The Wall of Winnipeg and Me - Mariana Zapata Page 0,93
my tongue. I wanted to ask her about the hundreds of times she hadn’t done something for me. I really did. On my best days, I was convinced I’d forgiven her for the days at a time she never came home. For making me resort to having to steal money from her purse to buy groceries because she’d forgotten again how there wasn’t anything to eat at home. For leaving me alone and forcing me to deal with three angry, mean older sisters who couldn’t have cared any less about my little brother and me.
But I couldn’t get myself to go there. Regardless of how many years she’d been sober, I knew now that my mom hung by a thread. She had a problem and she was dealing with it, even if it was twenty years too late to take back her mistakes.
All I could do was grunt; I couldn’t promise her anything. I really couldn’t, no matter how badly I wanted to tell her this could be the first time since we were kids that Susie and I wouldn’t end up wanting to kill each other within minutes of being face-to-face. Good grief, that was sad. It seemed liked we hadn’t ever gotten along, and by that, I meant my slightly older sister—only by a year and a half—had singled me out and hated my guts for as long as I could remember.
I’d taken a lot of shit from her for those first few years. She’d bullied the hell out of me. It had started off with her pinching me whenever our mom wasn’t around, which was always, then progressed to name calling, evolved to stealing the few things I had and then ended with physical confrontations. She’d been an asshole forever.
Then one day, when I was probably fourteen, I decided I was done taking her shit. Unfortunately, she kicked my ass and I’d ended up in the emergency room with a broken arm after she’d pushed me down the stairs. It was that broken arm that had led Child Protective Services to our house because our mom hadn’t shown up to the hospital after she’d had people try to contact her. The five of us got split up after that night, and it was only at one other point, four years later that I lived with my mom or sisters again. That hadn’t ended well at all.
It was a painful, miserable history I’d given up on a long time ago.
I had accepted that there was something wrong with all of my sisters but mainly Susie. As I got older, I realized that chances were high my mom had drank while she’d been pregnant with them. They were all small, unlike my little brother and me, and had learning and behavioral problems. While I accepted now that they couldn’t help most of the things that were wrong with them, it didn’t help ease my resentment much.
For the sake of my relationship with my mom, we avoided bringing Susie up and she only briefly mentioned my other two sisters once a year.
Until shit like this.
I seriously couldn’t believe Susie and Ricky were staying there, and that no one had warned me. Diana was going to lose it when I told her.
“Vanessa, please. I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve missed you. You never come visit enough,” my mom laid the guilt-trip road down for me thick.
There was nothing in this world I couldn’t do, I reminded myself. Everything in my life had worked out. I had more than I’d ever imagined. The past didn’t matter anymore.
With a deep breath, I forced out an “Okay,” gritting my teeth the entire time.
“Yes?” she asked, beaming with hope.
I nodded, urging my muscles to stop locking up. I knew what I was going to say was an asshole comment. I realized I was being immature, but I really couldn’t find it in my soul to care. “Yeah. I’ll play nice as long as she does.”
The sigh she let out?
Yeah, she knew. She knew Susie didn’t know how to be nice.
Chapter Fifteen
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” I snarled as I tried to shake off my anger for about the millionth time in the last day.
Diana scoffed as she moved around me, a stained plastic bowl in one hand, a brush in the other. Her brown eyes temporarily shifted from the section of my head she’d already put color on, to meet my gaze before she blew a