Page 27 of A Constant Love
“You ready to tell me what happened? Something go wrong with you and Tyler?”
“No, Tyler and I are fine. I went to therapy…”
His eyebrows shot up in shock. “You?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Me. I’ve been going for a few weeks now, but usually I just sit there quiet as a mouse. It was Tyler’s idea that I go, but he never said anything about actually talking about anything.”
My dad crossed his arms over his chest and rolled his eyes. “Pretty sure it was implied.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I guess. But anyway, this doctor completely sailed into me when I told her about the whole thing with James.”
His brow furrowed. “What’d she say?”
“That if I kept running away, I would never be able to heal or move on and that I was still letting my abuser control my life. She said I needed to find some type of closure, some way to move on. I don’t know…I started crying and couldn’t stop. Ended up here. I don’t really know what my reasoning was.”
“You ever think maybe you came back here to get some of that closure she was talking about?”
“Come on, Dad. Not you too.”
“Something brought you to my doorstep, Sammie. Maybe you came looking for closure…maybe not. I don’t know…I’m no doctor. But here you are, so why not try to let go of some of that baggage you’ve been carrying around. Aren’t you tired by now?”
“Dad, it’s not that easy,” I whispered.
“No, it’s not, darlin’. The good things in life never are.”
I excused myself to go take a shower to try to wake myself up a little bit more. By the time I had arrived in Kansas, it was late, and I had to take a cab to my dad’s house, which wasn’t close to the airport at all. Exhaustion had set in.
When I had gotten myself clean, I realized I didn’t even pack a bag to bring with me, so I rifled through the clothes in my old bedroom, finding a holy pair of bootcut jeans and a ribbed black tank top with a flannel shirt to go over the top.
Thankfully, we were getting into Spring, so the weather wasn’t too bad.
When I walked back into the living room, my dad got up from his recliner. “There’s something I need to show you, Sammie.”
I followed him into my parents’ room and stopped cold, staring at the bed…the bed where I had found my mom dead. Needless to say, my dad had slept in his recliner ever since it happened, not able to lay his head in the same place she passed.
“Come on, Sammie. Don’t think about it.”
Hypocrite.
He walked into the small closet he and my mother once shared. A gasp escaped me as I saw that he hadn’t touched a single thing.
“Dad, I thought you got rid of all this stuff.”
“I just couldn’t do it, Sammie. It’s like I feel like she’s still here with me. I was scared that if I got rid of it, I’d have to face she was really never coming back.”
“Why are you showing me?”
“Because after hearing what you said about closure, I think maybe it’s about time to let it all go. But before that, I thought maybe you’d like to go through it and see if there is anything that was your mama’s that you may want. Maybe it’ll help you close that chapter, too.”
As my father walked out, I took another step inward, looking at everything that once belonged to my vibrant mother. After all this time, her clothes still smelled like the perfume she used to wear.
Inhaling deeply, I sniffed the arm of one of her favorite sweaters, remembering when I was little how she would wear it and wrap us both in it when I got cold.
I questioned whether or not I really wanted to do this. Would going through my dead mom’s things really give me some type of peace of mind. Would it help me to move on?
Pacing the room for a few minutes, I instinctively started biting my nails. Despite the fact that I hated my bitch of a therapist, her words kept replaying in my head.
How much of your life have you given up because of what he did to you?