Christina (Daughters #1) (20 page)

It is one of the best days I can remember for a very long time. As it grows dark, Dad lights a fire in the small firepit and we sit around, calmer now, just talking and being. The sadness hits me then. I realize this might be one of the last times I’m here with the family like this. As Christina Hendricks, their daughter. Not quite grown up. Not quite out of the house. It feels somewhat momentous. Today, for one last time, we are all together,
The Hendricks.
Half of my identity.

This, today, was my real going away party.

As I stare into the flames of the fire, the pleasant chatter of my family’s voices humming around me, and the stars blanketing the sky, my life really feels like it’s on the cusp of changing. Am I growing up? My family, this place, and this life will not be my whole identity anymore.

I am now on a quest to find the second half of my identity, which both unsettles and thrills me.

~Christina~

THE NEXT DAY, I missed both my parents when they left for work. I bickered with my sisters before finishing the collage I was planning to hang on my dorm room wall. It has pictures of me in my teens, with friends and family, at dances, parties, and hanging out at the river as well as riding motorcycles with my dad. Max was all over it. I spent the morning carefully taking him out. I cut and folded the pictures so it looked like I overlapped them. I almost totally eradicated him from my life. Now, I just have to get him out of my heart.

It is almost noon when my mom calls me, panicked and upset. She has news about Max. Of course, no one thought I knew anything. Max had apparently picked another fight and gotten the living daylights beaten out of him. (My mom’s words). They took him to the ER on Saturday night. He begged them not to tell anyone in the family. Ha! As if. Still, my stomach churns and clenches as I realize I left him there when he needed to go to the ER. It felt surreal. He didn’t actually seem that hurt in the moment. But now? I get nauseous when I think about what I did. I was so mad and disgusted at him… but now, he probably feels that way towards me.

Playing shocked and concerned, I hang up, then go back to thinking about him.

He’s going to keep fighting. He will always keep doing those bad things. What if he gets worse? Or turns to a life of crime? Or gets himself really hurt? Saturday night looked horrific enough to me, but Max acted so blasé with it all; I’m guessing it’s not such a big deal to him.

I start pacing my room, which feels way too small. I pace the living room. The deck. I walk out to visit Sugar, one of our horses. Nothing soothes my guilty brain. I can’t just walk away. I want to. I want to forget Max. I’m so mad, I want to leave here and never stress or worry about him ever again. But I can’t do it.

The eeriness of that locker room keeps replaying in my mind. It was so awful. The way he looked dead, all limp and helpless on the floor. Blood. There was so much blood. And that man.
Simon.
I keep reliving the chilling thought that something was going to happen to me. I was vulnerable and helpless, two things I’ve never felt before in my life. I was at that man’s mercy. If he decided to advance on me, he would have trapped me against the shower wall. I was not strong enough to stop him. Or fight him off. And even if Max had come to, he could not have helped me if the man really wanted to do something.

That thought sickens me. It sits in my stomach like rancid meat. Oh, my God. What did my poor mother have to live through? That question comes to me out of nowhere. And in a way I’ve never really felt before. Fear? Vulnerability? Terror? I’ve never experienced any of them, or been the cause of them. I barely caught a glimpse of the horror that was my mom’s reality.

I feel weird. I can’t shake it. I’m so worried about Max, and what I know he’s up to. I don’t know what to do.

“Missy, can you watch Emily? I have to run a quick errand,” I yell into the living room.

I’m grabbing my keys, jamming my flip-flops on my feet, and ducking into my car as soon as Melissa mumbles, “Sure.”

I drive to my mom’s office. I can’t help it. I need her. I enter the vet clinic and there’s the new temp, answering phones now that I’ve quit. Noah sees me first.

“Hey, you hear about Max?” he asks, coming up to me. He pats my arm sympathetically and offers his comfort. He looks worn out. Damn Max! Why can’t he just accept us? We who love him? How can he fail to notice all the worry and concern on our faces?

I nod, playing along. “Yes, is my mom in back?”

“I think she’s with someone; give her just a sec.”

I pace the waiting room until the exam room door opens. My mom steps out behind a couple and their little Chihuahua. She wears her lab coat and smiles as she shakes hands with both people. When she notices me, her smile dims and she waves me towards her. Trying hard to restrain my tears, the minute I get near her, I fall apart. I start crying…. Yet again. She embraces me tightly, squeezing me close to her. We’re eye-to-eye, the same height, same build, same coloring, and same facial structure. We could almost pass for twins. She doesn’t even begin to look like she’s in her late forties. Her skin is just barely wrinkled around her eyes and mouth.

She takes me into her back office and shuts the door behind us. Holding me, she soothes me as I cry like a baby all over her.

“Is it Max?” she asks, quite reasonably. Smoothing my hair back, she tucks it behind my ear.

“It is, but not in any way you might imagine. Oh, my God, Mom. I
can’t tell
you,” I choke on my sobs and her arms tighten around me before she kind of pushes me back and looks into my eyes.

“You slept with him,” she states simply. Her face is totally neutral and her tone calm.

I nod my head as fresh tears build up and fall over my eyelids. I shouldn’t talk about that with her. I mean, Lindsey is her sister, Dad will freak the fuck out, and everyone else will freak out too. Yet… I can’t help it. I need her. Now.

“How did you know?”

“I figured it out on Saturday at your goodbye party. He was so angry and cold, I haven’t seen him like that since the first year he came here. And you, you are so good at fooling everyone. But you can’t fool me. I saw the look in your eye when I asked you to take your sunglasses off for a picture with Max. I suspected, something. A fight perhaps. But seeing you here today. It wasn’t a stretch to figure out what really happened.”

“A—re you mad at me?” I know it’s childish. I’m eighteen, nearly nineteen, and it should not matter what my mom thinks of my sex life. I mean, it’s totally ridiculous; yet here I am, kind of strangely, almost seeking her approval in a sick way.

Her smile is like one a mother gives her naughty five-year-old after she’s just been caught drawing with permanent markers on the living room wall. I swear to God, that’s how young and naïve and stupid I feel about all this. “No, honey, I’m not mad at you for growing up.”

“But… it’s Max.
Cousin Max
. And after everything you went through, I was supposed to make sure it was different. Special. I was supposed to make it matter.”

She keeps stroking my hair. “Who told you that?”

“Well, no one; I just think I should.”

“First off, it is not your duty to avoid having sex because of what happened to me. Honey, all I could ever wish for you and your sisters is the gift of choice, for
when
you want to and with whom
you
decide. Please realize this: my only dream for you is that it’s all your choice. It was your choice, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you had, and have, every right to do it. You’re old enough, even if right about now, you don’t feel that way.”

I nod, understanding that her pain had nothing to do with her choosing. “But it was
Max.
”

“He’s not your cousin. I never, for one second, considered him that. Everyone else lumped you two in and called you ‘cousins.’ Never me. Not for a second. I saw it, Tiny, I saw the connection between you two. I didn’t know for sure if you’d see it. But it really doesn’t shock me, not like you think.”

“Why did you let him hang around me like that then?” I almost accuse her, like it was her fault for allowing us to spend so much time together, unsupervised.

A little smile indents her cheeks. “Well, if I noticed it when you were sixteen, I would have. I just noticed the signs this spring, and you were eighteen, which is old enough.”

“But it’s Max,” I repeat, still horrified to admit any of it.

“What happened, Tiny?” Her voice is so gentle and kind and motherly, it makes me lean into her again.

“Are you going to tell Dad?”

“No. There are some things fathers don’t need to know. This I would classify as such.”

“But you never keep secrets from him.”

“I can keep your secrets, however, when it’s appropriate, which is now.”

“Are you sure we can talk about this?”

“I’m sure I don’t want you going around feeling like you do now.” She glances toward my tear-stained face and pushes my hair back. “I think we can talk about this. And the person I think you normally go to is the very one this is about, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So again, what happened?”

“We were at the beach. We got into a discussion, or a fight, I don’t remember which. It was really intense. It was about how he’s been acting all summer. He grew so distant from me, I thought he didn’t care about me anymore.”

“And you found out the opposite?”

“He said he needed me more than anyone else.”

“Powerful stuff,” Mom mutters as she nods.

“Yeah. Very. We… well, you know… and then he decides it shouldn’t have happened, and doesn’t want to be friends with me anymore; so that leaves us where? I can’t even figure it out.”

“Slow down. I have to ask how did ‘it’ go when Max can’t stand touching anyone?”

‘“It’ was very strange, but I think it worked.” I blush and drop my gaze to stare at my fingers, which I keep intertwining in my lap.

“He can’t touch you, can he?”

“Not really. No.”

“And that was okay for you?”

I can’t imagine what Mom’s picturing. I know she’s trying to figure out how we managed to do it without actually touching. “Not okay. But I think I could handle it and I would accept it.”

Mom’s eyes sit heavily on me for a moment. Then she nods. “Yes, I believe you could.”

I want so badly to ask her something, but I don’t. She notices my silence and nudges me, “What? What do you want to ask?”

I glare hard at my fingernails. “Aft—After what happened, was it hard for you?”

“Yes. Excruciating. You have to understand, Tiny, it was never normal for me again.”

“Even now?” I’m burning up. I swear to God, I must have a fever. She touches my head and gently ruffles my hair.

“Even now.”

“How—” I slink down on the couch we’re sharing. I can’t ask that.
How does my dad deal with it?
The mental picture is sickening. But the mature me is only sickened when picturing how excruciating it must be for my mom. I glance up at her. She appears so normal. She is nice and kind, a responsible mom, and a freaking doctor! I mean, she has a license to practice veterinary medicine, for God’s sake! Yet, there is all this background stuff I never had a clue about.

She nods. “How does your dad deal with it? We just deal with it. It’s not always hard for me, but for others… it can be terrible. It’s something we’ve dealt with by being pretty honest. Are you asking me if you could learn to handle Max?”

“Yes. I mean, as of now, he won’t even look at me, but…”

She nods. “I can’t speak for him; but he’s obviously not mature enough for that.”

“Beg to differ with you, but he started having it long before me.”

She smirks. “I don’t mean sex; I mean a relationship.” There’s that word.
Sex.
So out there. I cringe like an eleven-year-old girl, getting her first period. “He’s in love with you, Christina. He has been since the first time little, screwed-up, stuttering Max ever laid eyes on you. He just has no idea what to do about it. He didn’t grow up learning how to solve problems. By the time he found a decent example of a relationship, he was almost too old. A lot of the damage was already done.”

“Why did he do this to me then?” I nearly wail like the child I am.

“Because he wants you. He loves you. He also needs you. He has no idea what to do with that. So he acts the way he did at the party. You know, that push and pull. His abject rudeness is designed to cover his total unease and guilt, since he knows he hurt you. I doubt he even understands why he did. I think, honestly, honey, he loves you too much. I think he’s unprepared for the scope and depth of feelings he harbors towards you.”

“So he hurts me instead? Why not just stay away from me?”

“Do you remember Tommy Stone when you were in second grade? He used to chase you around the playground, during all three recesses, and you hated it. You made me report him to your teacher; and the recess aids kept warning him, but still, he chased you. After three detentions, he still refused to stop chasing you. That was all because he liked you and wanted your attention. That level of thinking is about Max’s emotional maturity right now.”

I smile a little because it kind of makes sense. Even though my heart squeezes tightly.

“I think you’re also asking me, can it work when one person is damaged? And I’m telling you, it can, if you are willing to accept he might never comfortably touch you, or be able to show you affection. It’s a real phobia he’s got, honey. It’s more painful for him than it is even for you. I can’t guarantee you that anything will ever change either. You must be willing to accept it, and him having it, as it is.”

“Like Dad does with what… with what you go through?”

“Yes. Exactly. It’s not easy. We’ve had our difficult times… I wasn’t easy to love, Christina. I was not the mom that you know now.”

“Did Dad ever not want to deal with it?”