Chapter 26 - THE WATER
I was seventy-six when I finally asked Selene one question I had avoided for decades.
We were sitting at Adelaide's garden after a memorial fundraiser.
“Did you know the mop water was filthy?”
She stared.
“What kind of question is that?”
“You could have dumped clean water.”
“It was a mop bucket, Nicolas.”
“So yes.”
“Yes.”
“Why water at all?”
She looked toward the trees.
“I wanted her to feel degraded.”
No softened language.
Then:
“She had just told me you would choose her over me every time.”
“Did she?”
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes.
Mother.
Then:
“And I wanted to prove she was wrong.”
“How?”
“By making her leave.”
There.
Not contracts.
Not money.
The emotional core.
“If you left, I won.”
Selene looked ashamed.
“I know how childish that sounds.”
“It sounds human.”
“Dangerously human.”
“Yes.”
Then:
“When you came out of the study, I thought for maybe one second you'd still side with me.”
“I saw her soaked.”
“I know.”
Then:
“When you hit me, I stopped thinking about her completely.”
I looked at her.
“I am sorry.”
“You've said.”
“Still.”
She nodded.
Then:
“When the guards picked up my suitcases, I thought you had destroyed my life.”
“Did I?”
“No.”
She looked around.
“You ended my marriage. Courts punished me. I lost family roles. But no.”
Then:
“I built another life.”
Good.
Then she asked:
“Did you mean it when you said you'd already made your choice?”
“Yes.”
“What choice?”
I thought back.
“At the time? Mother over you.”
She nodded.
“And now?”
“I think the real choice was whether I would keep pretending cruelty was a domestic disagreement.”
Selene looked at me.
“That sounds like therapy.”
“Expensive.”
Then:
“You should have chosen yourself sooner.”
I laughed.
She did too.
Then rain began.
Light.
We moved beneath pavilion.
Water on paths.
For half a second I saw dirty hallway again.
Then just rain.
Selene held out her hand.
“Clean.”
I stared.
Then laughed.
“Terrible joke.”
“I waited twenty-eight years.”
“Worth it?”
“Yes.”
Maybe healing is occasionally bad humor surviving long enough to become harmless.
Then we walked to parking lot separately.
No embrace.
No last declaration.
May you like
No romance.
Just two old people who had finally exhausted the story.
