Lucy's expression changed. She stared at me with a look I’d rarely seen on her face. I couldn’t place it. She didn't say a word, but her eyes smouldered.
“Lucy, are you upset with me?” I played innocent.
“God damned right I’m upset!” She shoved herself back in her chair and huffed, “Do you really believe that he didn’t want you here?”
“He loved you better,” I responded. “I know he loved me, but he loved you better.”
“Like hell!” Lucy’s face went bright pink. Her brown eyes brimmed with tears, “You are so stupid if you believe that! For all your brains, Silvia, you are so god damned STUPID!” She made a move like she was going to stand up, but didn't, “Do you realise you were all I ever heard about?” She slapped her palm against the table, “YOU! All he ever talked about was YOU! Friends would come over to visit and he’d tell them all about his Silvia!” She snorted, “‘Silvia got the highest marks in her class this semester!’ ‘Silvia won the science competition!’ ‘Silvia looks so much like your mother, Lucy! So much it takes my breath away sometimes!’ He never said a thing about me! Not to me, not to anybody...”
“He always pampered you!”
“I’m not saying he didn’t!” She was still shouting, “He did! Poor stupid Lucia who couldn't do a thing for herself! She needed looked after! Either by him or her big sister! I never even COMPARED to you!” Her face was bright red now, wet with the tears that were pouring down it. Whether they were tears of rage or sorrow I had no idea, “But you are so fucking selfish and so arrogant and so BLIND that you never saw he tried to do the same thing to you! You needed something, he saw you had it, didn't he? Train tickets and clothes and all your books and your extra classes! You told him you needed ten quid and he gave you fifty! And you never came out of your bloody bedroom!” Lucy threw a crumpled serviette at me, “He tried, Silvia, to be good to you and you shut him out!”
“He gave me things! Things! I didn't want things!” I screamed, chucking the serviette back at her. It hit her in the breast and fell to the ground. She was bent over reaching for it as I laid into her, “I wanted a father! I wanted a home and a family and I got a school! I got a fucking school because he didn't want me here! He wanted to work and he only wanted you! I was too much bother!”
She lobbed the serviette back at me, but I deflected it with the back of my hand and it sailed into the sink, “Shut up! Just shut up! He did what he thought was best for you! You were so bright, Silvia! So bright that your teachers didn't know what to do with you! Put you up a year? He gave you professors when all you had before were dimwits!”
“I didn't have to live there!”
“Maybe you didn't! But maybe he didn't want you wasting away here where you weren't being raised properly!”
“It doesn't matter! I needed him! And what about when he moved us all to Wales so we could all be close? He never sent for me!”
“You were always with Oliver!”
“He could have stopped me!”
She was silent for just one second, her eyes wide with disbelief, “Do you really mean that? He could have stopped you? Really? Do you think he wanted you at Oliver’s constantly? Do you?” She demanded, “He hated it! He told me he hated it. He worried! He worried that you’d wind up pregnant! He used to tell me to go along when you'd invite me to keep an eye on you!” She drew a sharp breath, “But when I told him you weren't having sex...and believe me, I left a whole lot out in the area of details!” She laughed out loud, quickly shaking her head, “And I mean a WHOLE lot out...then he saw you were finally happy. You were always so sad, so fucking MISERABLE and there wasn't anything anybody could do to ever make you happy! So he let you go. You never listened to a damned thing he told you anyway! You‘d just run off, I told him, and you and Oliver were right and proper. No worries, I told him. I had to tell him because you never listened to anything he said and if you fucked up, it was me who was going to have to listen to it because I was the one he always dumped his shit on…”
I'd never thought of it from her perspective. She was telling the truth. It was her that always caught the brunt of it when things would go wrong. It was her because she was the one who always ended up going home and I was the one who was always leaving and doing all she could to not come back. But I wasn't ready to slow down. I wasn't ready to see that. I was so angry at him, still so angry at him just because he hadn't been a good father to me and I had wanted one so very, very much.
“He never said anything!” I found myself yelling at my sister as if I were speaking to my father, “He never said a word! He let me go without a word! He even gave me money to do it, to get me out of his way! He didn’t give a damn about me! He never stopped me! He could have!”
“Is that so?” She screamed back, “If that’s so then you tell me why he rang Eddie and Ana every time you went to make sure you were there safe! Or why he took a day and drove all the way to Welshpool to sit down with your boyfriend and find out exactly what his intentions were!”
That stopped me in my tracks. “He did that?”
“Damn right he did! He rang Eddie and told him he didn’t like what was going on. He was worried about you and he told him he wanted to speak to Oliver man to man! Eddie had him come down!” She was shaking, her hands in tiny fists, stuck together like she were squeezing my head between them, which is what I know she wanted to do, “I was there, Silvia! He literally grabbed Ollie by the collar and sat him in that chair in corner of the sitting room, the red one, the wing chair, and prodded him! He had him pinned! Ollie couldn't have left if he wanted! And if Oliver hadn’t answered exactly the way he had, if hadn’t been so honest and so sincere…if he had been anything at all like his brother, Alexander…well, Dad was going to send you back to school in Scotland! And that would have been the end of it!”
Oliver had never told me that. Never. I stood there, silenced, stunned.
Lucy continued, “And, besides, he sent you to Bennington to be closer to him! He really did! He was planning on having us both home every weekend! He was going to marry that woman and try to make a real family, but you…you never wanted to come! You met her...what? Twice. And as I recall you were a stone! And after you started Bennington, you asked him not to come and get you! Or do you forget that? You had to study, you told him, but then it was Oliver, wasn't it? You always wanted to stay at the school or go to the Dickinson’s because of Oliver! You never asked if Oliver could come here! Not once! Not for more than ten minutes to come and take you away! Dad wouldn’t have let him, you know? He missed you, Silvia! He missed you! He loved you and you just shoved him off!”
I couldn't say anything to defend myself. Every word of what she'd said was true. I'd always blamed him for abandoning me, but I had abandoned him, too.
“I didn’t want to stay in Scotland after I graduated high school!” She was losing her resolve. She sank back into her chair and covered her face with her hands, “I didn’t want to come home, but I did! Don’t you know what you did to me? I did it for him! I had to! He was all alone and you left him! You were so selfish! I did it for him because I didn’t want him to be alone and you had shoved him so far away!”
I was so ashamed of myself. I’d always thought of my father as being the cold fish, but maybe he hadn’t been. I had shoved him away. Maybe it had been me all along. Maybe I had been the one who left him all alone and not the other way around. Lord knows I was selfish when it came to Oliver. He was all I wanted, the only thing that mattered. That was true. I had cast my father…everybody, really, aside for him and only him. And at what cost to poor Lucy? She'd become not only Dad’s spy and his link to me, but his emotional caretaker.
I shook my head, trying desperately to clear the rush of thoughts that were invading my brain. Had Daddy really reached out for me and I’d been too blind to see it? How many times? How many different ways had I been too caught up in my own pursuits to notice? Had I rejected him over and over until one day he’d just finally given up?