I bury it as deep as I can.
I won’t be Melpomene. I won’t allow myself to crumble under the weight of this life. So I box up those memories and seal them away. Wilder, too. I refuse to be like Mel, and it’s not possible to be the girl I’d been with him last night, so all of it has to go.
There’s only one thing I can be. The only thing I’ve ever been.
Someone’s muse.
And if it stings a little that the very nature of my life, of what I am, requires me to be someone’s possession, someone’s tool, then it’s a sting I do my best to ignore.
To live with.
PART TWO
Wilder
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
Albert Camus
Chapter Nine
It’s a bleak fucking Christmas.
Mom spends most of the holiday working double shifts at the hospital. And I pick up whatever extra hours Mr. Gibson will give me at the firm. There’s plenty to do as the year draws to a close.
It’s necessary, and if I’m honest, I prefer that god-awful boring office to being at Mom’s. That probably makes me a dick, but it’s just a little too much for me to handle. Without the distraction of classes, I can’t even pretend that I don’t see how miserable Mom is. Gwennie, too. It’s hard on her because she’s still young enough that she doesn’t quite grasp what’s happened. Oh, she knows Dad’s gone. I caught her playing prison with her dolls once too, so I know she gets that part, at least a little.
But she thinks it’s all temporary. Like the bad version of a vacation. That eventually Dad will come back, and they’ll move back to the old house with two floors and big rooms and a pool, instead of the apartment she and mom are in now. She thinks everything will go back to normal. To her, money is just the colorful sheets in Monopoly or plastic gold coins. She can’t even pronounce the word embezzlement, let alone grasp what it means for our family, the mess Dad left us in.
Sometimes she’ll say things … about how she can’t wait until we have a pool again or she’ll wonder what Dad will get her for Christmas, and I can see the way it affects Mom. She’d always appeared young for her age, but in the last year, her posture has changed, her shoulders curve downward. I don’t know if it’s fatigue or fear or the absolute fucking unfairness of it all that weighs on her, but it’s there and I can’t unsee it. And I’m doing my damndest to fix it, but I can’t fill the gap Dad left. I can’t even fucking fill the gap left in her bank account, but I will. I’ll get this damn business degree, and then I’ll get a job that pays decent enough to get back a little of what we lost.
And in the mean time, I’ll do what I can to make up for the rest.
Like taking Gwen out to find a dress for Christmas, second hand of course, because we can no longer afford to buy her the poufy monstrosities that she loves to wear for every holiday and occasion. She’s growing so damn fast that she doesn’t fit into any of her old ones, a discovery which had led to a complete meltdown this morning when I came over to take my shift as babysitter while Mom went to work.
When Mom had told her that she couldn’t take her shopping for a special dress this year, Gwen’s sobs had been headache-inducing. I’d promised to work something out just so she’d stop, and so Mom could get to work without being late.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve, so the last thing I want to do is go anywhere near anything that involves the word shopping, but I’d made a decision after Dad was sentenced to put my own wants aside for a while, and this is part of that.
We try the mall first, but as I feared, those tiny little dresses are fucking expensive. I don’t even let Gwen try them on because I can already envision the chaos that would ensue when I had to explain that we couldn’t get whatever dress she wanted. I go for a different tactic, and map out directions to a Goodwill on my phone.
But from the moment we enter, Gwen is pouty and stubborn, and nothing in their limited selection of little girl’s dresses is what she wants. I’m reaching the end of my patience, and I have to work hard not to snap at Gwen as I take her hand and pull her back toward the front of the store. A middle-aged woman sorting donations at the front counter calls out as we near the door, “Try Caroline’s Closet. It’s north a few streets. Still second-hand, but I think she might find it a little more to her liking.”
I thank her, and load Gwen into her booster seat in the back of my SUV. She complains when I try to buckle her in, so I step back and close the door. Sure enough, after a minute or so of trying to buckle herself in, she starts to whine that it won't work. I lean between the seats, reaching back to her, and click the thing into place.
I take a deep breath and clutch the steering wheel tight for a moment.
This is my life now. Not even now. Always. This is my life. Period. The end. I sigh and lift my glasses to rub at my eyes.
It's not that I don't love Gwen. I do. Even with that high-pitched cry she's so good at weaponizing to get what she wants. I love her, and I love Mom, and I would do just about anything for them. But when you think stuff like that … you think of grand, heroic gestures. Pushing someone out of the way of a moving vehicle. Standing between them and danger. Sacrificing something important. But it's not like that. Not at all. It's not one big moment, it's a thousand. It's every day. And you don't sacrifice just one important thing, you sacrifice a little more and a little more until you start to feel hollowed out. It's not the sacrifice that hurts so much as the thought that it will never end. That you're stuck in your fate, and nothing and no one can change it. You’ll just keep giving and giving until you don’t even know who you are.