The Girl That Care Forgot ✓

39 • The Oppressor & The Oppressed

The three weeks that followed felt unnatural, in a way.

There was so much calm, so much ease in the way Vincent carried himself. Sometimes a bouquet of flowers for Eva, sometimes her favourite blueberry cheesecake – a kiss on her cheek every morning as she woke and a mug of steaming coffee by the bed.

There’d even been a trip to the amusement park for Lillian’s sake. It had succeeded in coaxing her out of the frightened hole she’d crawled into the night she witnessed their fight. Eva wanted to do more – say more. But she didn’t really know how, so it came as a relief that it took something as simplistic as going for rides in the park to make Lillian smile again. Children must be like that – innocent, and too quick to forget horrors in the face of simple joy.

Besides, what else could Eva have said? When she was a child, her mother had taught her one thing. Caroline Monroe had told Eva that if she wanted the pain to be over, she needed to endure it rather than resist. And it had worked, hadn’t it? It had worked with Logan. It had worked with Vincent. And even that night three weeks back, when Eva listened to his words and didn’t fight back, it didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would when their bodies joined together.

Resistance hurt. Acceptance didn’t.

But why was she so reluctant to teach her daughter that, then? Why didn’t Eva want to pass down to Lillian what Caroline had taught her? Undoubtedly something that Caroline had picked up from her own mother before her. How far did the generation of not fighting back go? How long was the line of don’t-resist-just-accept that Eva descended from?

But this was what Eva had grown up with. It’s all that she’d ever known. Had her entire childhood been based on Caroline’s perspective? On something not inherited but taught generations after generations? Had Eva’s whole life up till this point been a lie? Or just an ugly, ugly truth?

Or did it all go back to two lies told a thousand times over? One which said resistance only meant pain, and the other which said pain was always the solution. Had Eva grown up with the first? And had Vincent grown up with the second? Were these the only two kinds of people to exist? The kind that was told to accept the pain – and the kind that was told to use it?

Eva’s eyes snapped to the window above the kitchen sink as soon as she heard the school bus pull up.

Smiling to herself, she turned away from the glass and grabbed a rag, wiping her damps hands with it before heading towards the door.

Eva heard feet running up towards the door just as she swung it open, her lips only inching up further. “Hey, kid,” she greeted, extending her arm for the bag Lillian would typically toss her way. “How was school?”

“Good,” Lillian panted, catching her breath from running up the drive to their house. Eva shook her head to herself and shut the door. “I’m thirsty, mum.”