Sweet Adaline

Chapter Nineteen

She was outside at a patio table, cross-legged and always proper. She looked put out, as if I'd begged her to meet me. Angela's technique to render a man speechlessly inadequate with a glance, was precise. For most men, it's the enigmatic dominance that she'd wield, but for me it was her absence. That sounds harsh, but I find it commendable, only because she has survived and found her way. There's nothing wrong with signing off, checking out in order to make obstacles more manageable. She spent my life somewhere else, though. I am allowed that animosity. Whatever comes of love for her however, will settle on whether she can suffer a return and be moved. I've never seen it happen. Not for my mother at least. But hope is abundant when you look for it.
She was supportive and protective of me as a child, and never very good at hiding all of what she lost in the process. Over time though, she realAngieed even her boy would leave, so she pulled out first. I was her last attachment.
She sat drinking from a white ceramic cup. A latte in my mother's hand was an invitation to a lively afternoon, or a trap door into confrontation.
"You're more prompt than usual," She said.
"I admit, I am curious." I replied.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I'm kidding." I said. "I'm going to get something to drink."
She disengaged, returning to another redundant Biosphere article she'd been reading in the Weekly.
At the counter, as I waited for my latte, I thought more about Adaline, my unforeseen medium. I'd read her description of the dreams she'd encountered after her mother died, and I suppose I'd accepted them as fact for what they were. But still, they were written accounts and not at all the type of thing I'd ever expected to witness. Not from her, my dark haired champion passed out on my sofa. Not from anyone in my lifetime for that matter.
I dwelled on the dreams she'd had, about being her mother. Her descriptions became so much more visceral after witnessing what I'd just seen. I heard Penny speak from her. I tried to gather all my warped and faded, intoxicated memories to find a time when she might have eluded to such dreams she might have had of Penny. God! What might she have seen? Was she there, inside her when...when...
My drink was called out by the Barista at the end of the bar and I lost my panic in the thought. I looked back through the window at Angela. She was so resigned. Ambivalent to the world that raced around her, she led her distant existence on a mantle above it all. It wasn't until I found Penny that I began to understand the vacancy between us. Her lofty abstraction kept her too far to touch. Her bent perspective. Her ideal list of standards. Her tunnel vision.
Despite my opinion, she's a woman, and requires faith in love. What she demanded was no more in relativity, than that of any woman. I realAngiee now, her heart had been broken every time. Perhaps every time she fell for love again, as much as she would allow, she gave equally. Maybe she gave too much, too often. Maybe she only did what I'd told Adaline to. She simply loved, with all she had inside her. No restraint. And she'd love like a girl, not a woman, always in search of that man again, practicing with her heart. Just like Dylan put it, "She aches just like a woman, but she breaks just like a little girl."
Although I humored that possibility, I just couldn't buy it.
I returned to her at the table, where her stare drifted out past the well worn patio tables and chairs, across the grass to a small fountain in the center of the plaza.
"The last time I was here, it was dry." I said as I sat across from her.
"Pardon?" She responding eyes lingering for a second as she spoke, then reluctantly landing back on me. "What did you say?" She asked blankly.
"The fountain. The last I had been here, it had been emptied." I repeated. "Actually, come to think of it, I can't remember seeing water in it for, shit, I don't know. Years even." She sat uninterested. "Not since, high school maybe. Maybe. I forget."
"Well maybe it had lost the will to flow. Can you blame a fountain for running dry?" She said in theatrical excess.
"In this neighborhood I can." I replied playfully. She sat unimpressed.
"Ashley, you really do have your fathers gift."
"Oh? We're talking about him now? This must have been serious." I was always irritating when she'd bring him up. It's audacious. I'd never had the pleasure. It was so remarkably tacky and indicative of her personality to carry on about him as the old boyfriend she'd had. One she enjoyed, like a first car or an old movie, oblivious to what the topic meant to me.
It was never uncommon to hear random comments about him in the course of one of these emotional disasters. "Your father," she'd tell me, "was my alpha/omega. There will never be another man like him," though it never stopped her from looking.
"Don't chide me Ashley. I know you never took the time to get to know Jack, but I put a lot of effort into this relationship. I don't need your sarcasm here." She said sharply, then quickly regained herself.
"I'm sorry," She continued. I'm sure I looked careless. That was what I had for this whole arrangement, from start to the finish, as I hoped it was. "I just...I, I'm just so uncertain. I feel guilty, like 'here we go again'. I don't know if I just didn't try long enough. I mean, you know me." She said with a brazen, foolish grin. "It's not entirely unusual for me to get, oh I don't know, hasty with this sort of thing."
I wanted to get into it. That was my cue for scolding and 'I-told-you-so-ing'. This was the slot for my two cents. 'If you don't get over yourself, you're not going to ever be happy.' I'd say it with panache, not expecting a word of it to register, and so the weight of my inherent responsibility as a son could be lifted, and I could endure whatever else she'd say.
I left it open. For the first time, I wondered, what was her judgment? What brought it to its end. What did the man say or do? What had he done that seemed so out of character from where she started from. I never fed into the protective son role. Watching her work a man was like watching a bobcat strip its prey to the bone. You don't protect that. You just try to survive it, and wait for her to throw you a hunk. Only, this guy was different, and doubtfully prey.
"What happened, Mom?" I asked, attentive to her story.
"There's a lot to it. It wasn't just one thing. It just kept building and building. This isn't, Angela doing the usual...thing." She took a swig of her lukewarm soy latte, like it was a rum and coke. "But god dammit! I don't know. Maybe it was there the whole time and I just didn't see it." She rambled on, checking every few words to see if I was still present. Yep. Still there.
I should just chime in, as usual, I thought again. Charge in with cynicisms to caricature her dramatics. Instead I was too invested.
"What did you miss? Mom, start from a beginning." My patience slipped.
"Ok." She took a breath. "Well, at first I just thought, we've each got our own hang ups from being hurt, namely his wife, for one." Her eyes sank with sympathy as she leaned in. "She had taken her own life about four years ago. I don't know if you'd heard that." I nodded in silent admission.
"Ok, well. Jack's always been somewhat closed off because of it."
"And that was working for you?" I asked, subtly surprised. My mother had always been the type that needs to be in on every nuance of the relationship. There was very little room for eclectic mystery unless she was in on it.
"Well, at first it was nice. I never felt like he was hiding anything. Nothing important anyway. I accepted the fact that there were things that he just didn't want to talk about, and I was in fact, ok with it. For the first time, I felt ok with just spending time with a man without needing to stay on top of the conversation. He had his skeletons, and I had mine. It's not like I just didn't know anything!" she exclaimed.
"Yeah!" I retorted, chuckling. "You are, after all, still a woman."
"Right!" she said, just then catching my sarcasm. "Smart ass." She smiled wryly. "Anyway, that was all fine." she continued.
"At first."
"Then I did start to feel like there were things he wasn't telling me. But still, I told myself, it's all in your head Angie." She told stories like some old veteran granddad sparked to life by finger of scotch. Always animated and over the top. Every faculty was a part of her expression. It was always an entertaining sight when she'd get caught up and carried away in the current of an exciting tale. And my mother could make any story an exciting tale. I'm certain this was the thing that men loved most about her.
"But he was staying at work later, and I'm thinking to myself, how long does a dentist need to be at work? But I don't know what all they need to do. All I knew was that our time was being cut shorter and shorter." She struck aghast, then went on. "But even then, I was doing alright. After all, I had the opportunity to get to know Adaline a lot better."
"Oh?" I said with mild interest. "And how's she?"
"You know, she's doing fine. I feel as though she accepts me, more and more. Maybe not as a stepmother. I ever intended to come in and be this motherly role model for a girl who lost her own mother so tragically. It was very painful for her. Anyone can see that. She doesn't talk about her much at all, and I respect that." She slowed for a moment in recognition of all the poor girl's unspoken sufferings.
"I just can't imagine how hard it must have been for her. You know, your grandfather passed away when I was nineteen. It was very hard for me to get over that. I just can't imagine! I mean, thirteen to seventeen. Those are the years that everything happens. They're the prime of a girl's development. Starting their period, dating boys. Make-up. Really recognizing themselves as women instead of girls. Those are the years a girl needs a woman in her life to guide her, more than anything." My mother spoke wide-eyed and declarative. These were words she believed more fervently than other subjects: The needs of a woman. I'd say it was her forte.
"I know. It may not mean as much for a man, but girls need a pilot through these things," she said, oblivious to the ignorance of her commentary.
I couldn't help but volley a look of contempt towards her.
"Oh come on, Ashley. At least there were men in our home. Men I might add that wanted nothing more than to mentor you. Help you to become a man. The best kind of man. It's not my fault if you chose to hate them." she said in her lofty proclamation of vindication.
"Oh? Was that it?" I seethed. She'd turned the train around, and I hadn't the desire to lay down before it, as I'd found to be the best way to survive with my temper, or as I'd been informed dozens of times over, my father's temper. "Or perhaps I just didn't know which man could make me an honest man. Really mom, which one was the best kind of man. The pervert or the heathen? Or should I have just followed your stories of the mystery father. Was it this guy? Because it seems like all of them..." I withdrew my claws, though my stomach still boiled. "Just...keep going." I said in resignation. Angela sat back looking away, regaining her own composure, settling from her coiled position she had wound herself into, ready to strike, had I continued.
"I don't know, Ashley. Maybe..."
"Jesus! Come on mom. Just tell me what's happened. I'm really tired and I got over sensitive and acted like a child. I started it, and now I've ended it. So please, just keep going." I pleaded. I needed to know this. It was everything I'd already known, but still, I was certain there would be some fragment I'd need to know. I needed her to finish.
"If you're tired..." she continued to play me.
"Mother!" I snapped. She smiled as she rolled back around, warming back up. She lifted her latte to her lips, then jolting back slightly with a look of disgust. Cold coffee. She contemplated ordering another while she sat, trying to find her place again.
My mother's drug of choice was always caffeine. Not alcohol or any other popular poison. Just that hard wire from a couple cups of fresh brew. Ideally espresso. On this afternoon, she'd had downed four shots already in a pair of lattes.
"Ok!" She said with the flat palm gesture for 'silence'. She choked down another drink of her icy latte, before calling it's time of death by way of soured grimace and pushing the cup from her.
"Adaline" I softly said, prompting her.
"She's a wonderful girl. And gorgeous. I can only imagine how beautiful her mother must have been. I mean, I have to imagine. Jack doesn't have any pictures of her... anywhere." She said, her wry expression cresting offended.
"It's probably just too hard to see her." I replied, recalling from Adaline's diary, the time when they'd first moved, and no photos of Elisa ever returned to display, lost in the wake of escape.
"I know you're right." She agreed with a nod, only half understanding it. I thought about Penny, and how I could remember her face, but the details were fading. I hadn't seen a picture of her since I last left the house. It seemed odd. Rather. It seemed as though, if I were to think about it in any logical sense, it would seem odd. However, to me, just then, to not see her face again seemed more right than any of this. The truth of it, of reality, had begun to sink in. Perhaps I was feeling the birth of what Adaline called, part two. The part where you wake up without that pit, half believing it's all just some horrible nightmare, and somehow it could be made right. This is the part after that, where you begin to work on making whatever's left as useful as it can be.
"I know." she continued, trying to grasp it. "I just can't really understand it. She was the woman he loved. At least one small frame, even if it's hidden away. Just somewhere to find her if, who knows, one day he just needs to see her." Just a peak, she argued unable to comprehend.
"When they're gone, you'd give anything to see them again. It's a part of letting go. I had to leave it all. Never look back. Honestly, I don't think I would have returned. But then you called," I said with a damp resurrection of the feeling of my life's dismemberment.
"I understand it. I don't think I could handle seeing Penny. Not yet at least. Maybe eventually." When I looked up and my eyes caught hers I saw the heartache and embarrassment in my mother's eyes. Again, she'd backed herself into some foreign alley.
"Oh god, I'm sorry baby. I just...I didn't think. That was so careless of me." She pleading for my forgiveness. She reached out and took my hand, caressing it with the other. Her hands were always warm and soft. Bony fingers though. I remember that from childhood. More so than they looked. "I'm just batting a thousand today." She said with an awkward attempt at a grin, as she sought after my eyes in response.
"It's ok," I nodded. "The point is, you do strange things in the course of moving on. A lot of the time, you don't know why. You think you're just losing it. But you're just trying to survive. When something like that happens, you're sure there's no way you can." I met her stare, her puppy dog eyes, with a maladroit smile and a furrowed brow.
I didn't go on. There were still questions I couldn't answer. Not with answers I believed, anyway. Hours ago, I was sure I had died away completely and was already rotting. If only that was what the face in the mirror was telling me...
I sat there, my hand in my mother's palms, breathing warm humid summer air through a new perspective. No sun shone through the steely cotton clouds. Only lighter shades of grey.
"You still haven't told me the worst of it." I said returning to the subject.
"Oh no Ashley." She replied, retreating. "Let's not talk about me any more. I've said enough. You haven't told me anything about..."
"We don't talk about me because I'd rather not and you respect that." I said, cutting her off hastily. "You respect my need to deal with this the best way I know how, and that's the best thing you could ever do for me." I squeezed her hand in returned comfort, then pulled gently away, straightening. I sucked down another third of my iced latte, and returned to our conversation, prepared for the flaccid conclusion.
"So what did he do," I asked, priming her, "repeatedly, to bring about this hasty escape?" I smiled. Business smile.
"Alright. Well, the sex got weird. That's always a beginning to the end." My mother said matter-of-factly. You don't neglect a middle-aged woman's libido. You just don't.
"What's 'weird'," I asked, hoping for a PG answer.
"Well," she paused to compose a family friendly approach. "When I'd try to start into it, he wasn't interested. That was just irritating. But then he'd come onto me once I was asleep. It was like, come on babe, I was practically begging last night."
"All right, wait." I stopped her to ask cautiously. "He'd come onto you." I inquired. She stopped her train of thought. She began to respond, blind to my confusion.
"Yeah," then it hit her. She cocked her head, unimpressed, as if I were joking. I wasn't. "He would try to start up with me, not trying to wake me up. Just, you know." She found herself embarrassed by the topic, now that she thought about how it went down. She didn't know how to explain to me how he'd whisper so quietly, she couldn't quite hear, and what she'd catch, she couldn't make any sense of.
She paused incoherently, accessing suppressed memories from only two weeks ago. He'd said things so profane her stomach turned inside out. She thought of the nights that he'd enter her in her sleep and she'd find herself raw and confused. Excited for it, but not in any genuinely desirable way. Then she thought all the way back to the start of it all, when they'd drink till their words slurred, and he'd take her home where they fucked wildly, cresting violently, the way he'd attack it. He'd swear at her, and she'd claw him and call him names. He'd slap her and she'd love it, she'd push him down and he'd wrestle her to the floor, where they'd do this for hours, thrusting in positions she'd never imagined.
The way it transformed was so remarkable, in only a sickening, nerve racking way.
"It didn't feel like making love, anymore. It felt like something else," she said, with a shameful glance. "You know?" I'd heard enough. I knew the man almost solely on here-say, but I trusted their accounts. I knew him well enough to hate him.
"I understand." I told her with soothing promise.
"And the way he is with Adaline!" She exclaimed coming to life again. "I just don't know what to say about that!" She grew more animated with disgust.
"Yeah?" I was strongly curious.
"OH YEAH!" She replied, wide eyed and fully charged. "He acts like she doesn't even live there. Hardly the way it should be." She looked at me, realAngieing she might be wandering into sketchy territory, with a widower across from her. "I'm just saying that, since he's her only parent, he should spend a little more time with her. Be a dad. I mean, it's kind of not my business I suppose, but...you know what?! To hell with that! It is my business! If she were my daughter,"
"You'd have named her Ashley and have given her the world." I interrupted with a smile.
"That's right, smart ass." She volleyed back. "And if I couldn't give her all that, at least I'd give her my god   damn   attention!" She spat. "I saw him talk to her in passing, only. Jesus, I talk to the girl more than he does. Probably more than he did all year."
"Wow." I responded with shock. "That is weird. Did you ever mention it?" I asked. "Did you ever say, 'hey Jack what's up with your shitty parenting?"
"Seriously!" She exclaimed. "I did yesterday. We were arguing about...what was it at first?" she searched for few seconds for the incidental root of it. "Oh! Adaline doesn't have a car. No way to get around. And without a car, the girl can't work. She can't make the money to buy clothes for herself. Make-up, what-have-you, the necessities.
"So I take her out to look at some used cars. I had her find them in the classifieds and then we went out together last Saturday. Well, we go and she finds this gorgeous car, a Geo Storm, just perfect for her. Great on gas, low miles, the whole deal." She engaged every gesture, excitedly.
"I tell her, I'll do what I can to finance, but she needs to bring it up to her father. Make sure he's fine with it. I mean, we never really discussed Adaline, Jack and I haven't. I never could have thought something like that would be such a big deal. I just figured, she needs to start the ball rolling, just tell him she's found a car she wants..." she shook her head as if to say, "obviously", "because she needs one, and I'll cover the rest.
"Well, He wasn't fine with it, but instead of discussing like an adult, he just pouts and sulks until, finally, he blows up saying how I don't understand how difficult it is to raise a daughter. Well, maybe I don't, Asshole! But it's not that far a cry from bringing up a son by yourself!"
"Did you say that?" I asked
"Basically. It didn't matter though. He wasn't listening." She huffed, disgusted. "Men."
"Thanks." I said, playfully insulted.
"You're welcome. And don't pretend like you're some immaculate exception." I had to laugh. "So, he's condemning me for being sooo pushy and disrespectful, and we get into it about the whole thing. I mean, I was really trying to be rational about the whole thing." She smiled knowingly. "Yes. I was actually trying to avoid the conflict. It's not like me arguing with him was going to get Adaline her car any sooner. And it wasn't until we really started to get into it that I really realAngieed how much it bothered me, the way he is with her."
"What did he say?" I asked, hoping that it might have been something remotely redeeming so that I could at least hear the whole event, gathered with a logical perspective.
"What do you mean?" She asked, shifting gears into reverse. "When? About the car? He said no, that he didn't think she needs a car. She's too young, etc." She said settling back into her chair the way a sail falls as the wind dies out.
"No," I said, redirecting her to the core of her story. The part that she realAngieed was too private to tell. Too cold to repeat. Still, I pursued it. I was certain I knew it. The only thing that could have worked her up this much. "What did he say?" I asked carefully and she squirmed, as if I were trying to exercise her of some demon truth, she would not, could not willing part with.
She couldn't look at me initially. I felt like the parent, and she was my child. We were locked in the face-off, my inquisition and her defiant, frightened stand. She was breathless, without the answer. The easy answer at least. She sat in a thick silence.
"He said, 'she's not my daughter.'" Angela's face contorted with disgust for the words.
"So I slapped him. I slapped that son of a bitch and I left." She began to cry. I got up and went to her. My mother sobbed in public, as I knelt beside her. "She was right there." She said shaking with heartache and anger. My eyes were wide as I fit the pieces together. My forearm hurt, as it touched her back only slightly. 'We all had a tough night', I thought.
I told her it would all be alright several times and it calmed her. I didn't believe it though. What I believed was that this was the beginning of the end, with a great big terrible bang ahead. What would it be? I couldn't tell. Whatever it was, I was sure that life would get much uglier for Adaline Day before it was done. Without my mother to buffer them, there was no way of knowing how the two would survive. It had become evident. He knew exactly what she knew. But when and how did he know? Had he read her diary? Worse yet had he found Elisa's?
"I need some water," Angela said, pulling herself together.
"I'll get it. Why don't you go to the bathroom while I get it for you." I said to her quietly, with comforting confidence.
I ordered her water and a slice of marble cake, and took the pen from the register as he made change of my twenty. On the back of my receipt, I wrote a name. Andrew Mercer. The only man left that might care. The hopeless romantic in the wrong time and place, and parent of untested promise. As far as Adaline knew, this man was her dad, and uninformed of it.
Angela emerged from the shadows of the short hall to the restrooms, remade and powdered, confidant as ever, bold as all hell.
"Well, I've got packing to do," She reminded me. "I have a small pocket of time. I'm sure he'll get off work early to try and catch me. He seems the type that would play it that way."
"Well, do what you think is right. That's all I can say." I knew that wasn't what she wanted to hear. Anything else from me, however, would have been too much. It wasn't my place to tell her what I felt in the matter. I was too engaged, I thought. More so than I wanted my mother to know about.
She looked at me, indiscernibly. Those deep brunette vessels picked at my meaning. "I can't stay, Ashley. Not with a man like that." She said with heavy certainty. "And maybe you're right. I don't appreciate the sanctity of marriage. Maybe I just don't get it. I get this though. Who could love a man that cold?" She asked, receiving her water from me. I gestured to the cake which she declined.
"I'm not telling you anything." I clarified. "He sounds like a dick. You know you're options. I just think about the girl in all this, Adaline." She listened. "If the argument that ended the marriage was about her..." I said before she cut in.
"I can only do what I can, Ashley. I can't...change anything."
I was knocked around by her words.
We walked out towards her car to say goodbye. I had the receipt folded in quarters and tightly gripped in my hand.
"Then help me find somebody." I asked "Can you do that?" I said, implying insufficiency.
"I suppose so." She replied "Who?'
I handed her the receipt with the name of Adaline's biological father written on it. As she unfolded it and read it, swiftly her expression passed through of stages between shock and confusion, before managing a response.
"Is this some kind of joke?" she asked accusingly "Huh, Ash? Where'd you come up with this name?" There was so much more she wanted to say, bet restrained herself.
"What?" I was offended by her reaction. Quickly I realAngieed the gravity of her question. The way I'd let on, she had no idea how well I knew Adaline. Besides that, there's no way I'd get away with simply telling her I'd read it somewhere. On some letter or in some book of mine. She'd crucify me if she ever knew I'd read a girls diary, permitted or not. And even if so, I'd eventually have to explain the circumstances of the whole affair.
"Just help me find him."
"No I won't. You don't know..."
"It's Adaline's dad," I barked back. "Don't ask me how I know because, frankly, it's none of you're damn business."
"Adaline's father?" She gasped.
"So don't you say no and just walk away. You owe this to that girl! You damn well know it, too." I stepped closer to yell in a whisper, and so I proceeded to scold.
"Before you came in and fucked everything up, she had life with Jack well enough under control to survive. She survived because of the silence, by not being noticed. She was an invisible parasite as far as he was concerned. But now you're leaving and you're using her as your scapegoat. How do you think Jack's gonna treat her once you leave? How will she get on? Are you really so goddamn self absorbed that you don't see it? Huh?! He'll hold her accountable for your leaving" She stood stark with shock.
"You're going to find him because if it weren't for you, she wouldn't have this nightmare to deal with. You're not going to let another person carry your selfish stupidity. So fix it! You owe that to her."
I turned and stormed to my car, not waiting for any response from her. My heart was rabid. My face, beet red, was stuck in a venomous snarl. I was in the car, slamming the door before I realAngieed how horrendously I'd just acted. Before I could breath, I needed to be gone and I pulled out of the lot, heading home. I was crazy with the argument, playing it again and again in my head. It just didn't make sense why it had to be so hard. Sure it would be awkward, but she still must find the man.