Take Me

Chapter Twenty-Eight

♔ Chapter Twenty-Eight ♔

Cigar smoke was wafting freely around the waiting room. The entire air was thick with it, so thick that every breath I took made me want to cough up my own lungs. I had to resist the urge to forget that I'd even came here. This wasn't where I wanted to be at all.

Now that things were all cleared up with Isaac, I felt like I should have a clean slate, like everything should be off of my chest. But in thinking things like that, I had forgotten that my mother had committed suicide. And she hadn't only just committed suicide, but she'd killed herself because of the lies I told her, lies I told to protect someone who was already gone.

I know I shouldn't be feeling guilty, but I was. In a twisted way, it almost felt like I'd tightened the noose that finished her off, I brought my mother to the edge, and then, like the tragic little darling that I was, I pushed her right over it and watched her crash into the thundering waves below.

The weirdest part of it all was the change. After what had happened at Isaac's house, I'd returned to my street, to my house, but it had been blocked off. The Goldeyfurlongs, the perfect family that lived next door, they offered to take me in for a few days until my father could come and pick me up. While I was with them, I settled down a bit.

Darby was always there to help me when I needed him, and for a moment, I gave into these wild fantasies that this could be my life now, if I just let it. The Goldeyfurlongs were the perfect family in every single thing that they did. There was no tragedy or dysfunction, they were just so normal. They went grocery shopping together, they had family game nights, movie nights, they even went out to restaurants every weekend together. They were so normal that it seemed almost abnormal, but it was what I needed. And so what if I gave in to thinking that it could always be like this? The Goldeyfurlongs could be my family. They could adopt me. Darby only lives over the road, so it all seemed to fit together like the world's easiest jigsaw puzzle.

But I knew none of that could happen. The Goldeyfurlongs weren't my family. I was a guest in their home, I had my own family. Besides, I didn't want to intrude on their lives, to destroy their family like I had with my own. So when the time came for me to leave and move in with my dad, I did exactly that, and I made no complaints.

That was why I was here, in the smoky waiting room. My father was a doctor in the capital of Cornwall, a speckle of a city called Truro. Penzance wasn't too far a distance, but I knew that I couldn't live in two places at once, and the time would come where I'd have to choose.

My father was a clean man. That was the only word I could use to describe him. Clean. He liked things in order, placed exactly where they needed to be. He liked life to be precise, with no surprises, and everything planned down to the exact second. I think those traits are useful to have when you're a top-notch surgeon, but other than that, he was a general prick. But he was the only family I had left, and I had to put up with him.

When I told him that Luke had died, he didn't even cry. Mum burst out into panicked fits of tears. She'd faint at times. She grew ill and depressed, and she never left her room for what seemed like weeks. After a few days of putting up with her, he must have grown tired. Or maybe he just didn't like that his life was now off of the plan. He'd probably planned that Luke would take on the family business and become a surgeon, have a family and kids, but that plan went awry. And what was Daddy Dearest's first reaction? To grow even colder and more detached than usual.

His second response to Luke's death was to pack his things and leave his family with no money and no prospects. He divorced Mum within a year, and won the divorce proceedings that only meant he had to pay meagre pennies to us each month. That meant that my mum had to go out and find work, and she worked herself into the ground trying to provide for us. At times, she had three or four different jobs and hardly even slept, while he was living it up in the next city over. Now she was dead, and now I was left with the shit that walked out on us. Left waiting in the waiting room of his general practice surgery on one of the high streets of Truro.