In Sight of Stars(62)

“How could you do that to him?” I shout. “To us? How could you hurt him like that?”

“Klee, please, I hear you, and I’ll answer, but you’re not going to like the answer. You’re going to have to listen anyway. Please. You don’t know what you’re talking about … There are things you don’t understand…”

Dr. Alvarez hands my mother a tissue, but she doesn’t take it, waves it off. Her lip trembles worse, and her voice is barely more than a whisper now. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. It wasn’t like that. Your father was, that is … those emails weren’t mine.”

She leans forward, reaching for my arm, but I whirl away from her.

“Please, don’t touch me. Not ever again.”

“Klee, please. Jesus, you have it all wrong.” My mother looks to Dr. Alvarez, helpless. But she’s got that wrong. Dr. Alvarez is my ally, not hers. She’s here for me, and she knows the truth. So the Ice Queen thing isn’t going to work anymore.

“He did everything for you,” I say. “Gave up everything! His painting … his art…” My voice shakes, but the solidity of my alliance with Dr. Alvarez—with what she knows—gives me courage to keep going. I’m finally saying what I’ve wanted to for years. “His art, our old apartment, everything he loved and cared about. For you. So you could have your fancy shit, your expensive apartment, your nice clothes. But even that wasn’t enough. You had to cheat on him. You betrayed him. You might as well have held the gun to his head—”

“Klee! Stop!”

“No, you stop—”

“Klee!” My mother shouts loudly this time, enough to make my name echo and reverberate, and me listen. “Those weren’t mine! The A was a man named Armond,” she says, more softly now. “Those letters were your father’s…”

The silence is swift and deafening.

Finally, I manage, “What?” Because, that second part … I’m not even sure I’ve understood. What she just implied about my father.

Armond.

“What?” I say again, but now I get it. It’s starting to solidify. I don’t know how it can be, but I’m trying to.

I look to Dr. Alvarez for help.

“Hear her out, Klee,” she says.

I sit and wait, if I still can’t look at my mother.

“The letters you found, Klee,” my mother says, ‘those were between your father and a man.”

I hear what she’s saying, but none of it makes any sense in my brain.

“Bullshit,” I say weakly. I say it, but I know that it’s not. She’s not lying. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before.

The growing distance between my mother and father … her coldness … The weird way my father acted that day in the gallery with Armond all those years ago …

All those years.

“Jesus.” I put my head in my hands. “How long—?”

“I’m so sorry, Klee. I should have told you—”

But, of course, if I just looked back myself, I would know.

Of course I would.

Anyone looking in would see.

I slide down off the couch and onto the floor, lie back on the rug, and stare at the ceiling. Down here out of the swirl of the blizzard.

“Are you okay?” My mother reaches down, but I wave her hand away. I wait for the crow, for the red-bearded man, while I breathe. Neither appears. Just an odd, hollow ringing in my ears.

Dr. Alvarez gets up and moves toward me, but I say, “Actually, I’m okay. I think I’m okay. I just want to be down here for a minute. Go ahead, Mom, you can talk if you want. I’m listening.”

My mother slides over on the couch so she can reach down and touch my bent knee. I fight the impulse to stop her from keeping her hand there.

“I’m so sorry, Klee. I kept things from you … not to lie, but to protect you. To protect your memories of him. Maybe I was wrong, and I shouldn’t have. But they weren’t your problems, they were our problems. Grown-up problems, that it didn’t seem fair for you to have to know. I thought it would be better if—” Her voice stops. A hiccup escapes and her hand disappears from my leg. She pulls a tissue from the box and blows her nose. “I thought wrong, I guess, and I’m sorry. Because without knowing, how could you possibly understand?”

I sit up, pull my knees to my chest, and study her face, so broken and apologetic, it almost hurts to look at her.

“I am so sorry, Klee. I’d known for a while, well before his death, but there were other issues … I didn’t want to involve you in them. He was hurting, I knew that. But I was hurting, too. He made so many mistakes, but I loved him. It’s hard to explain, but I did.”

The room is quiet. I close my eyes, glad to feel the floor under me, solid and sure.

“So, my father was gay, is what you are telling me,” I finally say. “And Armond was his boyfriend. Or whatever.”

“Yes,” she says. “For several years.”

She smiles sadly and I nod again, and push a fist to my forehead and bang it there. Because I’m an idiot, because I didn’t see it, because I didn’t want to see what I probably should have known.

My mother leans down toward me. “I’m sorry,” she says again, touching my cheek. “I was trying to protect you.”