Come Clean. Terri Paddock
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he’d abandoned you?’
I think I say stop again. Stop, stop, stop.
‘Were you ever embarrassed by Joshua’s actions?’
‘Joshua never did anything to hurt or embarrass me.’
‘Maybe it’s not something he did, maybe it was just the way he was. He did have a certain reputation after all, didn’t he?’
‘No. I said, I don’t want to talk about this.’
‘Did you resent Joshua for not letting you help him?’
I fling myself into tantrum mode, just like when we were kids. I scream at the top of my lungs, pound my feet on the floor, slam my hands against the sides of my seat, splinters shooting into my palms like poisoned darts. ‘Would you fucking leave Joshua out of this?’
Mom’s crying but I don’t allow myself to cry. Dad uncrosses his legs and plants his feet full-sole to the floor. Hilary starts to gather up her papers.
‘OK, Justine. Thank you for being so patient. Just one final question. What do you want to get out of life?’
‘Right now? Right this minute?’
‘Sure.’
‘I want to get the hell out of here.’
‘Anything else?’
I pause, roll my shoulders. ‘I want a 1500 score on my SATs, I want to graduate from high school magna cum laude, I want to go to an Ivy League college and fall in love with a future Supreme Court judge and have babies and discover a cure for cancer and do lots and lots of great things. You know, the usual.’ Our mother beams and our father makes a comforting chip-off-the-old-block kind of noise. I’m the golden child again, I can feel the weight of my halo resting round my temples and I love it.
Hilary, too, manages a small smile. ‘Excellent. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that.’
Our earliest actual memory, that’s something different. I don’t know who had our first memory first, or if I really remember it or just think I do because we talked about it so many times. I’m a baby, lying on the sofa, the one with the fruit-basket pattern. Daddy’s not in the frame of my memory and neither is Mommy – could be she hadn’t followed us home from the hospital yet after her long stay.
What is in the frame is the ceiling: white, stippled and big as life until my hands come windmilling in. They keep doing that, diving in front of my face in their arc to sink themselves in fistfuls into my mouth. I try to fix my gaze on them for a minute but they’re moving too fast. And then, shifting my head, I see, beyond the fleshy pad of my palm, I see myself, my whole self. Not two feet away from me, lying on a plate of pears on another cushion on the same sofa, wearing the same romper suit, dripping the same saliva from the same hand. I’m staring at me, except of course it’s not me, it’s you. I stare at my hand and then I stare at you and I start to cry because I’m kinda scared. Then you up and do the same thing. Wail, wail, gasp. We look at each other, see the other one crying and then we stop, just like that.
Mom discovered this trick later. If you came down with a bug or couldn’t sleep, she’d tuck me in the crib with you. And vice versa. The healthy, happy one calming the other down. Sometimes, of course, it backfired and we both got cranky, wide-awake or sick. I remember catching chickenpox off you, for instance, when we were in preschool. Mom had to separate us then because picking each other’s scabs was just too irresistible.
I’m alone in the room now, and oddly calm. ‘I’ll just take your parents next door for a quick word,’ Hilary said as they jangled out of the room. I shut my eyes and hunch my shoulders up to my ears, let them drop, roll my head round on its axis, listen to my neck muscles pop and stir.
All things considered, I think I handled Hilary’s interrogation pretty well. Those questions about you were out of line, and I wasn’t expecting that part with my diary, but surely that showed Dad in a worse light than it did me. How could he? Snooping around in my private possessions. I blanch at the thought of him inspecting my blushers and strawberry lip gloss, the new grey kohl eyeliner that I haven’t quite got the knack of, flipping through my Judy Blume books and my Seventeen magazines to see the pages I dog-eared, the words I underlined, rifling through my underwear drawer, his fingers catching on the stray tampons hidden beneath my new bikini briefs with the little silk rose at the front.
The questions were more intense this time round, much more pointed than when I had to come in for the sibling interview, but really the gist was the same. I was nervous then, too, sick to my stomach after the night before with you. Just a precaution, more a formality than anything, that’s what they told me at the time. All siblings are interviewed when a person is entered into the programme. And so they asked me some silly questions about parties and drinking and my favourite General Hospital characters and then they sent me home.
I switch seats, slipping into our mother’s chair, still warm and scented with her perfume, Chanel. When we were little, we’d curl up in Mom’s lap and let her read to us or we’d read to her. I liked it best when it was late at night and we were bone tired. I’d shout dibs on the lap then coil up with my feet tucked into the crook behind Mom’s knees, my cheek resting on her breast, her ribcage rising and falling like a cloud, and I’d drift off with the sound of you and Dr. Seuss spinning echoes around me.
There were more questions today, more drugs named, a lot more testing and prodding. And I admit I was worried for a while, really worried. But I was myself, I answered honestly, just like I did before and it all came straight in the end.
Right about now, Hilary should be telling Mom and Dad to stop overreacting. Justine? A drug problem? Don’t make me laugh. She’d couch it in all that counsellorese, of course, but either way, it’s obvious, isn’t it? She knows it and now they know it. Maybe it’s no bad thing we went through this whole rigmarole, if only so Dad could be proved wrong for once.
I glance at my Swatch, the one you gave me, with the confetti strap. I can’t tell for sure whether it’s two thirty or three thirty, but I can tell by the position of the minute hand that Hilary’s quick word hasn’t been very quick at all.
What are they doing next door anyway? I decide to see for myself.
I try the door only it doesn’t open, not all the way. It gives about three inches and stops. I peer through the gap to see the chain on the outside. They’ve locked me in.
Beyond the chain, I can see Hilary chatting with our parents in front of the glass double doors to the parking lot. ‘I think you’d better go now,’ she says, ushering them out.
They’re leaving and I’m locked in this room with crappy chairs and a Formica-topped table.
My calm evaporates. ‘Hey!’ I scream. ‘Hey!!’ So loud it makes my throat hurt. ‘Mom, Dad, what are you doing? What the—What the—What are you doing?!’
The double doors are separating, drawing our parents back out into the February day.
‘Hey!! Don’t leave me here. I didn’t do anything wrong. Please! Don’t go!’
Mom’s crying again. She turns and bends towards me like a tree blown by a gale, her arms outstretched like hopeful limbs. But Dad has her by the waist and is pulling her towards the Volvo. Frantic, I try to force my arm and leg through the chained gap. If I can just squeeze myself through, if I can just get into our mother’s arms, I know I’ll be safe. But it’s too tight, the chain’s too strong. My face is hot and swelling up, too big for the gap.
‘Mom, please. I love you Mommy