My mother finally stops rambling and I stare at her in confusion.
“What the fuck are you talking about? What check?”
She looks at me with pity and it takes everything I have in me not to get in her face and scream at her like I did with Garrett the other day.
“I thought she told you. I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
She quickly turns away from me and goes around to the back of my father’s desk and starts pulling out drawers, shuffling through files and papers.
“I hate myself for what I did, you have to believe me, Cole. I can’t do this anymore and what happened today only solidifies that.”
I shake my head at her. “You’re not making any sense. What the hell happened? Will you stop digging through the fucking drawer and look at me!”
She jerks her head up and, for a moment, the mother I’ve always known is looking right at me. She purses her lips and raises her chin in defiance.
“Your father, he’s not on a golfing trip. He’s been sick. He’s been sick since before you left and when Olivia came to me and told me she was pregnant, I didn’t know what else to do.”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before looking at me again.
“He hated her, Cole. I’ve never seen him act the way he did when her name was mentioned. He was so focused on you having the perfect life and following in his footsteps that it drove him crazy thinking you were going to screw everything up again. I don’t know what happened. One day he was fine and the next he just snapped.”
She bows her head and speaks the next part so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear her. “The doctors think he’s schizophrenic with severe delusions.”
My jaw drops and my eyes widen in shock as she continues.
“He sees Olivia as a threat to you and this entire family. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted my husband back and I didn’t know what to do!”
She’s sobbing now, the tears rolling down her cheeks in a way I’ve never seen in my entire life. Even at her own parents’ funerals, she never cried like this. I can’t even process what she’s telling me about my father because my stoic, perfectly poised mother is breaking down right in front of me.
“He didn’t retire, I made him quit. He started making mistakes at work, signing off on the wrong surgeries, ordering the wrong medications and getting into screaming matches with the staff. I had to get him out of there. He’s had a few stays at some very good institutions over the years, but they never did any good. All of those trips we took? That’s where we were. Trying one new thing after another to bring him back. It never worked. NOTHING worked. I had him involuntarily committed a few months ago.”
I sink down into the chair in front of the desk, trying to make the words come, but I can’t. I can’t believe what she’s saying and yet, it makes sense. He always seemed so strong and silent, but underneath it all was a bomb just waiting to go off. He was always so focused on my future and the mistakes he thought I’d made with my career choice. Instead of trying to listen to me and understand what I wanted out of life, he would walk away. He was always walking away from me and I finally understand why. The man who ran an entire hospital and was revered by everyone in this city was slowly losing his mind. I think back to all the times my mother stopped him mid-sentence. I always thought she was trying to sway his decisions, to get him to come over to her way of thinking, but maybe she was just trying to redirect his thoughts, calm him down and keep him from losing his shit and revealing what they’d kept hidden for so long. I resented every time my mother interrupted a private conversation between my father and I, blaming her for the breach in our relationship. I blamed her for my father’s disappointment in all of my choices. I blamed her for his anger and his refusal to listen to me when, all along, it was his own mind keeping us apart.
I remember walking in on arguments between my mother, my father and Caroline. She always brushed it off and made jokes about how they were disappointed that she was soiling the family name. Did she know? All this time, did Caroline know what was going on with our father? I left for the Navy right out of high school and I was rarely home afterwards. Caroline was left behind to deal with the chaos. Of course she knew. She was the one who was here, day in and day out, not me. The conversation we had earlier about her and our mother mending fences makes sense now. They finally have something in common. All those years our mother spent trying to make her conform and turn her into a mini version of herself did nothing but make Caroline wilder and more defiant. Being the only two people in the house left to deal with our father as he deteriorated would obviously bring them together. My family is a mess, but I should have been there. I should have known. Caroline should have told me. I let her shoulder this all on her own and I know it couldn’t have been easy.
My mother finally finds what she’s looking for in the drawer, pulling the folder up to her chest and hugging it to herself for a few moments before slowly pulling it away and holding it out to me.
“I understood what you had with Olivia, I really did, even if you don’t believe that. In the beginning, I thought she would be good for you, a way to make up for the past and for the things we never gave you. For the love your father could never give you and for how preoccupied I was with his illness. I should have told you about him a long time ago. Maybe then, none of these mistakes would have been made.”
I take the file from her hand and set it in my lap, opening it up and staring at the contents inside. My hands start to shake as I grab the photocopied piece of paper lying on top.