Kylie puts her hand to my cheek. “Oz…baby, it’s okay. We’re all here. We’ll talk it through. I’m here. It’s okay.”
I take a deep breath. “Mom. How do you know Becca Dorsey?”
Mom closes her eyes, steps away from the bed, stumbles a few feet, and then collapses to her knees. Her shoulders shake, and I hate that I can’t get out of this bed to help her. “Oz. Baby…I know you’ve got a lot of questions.”
“A lot of questions?” I say this with so much bitterness my voice breaks. “I’ve gone my whole life with nothing but f**king questions, Mom.”
Becca steps forward. Touches Mom’s shoulder, sinks to her knees beside her. “Kate. I can’t believe it’s really you. I’ve spent so many years wondering what happened to you. You just disappeared, and I—I was never able to find you.” She sounds almost angry, and a lot sad, and lost in the past. “I looked. For years, I looked.”
“You did?” Mom’s voice is disbelieving.
“Of course I did!” Becca shuts her eyes, breathing shakily. “I told you, I t-told you we’d be there for you. We’d help you. But you just…vanished.”
“It was too hard. I was scared.” Mom’s voice is distant, small. “I couldn’t handle it, being so close to—to everything that reminded me of him.”
Him? I wanted to ask who, but I knew. I stayed silent and let it all come out.
“You think—you think it wasn’t hard for me? He was my brother, Kate. You were…you were c-c-carrying…his-his child.” Becca’s eyes turn to me. “My nephew.”
The world spins around me. “What?” I try for breath. “What’s going on?”
Mom seems stuck, sitting on the hospital room floor, head hanging. Becca glances at her, sucks in a deep breath, and I can see her visibly counting, calming herself. She stands up, moves to my side.
“Your father was … my brother. His name was Benjamin Aziz de Rosa.” Her voice wavers. “I named my son after him, and so did Kate, it seems.”
I can’t breathe, but a million whirling skirling questions batter at my brain, flutter just this side of my lips. One slips out. “What…what happened to him? Where is he?”
“Your mom never told you anything about him?” Becca asks.
I can only shake my head.
“I couldn’t!” Mom shouts, hysterical, manic, suddenly sobbing. “It was too—too hard! He—he—oh god…I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I’m sorry, Oz. I just couldn’t. It was too hard. It’s still too hard.”
Becca blinks hard twice, breathing deep. “My brother was very troubled, Oz. He struggled with bipolar disorder his whole life. He got into drugs. When he met Kate, your mother…he seemed to get a little better. But it—it wasn’t enough, I guess. He wouldn’t take his meds…b-b-be—bec—because…” She trails off, struggling. She pauses for a moment, breathing deeply. “God, I haven’t stuttered like this in years. He wouldn’t take his meds. He said they made him feel…empty. Half-dead. Like he was in a cloud. Not himself. He hated them. The drugs just made it all worse, I think. Your mother loved him, and he loved her. But…it wasn’t enough. He had…so much darkness in him. So much self-doubt.”
She pauses again, and clearly, this next part is hellishly difficult to say. I don’t dare interrupt. Mom has her face in her hands, sobbing quietly.
Becca continues. “It was all too much. My brother committed suicide. It was April ninth. He hung himself. I found him.” She stops then, and I see the tears in her eyes. She starts again. “Your mother had just found out she was pregnant.”
I don’t even know what to say. “So…he couldn’t handle the fact that he was going to be a father? So he just…offed himself?”
Becca flinches at my coarse words. “I don’t know. There’s no way to really know what he was thinking.”
“He—he was scared. He thought he’d ruined my life. His life.” Mom, for the first time in my life, was offering answers. “That’s what he thought. He was scared he’d pass his sickness on to you. That’s how he saw it, his bipolarism. A sickness. A disease. I just…I just thought he was different. Just Ben. But he—he suffered a lot, so much, just to try to function. And when I told him I was pregnant, he just couldn’t handle it. He felt guilty. He thought—I think because he struggled so hard just to take care of himself, he’d only f**k up a kid that much worse, but he couldn’t run away from me. I think—I think he didn’t feel like he had any other way out.”
I look at Ben. “So Ben’s my cousin.” It’s a rhetorical question, and no one answers. I look at Mom. “Why, Mom? Why did you never say anything? Why did you keep this secret from me for my whole f**king life? Why? All I wanted was to know…even his goddamn name! One single thing about him.”
Mom sucks in a shuddering breath. “It hurt too much. I loved your father. I loved Ben. So much. I wanted…I just wanted him to be happy. I didn’t care if he was bipolar. I’d take him any way I could get him. As long as he wasn’t doing drugs, he was okay. To me, at least. He’d have his ups and downs, and they were rough, yeah, but it was manageable. And then he—he killed himself. It—it broke me. I’ve never been okay. I haven’t been okay since…since he died. I just couldn’t handle it. You’re so much like him, Oz. So much. It scares me, and reminds me, and it’s—so hard sometimes.” She looks up at me, eyes wet, tears flowing freely down her face. “I’m sorry, Oz. I’m so sorry. You deserved the truth, but I just couldn’t—couldn’t face it. When you were young and asking about him, how do you tell a six-year-old that his father hung himself? And then the older you got, the more it was just easier to pretend like I was protecting you from the awfulness of the truth. It was easier to let you think he’d run off, or abandoned us. Because the truth that he killed himself rather than even try…to me, was so much worse. More than twenty years have passed since Ben killed himself, and I’m still—still so mad at him. And I miss him. I loved him, Oz. I loved him so much. And I would have done anything for him. But it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.”
I’m near tears. Again. I’m sick to f**king death of all this bullshit drama making me emotional. But it all makes sense. It answers so much. “So…am I like him? Am I bipolar?” I’ve heard of bipolar disorder, of course, but I don’t really know much about it.