Chapter 33: Reminiscence
She exhaled slowly.
'Well. My childhood makes a lot more sense now, at least. When I was little, everything was so perfect. But then, soon after I turned seven, something changed. He and my mother started fighting, more and more, then almost every day. And when they weren't screaming at each other, there was this cold suffocating silence all around the house. I didn't know what was happening, or why. I thought that, somehow, it was my fault. But it wasn't.'
She looked at Mickey, then at me.
'Because if what you say is true, that was the time when he started working for the PA. That was what they were fighting about. It fits.'
Mickey frowned.
'You didn't know? That he was a Protector?'
Tanya shook her head.
'They divorced when I was eight. I stayed with my mother, and he went to live on his own. He would visit, first once every couple of weeks, then once a month, then once every few months. It was his work, you see. He told me that he was very busy, that there were people depending on him. I thought he was a doctor. A pediatrician. His patients were his life. I was actually envious of them, can you imagine? Those other kids, someone else's kids, whom he loved more than me. I wished them all to die. I wished that I was ill too. Then maybe he would spend time with me. I even faked it: stomach aches, headaches, puked all over the house. Drove my mom crazy. But now I know that I would have had to have a different kind of sickness to get his attention. Right? Because he was only really interested in the Disease.'
She sighed.
'Then I became older, angrier. I stopped caring so much. We grew even more distant. It hurt him, I guess. I didn't care. The last time we talked, I was close to graduating college. He came to my apartment one evening. Said he was going away for a while. I said, "Okay, whatever." He said, "I hope one day you'll understand that everything I did, I did for you." I said, "Sure, that's cool, dad. I'm kinda busy now."
She turned away, looking in the window.