The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [204]
But I did no baby-snatching that day. I knocked on the door, and when there was no answer I opened it and walked in, then climbed the steep, dark, narrow stairs to Aimee’s second-floor apartment. Aimee was in the kitchen, sitting at the small round table, looking at her hands, which were holding a coffee mug with a smile button on it. She had the cup right up close to her eyes and was turning it this way and that. Her face was pallid, her hair straggly. I can’t say I found her very attractive. She was smoking a cigarette. Most likely she was under the influence of some drug or other, mixed with alcohol; I could smell it in the room, along with the old smoke, the dirty sink, the unscrubbed garbage pail.
I tried to talk to her. I began gently, but she wasn’t in the mood for listening. She said she was tired of it, of all of us. Most of all she was tired of the feeling that things were being hidden from her. The family had covered it up; no one would tell her the truth; our mouths opened and closed and words came out, but they were not words that led to anything.
She’d figured it out anyway, though. She’d been robbed, she’d been deprived of her heritage, because I wasn’t her real mother and Richard hadn’t been her real father. It was all there in Laura’s book, she said.
I asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in The Blind Assassin. Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we’d thwarted her – disposed of this unknown lover somehow. Scared him off, bought him off, run him off, whatever; she’d lived in Winifred’s house long enough to see how things were done by people like us. Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we’d sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we’d stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own.
She was not at all coherent, but this was the gist of it. You can see how appealing it must have been for her, this fantasy: who wouldn’t want to have a mythical being for a mother, instead of the shop-soiled real kind? Given the chance.
I said she was quite wrong, she’d got things all mixed up, but she didn’t listen. No wonder she’d never felt happy with Richard and me, she said. We’d never behaved like her real parents, because in fact we weren’t her real parents. And no wonder Aunt Laura had thrown herself off a bridge – it was because we’d broken her heart. Laura had probably left a note for Aimee explaining all of this, for her to read when she was older, but Richard and I must have destroyed it.
No wonder I’d been such a terrible mother, she continued. I’d never really loved her. If I had, I would have put her before everything else. I would have considered her feelings. I wouldn’t have left Richard.
“I may not have been a perfect mother,” I said. “I’m willing to admit that, but I did the best I could under the circumstances – circumstances about which you actually know very little.” What was she doing with Sabrina? I went on. Letting her run around like that outside the house with no clothes on, filthy as a beggar; it was neglect, the child could disappear at any moment, children disappeared all the time. I was Sabrina’s grandmother, I would be more than willing to take her in, and . . .
“You aren’t her grandmother,” said Aimee. She was crying by now. “Aunt Laura is. Or she was. She’s dead, and you killed her!”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. This was the wrong response: the more vehemently you deny such things, the more they are believed. But you often give the wrong response when you’re frightened, and Aimee had frightened me.
When I said the word stupid, she began to scream at me. I was the stupid one, she said. I was dangerously stupid, I was so stupid I didn’t even know how stupid I was. She used a number of words I won’t repeat here, then picked up the smile-button coffee mug and threw it at me. Then she came at me, unsteadily; she was howling, great heart-rending