"Are you scared of the storm?"
"Yes"
"You know you're safe, here. The walls of our house are thick, they will protect us"
"Hold me and ask me again"
"Are you scared of the storm?"
"Not anymore"
• • •
Storms always scared the hell out of me since I was a kid. I would go on and on whining, crying, running back and forth across the hallway in my childhood's home; my parents words did little to sooth me. It took years and years to find my real refuge. It was not a building bounded with thick walls, it was Bette's arms. I haven't been scared of a storm since then. She herself was a storm. One of those brilliant, wonderful storms. She could overwhelm me with the force of her winds, caressing me when we made love. Creating ripples that soon became waves of pleasure. We went, we came, our souls parting before crashing against each other, again, when our eyes met in a fulfilling calmness once the whirlwinds of our passion ceased. I learnt to love that storm, in that storm I found my refuge.
A shelter I couldn't find any more when I looked in her eyes, now. I sat at the table, in the kitchen and the overwhelming feeling that crossed my body every time I was near her gave me everything but a soothing sensation and the fear came back. The fortress collapsed. I dropped the bomb that caused it to fall down. I started to panic as I heard the doors and windows slamming for the wind was too strong now it almost made the entire cabin rock. I stood up and ran toward my room.
In a matter of two seconds, I found myself hidden underneath a duvet, waiting for the end of it all. I didn't know if the noise I was hearing was my breath or the winds outside. I needed to calm myself if I didn't want to die like that. Dying because of a fucking snowstorm, how nice! I heard a loud noise.A thunder?
"Tina! What the hell happened?" Alice voice came through the closed door. I soon realized the noise was her fist banging against it.
"Storms scare me!" was my muffled reply.
"Oh, come on, honey! The walls of the cabin are thick, they'll protect us" she tried to reassure me. Poor woman, if she only knew how wrong those words sounded to me right now.
"That so doesn't sound right!" I whined.
"What the fuck is wrong with her?" I heard her whisper to someone else. Kit? Shane? I didn't really care.
"Baby girl, why don't ya come back in the kitchen? I'll make ya a cup of hot tea and you will forget all about the storm" Kit's sweet voice almost brought tears to my eyes, but I couldn't forget about the storm. I didn't even know which one scared me the most. The one outside or the one inside? I guess I'd go for the latter. At least, the first one could end. Bette was a constant presence in my life, and her calmness, her coldness was even more frightening. A shiver running along my spine was the result of the thought on how scary it could have been, the moment in which her winds happened to blow in their full force.
I don't remember how long it took but, at last, they managed to get me out of my 'temporary' hiding place using Angelica as an excuse. She was asking what was wrong with me and I rushed to her, poor baby she looked at me as I was out of my mind; and pretty much, I was. Screw me! I was making an ass out of myself, in front of everyone.
"You should take better care of yourdaughter," Bette said as I entered the kitchen. I don't know if it was due to my being anxious at the moment, but I was starting to hate her witty remarks.
I sat down and huffed, "I hate storms!"
"The cabin will protect you. The walls are thick" she said matter of factly, and how I hoped I could ask her to hold me, just like I used to do years ago. I wondered, for a second, if she was thinking about the same memory, hoping to see a glimpse of the warmth I was so used to feel. The doorway to the fortress barricaded the exact moment I walked out. The storm overwhelming me from the inside to the way out.
After my quasi-confrontation with Helena, we didn't speak to each other for the whole morning. Sitting across one another, I could see she wanted to talk to me. As a fish out of water, she kept opening and closing her mouth, without saying anything, each time ending with a long sigh. My friends, and Bette, quickly dematerialize as soon as breakfast was over. We were alone and I guess that was the right time to try to get over what happened that morning. What really happened I couldn't understand, actually.
"I'm sorry about this morning" she finally spoke earning a scoff from me.
"Are you two all lovey-dovey now?" I could feel the jealousy in the tone of my voice.
"It's not what it looks like"
"Well, I can easily say what it sounds like" I replied clearly talking about the sounds they made that morning.
She sighed, "It's just… complicated"
Silence.
She went on, "Tina, I saw a side of Bette that no one here saw. She's been in hell. That's how she acts when things get hard. I tried to talk her out of it but she just can't help it"
"Oh, so you just go and fuck her in the room next to mine?"
"Shegoes and fucks"
I frowned.
"It's not only with me, Tina. She has been living like this for the last six years she's been in New York. She finds a woman, she fucks her, she leaves her. She never, not even for a second, lets them touch her"
My eyes widened, "So, you let her use you? Or wait… maybe that's exactly what you want, right?! I know she can be really good at it!" I snapped. No, she couldn't be in love with her. That would mean there wasn't any hope left for me.
"One night," she started saying, ignoring my outburst, "we met in New York, after one of her exhibits and got really drunk. One thing led to another and we ended up in bed together. We didn't expect anything from one another; we did it to numb the pain. I was hurting because of Dylan, she was hurting because of you"
"So, you're fuck buddies, now?"
"Kind of"
"And you like it?"
"I can't say I don't, it would be a lie"
I took my time to digest what I was hearing "Hel, what hurt me the most is the fact that you let it happened here… with Angie and I being under the same roof as you. You know how scared I was to know she was going to be here. This is really low" I confessed, my eyes welling up with tears.
"I couldn't stop her" she said.
"Right, because you like it" I scoffed.
"No, it's because I sawwhat she's capable of when she's in the middle of a major crisis. As I said, there's a side of Bette no one, not even Kit, witnessed. And believe me you wouldn't want to see what I saw…" I could see she was struggling with something. "But that's not my place to talk to you about this"
As she said that, she walked out of the room. I knew by now that hidden within Bette's apparent void shell was a new, scary world from which I had been banished.
# # #
Bette could be appalling whenever something didn't go as she wished, or someone tried to state a wrong opinion. She would go on and on, yelling if she thought it was necessary, proving her point and she stopped when she finally managed to win the argument. I lost count of the many remote controls and cellphones that flied across our living room every time an artist was giving her a hard time at work. Those wraths, in the early days of our relationship, scared me, but soon I learnt how to calm her down. Some sweet words and she could become the sweetest person ever and I was lucky to be the one who could witness that side of her. Truth be told, I loved her passion. That fiery, endless passion. A passion that slowly faded away since her father died. It was right before they fired her at the C.A.C. and Angelica Birth was near. She started falling down and I wasn't there to catch her. I actually pushed her further down, leaving her weak soul sink into the abyss of her own fears. I soon realized Iwas her passion. Once I stopped fueling her being, she stopped functioning. She may looks self-absorbed, sometimes her way of acting as an utter bitch was unbearable, but that was her own endearing characteristic. People always thought she was the controlling party in our relationship, little they knew I was. I would, way too often, withdraw into myself without speaking to her for a whole day just because she did something I didn't like. It was my passive-aggressive behavior that controlled her. She would try and try to make things better just so I could forgiveher and what came after our fights was so fucking mind-blowing. The way she made love to me, showing me how sorry she was, how much she loved me and cared for me. She never, in any kind of way, controlled me. She let me be. The only control she had was on her own emotions and feelings. Once she lost it, I ran away. I needed her to be strong for me, yet I didn't give her the chance to do so. I know now, her unwillingness to lose control of her own actions and thoughts was due to the fear to appear weak in my eyes, she feared my judgment. A fear that became reality after I gave birth to ourdaughter.
I knew her like I know the back of my hand. It took just a glance, a frown, a little gesture to see what she was thinking about. I could easily read her mind, she was an open book, a beautiful, gripping, enthralling story. Things changed, though. She translated herself in a language I couldn't comprehend and the unknown scared me, Helena saw a side of her no one had ever seen, she said. What else could be stronger, scaring at times, than the passion I knew so well?
# # #
"Bette what is it with all this black you're wearing?!" Alice voice broke the silence "I mean, I know you always liked it, but there's not even a little nuance of colors on you. I got to tell you is freaking scary! You look like a Death Angel" the nerve she could have was amusing and unnerving at the same time and I could see Bette was thinking pretty much the same thing.
She smirked and then adopting a serious tone of voice, she added: "I'm grieving" I didn't know whether she was joking or not, as Alice said, it was scary indeed. A simple, yet twisted reply, which managed to hush Alice curiosity as well. Everyone fell silent.
We were all sitting by the fireplace and, every now and then, I took advanced of the fact that she wasn't looking at me, to just study her. Now that I thought about what Alice said, and Bette's response I could easily agree with my friend. She looked like someone who's not from our world. The deep signs between her brows were a sign of years and years spent frowning. Her once gold skin was now greyish, her actions detached as if there was no particular motive to do so, inertia was her fuel. A living dead.
After my quiet contemplation, I noticed Angelica, who just some minutes before was sitting between my legs, leaving her spot and slowly approaching Bette. Just like me, she was inquisitively studying the woman. Something occurred to me and I started to panic, what if she's going to recognize her from my descriptions? She knew about her look alike 'invisible mother', though I didn't really show her pictures, and now that they were close the resemblance between the two of them was palpable. I just hoped she didn't utter a word. Fuck me, she did!
"Are you my mommy?" the once faint silence was now a deathly one. Everyone must have been holding their breaths.
Bette slowly turned to face her and I could see the frown lines become deeper. She clenched her jaws, "Why would you ask that?"
"Because you look like me"
"It doesn't mean I am your mother" her tone cold and sharp.
"Oh, it's just… Mama once told me that there was a woman who looked exactly like me and that she was my other mommy" Angelica's voice trembled.
"I guess you got the wrong person" she said, then looked at me and I could feel a grip at the top of my stomach. She stood up and walked away.
I could see Angie's worried look. Her "Mama I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be a bad girl" and the glistening in her eyes almost broke my heart. I quickly got up and followed Bette.
"Bette! You could at least use a more gentle tone" I didn't know why I was feeling that angry.
She ignored me and kept walking toward her room.
"Did you hear me?"
She turned around and just stared at me.
"She's very sensible, she's going to beat herself up because of that"
"I apologize. I would have known if I spent more time with her" the sarcasm in her voice didn't go unnoticed "and for the record you shouldn't tell your daughter about inexistent people, you know"
"You exist"
"We've been practically invisible to one another, she doesn't know me, I don't know her. She can't be my daughter, I can't be her mother" she laughed sardonically "Oh wait, I get it, your heterosexual dream didn't work out and now you wanted to try and make things better for your daughter and tell her she has two parents, like all the other kids, just so she won't feel different,but normal. Normal. Isn't that why you wanted to marry a man, so she could have a daddy and a mommy?" she wasn't yelling. Her tone was placate, low, calm. It was as though she was speaking and not feeling.
"I told her because you are her mother"
"And where the fuck was she?" her voice raised now, "Where the fuck was I? Aren't mother and daughter supposed to be together? You told me, Tina" that's the first time I heard my name coming out her mouth and it wasn't pleasurable "You told me yougave birth to her, Icouldn't be her mother!"
"I was angry" I shut my eyes, knowing it wouldn't fill the six years gap, "I shouldn't have done it, okay? It happened three years ago. She asked me why she didn't look like me or like her friends. She kept asking me about the color of her skin. I had to tell her. I had to" my voice cracked, "I also tried to contact you, I wanted to make amends, but no one would talk to me. Not our friends, not even Kit. I didn't know how to take a hold of you"
"That's because I didn't want you to contact me"
"Even if that was about Angelica?"
"Especially for that!" she said looking into my eyes. She couldn't actually think that, "I don't fucking care, Tina! It's your choice; it's yourdaughter, deal with it"
"You are heartless!" I spat. And if I only knew what was going to happen after that, I would happily avoid that slight outburst.
She grabbed my hand with force, for a split second I feared she could hurt me, but it was nothing compared to what she told me next. And it hurt, it tore my soul apart to see what I did to the woman in front of me.
She placed it on her chest "Can you feel it?" she asked me, not knowing what she was talking about at first, then I gasped and withdrawn my hand as if it was on fire. Her heart, it wasn't beating, or at least that's how it looked like. If it was, it surely wasn't working properly; it was imperceptible "Exactly! As you may see, you are completely right. I don't have a heart. You ripped it off my chest, six years ago and shattered it. I am dead. My body rejects every kind of feeling. I can't feel anything, not even a single emotion, not even anger"
Rooted to the spot, I watched as she walked away from me and entered her room. I turned around, I was shaking, my friends shocked. Bette's words still roaming across my mind, the calmness in her voice was the opposite of the force held by her words. The silence was too silent, the storm placated. No soothing sensation overwhelmed me, a sharp pain, instead, in my chest when I suddenly noticed something neither of us did, for the succession of events took everybody by surprise. I shivered and this time was actually because of the cold.
Angelica was nowhere to be seen, the front door open.
