My head weighs a thousand pounds. I want to wake up, run from this, for it to only be a nightmare. My life has gone from finally getting on track, to straight to hell in a matter of minutes. I wonder who else knows and watched me blindly go through life without knowing the truth. Dexter obviously knew, but the real act of betrayal is my parents’ lies. I never trusted Dexter, but them―how could they do something like this?
I hear tires screech outside and see the white Audi pulling off. She’s gone. Maybe for good. She had no clue what was going on. This Cal guy has screwed us both over. If I was that girl, I’d walk away and leave this mess behind. If he’s anything like I think he is, she’s lucky. Nothing tying her to this mess, but if that’s the case, Jenna should leave too. She’s not tied to me. We’re only engaged.
Are we engaged? Can you even get engaged while married to someone else? Married. I’m married? No, Cal’s married. That sounds even more ridiculous than me being married. I’m Cal, or Cal is me? It’s a bad math equation. How is it possible for him to have a whole relationship, and manage to get engaged and married while this was happening? I should have some recollection of her. Well I did, kind of, but nothing concrete, no memories, just familiarity.
The emotion that poured off that girl when she saw me. She looked at me like I was her world. She was devastated when I didn’t know who she was. He couldn’t have had time to have a relationship like that. How could he forge a connection with someone that intense when he could disappear at any moment? They couldn’t have been in love.
Fix this, or there will be hell to pay.
And who is he to threaten me? How am I supposed to fix this? I didn’t even know about any of this until today. He’s the one who ruined my life! The part that sucks about this the most is there’s nothing I can do. I’m powerless. How can I marry Jenna and not know when this guy will show up? I don’t know anything about him. Can I take his threat seriously? What if I marry Jenna one day, and wake up as this guy the next? She doesn’t deserve that.
I look under my bed and pull out calendars I used to keep before my blackouts stopped two years ago, when I started tracking the time I lost. I have four years worth, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. I used to keep track of how many days I didn’t remember. I look over them all, counting. Twelve days one month, 16 the next. Seven, ten, eighteen, twenty two, I total them all together. Out of four years, I was aware of what I was doing for 750 days. A little more than half of the time frame. That’s a hell of a lot of time for this Cal guy to do a lot of damage to my life, and build his own.
A burning starts in my throat and spreads to my chest. I grab the calendars, and start ripping them up, and throw them across the room. I see pictures of me with my parents, with Jenna, and with friends throughout the years. I grab them and throw them, too. This isn’t my life. How can it be my life, when I don’t own it? When someone can take it over at any second without me having any say?
“Christopher,” my mom says, her expression is horrified as she stands in the doorway, looking at me in the middle of the room I’ve just trashed. I’m about to be 28 years old, and I still have a room in my parents’ house. I look at her, her face partially covered with her hands. My dad joins her soon after and takes a deep breath.
“Son, what’s wrong?” he asks cautiously like he’s afraid to hear the answer. I let out an angry laugh.
“Dissociative-Identity-Disorder,” I say pointedly, and watch their expressions change from shocked to guilty.
“We can explain. Come, come downstairs so we can talk about this,” my dad says.
“What’s there to talk about? How fucked up my life is? That I’m sharing it with some asshole, and you hid it from me?”
“Don’t use that language with us!” my dad says, seemingly offended.
“Why not, Dad? Is that too Cal-like?” I shout at them. Cal had no problem dropping f-bombs in the message he left me.
“Son, we know you’re upset,” my mom interjects.
“Upset doesn’t explain this. My life has been a lie. I don’t have a life!”
“You have a life. You, you’re the real person. He’s—”
“Is that right? Because he has the wife? I’m pretty sure he has friends, and a house. He at least knew what was going on, and according to him, I’m ruining his life. He knows a hell of a lot more about everything than I do!” I shout, and there’s silence.
“How could you not tell me this was happening?” I say, my anger turning to exasperation.
“We thought we were protecting you. We didn’t want to burden you.”
“Huh, how do you think I’m feeling now?” I laugh with disdain.
“We’re so sorry, Christopher,” my mom says, tears falling from her eyes. She can save them now.
“We thought it would make things worse,” my dad says incidentally. Like hiding the fact that I have another person inside of me was trivial. Some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde isn’t a big deal.
“How?! How could you think that was best? How could you think that me not knowing there’s this jerk-off running around, screwing people, and getting married, was best for me?!” I ask, letting out a disbelieving laugh. They looked dumbfounded.
“You let me think that I was having blackouts and amnesia, a normal side effect of some made-up neurological disorder. How could you do this to me?” Now I’m shouting, because I want to make sure they are hearing me.
“We were going to tell you,” my dad finally answers.
“When? Because this has obviously been going on for years. Why now? Oh, because I could possibly get arrested for being a polygamist?” I shout.
“That’s enough!” my father says, authority dripping from his voice. My chest is heaving, but I try to calm down. I see the tears covering my mom’s face, and hearing her soft whimpers from her covered mouth breaks my heart.
“Don’t you dare think for a minute this has been easy for us. You don’t think we wanted to tell you? You don’t think we wanted this guy to disappear? Trust me he’s not any fun to deal with! The day we met him was one of the worst days of our lives,” my dad says, his voice stern but yielding.
“Not telling you was one of the most difficult decisions we have ever made. We thought we were doing what was best for you. Clearly we see that we were wrong now,” he continues.
“You have to know we didn’t do this to hurt or deliberately deceive you. You have to know that, Chris. We thought that it would be easier for you not to know, until we knew you were in a good place to deal with this. We didn't know what would happen if we told you,” my mom explains timidly.
“We couldn't see what good would come from telling you,” my dad interjects.
“The doctors pretty much told us that there was no cure for this. Intensive therapy could make you one with this guy. Trust me he isn’t anyone you need to be ‘one’ with. Why tell you this if there was nothing we could do about it? It was just going to make you worried and stressed out of your mind,” my dad says defensively.
“When you came back after my diagnosis, we were going to tell you. By that time, we knew about Lauren and saw that Cal was doing things that would eventually affect you,” my mom sighs.