One More for Christmas(90)

Instinctively she took Ella’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Looking out for her sister stopped her having to think too hard about her own feelings.

“Just tell us, Mom.” She wanted facts, so that they could deal with them and then talk about the past. And she was determined that they would talk about the past.

“Your father died in exactly the way I described, but what I haven’t told you is everything that happened before that.”

Samantha held tightly to her sister’s hand as her mother started to talk.

Next to her, Ella gasped, reacted, made sympathetic noises, responded to everything their mother told them. At one point she stood up and poured her mother a drink, the water sloshing over the sides as she poured with a shaking hand.

There, drink something, take a break, this must be so difficult for you.

Still Samantha sat, feeling like an observer not a participant, not knowing what to say.

All these years when she’d pictured her father, she’d imagined a benign, loving figure. She’d imagined how her life might have been different had he lived. She’d thought that maybe she and her father might be close. That he might have been more approachable than her mother.

The clash between her childish dreams and the reality was so violent she didn’t know what to do with the pieces.

“I didn’t want the two of you to ever feel the fear I felt. I never wanted you to feel vulnerable. I wanted you to be self-confident.” Her mother blew her nose on a tissue Ella had handed her. “I wanted you to feel you could cope with anything.”

Samantha imagined her mother, pregnant and with a toddler, bruised physically and emotionally, walking out on the only security she knew.

All the times I blamed her, she thought. All the times I thought she was a machine.

“I wish you’d told us.” Ella was crying now, her arms round their mother. And Gayle hugged her back.

“I was trying to protect you. If he hadn’t died, maybe I would have told you the truth, but he did, and then I couldn’t see the point. It would have hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt my girls.”

“I understand.” Ella rocked her. “I understand all about wanting to protect your child. It’s what a mother does. In your situation I probably would have done the same. I’m grateful.”

Samantha said nothing.

How was it protecting a child to hide the truth? She didn’t feel protected. She didn’t feel grateful. She felt confused.

She should say something. But what?

I would have liked to have known, Mom.

What was the point of saying that when there was no undoing the past?

She felt so many different things it was hard to untangle them. She felt guilt that she and Ella had never questioned if there was more going on, and anger and frustration that her mother hadn’t told them, and therefore hadn’t helped them understand. Would her own relationship history have been different if she’d known about her mother’s past?

And then there was her father.

Samantha swallowed. She felt as if she’d lost someone. She tried to picture the man she’d imagined all these years, but this time her brain wouldn’t cooperate. He’d gone, the shadowy figure who had lurked in her imagination as absent as the real person had been. She felt a profound sense of loss, which was ridiculous because how could you lose something you’d never had?

Ella was asking questions now, about those early days, about how her mother had managed, information flowing until Samantha found it hard to breathe.

“It happened at Christmas.” Gayle spoke quietly. “I think that’s why I was never able to see Christmas as magical. I associated it with the worst time in my life. But being around Tab made me remember the Christmases I’d had before that time. With my parents. Happy times. I don’t know what happened today—habit, I suppose. She was asking a lot of questions, and the words came out before I could stop them. Have I ruined everything?”

“No.” Ella shook her head. “Thanks to Brodie, she is still happily anticipating the arrival of Santa.”

Gayle slumped. “Thank goodness for that.”

“She does ask a lot of questions, and sometimes it does wear you down, so I do get it. But I can’t bear to think you went through that at Christmas. And you emerged from it this strong, independent person. I could never in a million years have been as brave as you’ve been.” Ella choked, scrubbed her palm over her cheeks.

Gayle stirred. “I think you’re one of the bravest people I know.”

“Not true. And as we’re all being honest here, there’s something I haven’t told you—” Ella’s gaze skidded to Samantha, but she felt too exhausted and confused to give her sister any direction.

She was on her own with this decision.

Ella sat up straighter. “I’m not working at the moment. I haven’t worked since Tab was born. My choice. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, and Michael supports that. And me. He supports me, financially at least. Although I do intend to go back to teaching in the future. Not because I don’t feel our relationship is secure, but because I love it so much. And I’m good at it.”

There was a long silence.

Finally Gayle spoke. “You didn’t tell me.”

“No.”

“You didn’t feel able to tell me. That’s on me.”