Family Inflamed: Force of Family Book 1

By K.G. Wilkie

Melanie always seemed to have a great life. She had a new house, a new car, and the perfect family. But things are not always what they seem. Behind the grand doors screaming and broken knick knacks are the norm. But things are looking up for their family and it seems Melanie’s mother is starting to make progress in therapy- until they stumble on the shocking scene that reveals what she’s really been doing with the doctor. And then her Dad, the only solid point in her turbulent life, suddenly is gone for good.

Family Inflamed is a YA book full of intrigue, heartbreak, affairs and abuse and assault. Through one girl’s eyes we discover a toxic cesspool that is anything but the picture perfect family kids dream of. Melanie struggles to hold herself together and define herself and her life on her own terms and fights against fate in this coming of age drama.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.G. Wilkie
• Release date: Sep 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9788829508211

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PART ONE

Part 1

Chapter 1

You could say my family is a seething nest of snakes all wrapped up in ourselves and pitched so we are hurtling towards the sun. Obviously I’m not the problem. My Dad isn’t either. We’ve got just one problem in our lives, but she’s a big enough one that she can be a pack of carnivores all by herself.

It’s not supposed to be like that though. We are supposed to have a comfortable life. You are supposed to put in the work, and get the life out of it, and the work gets done.

We are supposed to have a house, a car or two, a yard, connections to other people and families in the neighborhood. Maybe a golden retriever or a fluffy cat scampering around the place, and when the kids are young the sound of happy giggling and playing and toys left around the house. And when the kids grow up some stress because grown ups are famous for finding teens difficult, but frequent moments of happiness and the family coming together interspersed with the apparently inevitable fighting.

A white picket fence kind of life. Living the storybook ideal.

Not a big life, with flashy cars and silver plates and vacations to other countries.

I don’t really have that. I mean, sure, I’ve got a house and we actually have three cars because I got a car at the beginning of the year when I got my license. I know, I was a little late, my birthday was January and I didn’t pass the driving test until July and so I barely got the car in time for the new school year, but I didn’t get a chance to practice driving too much with my dad so it took awhile to build up my skills. And it’s a nice car, I picked out a medium blue Mini Cooper in the bizarrely over sized countryman model. My mom had a jaguar, and my dad had a Ford Expedition SUV. But it was more than cars and why my mom’s is twice as expensive as ours. It was more than a big house that had few luxury furnishings because we wanted to own less things so it was less of a hassle to replace them when they inevitably broke.

But I didn’t really want all of that. It was nice to have, for sure, but it wasn’t my goal. I just want a normal sort of life. A life where you can go through the week with three meals a day. A life where your Mom and Dad come home from work every single day and then you all get together to have a family dinner at the dining table. Or around the couch, I’m not too picky. A life where sometimes, on someone’s birthday or when you get really good grades, you can go out to a family restaurant as a treat and sit down and order dinner together, and everyone talks about how their day went and maybe the dad told dad jokes and the mom laughed along. What a thing that would be.

We didn’t have that. We had a nice life for ourselves, a townhouse we bought a few years ago but was still pretty new-ish, paid off within a year. We had a big back yard and a nice space in the suburbs- close to work but far from the noise of the downtowns. Our house was sparkly clean, our food was fresh and home made and local. It was probably even fair trade, but I didn’t really know. The three of us had gym passes and everything that was supposed to make us a healthy family.

I really couldn’t be jealous of other people. I never went to bed hungry, and besides my three square meals a day were made of nice food. Heck, we even shopped at Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, and the Farmer’s Market which was at the mall’s parking lot on Saturdays and in the community center on Wednesdays. I had snacks whenever I wanted them of health food or junk food all lined up neatly in a section of the pantry and a mini fridge under the counter that was just for snacking foods, and besides that like I said we had the kind of nice fancy house that had an actual pantry. Pretty swanky, really. And my mom occasionally had visions where zombies tried to chase her down and kill her so she’d fight back and accidentally slash all the curtains in the livings room or stab the tv, but it wasn’t that big a deal because we could afford to replace them all. I mean, it could almost sort of be considered cool if you thought of it in the right way, like our house was a pretty frequent staging of something real similar to The Walking Dead. Tv in real life was a cool idea, especially if you didn’t actually have to be the one living it.

Sure, she’d sometimes hide the car keys so only she could go out and me and my dad were stranded in the house all day, but that wasn’t really that big of an issue- after all, we could just take the buses or the metro trains- and it made her feel better when she went into a jealous paranoid rage that she thought my dad was sleeping with other women or that I secretly went out at night to go to crazy parties and she was trying to keep me stuck at home so I’d be safe. I’m sure those were just signs that she cared strongly about us even when she was in one of her fits, and that’s sort of a good thing. Who doesn’t want to know they are really cared about? And sure, sometimes she’d just lock herself up in the bathroom all day and scream and yell and throw things, but no one got hurt, and it’s what she needed to feel better, so no one really got upset by her doing that in particular.

I guess it was all of it together that really bugged me. After all, just doing one of those things would be a bit disruptive to life, but I guess there were ways around it so it wasn’t really a big deal. But having all of those problems pile up on top of each other like a tippy Jenga tower of doom to reach new heights of craziness even while my mom constantly plucked the blocks we’d built our lives on out from underneath us just made it so I knew eventually it was all going to crash down on us, and the just waiting for everything to collapse was stressful in a way I didn’t think the actual collapse of my family would be. Like sure, it would be stressful when everything eventually came apart, but it would be done and over with. Half the reason I couldn’t watch horror films was the suspenseful music that kept you on edge and ready for things to go bad the whole time- if they just went and got murdered in the beginning scene and left it at that the rest of the scenes of maybe killing other people or having more blood and stuff wouldn’t be so bad because they went and let the worst of it go first so you could kind of get over the stress of it all. Not that I’m saying I wanted things to fall apart, but it was going to happen anyways so it would be easier on all of us if we just got it over with. But we were just waiting now, waiting for things to go wrong. It sucked. Sometimes I just wish my mom would go into her worst fit yet and do something we could really thoroughly arrest her for or get a protection order over, and then we could have some normalcy if my my dad manned up enough to get divorced, and then I could just live with my dad and be away from my mother’s issues affecting me forever, or at least for the last few years before I moved out of whichever parents’ house and moved into my own place and did the whole adult thing.

The worst part of it all is I know other people are jealous of us. They just see the surface of it all, the shine on our pile of crap. We had the luxuries, I had both parents, I had every thing I needed in the world. Anyone would be jealous of me, of my life. But I just didn’t really feel like it was all as good as it was made out to be. Like, sure my house was big- but I needed to have space so there could be distance between me and my mother. Sure we had good food- we had to do whatever we could to try to improve my mother’s condition.

So I was technically living the good life, but somehow with my family it still felt a bit more like a nightmare I was willing to do anything to end.

Especially my nightmare of a mother. I’d considered things to do, had dreamed of getting rid of her somehow, but my plans always tapped out at the Sure, I want her gone, but what can I do about it? stage of thought. What could I do, make my dad divorce the woman? Not going to happen. Every time he even considered it a little bit I’d yell at him to do it, my mother would yell at him that he was a horrible person and look at the kind of hateful person he’d raised his daughter to be, and he’d end up driving around town for a few hours to pull himself together emotionally after it all and then he’d come back home and just tell me there would be no more talk about it and that would be the end of that. Try to make her go to therapy and get treatment for her condition? I’d tried that so many time before. We sent her, and it didn’t work, and then she’d stop and refuse to continue, and finally she’d be willing to go again, but it never works right away, so eventually she’d quit it again. It was a vicious cycle that always repeated. The illness was her problem, but she basically refused to try to make it better. Well, and I guess sort of kind of mine, because it was technically hereditary and my doctor technically said I had it so technically I was doomed and I’m going to be just like her someday.

I don’t want to be like my mother, not some day, not any day.

You know how they teach health problems to kids? They basically tell `em bodies are something real basic that people just sort of have and don’t need to think about. What’s there to think about? You have arms, and legs. You have eyelids that blink open and shut, and knees that bend, and lungs that breathe, and feet that run, and sometimes very rarely they’d say, it doesn’t work quite right.

But I think it’s really a turning point in a person’s growing up when they realize how easily the body can be broken.

I suppose some people realize this because of something getting broken the normal way, like playing too hard in your soccer game or getting hurt by being a klutz and running into a telephone pole or falling down the stairs. They do say that experience is a great teacher.

I didn’t really learn it through my personal experiences, but more by learning first aid to care for my father when he went through the hard experience of having practically every part in him broken a time or two. And none of it was broken on accident. Oh no, she’d been very on purpose when she’d done it, every single time. That’s just something you can recognize when you’ve grown up like I have.

Oh, she wasn’t always like this. It got bigger and badder over time. The doctors have always told me we share the same type of psychosis, not really sure what condition it is but I know we both have it, but it’s deteriorated over time. That’s something I have to know about myself now, that I’ll get worse over time and probably become like her, but in the mean time I haven’t been too affected when she does things.

Mostly.

It kind of kills me inside to see how she treats my father like complete crap, though.

But she can’t help it completely I guess. She doesn’t know she’s hitting him, she freaks out at him because she sees him as a lion, or a zombie, or whatever her delusion du jour is. It drives me nuts, but my dad always insists that since it isn’t her fault, she shouldn’t be blamed for it. If it were a zombie, wouldn’t you be happy she’s trying so hard to stop monsters she thinks want to hurt you? Aren’t you happy she cares? Why would anyone be happy when someone they love is getting beat up, regardless of what the reasoning behind it is. She hurt him, and I don’t really care why, I just care that it happened. Not once, never once. Just over and over again, more and more often, until I could remember the years of my life based on which part of him was broken, like thinking Oh when I was nine she broke his collarbone, when I was five she just broke his toe. Anyone could tell it’s gotten to be a pretty big problem when your life is based on measuring times of pain.

I guess I’m just not as forgiving as my dad is. He wants me to be, he encourages me to be more caring and forgiving and kind to the crazy and normal people of this world, but I just am not willing to be. I’m not willing to just turn over and let it all go and forgive people who hurt those I care about. I’m not willing to be kind if it makes me naive and defenseless against those people who hurt other people. I’m not willing to feel bad for not being as kind as someone naive like him. I’m just not willing too be kind at the cost of being abused, regardless of that’s not how he sees what he’s doing. He just thinks he’s being loving and supportive to someone sick. I think he’s enabling her and he’s been dragged into her sickness. I guess even though I love him the most in this world that’s just something I’ll never be able to understand or see eye to eye with him on.

It’s something we were arguing about yet again when we came home that day.

My dad had picked me up to come home early from school because I’d gotten the flu and completely embarrassed myself in front of absolutely everybody by throwing up in front of my entire grade at an assembly and the school let me leave because I’d been sick, and he picked me up in the office and walked me out with me crying and my dad promising to spruce up some chicken noodle soup with garlic and ginger and make a cup of peppermint tea like he always does when I’m sick.

And we came back in the house and opened the garage door as usual until we heard funny noises, like someone with breathing problems was having an asthma attack. I felt worried and started to run towards the kitchen and the sounds, but my dad pulled me back and motioned for me to stay where I was, hidden behind a corner of the wall. I was going to argue with him when he put his finger to his lips, motioning for me to stay silent as well. I frowned at him but followed his directions. Mostly it was the look on his face, though, that pushed me to stay still and silent and just wait for him to check it out. It was like thunder clouds had zapped him so his eyebrows had slanted and dropped all the way down with a thick wrinkle in between them on his fore head and a tight slash where his smiling mouth normally was.

He moved forward on softly padding feet and stopped at the end of the hallway, peeking around the doorway to the kitchen. Then he barged in the open door to the source of the now snuffly noises gradually increasing volume and I decided it must be urgent and moved to run behind him. I stopped in the doorway then and just stared.

I was surprised to see my mom there on the floor floundering around and grunting while doing the naked tango. And I mean, she was really into it and didn’t even notice that we’d come in the house, but her lover looked at us and blushed. Then I realized who he was and yelled, My god woman, you fucked your psychologist?!

He ran over to the sink and pulled out the faucet end and started spraying the people on the floor, and the two jumped up with their naked and flabby flesh wobbling all over in protest at the sudden movement. Aiden! my mother screeched while at the same time the man trembled, Mr Bryne, you seem to have misunderstood our current position, it’s not like it looks like. Your wife and I were merely exploring a new therapy… he gargled as my dad moved his arm so the stream from the sink went directly into his mouth for a moment making the dude gargle.

Shut it! What kind of therapy involves doing the naked tango while the husband is out of the house? my dad roared. He dropped his weapon and threw one of the wooden spoons in the counter top crock with perfect aim at the guy’s head.

Aiden, you are being very rude to our company, my mother sniffed as she stood tall with an air of injured dignity. Apparently the woman was too stupid to see which part of the situation was worth outrage. Mr. Johnston kindly agreed to continue my treatment as home therapy today, I see no reason for all of your dramatics, my mother huffed.

He had his dick all the way in you, you daft idiot! my dad yelled at her. Apparently his accent go thicker when he was angry, reminding us that he was from a primarily Irish American portion of Boston.

Well, not precisely, she was having trouble adjusting to my large size so I wasn’t really very deep in her, Mr Johnston said while blushing. My dad threw a pot at the man and the idiot ducked, seemingly having finally realized it would be in his best interest to wobble away in something like a jog, pick up his clothes, and run to the other side of the house to put them on. Just a few moments later I heard the front door slam as he left.

Aiden, I don’t see why you’ve gotten so unreasonable. Look at what you’ve made our daughter go through.

The both turned and looked at me, then my dad walked over and kissed me on the head and told me to either go to my room or go on a drive somewhere for awhile. I hugged him and kissed him on the cheek and promised to go upstairs, then walked around the corner where they couldn’t see me and hovered with my ear cupped to hear what else they had to say better.

Why would you think I wouldn’t be upset by my wife cheating on me, he angrily asked.

She waved a dismissive hand at him. Well, obviously it’s no concern of yours who I have sex with. I make my own choices in life, and you have no right to say anything about it, she returned just as angrily, as if she was the one who felt personally victimized by how my father reacted to what she’d done.

It became every bit my concern, he bit off angrily, when you promised to love me and only me for the rest of your life on our wedding day!

Well, you can’t expect me to stick with that. No one really means what they say at their wedding, they just say it because it’s expected of them. After all, you didn’t marry me because you loved me, and I didn’t marry you because I loved you, so I don’t see why you are so upset by all of this.

I gasped, and then realizing what I’d done I put my hand and my shirt over my mouth so I couldn’t do it again and call attention to my hiding spot.

You didn’t, what?, he spluttered. I leaned around and saw he looked at her for a moment, searched her face, before his crumpled. You didn’t love me even when we got married? now it was a whisper, but his voice cracked on the words.

No, of course not, she shrugged.

Why then?

She laughed at him. Well, obviously we got married because you were in the forces then and you were about to be deployed, and if I wanted to keep dating you I had to marry you or you’d be gone.

And why did you want to keep dating me? He asked, sounding like he was still holding onto that one last shred of hope.

Well, because you make a lot of money of course dear. You were pretty high in the ranks then, and now you’ve got an even better job with whatever it is you do.

Civil engineer, I whispered to myself. I’d bragged about it, sometimes, when I was a kid. Whenever the other kids had tried to make fun of me for my crazy mom the few times she’d shown up to school events and they could see how weird she was in person, I could always brag that I had a dad who was a real engineer.

I guess I always liked that you were nice enough to me too, you’ve always bought decent presents on holidays and you do it sometimes on normal days too. She laughed. I mean, I didn’t marry you because of how handsome you are, your face is skinny and your ears stick out so much. Obviously the only reason left why anyone marries or dates anyone else is because you make enough money for me to get most all the nice things I want.

Why did you cheat on me with suck an ugly guy anyways? I could tell