“I won't have them beggar themselves trying to preserve your bloody mother's memory!"
"It's not your decision."
"They will face financial ruin!"
"It's not your decision, and if you truly want them to be financially successful, you'd do well to stop shrieking about their businesses woes at the launch of what you described as their best asset."
"Is that what you really think?" I asked Tess.
"You're always putting words in my mouth," she said, staring angrily at the floor.
Fuck. My mind instantly conjured up a veritable smorgasbord of times I'd jumped in to help my sister. Claiming they were my cigarettes, not hers when we were teenagers. Handing Mum my report with a failing grade in Maths when Tess broke up with her high school sweetheart, Trent, who also happened to be Mum’s best friend’s son. Saying I smashed the window while waving branches around like magic wands and telling Mum I'd cut the hair off all of her dolls. I'd been scolded and yelled at and even copped smacks on the arse. All to protect my little sister.
Mum had been damn scary, even when we were little. One day, when I was about eight, I'd walked into the bathroom after playing outside. Mum had shouted, “Clean your hands before you come and get your lunch!” I'd climbed the stairs, then opened the door to see Tess sitting half-naked on the bathroom floor. Tears ran down her face, her eyes swollen and red and thin lines of clear snot ran from her nose. She had a bar of soap in one hand and her new blue dress in other.
"What's the matter?" I asked, unable to put two and two together. She'd just wailed and held the sodden dress out to me. Once it was in my hands, I could see the big purple stain on the front. It looked like she'd gotten paint or crayon on it. She'd obviously been trying to clean it, the pretty white trim at the hem had partially ripped off due to her scrubbing, and the purple had not moved a bit.
"Ashley!" Mum called.
"In a minute! Just having a shower!" I called back. “C’mon," I'd said, tugging off the rest of Tess's clothes. Mum hated mess and snot more than anything and would lose it if she saw Tess. I made sure the water was at a reasonable temperature and then shoved her in, helping her to scrub the purple off of her fingers and clean her face.
“What’s going on?” We both jumped as Mum stood inside the bathroom door, a darkened shape.
“Tess got dirty.”
“How did she get dirty? What’s this! This is your new dress! You were supposed to wear this to the luncheon on Sunday with the Phillips! Look at the hem!”
I looked from Mum, standing there holding the sodden dress, to Tess, who cowered under the warm water.
“I did it,” I said, not believing the words that
were coming out of my mouth. I was going to get in so much trouble. The Phillips were Dad’s bosses at this point and we had been told over and over how important they were to Dad’s career. Daddy needed to impress them to move up the ladder, Mum had said.
“You what?” Mum’s voice was a low growl.
“I spilt paint on Tess’s dress. I’m sorry, Mummy.”
“Go to your room right now! I cannot believe your carelessness! You can stay there until your father gets home and explain to him what you’ve done to this family and you will stay home on Sunday. I expect more from you by now, Ashley!”
I was marched off to my room where Mum kept lecturing me. She ranted on and on about all the different ways I’d betrayed the family. Her face was so different, bright red and her lips pulled back from her teeth, like an angry dog's. I was only a kid, I couldn’t make sense of much of it, but I knew was making mistakes was unforgivable and could jeopardise the whole family. Tess was left in the shower unsupervised until the water went cold, then she got out on her own.
For a while afterwards, I tried to avoid making mistakes ever, to try and stop this angry, foreign creature from replacing my mother, but it didn’t take long for me to realise this was impossible. This person was an inextricable part of her.
It took some time, but a weird kind of freedom came from this. I didn’t fear making mistakes, I was always making them, whether I realised it or not and Mum would quickly point them out if I didn’t. She’d get angry, but she was angry so often it became my norm. I didn’t enjoy it, but it wasn’t so scary because it was normal. Dad was my buffer, my port in a storm and when he was home, he would step in to stop her rages, but he was at work for long hours, trying to support the three of us. More often than not it was me and Tess and Mum.
Tess never felt the same way about Mum, she was always scared or upset when Mum told her off. She took Mum’s many comments about her mistakes to heart and grew more careful and more anxious, when being careful didn’t stop the outbursts. I didn’t understand it at the time, I just knew my sister was unhappy. I started taking the blame for everything because it didn’t hurt me like it hurt Tess. I watched Tess grow happier and more confident when the harsh spotlight of Mum’s attention shifted away from her.
I blinked and looked at her now, a grown woman. Her fists were clenched and she was blinking back tears, but she wasn’t making eye contact with any of us, probably because she’d start yelling at us again. She doesn’t need me anymore, I realised; me to redirect Mum’s anger away from her. She probably wanted the opportunity to deal with it herself, put some boundaries up between her and us. Intellectually, I was pleased for the change. Emotionally, I wondered what kind of relationship we’d have.
Gabe’s arms slipped around me. I shifted against the iron band of his arms, letting out a little huff when they stayed where they were, finally going limp and letting them cradle me more gently when I realised he wasn’t going to move. His lips dropped down to my neck, trailing a couple of kisses along it.
“Here and now is not the time to have this conversation,” Dad said. “Cecelia, it’s time to go home.”
“Why, Dad?” Tess asked. “Everyone’s finally saying what they’ve always wanted to say. The truth is coming out. You can’t expect to always gloss everything over with a few hugs and kind words.”
“Tess . . .,” I said. It was an unwritten family rule, no one picked on Dad. He had been the breadwinner before Mum’s late-career success, the peacemaker, the one to work out the compromises. Without him, it would have been out and out war.
"I'm done," Tess said. "If I'm never going to be allowed to speak my mind, I'd rather be at home."