Janice Johnson - From This Day On

“Not a good moment in our lives,” Jakob observed at last.

“Funny, I remember looking at the picture and not seeing that. I think I’ve been guilty of a lot of self-deception.”

“Maybe.” He waited until she had to turn her head and meet his eyes, closer to gray right now than blue. “But you don’t know, do you?”

“I do,” she said sharply.

“You’re still guessing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “But you already knew, didn’t you?”

He hesitated. “No. I heard things that made me wonder, that’s all. Remember, I wasn’t very old. Mostly, I put what I heard out of my mind.”

The slightest change of intonation in his voice there at the end suggested he was lying, although she didn’t know why he’d bother. After a minute, though, she nodded, as if in acceptance.

“You were only eight. No, I guess nine at the end.”

“Their yelling freaked me out.”

“Me, too,” she admitted. “I pulled the covers over my head at night. Sometimes the pillow, too, when they got especially loud. I knew I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I was so scared.”

Jakob laid a hand atop hers on the table. His was big and warm and comforting. She stared down at it until, to her disappointment, he removed it.

“I didn’t like your mother,” he said gruffly, “but change is always scary for kids. I felt safe when we were a family. Sometimes I worried Dad would leave me behind if he moved out.”

“Like he did me.” Amy swallowed. “I wanted to go with him so bad.”

“I think he believed your mother needed you, that she loved you.”

She snorted. Not with a lot of authority, but still... “Sure. Right. Get real. He didn’t want me, because I wasn’t his kid. And yes, he was nice enough to keep pretending for my sake, but even then I could tell. He didn’t look at me the same. I knew, but I didn’t want to know. Now, well...” Amy shrugged. “I guess denial only takes you so far.”

Jakob sat there frowning at her. “What have you been doing the past two days? Hiding out?”

She tried a smile, even if it didn’t come off very well. “Yeah, I suppose. I felt...” A huge lump clogged her throat. Felt was past tense. Feel. I feel. “Sick,” she finally acknowledged. “I always knew that Mom...” She gave something like a laugh. “I was going to say, Mom didn’t love me. But it was worse than that. Especially when I was little. It was as if she couldn’t stand to touch me. She’d shy away from me if I tried to cuddle. I learned not to try.” Oh, that sounds pathetic. She managed a shrug. “It’s not like I didn’t survive. Maybe I’m tougher because she wasn’t touchy-feely. In all honesty, I don’t think she would have been even if I’d been a planned pregnancy. Her parents were rigid and cold.”

Jakob nodded. She’d forgotten that he had, of course, met them.

She sighed. “I’ll bet they didn’t do a lot of cuddling, either.”

Jakob’s expression was troubled. Looking at him, she felt as if a band was tightening around her chest. He was a really beautiful man, with that lean face and strong, prominent bones. His hair was disheveled, even spiky tonight. It seemed darker in this light, but the hint of stubble on his jaw glinted gold. As a child, she had so wanted them to be close. She’d taken comfort in knowing he was her brother, that however funny she looked she still shared his blood. Maybe if she had kids of her own, the Scandinavian genes would reassert themselves. Nope, she thought sadly, no such genes here. Hers were...who knew?

“You never suspected?” he asked. “Your mother never said anything?”

“Like, by the way, your real father is this creep who raped me when I was only nineteen?”

“Uh...I was thinking more along the lines of saying that she was pregnant already when she met my dad, but he’s a good guy who took responsibility for you.”

Amy huffed out another laugh. “One of the things she wrote in that diary—” she nodded toward the book that still lay open to the final, devastating passage “—is that she didn’t ever want to think about what happened again. Then she said, and I quote, ‘But I can’t completely pretend, can I?’ And she was right, because she was stuck with me. A living, breathing manifestation of the worst thing that ever happened to her.”

Jakob visibly winced.

“Hard to put it all out of your mind once you realize you’re pregnant,” she continued, her tone hard. “Did you know Mom was raised Catholic? I think we can assume if she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have seen the light of day.”

He sat forward abruptly. “Jesus, Amy, don’t talk like that.”

“I’ve had two days to think about it. Wouldn’t most women who had been raped want to abort the baby?” She saw that he couldn’t deny her conclusion. “But Mom was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, her religion and her parents. Your dad gave her an out.”

He closed his eyes and scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked older when he was done. “No wonder he was so angry.”

“No kidding.”

“I tried to call him last night. When I hadn’t heard from you. He hasn’t returned my call yet.”

“You were going to ask him if he knew what was in the time capsule?”

“Yeah.” Jakob grimaced. “I was going to ask him if you were his kid.”

“I suppose the panties raised a few questions in your mind.”

“You could say that.” His eyebrows drew together. “DNA testing wasn’t available that long ago, was it? Did she say what she was thinking?”

“Only that she never washed them because she couldn’t bear to touch them. She says in there that they and the diary were a sort of funeral offering. That the woman—girl—she’d been was dead.”

They were both quiet for a minute after that.

Jakob let out a long sigh. “You know what you have to do, don’t you, Amy?”

She gazed at him in alarm. “What do you mean?”

“You have to talk to your mother. We could be completely wrong about all of this. The pieces could fit together in a way you’re not seeing at all.”

“You know I’m not wrong.”

“That doesn’t mean you should sweep it all under the rug, even if that’s what she did. You won’t be able to come to terms with it until you hear her side of what happened, why she made the decisions she did.”

Amy crossed her arms protectively. “What makes you think she won’t keep lying to me?”

“Why would she? You’re not a child anymore. I imagine she kept the secret partly, or even mostly, for your sake. You’re in your thirties now, and it’s tough to take in. Imagine if you’d found all this out when you were sixteen.”

Amy shivered a little. Of course he was right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at her mother. Which wasn’t the worst part, she realized. Most painful was the fact that, as a woman, she understood and sympathized with her mother. A second shiver was more of a shudder as she thought about having to bear a child of rape, keep her, raise her, pretend to love her.

Could I?

She honestly didn’t know.

“I’ll call her once I’ve absorbed all this.”

Jakob shook his head, his expression implacable. “Nope. We’ll figure out the time difference and you’ll call her tonight, while I’m here.”

“What?” she snarled. “You think I’ll collapse if I don’t have you here to support me?”

He actually had the nerve to smile. “No, I think you won’t do it at all.”

“My privilege.”

“I want to know, too,” he said simply.

She should have asked why. What difference did it make to him? Did he want permission to go back to ignoring her?

But she couldn’t do it. Some veiled emotion in his eyes made her uneasy. Did he suspect some other truth? If so, she couldn’t deal with it.