Chapter 5
THE REST OF the year until Gabriella turned ten was a kaleidoscope of darkness, the patterns moving and shifting, but the theme always the same, the terrors always as acute no matter how varied the colors.
Gabriella's father disappeared as effectively as if he had vanished off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. He never called, never wrote to her, never came to see her, never explained how or why it had happened, what he had done, or why.
And the day her mother got her first notice from his attorney she was so enraged that, predictably, she nearly beat Gabriella senseless. Only her own exhaustion finally stopped her. But in the days following, she showed Gabriella no mercy. She blamed her for everything, as she had since Gabriella was born, and told her that he hated Gabriella as much as he hated her. She said he no longer needed her, the woman he was going to marry had two little girls who had replaced her. “They're not like you“ her mother raged at her venomously every time she mentioned them, which was as often as she could. “They're beautiful and good and well behaved, and everything you aren't. And he loves them,” she whispered cruelly. And once when Gabriella foolishly tried to argue with her, defending the feelings she attributed to him but no longer felt quite so sure of in the face of his defection, her mother took out a scrub brush and the laundry soap and washed her mouth out until the soapsuds oozed down her throat and she vomited, as much from the soap as from the bitter taste of her own sorrow and loss. She knew her father had loved her, she told herself, she knew it… or thought so… or perhaps only wanted to believe it. Until, finally, she no longer knew what to think.
She spent most of her time alone, in the house, reading, and writing her stories. She wrote letters to her father sometimes, but she didn't know where to send them, so she tore them up and threw them away. He had left her no address, and when she tried to look for it when her mother was out, she never found it. She wouldn't have dared ask her mother for it. She knew where he worked when he left, and when she called she was told that he had left the bank, and had moved to Boston. It might as well have been in another galaxy, for all Gabriella knew. And when she didn't hear from him on her tenth birthday, she knew she had lost him forever.
She still felt rising waves of panic sometimes, when she thought about it, remembering back to that last night in her room, when they had whispered in the moonlight. There was so much she would have liked to say to him… maybe if she had… if she had told him how much she loved him, he might have stayed, he might not have left her for the two little girls her mother talked about… the ones who were so much better than she was, the ones he loved now. Maybe if she had tried harder, or got better grades in school, though she could hardly have done much better… or perhaps if she hadn't had to go to the hospital at times… if she hadn't made her mother hate them both so much, maybe then he wouldn't have run away… or maybe he was dead, and it was all a lie. Maybe he'd been in an accident and she didn't know it. The very thought of it made it impossible to breathe… What if she really never did see him again? What if she forgot what he looked like? She stood and stared at pictures of him sometimes. There were two on the piano, and several in the library, but when her mother saw her doing that one day, she took all of his photographs out of their frames and tore them into a million pieces. Gabriella had an old one of him in her room, from when she was five, in Easthampton one summer, but her mother found that one too, and threw it away.
“Forget him. He doesn't care about you. Why waste your time thinking about him? He won't save you now,” she said, laughing at her, making fun of her, watching Gabriella's eyes fill with tears. The one thing that reached her now, with greater force than her mother's blows, was the knowledge that she would never see her father again, as her mother reminded her constantly, and that he had never loved her. It was hard to believe at first, and then eventually, she knew it had to be true. His silence confirmed it. But if he did love her, she knew she would hear from him one day. All she could do was wait.
And one year after he left she spent Christmas alone in the house on Sixty-ninth Street. Her mother spent the day with friends, and the evening with a man from California. He was tall and dark and handsome, and looked nothing like her father. He spoke to her once or twice when he picked her mother up to take her out to dinner, but whenever he did, Eloise made it clear to him that it was neither necessary nor welcome for him to speak to the child. Gabriella was wicked, she explained to him vaguely more than once, so much so that she was reluctant to share the details with him. And he understood early on that befriending Gabriella was not the way into Eloise's good graces. If anything, it was wiser to avoid her, so after a while, he said nothing to her at all.
There had been a constant parade of men who came to see Eloise to take her out, but the man from California was the most frequent visitor. His name was Frank. Franklin Waterford. And all Gabriella knew about him was that he was from San Francisco, and living in New York for the winter. She wasn't sure why, and he talked about California a lot with her mother, and told her how much she was going to love it when she came out. And then her mother began to talk about going to Reno for six weeks. Gabriella had no idea where that was, or why her mother wanted to go there, and they never explained any of it to her. All she knew was what she overheard as they walked past her room, chatting animatedly on their way out, or what she could hear when they sat in the library late at night, drinking and talking and laughing. And she couldn't help wondering what she would do about school when she and her mother went to Reno. But there was no way to ask her about it. She knew that if she asked her anything, her mother would fly into a rage.
Gabriella just went on with her life, waiting for news and explanations, checking the mail every day when she got home from school, hoping to find a letter from her father, telling her where he was. But it was never there, and when her mother saw her rifling through the mail one day, the inevitable happened. But the beatings were a little less energetic these days, and slightly less frequent. She was too busy with her own life now to worry about “disciplining” Gabriella. Most of the time, she informed Gabriella that she was hopeless. Her father had figured it out after all, hadn't he? And she herself could no longer be expected to waste her life trying to make something of Gabriella. It wasn't even worth her time to do that. So she left Gabriella to her own devices, to fend for herself and, most of the time, make her own dinner, if there was enough food in the house to do it at all, which more often than not, there wasn't.