Secret Joy

Part 4

Not even Emily had known.

When she found out, she wouldn't even look at Mum, however much I tried to persuade her to. She stopped referring to Mum and Dad as "Mum and Dad", and started calling them her "Mother and Father" instead.

Cold terms. Distant terms. Formal terms to match the formality that was tearing us apart.

I couldn't stand to sleep. Every time I shut my eyes, scenes of a faceless woman tearing me from Dad's graveside played on my eyelids like a film I couldn't stop watching. In the long sleepless nights that passed, I sat with Emily in her room, and she helped me find a scattering of basic Danish words online.

The Danish for "Mum" was "Mor". I repeated it over and over, trying to imagine myself at every age, speaking Danish to my Mor instead of English to my Mum. I couldn't picture it.

Days were spent huddled on my bed, Emily clinging to me tightly as if she could hold our shattering family together by holding me together, while Mum lay on the sofa in the living room, once more silent and unreachable.

Days were limited. Time was short. Too soon I would be gone.

* * * *

When the time came for Dad to be buried, and the priest asked Emily to say a few words, she refused, taking a moment later on to kneel by his grave and whisper, to the loose soil that now shrouded him, "If you think I will ever forgive you for what you have done to us, you are wrong. I am only here for Laura. I am not here for you. Father."