The Woman in the Trunk by Jessica Gadziala

Author:Jessica Gadziala [Gadziala, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2020-08-23T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Giana

It was the hand.

That hand.

That one I remembered well.

All too fucking well.

It was a hand I had described in acute, painful detail to a female police officer while my legs were spread in stirrups.

I was one week shy of my sixteenth birthday. My mother and I had been spending time after school planning on a way to make it a big, happy affair. On a tiny, sad budget.

That was what I always remembered from childhood. My mother constantly trying to find ways to cut corners, to make a dollar stretch as far as possible. It didn't matter how rough a year we had, she always had found ways to make Christmas and Easter and birthdays something special. Maybe I'd never gotten name brands or expensive electronics like some of the kids I went to school with, but I had beautiful memories of brightly-colored packages on Christmas morning, of simple park birthdays full of amazing baked goods and close friends.

We'd never had much by way of family. My mother had grown up in foster care and had never found her forever family. Until she met my dad. She always said that, if nothing else, she would forever be thankful for me, and for the parents she gained through marriage, and for the grandparents as well.

Unfortunately, my great-grandparents passed before I was old enough to remember them, and my grandparents only made it to my early teens.

So all she had left to feel thankful for was me. And she showed it. I don't know if I knew anyone else who had as close a relationship with their mother as I did. She was who I confided in when I had a crush, who I cried to when said crush rejected me, who I went to for fashion advice, who I went to movies with.

She was my best friend in the entire world. And I was hers.

As a kid, I never stopped to wonder why she clung so tightly to me, why she would often come in my room to watch shows, and "just so happen" to fall asleep in my bed with me instead of going back to her own.

I don't ever remember hearing my parents arguing, but as an adult, I knew they must have, knew that the bitterness between them didn't just happen overnight, that there were many cross words that must have created it slowly over time.

And the older I got, the more I could see how much she had protected me from him. Not because he abused me, not because he was ever outwardly cruel to me, but because his cold indifference would have been just as hard to come to grips with as a small child.

He never wanted to be a father, and he didn't feel the need to act differently.

So my mom worked hard to be both parents for me, even while I shared the walls with my father as well.

He was never around, anyway.

So we clung to each other.

And we had decided on flower

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