“No, Cat!” I interrupted harshly.
She flinched at my tone. I hadn’t meant to sound so forceful, but there was no way that Angelica would handle Cat putting up ‘boundaries.’ And Cat’s mom wasn’t some messed-up girl. She was a grown-ass woman who had been perfecting her unique form of crazy for years.
“This is different. She’s your mother. Your family,” I explained.
The look of determination burned even brighter than it had before and she scooted away from me causing my arms to fall to my sides. Straightening her shoulders she nodded. “Exactly. You’re right. She’s the only family I have. She’s my mother.”
Raking my fingers through my hair I tried to figure out a way to make her see that this was a not a path she wanted to do down. I was racked with helplessness as I drew a total blank. I knew that anything I said might just push her closer to this idea—this bad idea. I didn’t want her to open herself up like that. I had no idea how to make her understand why this was a colossally shitty plan.
“Jace.” Her voice sounded quiet. “I’ve never stood up to her. Never told her that the things she did to me, said to me, were wrong. I’ve never thought I had the strength or even any reason to. But now, you’ve changed all that. You’ve not only given me the strength to want to stand up to her. You’ve also made me see that I actually don’t deserve the things she does to me. I don’t deserve to be treated like that.”
Fuck. When she put it like that, I didn’t really know how to argue with her.
“All right,” I agreed reluctantly. “On one condition. I’m going to be there. With you. When this goes down.”
No way was I going to let Cat lead herself like a lamb to the slaughter and not be there to make sure the wolves didn’t devour her. I thought she was going to argue with me, but once again, Cat surprised the hell out of me.
“Okay,” she said as she nodded once and stood, wiping the sand off her pants and the tears stains from her cheeks. “Let’s go.”
Wait. What?
My eyes shot to her in stunned disbelief. “Right now? You want to talk to her right now?”
A small smile played on her lips as she held out her hand to help me up. “I’ve always been a rip-the-Band-Aid-off-fast kind of girl.”
Overwhelmed with pride for my brown-eyed girl, I pushed up onto my feet and lifted Cat into my arms. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held onto me tight, perhaps needing to be held as much as I needed to hold her.
When I set her down and we started back up the walkway, I said, “Speaking of Band-Aids, do you think maybe I should grab some? Just in case.”
Cat laughed, sounding a little nervous. “That might not be a bad idea.”
Chapter 22
Cat
My entire body hummed with nervous energy as Jace and I walked back into the house. My mind was reeling from the decision I’d just made. I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to have an adult conversation with my mother—one where I made reasonable assertions and didn’t back down from the consequences. One, come to think of it, where I did anything besides sit quietly or nod. It was almost unfathomable.
Jace put his hand on my lower back and leaned down to whisper, “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” I looked back at him and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t worry so much. I knew he thought this was a bad idea, but I knew I had to do this. Not because I thought it would make a bit of difference to my mom, but because I knew it would make a big difference for me.
We found my mother sitting in the study, in front of the fireplace, looking camera ready as always, casually flipping through the pages of a magazine as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. I recognized this nonchalance. I had seen it displayed many times in the past after an ‘episode.’ It was my cue to start behaving like whatever major blowup had just occurred had been a figment of my imagination.
Well, not this time.
“Mom, I need to talk to you.” I was surprised by the steadiness and firmness of my voice.
Her head lifted and her eyes met mine. Her demeanor was all smiles and rainbows. “Cat, darling! There you are! I was just going to come look for you. Tell me, how do you think this haircut would look on me with my face shape?” She held up the magazine, squinting at the picture. After glancing back and forth between the pages and me, she said, “No, I think you’re right. I’ll stick with what I have. It really flatters my face. Now, tell me, what are your plans for the rest of the day? I was thinking perhaps we could take a nice little shopping trip. You can always use some new clothes for up at college, don’t you think? With the extra weight you’ve put on you probably need them.”
Ignoring her barb at my weight, I sat down on the couch. Jace followed my lead and took a seat beside me. It felt reminiscent of the ‘family therapy’ session of just a few days earlier, except that, now, I wasn’t the one facing the firing squad. The power dynamic had been flipped. It was still two against one, but I wasn’t on the short end of the stick anymore.
Somehow, I felt more comfortable, in many ways, on the other side. At least it was where I had always been and I knew what was expected of me. Here, I was completely out of my comfort zone and I feared that I was in over my head. I had absolutely no clue what I was going to say to my mother to start this whole Cat-sticking-up-for-herself intervention and even less of a clue how I might respond to her predictable wrath at what I ended up saying.
The little voice in the back of my head was whispering in my ear, telling me that it wasn’t too late to get out of this. All I had to do was make up something that I had wanted to talk to her about. Something innocuous. Something like asking her if she wanted to go out to dinner that evening or stay in. Actually, I thought, all I really have to do is stand up and walk out the door. I didn’t even have to come up with some big explanation. It would be a blip on her radar. In fifteen minutes, she’d be hard-pressed to remember that I’d even come in here.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to quiet that voice. I needed to focus. I needed to remember that I was doing this for me, not for my mother. I couldn’t expect a certain reaction from her—definitely not a positive one. I needed to brace myself against her rage and yelling if that’s the route she chose to go. I needed to focus on the fact that Jace, my love, was right there with me, provided unfailing support.
But mostly, I needed to dive in before I lost my nerve.
My mother settled back regally into the club chair, and I tried to begin but immediately snapped my mouth shut like it was the jewelry box Richard Gere held in Pretty Woman. Damn. False start. Nerves rattled me reminiscent of when I was a kid trying to work up the nerve to get into a cold pool. I figured the same logic could apply here. Trying to work your way in toe by toe was torture. Best to just jump.
“Soooo, what’s up, Cat?” my mother said flatly but with obvious razor blades just below the surface of her voice. I recognized that she was parroting back to me what I had said at the beginning of the family therapy session she had sprung on me just after Jace and I had arrived.
I guessed that, even if she acted like she wasn’t paying attention, she actually was hearing me. Of course, she most likely wasn’t listening for the purpose of really paying attention to what I had to say. She was merely storing up ammunition. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than if I weren’t on her radar at all.
I smiled a little. “Well, I want to talk about what just happened in the living room with Jace.”
She didn’t respond, just continued sitting there as if waiting for me to go on.
I obliged. “You know…um…when you kissed Jace just now.”
She didn’t say anything, but her facial expression clearly said, I am quite sure I have no idea what you are talking about.
I gave her a moment to compose her thoughts. When she still didn’t say anything, I pressed ahead. “Mom, Jace is my boyfriend. It’s really… It’s just… inappropriate for you to kiss him.”
Still n
o response.
I kept going. Who knew if I was getting through or not, but I had started this thing and I was going to see it through. “The thing is, this sort of behavior can’t go on. I won’t tolerate it. If it does, I won’t be able to stay and do any more press. I won’t be able to be here for the reporters and photographers that are coming on Thanksgiving to publicize our ‘happy’ family life. The bottom line is, if you kiss Jace again or do anything else that is inappropriate and crosses boundaries, I will go back to school. And if that means that you follow me, so be it. I don’t have any control over that, over you, over Jerry, but I do have control what I allow myself to be subjected to.”
She was silent. It was starting to drive me crazy—which was probably the intended effect. I was going back and forth between wanting to leap off the couch, dive over the coffee table, shake her by the shoulders, and scream, “Say something! Anything! Just talk!” and running out of the room like a bat out of hell.
I didn’t do either of those things though—of course. I merely sat in the tense silence and did my best to wait her out. I had a strong feeling that speaking again would be a big strategic mistake. I had said everything that needed to be said. Giving in to the pressure of the silence would be a tacit admission that her tactic was getting to me. I mean, her tactic was getting to me. That was true. But I couldn’t let her know that.
After a long moment, one that seemed even longer than it actually was, my mother smiled tightly. Then she gracefully stood from the chair she was sitting in and elegantly floated out of the room. I continued to stare at her empty chair, too drained to move. A moment later, the sound of her study door slamming made both Jace and me jump a little in our seats and it snapped me out of my stupor.
I turned to him and shrugged. “Well,” I said, my voice deadpan, “that went quite a bit better than I thought it would.”
Chapter 23
Jace
Wow. I had thought the first meal I sat through was as awkward and tense as a meal could get but damn, I was wrong. This dinner was wiping the floor with that dinner. That first dinner didn’t even run a close second.
Cat and I sat beside each other at the dining table, and her mother was seated at the head of the table. She had not referenced the impromptu spin-the-bottle session she’d pulled on me or the conversation that I knew must have been terrifying for Cat this afternoon. Even though she hadn’t said anything about those things, it was very clear that she was livid. The tension in the room was so thick I wasn’t even sure if you could cut it with a knife, you might need a chainsaw. My blood pressure was rising by the second from just sitting here and I wasn’t even part of the unspoken power struggle that was clearly going on. It was the same principal as getting a secondhand high but without any of the fun benefits. Secondhand pot high was great, you felt relaxed and calm. Secondhand blood pressure high was the opposite, you felt tense and anxious.
One of the elements that was maxing out the tense meter was, although there was definitely a lot of silent communication going on, not a single word had been spoken the entire time that we had been sitting here. Even when Rachel brought the food out, Angelica merely thanked her with a tight-lipped smile.
Although, in theory, you would think that silence would be a lot easier to block out than angry outbursts, I found myself having a pretty tough time with it. Maybe it was because, with the way I’d grown up, I was used to screaming and violent, crazy behavior. This felt like a Twilight Zone episode of the Stepford Wives. It was creepy as fuck. By the main course, I found that I could barely manage to choke the food down because my throat was so tight with anxiety.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more fucked up, Jerry came into the room, all smiles and manic pent-up energy.
“Angelica, I managed to get what you wanted. It wasn’t easy. Believe me. But here’s the info you asked for.”
Angelica smiled at him benevolently. “And is it illuminating as I suspected?”
Jerry gave me a bitter look, filled with venom and hatred. I seriously wanted to kick this guy’s ass. I was just waiting for him to give me a reason.
“It’s even better, A. Take a look.”
Cat looked at me questioningly and I shrugged, puzzled. I had no idea what this shit was about.
Cat’s mother opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of papers. She scanned them and then let out a cruel laugh. It reminded me of the kind of laughs you hear from the villains in Disney cartoons and it sent a shiver of fear up my spine. I didn’t know why, but I had a distinct feeling that this was all about to go very badly. For me in particular.
“Jace,” Angelica said, her voice as sweet as honey, “do you know what I have here?”
I decided to employ her tactic from earlier. I stayed quiet, not backing down but not saying a word either. Her grin widened. Apparently, she viewed this as a victory.
“This,” she cried, brandishing the papers triumphantly over her head like a sword she was about to bring down on my neck, “is your discharge packet from the military.”
I sat for a moment, not speaking. This was no tactic though. I was truly stunned. “Those papers are confidential,” I finally rasped.
Angelica waved this away as if it had no bearing on the subject at hand. “The thing I think you should really be concerned about is what they say, not how I got them. There are things in here that I’m guessing my dear daughter doesn’t know. Am I correct?”
I felt my fingers go numb. I didn’t want to have any secrets from Cat. I had wanted to tell her about my past, about what had happened. But we just hadn’t had the time. I wanted to have the time and space to tell her about them in my own way. I wanted to explain and talk with her, answer her questions. I didn’t want her to hear all of my most personal failings victoriously blurted out by Angelica in the same way that chess players yell, “Checkmate!”
Turning to Cat, knowing that those things were not going to be a luxury I would be afforded, I heard my voice come out stronger than I felt. “Cat—” I started to explain, but when I looked at her, but she wasn’t even looking at me. She was glaring furiously at her mother.
“There’s nothing in there I need to know, Mom. There’s nothing you can tell me about Jace that will change the most important thing I know about him—that he’s the man I love.”
Angelica was not going to be deterred by anything as trivial, in her mind, as what Cat had just said. She directed her attention back to the papers in front of her and flipped through them, making a show of perusing them to refresh her memory. I got the feeling that it was all fake, for effect. I got the feeling, in fact, that she could have recited the contents of the papers pretty much verbatim after having glanced at them just once.
“Well, it seems like the man that you love had quite a colorful history in the military. It seems that he was in a convoy that hit an IED. Apparently, there was quite the explosion. Somehow, Jace was the only one to walk away. But not everyone died in the explosion. No, several of your fellow soldiers lingered for hours waiting for help to arrive. Isn’t that right, Jace? It says here you tried to save them. Tried to drag them to safety. Tried to stop the bleeding. Tried to keep them conscious until someone came to bail all of you out.
“But, sadly, it seems like you failed at all that. Quite badly, really. All of them died. I don’t really see how you could fail worse than that, really.
“And then, after that, your next mission was also a total and complete disaster. I see that friendly fire killed not one but two of your fellow soldiers. Now, you were never convicted of this hideous crime. But I have to wonder if that is partly because, during the trial, you were diagnosed with…well, the medical file says PTSD, but the description of symptoms tells a much fuller story. Catatonic for long periods? Uncontrollable panic at loud noises? Flashbacks? Losing time? Sounds like just plain ‘crazy’ to me. Or maybe it was just convenient. Either way, I don’t think any of your behavior had anything to do with PTSD at all. You are smarter than I give you cre
dit for, though, because I see here that you were let out on a ‘medical’ discharge. Hmmm…that’s really just another word for ‘dishonorable,’ right? If we’re being honest? But hey, it’s better than prison, right?”
Angelica tamped the edges of the papers together and carefully slid them back into the envelope, the condescending smile never leaving her face. She handed the envelope back to Jerry. “Put those in the safe deposit box, will you, Jerry? We don’t want to lose track of them. Ever.”
For the first time since Cat and I had been together, I felt like the walls were closing in on me. Literally. The room began spinning. My tongue swelled in my mouth and sweat broke out down my back. Panic rose inside me as my heart pounded like hammer against my rib cage.
My eyes darted around the room, trying to get my bearings. I needed to focus on one thing if I had any hope of centering myself.
Everything was blurry. Jerry’s face, Angelica’s face. Even Cat’s face was just fuzzy circles.
I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt like I was going to die.
I stood up and, without thinking any further ahead than my intense need to escape, bolted from the room. I heard Cat calling after me, but I didn’t stop or even slow down. I kept going, straight out the front door, down the driveway, and as far away from there as I could get.
Chapter 24
Cat
Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit.
I picked up my phone with trembling fingers and swiped Jace’s name in my contacts, dialing his number yet again. I didn’t care that I’d dialed his phone twenty-five times in as many minutes. I didn’t care that I’d left voicemails on at least half of the calls. I didn’t care that this was making me appear to be an insecure, maybe even crazy girlfriend. All I cared about was that he was okay.
One Day His (The Someday Series Book 2) Page 15
