Your voice is small and fading
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no, no, NO!"
No matter how hard she tried, Jude couldn't block out the harsh words of her arguing parents. If she could, she would rip out her ears and revel in the ensuing silence, the relief.
"She needs to know!" Victoria shouted, her chest heaving with the exertion of fighting for the past several minutes.
Stuart shook his head, as equally incensed as his wife but better able to mask it. "I think we should wait a bit longer."
"A bit longer? And how long would that be? Is a bit longer the same amount of time that you're going to keep screwing that whore behind my back?"
"Don't bring that into this," Stuart chided with a heavy sigh. "We're discussing Jude, here, not me."
Victoria rolled her eyes. "Of course! The one time I actually do want to make something about you, and you change the topic."
"Please stop fighting…" Jude whimpered from her crouched position on the floor.
But they couldn't hear her.
And you hide in here unknown
With her arms cradling her knees, Jude rocked back and forth, wishing she was a young child again and her parents could comfort her. But what did she do when they were the ones causing the pain?
Stuart and Victoria kept at it, their youngest daughter's presence at the top of the stairs unbeknownst to them as they fired caustic words at each other. Angry accusations blended into incomprehensible sounds, the emotions behind the words were enough to convey their meaning.
"Stop it, just stop it!" Jude's voice cracked barely above a whisper, hoarse from silent crying and the effort to contain her sobs.
And almost as though they actually did hear her, the altercation ceased, leaving an eerie silence to fill the air still crackling with the recently released fury. A door slammed, Jude could only assume that her father had retreated into his office as she heard the sounds of her mother's poorly concealed weeping. After a few minutes, the sniveling stopped and Jude could hear the shrill beeps of the buttons on the cordless phone.
And your mother loves your father
"Hi…" Victoria's voice gave away on the simple word and Jude flinched as she felt her mother's pain. "Mmhmm….Yeah….I don't know, I just don't know." A lengthy pause. "I can't, Karen…..Why?" The bitter, harsh sound of her mother's mocking laughter startled Jude. She'd never heard her laugh like that before. Victoria's laughter had almost always been genuine, and pure. She chuckled or giggled when something was funny but remained silent when something wasn't amusing. Laughter wasn't supposed to be associated with anger, or pain, or hurt. At least not in the Harrison household…if there even was one anymore.
Jude tried to mold herself into the wall even more as she heard her mother's raised voice. "What do you want me to say? Karen, don't you get it? Even after everything he's done and everything we've been through….I still love him," Victoria finished in a hush, almost as though it was wrong for a wife to admit to loving her husband.
Her adulterous husband.
Jude still couldn't grasp it. Her father, her father—a cheater. If he was unfaithful to his wife, what did that mean for his children? Could Stuart's daughters trust him any more?
"….I-I don't think I can, sis," Victoria confessed. "I've been with him for two decades, we have two daughters--I can't leave him. What in the world would I do? He's been a part of my life for so long that I'd be lost without him. I can't start over, I don't think I remember how to…"
'Cause she's got nowhere to go
