Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy

Author:Tamas Dobozy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781771022040
Publisher: Dundurn

I’d see that look on Aunt Rose’s face many times over the years, nights I’d awaken to her sitting on my bed staring at me, as if I was a problem for which she had no solution.

“Go back to sleep,” she’d whisper. “I’m just checking on you.”

But it was impossible, closing my eyes while she was looking at me like that, and as I got older they became the times we really talked, as if the late hour, the lights off, gave us permission to broach subjects otherwise left alone.

“Did you ever want kids, Aunt Rose?”

She sighed and shrugged, muttered something about her “first husband,” one of “those pseudo-radical academics,” she called him, “about as far from your father as you could get, a narcissist who didn’t realize that having an ‘open relationship’ applied to the wife as well as the husband,” and then something about the “dedication” required for “making it as a woman scholar. Men have wives at home who take care of the kids,” she said, “but I’d never have that, and without the time to work I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.” She shrugged again, looking at me. “And I’m too old for that now.” She continued sitting there a while, the room filling with whatever I was expecting her to say, something to do with my father, that it wasn’t what she wanted but what he didn’t want that was in the way—not just between the two of them, but between her and me—his inability to risk loss, to lay claim to anyone or anything. She said nothing, and I knew, even then, that it was her way of trying to protect me from disappointment, from what she had already predicted would and would not happen between them, though if she stayed quiet long enough, unnaturally enough, I might hear it anyhow—the silent admission that she didn’t need kids because she had me, because I was her own—and that this withholding of what I wanted her so badly to say would, long after, be both an admission and my protection from it. Had she spoken the words it would have led me to form an even greater attachment to her, which would only have further confronted my father with what he was too afraid to have, driving us all apart. Though the truth is, her not saying it had exactly the same effect, at least for me.

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