branded (phantoms mc #2)

twenty-eight: in which she strips herself bare

"Strip off the shadows from your skin and cast them aside" –Just A Gent, Iris in the Dark

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Ghost was looking at me expectantly, but I didn't know what he even expected me to say.

Sure, it was disgusting that Dana had stripped in front of him. What, was I supposed to be mad about a crackhead behaving like a crackhead?

Sure, if he'd managed to wrangle her off to the nearest rehab, she probably wouldn't have beaten that cop half-blind three months later and gotten thrown into prison as a result. But how the hell was that his fault? How the hell could he have predicted that violent encounter?

No, what made me angry – absolutely pissed me off – was that all these years, he'd known that Dana was off. He'd known, and he'd never said anything, probably because it was so embarrassing to have a mother who not only had a couple loose screws, but also had a drug problem.

He'd known about Dana's problems – and yet, he'd still wanted that baby. My baby. Our baby.

"Catalina," he said to me, in the present, "you have to know that I did try to help your mother after her arrest. But fucking up a cop? Not even Robert Kardashian could've gotten her off."

I didn't give a shit about his guilt about Dana. Because...because if he'd known – all this time, all these years – and he didn't care? Then did our baby really have to die?

I felt my stomach turn so fast that it sent a sharp pain across my belly. I didn't know if it was a phantom pain, or if it actually hurt right there, but one thing was clear: I was nauseous.

Was I going to be sick, right here, in Ghost's office? I pressed my back against the cool wall, closing my eyes and actively focusing on not emptying my guts onto the floor. And maybe, just maybe, it helped that I couldn't see Ghost's face either.

"I should've told you. Catalina, are you okay?"

I was still clutching my stomach. Ghost had thought I'd callously and selfishly made the decision to get rid of our baby, but it hadn't been an easy decision to make. I'd done it because I didn't want to put Ghost through what my family had gone through with Dana; through what might even happen to me somewhere down the line. It wasn't set in stone that any offspring of mine would be schizophrenic, or bipolar, or anything really, but there was a chance. There was always going to be a chance, and if I couldn't have a perfectly normal child, it just wouldn't be fair to Ghost. To be the reason he would suffer the way my family had suffered.

He would end up resenting me, but not our child. Never our child. He would suffer in stoic silence, but oh, how he'd hate the shit out of me. Especially if I ended up like Dana. It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

There was a term I learned in high school that I never forgot: Anosognosia. I'd been reading all kinds of books, trying to understand why my mother wasn't like other mothers, and why my sister had to bathe her sometimes because she wouldn't get out of bed. Anosognosia was what they called it when someone wasn't aware that they even had a mental illness. They just lived their life in blissful ignorance while everyone around them whispered and shook their heads in pity. Like how most Alzheimer's sufferers didn't know there was anything wrong with them.

There was always something at the back of my mind that whispered that I might end up like that. Not knowing. Blissfully unaware that I was losing it.

When I told him all of this, it felt like a cork had been removed from the bottle that held every last fear in my chest. I didn't care that I felt completely naked all of a sudden, like I wasn't just stripped of my clothing, but of every last molecule that made me me.