Girl of Vengeance (15 page)

She felt like a coward. She should have stayed, no matter what Jessica had said. But … she was human.

I hate you
, Jessica had said.
You were a whore. You cheated on our father. I don’t believe your lies.

It had gone on and on, until Jessica finally turned away from her. Time passed and the verbal attacks began again. Adelina sat there, not hiding the tears that ran down her face, but also not replying in kind. Jessica’s words hurt. They wounded, like bloody stab wounds left open, but Adelina reminded herself that Jessica didn’t know what she was saying. She didn’t have the facts, and she was going through hideous and painful addiction withdrawals. Worse, her speech was slurred, the left side of her mouth drooping almost imperceptibly.

While Jessica was asleep, Adelina got on her knees in the corner of the room and prayed for Jessica’s recovery. She prayed that one day her daughters might forgive her—or, if they couldn’t do that, that they would at least find peace.

She’d finally fallen into a fitful sleep, still on her knees. A nurse found her there and helped her stand on unsteady legs, pain radiating up through her knees. She had stumbled to the chair and collapsed.

Now, Jessica looked better. Her skin wasn’t so sallow, and her breathing was steadier than it had been the night before. And that was a blessing. For the first time in days, she knew where all of her daughters were. Julia, Carrie and Sarah had all moved back to the condo the night before, and hired armed guards for protection. Alexandra and Andrea were at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, along with Dylan. She didn’t dare hope to see George-Phillip again—she’d hurt him too much to ever expect that—but she knew that unless he’d changed profoundly in the last sixteen years, he would do everything he could to protect her daughters.

Adelina would never forget those months. Never. She had lost hope in Belgium, lost all pretenses that she could ever have a life. Her hospitalization in Spain, initially just a few days, extended to weeks in Belgium after she’d woken up in a panic attack and the doctors had to restrain her to keep from clawing her own skin off. Weeks she’d spent in a drugged haze, while they tried antipsychotic medications on her.
Clozapine,
which gave her dizziness the first three days, then caused seizures on the fourth day.
R
i
sp
e
ridone,
which took away the terror but caused uncontrollable trembling and insomnia and the worst migraine she’d ever had. It was four weeks before she’d stabilized on
imipramine
and low doses of
r
i
sp
e
r
i
done
, which reduced the anxiety but also made her listless and vacant, with frequent trembling. Better that than another panic attack.

Almost ten weeks after her hospitalization, she returned to the Embassy in Brussels in mid-September. Julia had been cold on her return, turning her nose up and walking away. Carrie, always the sweetest of children, had come to her and hugged her, whispering, “I missed you, Mommy.” Alexandra, almost four, had been full of nonsensical questions.

The months following her hospitalization were hazy to Adelina. She vaguely remembered packing as the tour in Brussels was coming to an end, but the memories were confused and unfocused. She’d tried to reach out to Julia, but the poor girl had been so hurt and confused that she’d refused any contact, spending all of her time in the garage with Corporal Lewis, who Adelina thanked God for every day. At least
someone
was watching out for her, because it was clear that during her hospitalization, Richard had barely seen the children.

The drugged haze continued as they spent several months in Washington, DC in 1995—months Adelina could barely remember now, except that it was one of the very rare times in their marriage where Richard had insisted she sleep with him. Those occasions, no more often than every few weeks, had filled Adelina with rage and self-loathing as she lay there, unmoving, disassociated. One night in May, in the room in the condo, he’d cursed at her when she winced at their painful intercourse.

You’re a dried up old whore,
he’d said in response to her body’s inability to lubricate.

Maybe if I didn’t hate you with every fiber of my being, my body would respond differently.

His response had been immediate and violent. But his attempts to have sex with her began to become less and less often, and the very last time had been in September 1995, just before he left for China.

By that time, she knew she was pregnant with twins.

The children had to switch schools in the fall when Richard was assigned as Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. The panic attacks and anxiety had returned in full when she’d stopped her medication due to the pregnancy.

The flight over had been miserable. Richard had flown separately, as he often did, leaving Adelina to handle the travel arrangements for the children. Twenty-four hours travel time, seventeen of them in the air, with a teenager, a pre-teen and a toddler, made the stuff of nightmares. She’d been in the bathrooms on the planes half a dozen times vomiting. Julia was sullen, almost never taking her headphones off long enough to help. Carrie had been a godsend, holding hands with then four-year-old Alexandra as Adelina juggled the luggage while they made their way through the connecting stop in Los Angeles. Then, in Narita International Airport in Tokyo, everything went to hell in an instant. They’d stepped off a moving sidewalk into the crowded terminal, hundreds of people moving in every direction. Adelina had been awake more than twenty-four hours, and she stumbled, setting the bags down and searching for information about their connecting flight.

Then a chill had gone down her spine when Carrie screamed, “Alexandra! Momma, I can’t find her!”

Adelina shouted, “What?”

Carrie was standing there, eyes wide, panicking. They were surrounded by people and Alexandra was nowhere in sight. Julia had taken up a position against a wall, headphones on.

“Alexandra!” Adelina screamed out the name in a voice loud enough to be heard across that part of the terminal. “Alexandra!”

She’d turned to Julia and pulled the headset off. “Help me find your sister!”

Julia, not fully aware of the situation, shouted, “Leave me
alone!”

A mix of panic and rage swept over Adelina. She reached out and slapped Julia full across the face. Julia’s face jerked back at the slap, and Adelina shouted, “
Don’t
you talk to me that way. Help me find your sister!”

Julia looked stunned. It was the first time Adelina ever struck one of her children, and remorse and horror instantly swept over her.

“Alexandra!” Carrie cried, not seeing what had happened behind her. A red mark had bloomed up on Julia’s face. Adelina turned away, calling Alexandra’s name again.

It took forty-five minutes before airport security found her. She’d wandered into one of the smoking lounges, where she’d panicked, crying in the corner.

They’d missed their connecting flight.

The next few months were a nightmare for Adelina. This pregnancy was
different
than her first three. She was older, of course, thirty-one years old, but that wasn’t old to have a baby. But it was her fourth, and twins,
and
she’d just been taken off powerful antipsychotic and antidepressant medications. Almost instantly after coming off the meds, the fear and anxiety returned, her mind constantly wrapped around itself, twisting in fear. She took to writing in the margins of her Bible, and in a tight scrawl in her journal, filling every page right out to the margin, desperately trying to contain the uncontrollable emotions which were tearing her apart.

She remembered meeting with Charlotte Kelly, the only western obstetrician working in Beijing.

This pregnancy will be different than your others, Adelina
.
The hormones are twice as much or more
.
And as you get further along, you’re going to be much larger. I want you to get as much rest as you can. Are you staying off your feet?

Adelina had laughed.
As much as any parent of three children can. My youngest is four.

Get some help. You’re going to need it. I want you back every two weeks. We’re going to consider this a high-risk pregnancy.

High-risk pregnancy. Everything about her life was high-risk. She wasn’t ready to have another child, much less two more. She knew she was a terrible mother—every time she saw the sullen rage in Julia’s face she knew it. Julia became so involved with school activities that fall that Adelina rarely saw her. It felt as if Julia was more and more withdrawn, but she wouldn’t talk with her mother, and Adelina had no idea how to help. She was overwhelmed and terrified.

Shouldn’t the morning sickness be over?
She’d asked Doctor Kelly late in the fifth month of her pregnancy, just before Christmas.

It’s not always predictable, especially with multiples.

Predictable. It felt as if she spent half of each day vomiting.

One night in late January, Julia didn’t come home from school. At first Adelina didn’t worry. Julia had been late often this year, and usually got rides from her friends—Lana, the daughter of the Australian Consul-General, and Harry Easton, the son of the British Ambassador. But that night, she didn’t appear
at all.

She had called Lana’s parents: the girl had been home for hours. Ronald Easton had answered and verified that Harry was home and hadn’t seen Julia since he’d left school that day.

Where was she?
For that matter, where was Richard? As he often did, he hadn’t come home that evening. Usually she was glad when he gave his attention to whores and massage parlor girls instead of her, it meant that she would be left alone. But with their oldest daughter missing, things were different. Adelina lay on the couch, clutching her chest, unable to breathe, her chest tight with tension. What if she lost the babies? What if Julia didn’t come home? What if Richard had finally lost it and done something to their daughter?
WH
E
RE WAS SHE?

At ten o’clock that night, Julia stumbled in, half covered in snow, her eyes wet with tears. She was pale, strung out as if on drugs, her eyes dilated. Adelina pulled herself up, barely able to move with the weight of the twins, and half stood, half rolled off the couch.

“Where were you?” she had screamed. “Julia! Where were you?”

Julia’s eyes had widened, and she’d instantly screamed back. “Why don’t you ask me
how
I am, Mother? Don’t you care? Don’t you care about
me?
”

Adelina back, “You can’t just run off anywhere you want, Julia! You can’t just do whatever you want! It’s dangerous!
Don’t
you turn your back on me!”

In the other room, Alexandra began to cry—a little at first, then a loud scream.

“See what you’ve done, you bitch!” Julia shouted. “Leave me alone!”

Without thought, rage swept over Adelina. For the second time as a parent, she hit one of her children—a loud, stinging slap that knocked Julia to the floor.

Stunned, Julia stared up at her, her face horrified and grief-stricken. Then she screamed, “I hate you! I hate you!” She stumbled to her feet and ran out of the room, slamming her bedroom door shut so hard the frame rattled. The next morning she was running a fever, and stayed home from school for a week.

Seven years passed before she learned what had really happened to Julia that night. Julia confronted her in their dining room in San Francisco demanding to know why Adelina hadn’t been there for her daughter’s darkest moment, when the fourteen-year-old Julia had come home from a back-room abortion.

The winter of 1995-96 had been the culmination of years of suffering. Finally, on the first of April, the twins were delivered. She took her first dose of risperidone in nine months less than twenty minutes after their delivery. Almost immediately she began to come out of her emotional tailspin.

Then, at the beginning of May, George-Phillip appeared in her life for the second time, and once again changed everything. His arrival was no less transformative than the sunrise after a long night, and despite herself Adelina quickly fell for him again. He was everything she’d ever wanted or cared about—loving, caring, respectful. He asked her what he thought and genuinely listened to the answers.

She hadn’t planned to see him again. She hadn’t planned to fall in love with him again. When she saw him at the Embassy reception, her first intention had been to avoid him entirely. Adelina was in the back of the ballroom, talking with Julia and Carrie. Both girls wore well-tailored dresses, with their hair and makeup professionally applied. It was Carrie’s first official function.

“You’ve both done a very nice job tonight,” Adelina was saying, knowing that the words would be ignored by Julia, who had barely spoken with her in the last six months. Carrie, however, brightened at the words.

“Does this mean I can do it again?” Carrie asked.

Adelina didn’t answer. She’d stiffened, her heart suddenly racing, despite the heavy medications she’d been taking again since the birth of the twins. She froze, staring in the mirror at the front entrance to the hall. George-Phillip was there, unmistakably him despite the dozen years since they’d seen each other. He was accompanied by a slightly younger Chinese woman. A girlfriend? It didn’t seem likely—her posture looked like that of a colleague, not a lover.

“Mother?” Carrie asked.

Adelina didn’t answer. Her eyes were on the man she’d loved—and sent away. The memories were still fresh. Finding out she was pregnant. She’d provoked Richard into raping her, so that he wouldn’t suspect adultery. Then she sent George-Phillip away, unable to cope with the hideous shame of the repeated rapes, the adultery, the ugliness of her own life.

The subterfuge had worked for several years, but Carrie looked so different from Richard, and was so tall even by the age of eight, that he’d secretly gotten DNA testing for both of them. He’d stayed away for a couple of days right before Valentine’s that year then showed up unexpectedly. With flowers. She’d taken them, suspicious, but didn’t understand the danger that was coming. When she sniffed the flowers, his fist came out of nowhere, knocking her down. By the time it was over, she had two broken ribs and was pregnant again.