My grandfather lied to my grandmother. I guess it runs in the family.
My mother lied to my father about her powers and then later, when it became apparent to her that I had inherited her ‘gifts’ so to speak, she lied to him about that, too. He couldn’t handle her in the first place and once I came along, he apparently couldn’t handle anything. He disappeared when I was still a kid.
My mom finally told me about my grandparents one afternoon after Fred had been gone for a while. She was having a rough day, understandably, and I was just trying to distract her. I hadn’t expected our entire family history to come pouring out of her mouth, but there it was.
She had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking… rather staring at her coffee, saying nothing. I was tired of feeling helpless, of watching her fade away day after day. I thought I’d get her to start talking and maybe forget about Fred’s disappearance for even a few minutes. I was not expecting the stories that poured out of her.
So, I’ve not heard anything about my family my entire life. My mom would change the subject or gloss over anything. I couldn’t complete the family tree projects in any of my schools, but if the teacher started to ask too many questions, we’d literally up and move. That’s what really made me suspicious. I knew that all the other kids in my class knew about their grandparents. Even if they didn’t like them, or they were drunks, they still knew who they were. Me? Not so much. I didn’t even know their names. My mom just always said that the past was the past and should be left there where it belongs. I guess I just kind of expected that to be the end of it.
That morning the story just started out of nowhere, “Margaret had this habit of spitting. It began to get on my nerves.” My mom sat there, stirring her now cold coffee, obviously somewhere far away from me. From our current lives.
She looked at me as if she had forgotten I was even there, “Margaret was your grandmother. She was an odd bird, everyone said so. I always used to be so embarrassed by her, but once I found out about all the lies that my dad told her… well, I suppose I started to understand her a little bit more.”
I didn’t want to say anything for fear of distracting her from the story. I was about to find out about my grandparents! I was dying to know more… to know anything of my family history. She finally took a drink of the coffee in her cup and started again, “My mom was a fantastic showy person. Everyone knew who she was, but not for good reasons. She was the mom wearing the crazy colorful clothes, smoking her cigars and muttering things under her breath that scared the neighbors.” She chuckled to herself, “Oh, if they only knew how much my mother hated every one of them." She sobered up. "Maybe they should have been a little more worried.”
I smiled at this picture of a flamboyant grandmother that I’d never met. My smile encouraged her to keep talking, “Your grandmother wasn’t a bad person, just… full of a strange energy. My dad had fallen in love with her because of it, but it very quickly got old for him. By the time I was old enough to understand the realities of married life in any way, I knew that my father was embarrassed by my mother. And I knew that my mother didn’t care. He would drink and rant about how she was ruining his business with all of her embarrassing antics, and she’d laugh and spit.” I must have looked confused at that.
“Yeah, she spit. I found out later what the spitting was about. I mean, she apparently thought that her powers, her curses came through spitting. I don’t know why, maybe she really had started losing her mind at that point. I guess my dad yelling at her and accusing her of being batshit crazy for two decades could have driven her over the edge.
“It was the lying and the cheating that got to her, though. She let him do his thing and as long as he kept it private and left her alone, she was fine with him ‘playing around’ as she called it. It was the lying about the money, about the other women that he started flaunting around in public… that must have been the last straw.”
She sighed and forged on, “Well, there was one day that my dad had been drinking again, and my mom, well… she was in a weird place. Maybe it was the full moon, maybe she’d just had enough. I don’t even know exactly what happened. I could hear them fighting from upstairs in my room. He was screaming obscenities and she started yelling back at him. That caught my ear, I suppose, because she had never reacted to him like that before. SHe always just gave him that impatient look like she wanted him to finish up his yelling so that she could get on with her day. She quite often just looked bored.
“For some reason, that day was different. I hear her yelling, almost screaming, but in some language I didn’t understand. At first my dad tried to talk over her, but suddenly he stopped. I ran downstairs to try and help the situation.” She let out an odd laugh, “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.” She stopped and bowed her head, I could feel the pain of the memories radiating over her.
“I came into the kitchen, and my dad was standing there, mid sentence. He was… he was frozen and couldn’t move. My mom was just staring at him with an energy that I have never seen before or since. When I ran into the room, I apparently broke her concentration and she… well, I don’t know how to describe it. It was almost like she just suddenly regained consciousness. She did something really weird and she slapped her own face. She looked surprised. Surprised to see me, utterly shocked that she was there with my dad… and then… he collapsed to the floor as if the thing holding him in place had just simply let go.”
Taking one last drink of her coffee, she told me, “The doctors said it was a massive heart attack and that he was dead before he even hit the floor. I knew the truth. My mother had killed him with her powers.”
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Read more about the family of secrets in Part One: The Secret Me
