For seven years, I have been living in a world of my own, where sorrow was the heaviest burden my family has ever carried. I have come to believe that the loss of my Calla is what shattered us forever and became the defining factor of our lives. I have been spending every single moment of those seven years taking care of the ten kids my late fiancée has left behind, being convinced that I am but a victim of some awful accident, having survived the unimaginable alongside my fellow survivors. But then one Tuesday evening, while sitting with my eldest daughter in the dimly lit laundry room, she told me that it was now time for her to reveal the truth about what happened on that bridge the night Calla disappeared.
Most mornings start in a kind of chaos that’s almost predictable. By the time seven rolls around, something has already gone wrong. That morning, it was burned sourdough, three missing left shoes, and two of the middle boys yelling over a Lego piece like it was the most sacred piece of plastic there was. I am forty-four, and for the past seven years, I have been the sole parent to ten children, none of whom share my genes. The house is never silent; it is a vibrational wall of noise, with somebody always speaking, crying, needing a signature on a piece of paper, or a Band-Aid on a scraped knee. This is a special kind of fatigue that is impossible to fully convey to those who are fortunate enough to reside in quiet homes. But it is my life. To be perfectly frank, I cannot recall when silence last existed, and for a long time, I did not care to.
Calla was meant to be my wife. When we were younger, she was the one who kept the whole world glued together without seeming to do much work. Whenever she entered the room, everything calmed down. The children paid attention to her. The teenagers looked up to her. I depended on her even more than I knew back then. She was my anchor.
That anchor broke seven years ago.
Her car was found abandoned by the police near the river. The driver’s side door hung wide open, her purse remained in its place in the passenger’s seat, while her coat was left lying on the railings above the water. It was folded carefully, as though deliberately left there. None of this made any sense at all, but then again, in a small community, none of that mattered. Without facts, people have an unfortunate tendency of filling in the gaps. This is simply how rumors are born, through ignorance.
They discovered Mara only a few hours later. She was eleven at that point. They found her walking along the shoulder of a back road many miles from the bridge, barefoot and shaking uncontrollably with her teeth rattling like a machine gun. She appeared lost, confused and completely unaware of her surroundings and how she got there. It took weeks before she would even utter a single word, which was repeated endlessly; “I don’t remember.” Until eventually it became the truth. There was never a body recovered, but after ten long days of searching the river for her, the police informed us it was time to call it quits and they performed a ceremony and buried an empty coffin.
After that it was simply a matter of surviving one hurdle after another.
People called me insane for taking in all of her kids. Even my own brother had a sit-down chat with me and said it was more than what one person could handle. Sure, I might love them, but raising ten grieving children on my own was going to drive me crazy. He might have been right. There were many times when I stared at a mound of laundry at two in the morning and realized that he was right. But I couldn’t turn my back to them, so I stayed.
It had been seven years of school plays and visits to doctors.
And then came that day a few weeks ago. In the midst of the normal assembly line of lunch-making activities, she asked if she could speak to me later. She did not say much about it, but she carried herself differently. There was something grave about the way she spoke to me and I knew she meant to be serious. She seemed to have aged beyond her years at that time.
Late at night, when all had calmed down, she found me. I was expecting an exchange about something to do with her mother, either memories or something that she wanted Calla to be present for. However, her words left me shocked because she said that everything I knew for the last seven years was nothing but a lie.
Initially, my mind could not even comprehend what she was trying to say to me. I only stared back at her blankly before she spoke out loud and clear that, “She did not jump in the water, dad. All she did was leave.”
Mara told me everything else about what happened in slow-motion, as if she was relieved to finally get all of that burden off her shoulders from childhood till now. Calla had not fallen into the river, nor had she jumped in the water. Instead, she drove to the bridge, stopped her car, and created a scenario which would make people believe it was tragic. She had admitted to Mara that she had done wrong and that she had debts that she had no idea about, “complications” that she could not deal with anymore. There was someone else waiting for her. She told an eleven-year-old girl that she had a chance to start over somewhere else, and she was taking it.
Calla told Mara that we’d all be better off without her and asked her to not let anyone know what happened. She told a little girl that keeping quiet about this was the only way to “fix” everything. For seven years, Mara kept it. She witnessed me grieving, saw her siblings crying, and bore the burden of silence because she believed that if she said anything, the world would crumble into pieces.
I felt pain in my heart. Not only did I have to suffer the agony of being abandoned but also having Calla give that young girl a lifetime sentence of guilt and make her believe that she was doing her a favor.
I asked Mara why now. She showed me her phone. Calla had tried to contact her three weeks ago. She had sent an image and a text. In the image, she looked exhausted, grey hair showing as she stood next to some guy I’d never met. She was ill and wished to “get it sorted out before it was too late.”
This was where I drew my line. Her “explanation” was no longer relevant.
On the following day, I did not contact Calla. Instead, I contacted a lawyer. I let her in on all the details. She was very professional, for which I was thankful since I felt like I was buzzing with an anger I had never realized was inside me before. She explained that legally, I was the one with power. I was the guardian, and Calla would have to go through channels other than a sneaky text to a traumatized daughter.
I did agree to one meeting, just to see if it made any difference. We met at a neutral location in the form of a parking lot. As soon as she got out of the car, I knew nothing had changed. She looked like someone I didn’t know, who had endured a tough few years in her life, but it was not the same woman I used to love.
She told me that by leaving, it was her sacrifice. And then he told me that she knew I would make a better father for the kids than she could be at the present moment.
All I did was stare at her. There is a huge difference between making a sacrifice and disappearing from your child’s life. Not only did she use her own daughter as a pawn in her getaway plan, but she knew that Mara was soft-hearted enough to answer her phone calls.
The first thing that I did was talk to Mara. “Mara, you have been relieved from all responsibilities.” The secret had been kept, guilt was washed away, and it was not her fault. After that, I called everybody else into the room. I didn’t tell them every sordid detail of the debt or the other man, but I told them the truth: their mother hadn’t died. She had chosen to leave. I made sure they knew that Mara had been a victim of that choice, too.
The teenage kids got furious while the other ones became confused, but the most important part was that none of them pointed fingers at Mara. They all came to understand that Mara had actually been protecting them.
That evening, however, there was finally peace within the house, only it was a different sort of peace. Mara asked me what would happen if Calla came back and tried to be their ‘mom’ once more.
With a deep sigh, I explained to Mara how being a mother was something that had to be done everyday, especially those days when it seemed impossible not to run away from her children. Calla may have given birth to them, but she certainly was no longer a part of their lives.
And that was perhaps the moment in the last seven years where we truly knew what family was really all about.
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Bored Daddy
Love and Peace
