrinated religious freaks wore, there was no hiding that there was one vow she hadn’t taken entirely to heart.

Guess she had some serious explaining to do when she said her confession. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I forgot my Bible, sung out of tune during evening mass annnnnnd f*cked some dude and got myself knocked up. A few Hail Mary’s ought to cover it, right? Awesome. Thanks.”

Even as the months passed and she got more obviously in the family way, the pregnancy was ignored. And no one said shit according to Walter. Until one night when there been a bad storm. He’d been convinced that when he’d get to work the next day there’d be no yard to even tend. He showed up bright and early, ready to see the worst. And along with the destroyed azaleas, he’d found a fresh and poorly dug grave out the back.

I bet you can guess who was missing from the morning prayer meeting that day.

Yep.

Rose.

Same night I was born too. Quite a coincidence I’d say? Yeah, so the mystery of my maternity wasn’t so mysterious after all. My father? Well who the f*ck knew? Could have been a traveling Bible salesman.

Not that it mattered, because he either left the whore and I to face the music on our own, or the bastard didn’t even know.

I hadn’t asked to be born, f*ck knows I’d had more than my share of misery. But to know this bitch had cared more about her reputation and her precious f*cking church pissed me off beyond measure.

Of course, the story Jimmy probably had in his folder was that mother dearest was a wayward teen from Wisconsin, which was the lie I had believed initially. Apparently that little fabrication was planted by one of the nuns, she even went so far to leave little trail of bread crumbs as evidence so if anyone looked, there was enough there for it to be plausible.