The Knowing: Awake in the Dark Read Online Free Page A

thought the woman looked imminently sad and not at all like my mother. I asked, “Who is this?”
    She snatched the album from my hands and slammed it shut.
    “Put this goddamn thing away before you ruin it,” she snapped.
    Years later I would discover that the fat girl in the album was my mother at age fourteen. In her youth, she struggled mightily with her weight, reaching what we label today as “morbid obesity.” My mother struggled with that image of herself. It was a reminder of a sad, dysfunctional, childhood that held no joy.
    She grew up in a wealthy suburb with both money and opportunity. She was a debutant and had a “coming out party,” something that was from fairytales for me. Her family had domestic staff who cooked, cleaned and tended the grounds working daily at her large, whitewashed home sitting quiet on a stately street.
    We would never know our grandparents as our mother never spoke to them. Our grandmother would commit suicide two decades later. Three years would pass after her death before my mother would even know. My mother had a sister who was one year older than herself. I knew her only from photos. She had a half-brother too with Down syndrome who lived in an institution. She rarely spoke of her family at all.
    My mother would tell me years later why she married our father. “I never loved him,” she said. “When I got pregnant with Karina, my father forced me to marry her father, who was abusive. I divorced him in less than a year and moved back home. It was like a living in hell.
    Both of my parents were alcoholics and I hated them. There was no love in that house. I married Dell, to get away from them and to make them angry. They disowned me and cut me out of their wills for marrying beneath my status, but I didn’t care, they could keep their filthy money. He was my ticket out. When we met, your father was uneducated and poor with no future. I drug him through flight school. If not for me, he would never have gone anywhere in life.”
    I was shocked to hear my mother’s story and she never elaborated or shared more about their past.
    My father, Dell came from extreme poverty—a fact that was often whispered in conversation. My mother would say, “That poor bastard was dirt poor and lucky he had shoes on his feet.”
    This background defined my father and he had a lifelong fear of never having enough.
    “That poor bastard,” my mother said into the phone receiver one night while she stood at the sink rinsing dishes.  “He never got over his piece-of-shit father who left him standing by the gate from morning till night waiting with a fishing pole and bucket for a fishing trip he would never go on. He didn’t give a shit about Dell and everyone knew it.”
    Gifted with a high IQ, my father would fly planes and captain boats for a living. I thought my father was handsome and charismatic, with deep blue eyes and blond hair. When I was told that I looked just like him, I swelled with pride. He wasn’t home much and I yearned for his attention and affection.
    A few weeks before my mother left my father for good, he sat alone in our living room. The song, “Tiny Bubbles,” rang out from the stereo speakers. The album cover, propped in front of one speaker, featured a smiling, brown-skinned man sporting a flowered necklace. My father sat on the couch and sang along to his favorite song. I climbed into his lap, breathing in the smell of cigarettes and Old Spice, so I could feel the humming his chest made while he sang. I sang too, having memorized all the words.
    My father held me close, bumping his knee to the song’s beat so I bounced up and down. I could feel his love in the warmth and squeeze of his hands. I don’t ever remember sitting in my mother’s lap or hearing whispers of love. He was perfect in my eyes and I wished I could stay that way forever.
    I left for school one morning and everything was completely normal, but as I neared my house that day walking home, I saw