Scarlett

Chapter 12: The truth

I walked inside after I took a nervous glance at Mum.  Mark followed me inside and avoided a glance at Mum. 

"What the hell were you thinking Scarlett?" Mum yelled as soon as she latched the door and turned towards us. She continued, "Where were the two of you last night?" She shot towards us, the most dreaded question. Neither of us spoke and she repeated herself, "Tell me now, Scarlett. Where were the two of you last night?"

"We stayed at a motel." I whispered as I felt my throat dry up.

"What did you say? Motel?" Mum shrieked, and her eyes were wider than ever. "Scarlett, are you telling me that you spent a night alone in a motel with him?" She pointed at Mark. She spoke about him as if he was not present in the room. Disgust was clear in her voice.

"Mum, it's fine. I'm fine." I tried to explain. "Mark has helped me a lot."

"Helped you? How did he help you, enlighten me please? Did he try to take advantage of you? Tell me the truth, Scarlett."

She then turned to face Mark directly, and finally acknowledged his presence. "I let my daughter hang around you and you go behind my back to help her run away from home?" She looked at him as if he was no one and nothing but a spec of dirt. There was immense disappointment in her voice. Mark's eyes did not meet hers. I noticed that he had clutched his hand in a fist. He was furious but tried to remain calm in the situation. I felt pained by Mum's behaviour. A pool of tears formed under my eyes.

"Look at me when I talk to you. What did you ask from her in return, tell me?" She said. Mark finally looked at her in fury but did not speak a word.

"Listen Mrs. Raymond, I have been quiet for the past few minutes because I respect you a lot, but that does not mean that I will listen to all the shit that you have to speak about me or your own daughter, for that matter." Mark finally said. It created a tension in the atmosphere. Mum hated to be challenged.

"Yes Mum, please stop." I screamed to interrupt them. I could not let her say whatever she liked and whatever she spilled to Mark in the fit of anger.  Her assumptions were clearly wrong. He did not deserve to be treated the way Mum tried to treat him.

"So we are at that point now, where you go all against your own mother for a guy?" Mum glared at me.

"Will you ever stop to just listen to me?" I begged. A stream of tears flowed down my left cheek. I felt heart broken at Mum's reaction. Did she not trust me at all? Did she think that I was incapable of making decisions for myself? Did she think that I did not know how to take care of myself? The thoughts flowed through my mind one after the other as the pain in my broken heart grew stronger.

"Stop it now Margaret. You are overreacting, as always." Dad sneered. I noticed that there was a stress on the word 'always'. I did not know what he meant by that but my mind was too preoccupied to think even about it. Mum turned to face him. I could sense that Dad's words triggered her for some reason. The look of shock on her face explained it all.

"I am the one overreacting? Look at you! You do not even care a bit about your own daughter to even think of where she had been alone all night. You did not stop her from travelling all alone, so far to meet you. You do not care, you never did. You never cared and you still do not care because you are selfish." The conversation had taken a gruesome turn that I could no longer relate to. I realised that the argument was no longer about the fact that I had run away from home.

"I am selfish? Who was the one that left? Who was the one that gave up?" Dad asked.

"Stop with that now. We all know what kind of a man you are, it was bound to happen. We don't need to talk about it right now" Mum mumbled. The fire that burnt bright within her seemed to have diminished all of a sudden.