The three weeks that followed felt unnatural, in a way.
There was so much calm, so much ease in the way Vincent carried himself. Sometimes a bouquet of flowers for Eva, sometimes her favourite blueberry cheesecake – a kiss on her cheek every morning as she woke and a mug of steaming coffee by the bed.
There’d even been a trip to the amusement park for Lillian’s sake. It had succeeded in coaxing her out of the frightened hole she’d crawled into the night she witnessed their fight. Eva wanted to do more – say more. But she didn’t really know how, so it came as a relief that it took something as simplistic as going for rides in the park to make Lillian smile again. Children must be like that – innocent, and too quick to forget horrors in the face of simple joy.
Besides, what else could Eva have said? When she was a child, her mother had taught her one thing. Caroline Monroe had told Eva that if she wanted the pain to be over, she needed to endure it rather than resist. And it had worked, hadn’t it? It had worked with Logan. It had worked with Vincent. And even that night three weeks back, when Eva listened to his words and didn’t fight back, it didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would when their bodies joined together.
Resistance hurt. Acceptance didn’t.
But why was she so reluctant to teach her daughter that, then? Why didn’t Eva want to pass down to Lillian what Caroline had taught her? Undoubtedly something that Caroline had picked up from her own mother before her. How far did the generation of not fighting back go? How long was the line of don’t-resist-just-accept that Eva descended from?
But this was what Eva had grown up with. It’s all that she’d ever known. Had her entire childhood been based on Caroline’s perspective? On something not inherited but taught generations after generations? Had Eva’s whole life up till this point been a lie? Or just an ugly, ugly truth?
Or did it all go back to two lies told a thousand times over? One which said resistance only meant pain, and the other which said pain was always the solution. Had Eva grown up with the first? And had Vincent grown up with the second? Were these the only two kinds of people to exist? The kind that was told to accept the pain – and the kind that was told to use it?
Eva’s eyes snapped to the window above the kitchen sink as soon as she heard the school bus pull up.
Smiling to herself, she turned away from the glass and grabbed a rag, wiping her damps hands with it before heading towards the door.
Eva heard feet running up towards the door just as she swung it open, her lips only inching up further. “Hey, kid,” she greeted, extending her arm for the bag Lillian would typically toss her way. “How was school?”
“Good,” Lillian panted, catching her breath from running up the drive to their house. Eva shook her head to herself and shut the door. “I’m thirsty, mum.”
“Well, you’re in luck then,” Eva laughed lightly, “I have a jug of lemonade in the fridge, let me just –” She came to an abrupt halt once she placed Lillian’s bag on the couch and caught a proper look of her daughter’s face. “Goodness, Lily! What happened?”
Eva hurried towards her little girl, cupping Lillian’s face and examining the small cut on her chin and the fresh bruise on her jaw.
Lillian smiled sheepishly. “I got into a fight today.” And then her eyes widened, “But, mum, it wasn’t my fault!”
Eva’s heart skipped a beat. “Fight?” Her voice shook. “Did someone hurt you?” She gently prodded the wounded skin on her daughter’s face, making sure to not touch her where it would hurt. Her stomach felt like there were rocks piled up there. Was her daughter walking down the same road Eva had? That Caroline had? Had Lillian not fought back against the person who did this to her?
Was Eva teaching the same lesson to her little girl that’d been told to people a thousand times over? Was Lillian learning from her the same idea that so many generations before her were built upon?
“Don’t worry, mum, it doesn’t hurt too much,” Lillian grinned, her dark eyes twinkling and her words making Eva’s erratic heart to relax a bit. “The other person looks worse than me anyway.”
Eva’s relief disappeared into thin air.
“What?”
Lillian was tugging at her hair, undoing the pigtails. “I was stronger, mum,” she responded, “so they got more hurt.”
Eva was quiet for a while, watching as her little girl tossed her hairbands onto the arm of the couch and then began kicking her shoes off. “Lily,” Eva said softly, carefully. “Lily, darling, who started the fight?”
Lily looked up at Eva with a small frown. “He did. Peter.”
“Why did Peter start the fight?”
“Well,” Lillian sighed and then sat down on the sofa, now taking off her socks. “We had reading time today, and Peter had the book that I wanted. When I went and asked him for it, he wouldn’t give it to me.” She balled up the dirty socks in her small fists and then chucked them to the corner, before looking at Eva again. “I told him I’d punch him if he didn’t listen to me, but he just laughed. So I punched him.”
An icy, unbearable weight slowly formed in the centre of Eva’s chest. “Lily,” she said quietly, “you can’t do that. You can’t hurt someone when they don’t give you what you want.”
“But he wasn’t letting me have the book, mum!”
“That doesn’t matter!” Eva dropped to her knees in front of her little girl, running a trembling hand down her exhausted face. “He got the book first, so you should have let him have it for today. Or you should have waited for him to finish reading to get it from him. Not hurt him, Lily.”
Lillian’s forehead was creased, her eyes searching Eva’s face. She looked confused, conflicted. Upset, because she was being chided – but also like she didn’t understand something.
“But…” Lillian averted her eyes, her bottom lip quivering. “I’m sorry, mum. I thought… They just listen to me when they’re scared I’m going to do something, you know… So I thought, I thought…”
“Shh,” Eva murmured, running her fingers over her daughter’s forehead. “I’m not angry, darling. I know what you thought, but… that’s not the way to behave with your friends, okay? You can’t make them listen to you by hurting them. That won’t make them like you, baby girl.”
Lillian sniffled and ran her hand under her nose, nodding wordlessly. She raised her teary gaze to Eva. “I won’t do it again,” she told her in a tiny voice, “I’m sorry, mum.”
Eva felt her chest squeeze her heart, her breathing turning shallow. All this time… ever since the beginning, there’d been one fear plaguing Eva’s mind: would Lillian turn out to be like her? Like Caroline?
But she’d never considered her little girl taking after Vincent.
She’d been afraid she was teaching her daughter what was taught to her – but what if Lillian’s teacher wasn’t Eva, but Vincent?
She’d been worrying that her daughter was learning from her to not fight pain – but what if Lillian was instead learning from Vincent to inflict it?
Eva had been scared, wondering if Lillian would adopt the perspective that everything in this world was dealt with by pain anyway so she’d need to accept it when it was given to her. But how had she not thought of the possibility that her little girl might have the other mentality – Vincent’s mentality – that pain was power, was a tool.
Eva had once asked herself when the cycle would end, when the chain would break. Because she didn’t want to see Lillian become another Evelyn, another Caroline.
And her wish was granted. Lillian wasn’t becoming another Evelyn or another Caroline. But if she was taking after Vincent, if her view of this world was growing similar to that of Tristan’s, of Logan’s – then how was that ending the cycle? How was that breaking the chain? It was the same hell – just a different devil. It was still the cycle – just a different role. Not the prey, but the predator. Not the oppressed, but the oppressor.
Which was worse? Lillian growing to be Eva? Or Lillian growing to be Vincent? Were those two really the only options left to live in this world? Was there no way out? Eva refused to believe her beautiful little girl had an ultimatum to grow up – there had to be more.
Eva knew there had to be more, because Maite had been more. Because Mrs Lenora, her homeroom teacher had been more. Because Benjie had been more. Because Terrence was more. Because Millie Morgan was more.
Eva would not let her world be the only world that her daughter knew. She wanted to believe in more. She had to.
“It’s going to be okay,” she promised Lillian, pressing her lips to her daughter’s forehead. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
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Written on; 12th May 2019
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one more chapter + an epilogue left!!!