The Man I Called Dad
The room went dead silent.
The humming of the air conditioner seemed deafening.
“Richard?” Susan asked, confused. “Our uncle Richard?”
“No,” Elizabeth sobbed, unable to look away from me. “Your father. Richard.”
The floor completely dropped out from beneath me.
“My… my father?” I choked out, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
“He wasn’t your biological father,” Elizabeth cried, the dark, ugly truth finally pouring out of her. “Richard and your mother… they adopted you when you were twelve. You were an orphan. A beautiful, quiet little girl. But Richard… he was a monster behind closed doors. When your mother found out what he had been doing to you… when she found out you were pregnant with the twins… she nearly killed him.”
I stumbled backward, hitting the wall.
The hazy, dark shadows in my mind, the terrifying nightmares I had suffered from for decades but could never explain, suddenly clicked into a horrific, vivid focus.
“She was going to go to the police,” Elizabeth continued, weeping openly. “But Richard threatened her. He said if she told anyone, he would destroy you. He said you would be taken away, thrown into an asylum, and the babies would be given to the state. Your mother was terrified. She loved you so much, Mary. She couldn’t lose you.”
“So she covered it up,” Linda whispered, her face completely drained of color.
“She took you to a private Catholic hospital in another state,” Elizabeth nodded. “She registered the birth under her own name. She claimed the twins were hers. And because the trauma was so severe, your mind just… shut down. You blocked it all out. When you finally recovered, your mother told you that you were just a little girl, that Linda and Susan were your baby sisters. And you believed her. You wanted to believe her.”
I slid down the wall, pulling my knees to my chest.
The man I had called ‘Dad’ for fifty years.
The man who had walked me down the aisle at my wedding.
The man whose hand I had held as he died in a hospice bed.
He was the monster who had stolen my childhood.
He was the father of the two women standing next to me.
May you like
Susan and Linda collapsed onto the floor beside me.
The three of us huddled together, crying until we had no tears left, grieving the absolute loss of the family we thought we knew.
