House Of Secrets

by Tracie Peterson

  “I was talking about him being taken away—to jail. Then we would have been sent to foster care,” I defended. “I’m just as angry at him as you are at me. I didn’t lie to you, but you need someone to blame. So blame me,” I said, slamming my hands against my thighs. “Blame me that our mother is dead. Blame me that Dad was never around when we were growing up. Blame me for whatever you want. I’m sure Dad will do the same.”

  “Your father isn’t that way,” Judith interjected. “He loves you, Bailee. He loves each of you. He would never turn his back on you. He’s hurt, but that doesn’t keep him from loving you. Give him some time to pray and rest in God.”

  “What good is that going to do?” I asked. “God didn’t seem too concerned up until now.” I was growing angrier by the minute. “God hasn’t seemed to worry too much about any of us and the pain we’ve endured.”

  “She’s right about that,” Geena said, rising. “I’ve never bought into religious nonsense. I’ve never had any reason to believe God cares, and if anything, this just proves that He doesn’t.”

  Judith shook her head. “Whether you want to believe it or not, God loved you enough to send His son to die for you. Jesus came to intercede on your behalf—on the behalf of all mankind. He didn’t have to die for anyone—He chose to because He wanted you to be reconciled to His Father.” She looked directly at me. “I know you’re hurting, but God is there for you. He’s always been there for you . . . and He always will be. The fact that you don’t believe it changes nothing.”

  She left us, following Dad from the house without another word. I figured she was headed back to the cottage as well, and frankly I was glad. I didn’t want to hear any more about God and His love for me.

  What will you do with me now?

  The voice reverberated in my head. I pressed my fingers to my temples.

  ———

  I tried to edit to get my mind off the situation, but it wasn’t working. I felt awash in guilt and sorrow. Each time I thought of how our father had kept the truth from us all these years, I felt a growing rage inside of me. Yet at the same time I knew it had to be a shock to him to know we thought he had murdered our mother and said nothing. I couldn’t keep the vision of Dad’s hurt expression from my mind. It was the ultimate betrayal, I decided. To have your children believe such heinous things about you must be the worst thing a parent could feel. To be misjudged and held responsible for something over which you had no control.

  Putting aside my laptop, I decided that I had to get out of the house. I grabbed my purse and the car keys and went in search of Geena and Piper. I found them on the back deck.

  “Look, I know you’re both mad at me, but I’m driving into town. Would you like to come along?”

  They looked like I felt—drained and unable to contemplate the events of the day. Geena drew in a long breath and let it out slowly.

  “I am hungry,” she said. “I don’t know how I can even think of eating, but that’s all I want right now.”

  Nodding, I agreed. “I figured something to eat would help me as well. What about you, Piper?”

  “I just want to be left alone,” she told us.

  A part of me wanted to argue with her, but instead I asked, “Do you want us to bring you back anything?”

  She shook her head and walked toward the stone stairs. “I’m going to walk on the beach.”

  Geena and I watched her go, then went into the house. “Let me get my purse and I’ll meet you at the car.” Geena quickly headed upstairs without waiting for my comment.

  I walked to the car, trying hard not to calculate what Dad might be thinking at that moment. I hoped that Judith was able to comfort him, but at the same time I wondered if he cared about our damaged emotions.

  “I never meant to hurt him—none of us did,” I muttered aloud. Could a person’s misery be eased by the very one responsible? It posed a serious question in my mind. I wanted Dad to comfort me—to make me feel better, yet I blamed him for the sorrow I felt. Could it be the same for him?

  Geena soon joined me and I questioned her. “Do you think that a person who causes someone pain can also ease the pain they cause? Like us with Dad? Or him with us?”

  I put the car in gear and headed up the steep tree-lined drive. Geena sat contemplating my question, and for a few minutes I thought perhaps she’d never answer. She finally frowned and shrugged.

  “Sometimes the only person who can help is the one who is in pain.”

  We crept by the cottage and saw that the car was gone. Apparently Dad and Judith had decided to head to town as well. I thought for a moment on Geena’s words.

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  She looked straight ahead. “I think that our own determination to be free from pain is the key to that recovery. Some people like to hold on to their pain. Not for the feeling of anguish, but because it’s all that’s familiar. Like holding a long, long grudge. It’s a known element—something recognizable. There’s a warped sort of comfort in that.”

  “But I don’t want to hang on to the things that hurt me. I don’t want to hate Dad,” I said. “I want to be able to enjoy my life—to live it to the fullest—to know happiness.”

  “To my way of thinking, those are all choices we make for ourselves. We can cradle the hurt and pain—wrap it around us like a shield to keep ourselves safe from attack—or we can let it die.”

  “Let it die,” I murmured. Could a person really let their pain die? Could they stop feeding it and nourishing it with reminders and accusations of the past?

  “What would that look like?” I asked Geena. “To let the pain die?”

  She shrugged again. “I think it would look different for each person. I can’t take your pain for you, neither can I kill it. Just as you can’t remove my pain or isolate it from me. We can’t stop Piper or Dad from feeling miserable over the problems in their lives, but we can be supportive and understanding when that pain interjects itself into our relationship. We can also be very impatient and damaging.”

  “Piper hates me now, doesn’t she?”

  “Piper hates her life,” Geena replied.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Do you hate Dad? I mean, really hate him? He didn’t tell us the truth either.”

  “No, I don’t really hate him,” I admitted. “I’m hurt by him. I’m angry that he left us alone so much—that he refused to have a real relationship with us until we were adults. Now he acts like just because he has plans for the future and a desire to be religious that we should just forget about all of that and accept that he wants to be close.”

  “I can’t speak for Dad, nor for Piper. I do know that with her it’s something entirely different. It’s not you. In fact, it’s never been about you or me. She grew up without a mother and she’s never gotten over it. She’s done things to herself and with others that she regrets, all in a desperate search to ease her misery.”

  “We were all in that boat,” I countered.

  “Yes, but we were smart enough to get counseling—at least when we got old enough to get it for ourselves. Dad should have seen our need and provided it for us as children, but we can’t go back and remake the past. Although God knows we’ve tried enough times.”

  “You’re right. I hadn’t really thought of it that way until just now.”

  “Sometimes I think it’s very black and white,” Geena continued. “Maybe that’s the lawyer in me. There’s a right and a wrong. The shades of gray only serve to complicate the truth of the matter.”

  “Which is what?” I came to a stop sign and waited until she answered.

  “That each person has the ability to control whether they will accept or reject the hurt offered them.”

  “That surely doesn’t absolve others from the responsibility they have to treat people right—to do the right thing. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior or deception.”

  She shook her head. “Of course it doesn’t, but we don’t have control over what another pe
rson does or how they feel. We only have control over how we respond to it—what we do with it. At least that’s the way I see it. We need to take charge of our lives or someone else will.”

  “And you don’t think God or the Bible has anything to do with how our behavior should be?”

  Geena rolled her eyes and looked away. I took that as my cue to move on down the street, and to another topic.

  “So where do you want to eat?”

  “Let’s go to the Yacht Club Broiler in Silverdale. I read about it online and Dad mentioned going there for lunch. Sounds really good.”

  I nodded. “Plug it in and we’ll do it.” At the GPS’s instruction, I headed for Highway 303 and tried to forget that I still longed for an answer to my question about God. Geena obviously wasn’t the one to give me any help.

  Chapter 13

  We came home some hours later. Geena brought Piper a cheeseburger just in case she had regained her appetite and I brought a take-home box with most of my dinner. Funny, I’d been half starved when we’d started out, but by the time the meal arrived, I only picked at the food on my plate. When we reached our driveway, I saw that Dad’s rental car was back. I wondered if he would consider talking to me about what had happened.

  Why hadn’t he been honest with us about Mom? I could understand hiding the details from us when we were children; however, as a young woman I would have been able to deal with the truth. Dad could have brought us all together when Piper was sixteen or so and explained it. He could have taken me aside and sworn me to secrecy when I turned eighteen.

  More secrets? Why did that always seem like a logical choice for our family?

  Geena and I made our way into the house. Everything was quiet. I put my food away and because there was a bit of a chill in the damp evening air, I went to my room for a sweater. I had already decided to walk on the beach and talk to Mark, but I knew the temperature would only continue to drop as the sun faded from the sky.

  Slipping out the back door, I made my way to the stone steps and spied my father some twenty yards down the beach. I felt a sudden awkwardness. I still had anger to contend with, but I also felt a new sense of loss. Being the oldest, I’d always felt as though I were on some sort of selective team. He and I dealing with Mom—trying to keep balance in a family that seemed perpetually off-kilter. Would he be offended if I joined him? Could I be civil if we spoke?

  I gritted my teeth. If I was ever going to get answers—figure out why I couldn’t move forward in life—then I needed to confront him. But not with rage or my damaged feelings. I needed to be able to approach this logically and calmly.

  I tucked the phone back into my pocket and walked slowly to where he stood. He saw me but said nothing. I turned to look out on the water and wondered if he would ever trust me again. Why did that worry me more than whether I could trust him?

  “I never meant to think so badly of you,” I said in a whisper. “I should have known better.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then turned back to the water. “Yes, you should have.”

  His words offered no comfort. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected them to, but somewhere deep inside that was exactly what I’d hoped for. I wanted him to assure me that it was a simple childish mistake. That it didn’t matter. I wanted him to convince me that despite the pain I’d caused him, he still loved me and wouldn’t hold it against me.

  “You should have explained the truth to us,” I said matter-of-factly.

  He looked at me for a moment and nodded. “Yes. I should have.” He turned back to the water, and I tried to figure out where to go from there.

  “I didn’t understand,” I began again. “I was a child, and it seemed reasonable to my child’s mind to believe what I saw and heard.” I thought of God and how we must seem to Him. We often believed the worst of God—blaming Him for things He should have or could have done. Didn’t I feel that way right now, in fact?

  “I’m really sorry, Dad. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Bailee, I didn’t think you planned it out. God knows I didn’t mean to further your pain or that of your sisters,” he replied. “But that doesn’t stop the pain from existing. I’ve tried to do right by you girls. I know I deserted you by putting you in boarding school and hiring housekeepers and nannies, but I also knew I wasn’t able to be a decent father to you. I had failed you in so many ways—failed your mother too. No one knew this better than I did.”

  “All we really wanted . . . was you.” I felt as if I were twelve years old again. “We’d already lost Mom. We felt so alone.”

  “I never wanted that.”

  I felt my anger surfacing. How was it that he could make me feel like I owed him an apology for feeling alone . . . for being afraid?

  “So why couldn’t you have been there for us? Why did you desert us?” I knew my voice betrayed my frayed emotions. Still, I forced myself not to apologize.

  His expression was stoic in the fading light. “I did the best I could with what I had, but what I had was never enough.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I wanted to do better. I wanted to be the man you needed me to be, but I had nothing left to give.” He looked at me with an apologetic expression. “I’m not saying I was right or that it should explain away everything. I’m saying it because it’s the truth. I didn’t mean to make you girls suffer for my inability to deal with the loss.”

  Tears came unbidden. I wanted to hide them away, but instead I kept my focus fixed on Dad. “And that’s all we get?”

  He looked at me oddly. “What do you want me to say . . . to do? It’s not like I can go back in time and do things over. I hate what happened. I hate the way I acted. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I can’t change any of it.”

  “You could at least sound like you wish you could,” I said, squaring my shoulders.

  “And you think I don’t wish that every day of my life?”

  Now he was angry. The set of his jaw reminded me of times when he’d had to deal with unpleasant business complications. Was that all we girls were to him? A complication of the past that he’d just as soon be done with? Maybe that was why he’d remarried. Maybe that was what he meant by getting “right” with God. He was making a new start. One that clearly didn’t include us.

  “You wish we’d never been born, don’t you?”

  His face contorted. “How can you even say such a thing? I only wish things could have been different for you . . . for your mother. I wish I could wave a magic wand and give this family normalcy. But I can’t. Not any more than you can.”

  My mind took off in a different direction. “Momma was a good person—she should have gotten the help she needed.”

  “She had plenty of help, Bailee. She didn’t want it. She rejected the advice of doctors and she disregarded the medications they provided. I wanted to believe the love between us could keep her focused on the plan, but it wasn’t enough. Love wasn’t enough. At least not that kind of love.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He fell silent for a moment. A short ways down the beach, gulls screeched over some tidbit of food. The water lapped gently against the shoreline, soothing some of the tension from the moment. A stiff breeze blew across the water, and I tightened my hold on the sweater.

  Dad finally ran his fingers through the spiked ends of his hair. “God’s love would have been enough to see us through, but we didn’t have any interest in that. At least I didn’t. Your mother spoke of it from time to time, but I figured it was just her sickness. She said she heard God speaking to her.”

  I swallowed hard at that. I wanted to tell Dad about thinking God was talking to me, but I wasn’t really ready to admit that my childhood Sunday school lessons might be valid for my adult life.

  “God would have made a difference in how I treated her. It would have changed how I parented you girls,” he continued. “That much I do know for certain. I was afraid of what I saw happening. I felt alone and unsure. It was easier to be gone fr
om the situation and pretend it wasn’t all that bad rather than deal with it.”

  “If only we could have escaped it,” I murmured.

  “I wished that for you too.”

  “So why didn’t you . . .” I paused. I didn’t want to blame him, so I fell silent. The question on my mind would have sounded like an accusation and done neither of us any good.

  Dad understood my heart. “Why didn’t I get you away from her? Why didn’t I take you to safety?”

  I nodded.

  “Your mother was very keen. She had her fears and hallucinations, but she was a smart woman with a high IQ. I couldn’t just pretend with her. Fooling her wasn’t an option. Her paranoia kept her constantly ahead of the game, while her delusions clouded the truth.

  “Added to this, I didn’t want to frighten her. Once when I mentioned the idea of sending you girls to boarding school, she freaked out on me. I feared mentioning it again—thought she might take you girls and run. Knowing her as I did, I worried that I might never find you if she did that. So I tried to bide my time. I tried to make sure that someone was always aware of what was happening—that you were safe.”

  “But we weren’t.” I looked at the ground. “Dad, I never told you half the things she did. She told me I couldn’t say a word to anyone.” I looked up to find him scrutinizing me. “She scared me. I loved her so much, but she scared me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Bailee. I didn’t know. You should have said something.”

  “We both should have,” I admitted. “But I thought keeping quiet was the right thing to do.”

  “Bailee, I can’t say that what happened here today hasn’t left me shaken. I always thought I had the confidence and support of my children. Judith reminded me that God has a plan, even in this—but I’m hurt and I won’t lie and say otherwise.”

  “But what kind of plan?” I stiffened. “What possible good comes out of such things?”

  “Well, the truth for one. We’ve put an end to the lie that you’ve believed all these years. That’s progress, isn’t it?”