38. Your offense is unforgivable!

People come and go, in and out of your life. Some stay only for a minute and some hang out with you for a while. Some are here to derail your life and change it forever….

Julie’s car was parked in the same parking lot as mine. Oh no, I really didn’t think this through. I was a naive fool because I never thought she would find out about me and Clark. She probably knows him from preschool. Maybe she knows his wife too. My mind is spinning, thinking up all kinds of scenarios while I am driving home. My hands are shaking on the stirring wheel. What is Julie going to do to me?

I follow her and the kids home on the dark winding road, during what feels like the longest 30 minutes of my life. When we get home, she sends me down to my room in the basement. 

“Go to your room! We will deal with this in the morning.” Then she pauses and looks at me with her face contorted into a painful grimace. 

“How could you? How could you do something like this?” Her face is ugly. Ugly with disgust. The sad part about it is that she is disgusted by me. I made her face become distorted like this.  “Ugh!! Just go!” She spits her words at me.

I rush out of her sight as fast as I can and shut the door behind me. I am alone with my thoughts now but they are all racing anxiously in my head. I try to go to sleep but I toss and turn for hours. I am about to go into a panic mode but I don’t. I want to cry but there are no tears. Why was I such a fool? What’s wrong with me? 

As much as I want time to stop or rewind itself, it doesn’t. The new morning comes fast and I have to face it. I slowly get up, get dressed, and hesitantly walk up to the kitchen. It’s still early but Julie and the kids are already up. Dave is cooking in the kitchen and one of the kids’ grandmas is sitting at the table too. I have never seen her here during the week.

“Good morning,” I mutter and sit down at the table across from her. 

As soon as grandma spots me, she visibly tenses up, jumps up from her seat, and mumbles something that only Julie can hear. Julie is now eyeing me sharply as she sits down in grandma’s place. I look down, staring at my sweating hands in my lap. 

“Jarka,” Julie says. Anger and disapproval are almost palpable in her voice. “Granmda is here today and she will take care of the kids.” She pauses. I shift in my seat and the heat rises into my face. 

“Tell me what happened last night. You have no business meeting with Clark. He is a married man .” Julie’s voice is calm for now but I know that it can escalate within seconds.

I don’t know what to say, it feels as if all English words depart my brain again. 

“I…..I….I just…..talked to him.” 

“How could you do this? Can you imagine what his wife may be going through right now?” Each one of her words become more and more high pitched and squeaky and the volume of her words has increased too. Julie’s face is red and there are tears in her eyes. 

“How could you do this to another woman?” She is now openly crying and despite my fear, I am trying to understand her reaction. She is sobbing. Her shoulders are shaking, no, her entire body is trembling. She is shrinking under the weight of my sin. She has seen me talking to a married man. She has seen him holding my hand in a dark parking lot. Yes, it doesn’t look good but does it warrant this much grief?

I shift in my seat again. Her crying outburst makes me feel even worse about myself and I am very uncomfortable.

“I didn’t…I didn’t…” I attempt to speak again. “I just talked to him for a few times. I am sorry! I didn’t mean…I didn’t know….” I feel out of breath. I feel like I may faint. My face is hot. My palms are sweating. I feel dizzy.

“No!” she interrupts me again. “You definitely knew what you were doing!” She spits her words at me.

“I….am sorry, let me….please…” I am stumbling and stuttering but I don’t think she is going to let me explain. She is not going to take the time to listen to my stutters and my word stumbles, she doesn’t have enough patience for this. She is too worked up, too angry right now. She has made up her mind about my actions and I don’t have a chance.

“Your offense is unforgivable!” Julie raises her voice again, tears still streaming down her face. She slams her hand down on the table. The kids and grandma jump up in their seats in the living room. It feels like they are miles away from me and I am on my own with this furious woman. Just me and Julie in this insane little bubble. Dave is staring at the pan in front of him, stirring mindlessly. Once in a while, he gives me a sympathetic glance but I have a feeling he is as helpless in this situation as I am. 

“Ok, listen to me.” Julie wipes her tears and appears to calm down a bit. “I called the agency coordinator this morning. She agrees that what you have done to us is the worst imaginable thing. She agreed with me that no other family will want you in their house and therefore, she won’t be able to place you in another family again. And you are not staying here! That’s for sure.” 

Her face now gains a victorious look but my heart may have just skipped a beat. Is she really saying what I think she is saying? My heart moves into my throat, making it tight with a huge lump that is preventing me from breathing. I try to swallow to push it back down but my mouth is too dry. I think I may choke. I may choke over this impossible situation I found myself in. 

There are so many things in our lives already decided for us. Where we are born. Who our parents are. What they instill in us throughout our childhood. We have no control over any of this. After a childhood full of piano, full of decisions already pre-made for me, here I was,  thinking that I finally had some choices in my life. Turns out I don’t. My life is in Julie’s hands. 

And she is not finished. 

“I also called the preschool. They saw you and him talking by the door. They saw him walking you to the car.” She says with more disgust. The look on her face scares me. 

“Can I…c-can I please make a phone call?” I decide I want to call my agency and try to explain my situation to them instead.

“I. am. NOT. finished, Jarka!” 

I stay frozen in my seat. What else can she possibly tell me?

“I knew you were trouble. I had a feeling about you from the start. You don’t pick up the phone when I try to call you. You sleep when we are gone. You know what sleeping is a symptom of? Depression! You must be depressed…. or worse! That must be why you were trying to sneak out to the psychiatric unit. It’s genetic, you know! Your father has a mental illness and so do you!”

“But….” I want to explain to her that I wasn’t really sleeping when they were away and when she was trying to call me. It was a fun expression from my teenage years. Something we said with my friends when we were bored. And I really wanted to volunteer at the psychiatric unit. I am not mentally ill! I am not depressed! 

I don’t understand. How did I get myself into this situation? How was I so stupid that I told her about my father’s mental illness? I cannot let my painful childhood follow me here, all the way across the ocean. I need to be free from my past. That’s why I am here. To find a new life. A happier life. A life without my father and a life without the piano. I am so, so, so very naive. A wave of frustration over my own carelessness overtakes me. 

“And let’s not forget!” Julie stands up and leans against her chair, glaring at me with her angry, blue, icy eyes. “The kids don’t respect you! Kate had to jump on the hood of your car to get your attention!”

“What?” My eyes go wide with this nonsense. I am not able to defend myself. I cannot find words quickly enough to respond to her angry rants. We are not equals. She is an American woman with power. With power over me. And I am nobody. She is looking at me with contempt, like I am a piece of trash, like she can just squash me with her heel and throw me away. I know that soon I will be gone from her house and out of her life. 

“You are not saying anything!” Julie keeps going as my silence riles her up even more. But I am defeated now. She can deliver a blow after blow at me and in fact, she does. She recounts all of my ‘sins’ from the past several weeks. 

“You kept making international phone calls and racked up a huge bill. The same with the internet. You got a speeding ticket! This is all too much. Too much! You have no common sense, you have no morals, you steal other women’s husbands! You cannot stay here. You are leaving.. NOW!”

I stare at her in disbelief. Dave and grandma are looking at her too but no one says anything. 

I am still stunned but I manage: “Where will I go?”

Julie shrugs her shoulders. Yes, where will I go? I am sure she didn’t think this through. Or she doesn’t care anyway. In her mind, I am gone and the sooner it is, the better.

“Can I call Claudia?” I ask in desperation. 

Claudia is the very first person I think of in a crisis like this. I don’t know if she can help me but I am getting kicked out. And I don’t know where to go. 

“Yes, you may,” she dismisses me to go to the phone while little Dave approaches her. She immediately changes her face to the one of a loving mother. She gives him a hug and kisses the top of his head. “ What is it, honey?” Her abrupt change in tone is very odd.

I dial Claudia’s number and her host mother answers. Before I have a chance to ask for Claudia, Julie rushes up to me. 

“Give me that!” she grabs the phone from my hands and starts talking. She sounds very sweet when she is talking to someone else. Someone who is not me. I move out of her way but I can still hear little snippets of what she is saying. 

“Poor judgment…..can you believe it? Terrible…..no….can’t keep her any longer……”

She finally hangs up. The verdict is in. 

“I am taking you to Claudia’s. Right now. Go pack your stuff.”