Then I saw her face

A Story by Siobhan Welch

OK - just her paintings, but it was enough.

I always knew her paintings were there, hanging on my mother's walls. She had bought them from me at a garage sale. I don't remember when, but I'm sure my insistence that they be removed from the house created problems. I never imagined that my own mother would purchase them, and I never told her their source.

But now I see them, 30 years on, and I know their source. For me to adequately express the magnitude with which that particular artist plagued my life is not possible. I think of words such as "ruin" and "destroy," but I know she was only one small spark in my undoing. However, to my knowledge, she was the first.

I dug through search engines and social networks and found her easily enough. Address and phone number in a wealthy suburb of my home town, on the other side of the tracks, and across the state line.

I'm using the knowledge of her current existence to torture myself to the depths of all depravity. I want to smack her hard, in the face, and tell her current husband about the destruction she and my husband wrought on my life. In intimate detail, leaving out nothing. Every-single-detail-in-slow-motion-technicolor.

I want her to know that her thoughtless actions fucked up my life. They stole away my young, good-looking adult years, so that only now, in my old age, wrinkled and with hair turning white, am I able to move on. Or so I'm hoping.

I want her to know that I allowed her to take my life away from me. Between her and a man who shares the same birthdate as she, I allowed the two of them, separately and unknown to each other, to place me in a temporary hell, where I remained for all my good years. The years when I could have been a pretty woman and a sane mother. The years when my mind was so poisoned by acts of inhumanity I never imagined, that I was catatonically stunned.

Now she has a husband - maybe children; I really don't know. Maybe even grandchildren with whom she communicates and babysits. They will never know that my own grandchildren are gone from me because of their grandmother's actions, 30 years ago.

Even now, with all my rage, accumulated over a lifetime, I don't have the guts to call her on the phone in her upscale subdivision and tell her the results of her actions. I don't have the guts to reveal my life's destruction to her, even over the airwaves.

And would she remember me? Probably not.