Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Perturbations to our bond will come and go, but we will always wind up together. I don’t know if we were preordained or if we’re all just so willful that we refuse to lose, but whatever the reason, I know we will always reconvene, no matter what conspires to rend us apart.
Even when it’s one of us doing the rending.
I regret what happened with Eliza. I’ll not say it aloud, but I do. I regret what it did to us—me, Christine, and Danny—and I regret what it did to Eliza. And now, on top of all that, I regret what it appears to have done to a small child who has been dragged into a cauldron of chaos that I stirred to a boil.
I suppose it’s not entirely my fault. We are all ultimately accountable to ourselves for the choices we make. But I’m a narcissist who likes to believe everything’s about me, so I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to feel.
Which is another way of saying: I don’t want to believe there’s anything that could ever happen that I can’t control.
It’s easier somehow to think that if I had made different choices, none of the terrible things that have happened in my life would have happened. But, of course, if I had made different choices it’s possible that none of the grander things that have happened would have happened either. Like sitting here holding hands with Christine and Danny.
I’m trying to play this fokken thing through:
If we’re able to successfully get Eliza’s child back—my child—what happens then? Do I ever see the child again? Will Eliza just take her and retreat into the great, wild yonder, never to be found once more? I couldn’t fault her if she did. And, if I’m being quite candid, I’m not sure I’d be doing the child any favors by remaining in her life in the first place.
I think about Lars and how I had the chance to be his caretaker. His safe haven. And how spectacularly I failed in that regard. The best I can hope to achieve now is to seek vengeance in his memory for the ill that was done to him. And, obviously, that does him no good. Vengeance is for me. It’s about balancing scales and obviating my own sense of guilt. But it does nothing for Lars. To have helped Lars would have required me placing him first. Thinking of his needs above my own. A type of behavior I have seemed spectacularly incapable of executing.
And now I think of my own father. Our father. Mine and Lars’.
Zander van den Berg. A man without peer.
Which is not a compliment.
I wonder if I would have perhaps been better off if our father, such as he was, had been nothing more than an idea. A specter. A wraith. A mystery. A myth. A shadowy figure spoken of in hushed tones and in dark corners, but not a living, breathing human man who infected my thoughts and compelled me to become who I am today. A person against whom I railed with sound and fury which has ultimately signified… well, if not nothing, next to nothing.
I learned so much about who and what I am from him. Or maybe I inherited it. Maybe I never stood a chance at being less me, because woven deep into the fabric of my DNA is some damaged set of molecules that cause the synapses in my brain to function differently. With contempt and ego and all that brilliant mixture of pollutants which impeded even the faintest possibility that I’m capable of existing in polite society. Certainly Lars didn’t escape the same number of undiagnosed personality disorders. Perhaps it was simply our birthright.
But that can’t be true. Because the way I feel now, the desire to make things right and the love I feel for Danny and Christine—the true, unbridled, unconditional love I feel for them—that must speak to some part of me that isn’t corrupted and is worthy of salvation. Mustn’t it?
Nature vs. nurture.
I think this is why I need to believe that it’s within the scope of my control to change. Because if it isn’t… if it is heritable, deliverable, inescapable… then this deviance I feel has always been a part of me. And what does that say for Andra? My child? I’d far rather imagine that if I simply remove myself from her life before she has a chance to know me at all she’ll be able to escape whatever this thing is. This van den Berg curse. The sins of the father passed onto the child and such.
Sounds much more sophisticated than it probably is. All just a lot of big ideas in service to the fact that I don’t want to take accountability for who and what I am. The truth is it’s no one else’s fault. The things I’ve done. It’s mine. And while I don’t have the power I’d like to believe, I have enough. Enough to bend the arc of the universe back in the direction of something resembling—