“I don’t know what made me voice my choice,” I said honestly. “It just happened when it was meant to happen, I guess. But we are all still together, and just because I chose Michael doesn’t change anything for right now.”

“See, now that’s where you’re wrong,” Adam said.

And without another word or glance, he walked away.

9

I didn’t go after him or even call after him because there was no point.

He wasn’t going to listen to me, and at this point I wasn’t even sure if anything that I was saying was making any sense anyway.

I plopped down against the doorframe and let out a big sigh as I stared down the hall with everything and nothing simultaneously on my mind.

“Trouble in paradise?” Naomi hissed as she got up from her mattress and walked closer to me.

She had a tendency to make my skin crawl and I wasn’t very fond of having her in close proximity to me. But I also didn’t want to show fear, not to her. So I sat still and glared at her as she came to sit beside me on the other side of the doorframe.

“You take after you mother in that regard too,” she said as if she were taunting me. “Paula always found herself in the midst of boy trouble. It was like she was a magnet for that shit.”

I wanted to ask her about my mother, but I didn’t want to give Naomi the satisfaction of knowing that I was curious and that she was the only one who knew the things that I wanted to know about my mother.

“Boys are only trouble,” she said. She actually sounded a little normal and motherly now. “All boys are only trouble. You’d do better to let them all loose and go after what you want on your own.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Now see Naomi, this is the same kind of stunt you tried to pull before. You aren’t going to be able to separate me and the guys. You can’t control anything right now. I don’t need to be headmistress, and I don’t need to listen to you. I have all the inheritance money, all the help that I need, and all the power. There’s nothing you can do from inside that room with your hands tied together. So, go ahead and taunt me all you like; it won’t work.”

Naomi laughed. “If you acted like this all the time, then I would think you to be more my daughter than Paula’s. Why don’t you act like that all the time? It’s a much better look on you.”

“Act like what? Pissed-off?” I asked.

She snickered. “No. Act like you have all the power, because you do. Women have all the power that they need, we are just conditioned to think that we don’t. We’re raised to feel like we need someone to take care of us and protect us, like we can’t make it on our own and need to apologize for the times when we erroneously think that we can. It’s not a good look on anyone. It wasn’t even a good look on your mother.”

Okay, now that needed to be asked about.

“My mother?” I asked. “I can’t see my mother ever acting as submissive as you just described.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Naomi said.

But this time, she wasn’t being sarcastic or condescending. This time she seemed to be sad and regretful. And so, I took the bait.

“Tell me about my mother,” I said as I turned to look at her in the doorway.

Her striking resemblance to my mother still unnerved me. I expected her to try to strike some sort of bargain with me, to tell me that she would agree to give me answers about my mother if I agreed to let her out, or give her some of the inheritance money, or something that would benefit her current situation. But she didn’t.

“What do you want to know?” she said.

“Anything,” I answered.

I was so desperate to know about all the things my mother would never have the chance to tell me that I didn’t even care how trivial it seemed. I didn’t care if Naomi told me which flavor of soup was her favorite, or what her nickname was in grade school, or even if she told me something big like what my mother’s greatest fear was. They were sisters, so surely they shared things like these.

“Paula was brave,” she said.

I knew that already.

“And stupid,” Naomi continued.

I was about to verbally leap to my mother’s defense, but she kept talking.

“Your mother was the bravest stupid person I have ever met. She let herself get into so much trouble. At first, I used to think that Paula really was stupid. But then, I realized that she wasn’t. And that was even worse. She wasn’t stupid at all. She always knew exactly what she was doing and exactly what price she would have to pay for it. That’s why I always just preferred to think of her as stupid. It was easier than thinking of her as being so bravely selfless.”

“Aunt Naomi, what are you talking about?” I asked, feeling even more desperate to know what she had to say about my mother.

“Did your mother ever tell you about our father?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

Come to think of it, she never had. I always just figured that they had a strained relationship, as many fathers and daughters do.

“Good,” she said as if the discussion was over.

I wasn’t about to let it be over.

“What about your father?” I asked. “Was he mean?”

Naomi burst out into a fit of laughter that made her sound every bit as crazy as everyone thought she was.

“Oh honey,” she said as she shook her head slowly. “Mean doesn’t even get us started with him.”

Mom had never told me anything about my grandfather, neither good nor bad. It was almost as if he didn’t exist to me, and I knew and trusted my mother enough to realize that there would have been a good reason for that.

“Our father was a monster. And I don’t use that word lightly either,” she said. “I’ve known many awful and evil men. But I’ve never known one that was a true monster, aside from our father.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“Oh, he wouldn’t do anything,” she said with a far-off look as if she needed to distance herself from the story she was telling. “He would just make you think about all the things that he could do. He would twist your mind around itself so many times that you couldn’t tell up from down, truth from lie, or hero from villain. Paula and I would watch him chip away at our mother, too. It wasn’t anything drastic at first; little things like making a comment and then immediately pretending like he didn’t say it and like we were all crazy, even though we all heard him clear as day. We had a dog back then; I think his name was Sam. I remember watching my father stuff the dog in a trash can and close the lid. I can’t even remember what the dog did, only that it got into something or chewed something that it shouldn’t have. I remember standing there and watching him do it. He looked at me and smiled, the creepy kind of way that those clowns in horror movies do. Eventually he left the room to go do something else. I stood there and watched the trash can shake back and forth as Sam tried to get out. I should have helped him get out, but I didn’t. I knew what would happen if I tried. After a few hours, he came back into the room and pulled Sam out. Of course, the dog was dead by then. He threw it at my feet and then yelled at me for not letting the dog out of the trash can as if it had all been my fault. But I knew what would have happened if I had let the dog out.”

I cringed at the visual image that was playing out in my mind.

“Your mother came into the room at that moment. She saw our dead dog at my feet. She knew exactly what had happened and she started to yell at our father.”

Naomi stopped talking.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

When she didn’t answer for a few minutes, I asked again. “Naomi, what happened to my mother?”

She looked as if she was going to be sick. Even the coloring of her face started to turn a blanched shade of green. “Did you ever know why your mother wore scarves all the time?” she asked me. “Even in the summer, Paula would wear scarves, or bandanas, or sometimes pretty choker necklaces.”