"No, not yet." Tim answered, distorting his face in an expression of a depressed man.
"Just a minute ago, Rosa was criticizing Thui for what she had had done. Now it's her turn to tell you all who she truly is; something that I knew from the first time I saw her."
"Stop it Tim." Rosa almost screamed with a harsh distaste in her mouth.
"No, you must." Tim responded.
"Why do I have to talk about something that it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't matter no more." Rosa retorted.
"You mean that you've changed tonight! a day ago you wanted to kill Jacob, now you say that you're a different person!"
All were shocked by what Tim said, but Jacob, whom the last statement was referred to him, was bewildered. He suddenly realized what Tim meant. Everything that night was a calculated scheme.
"Rosa, did you know that I was your father before you came here yesterday evening?" He asked Rosa in a very calm manner.
Rosa caught between the spite of Tim and the calm question of Jacob, wondered how she had allowed herself to fall into Tim's trap.
"All right, if I must, then I tell you all. But I must say before hand that I'm not the same person as I was before I came here. I, too, am a changed person. Jacob, you for me, for a long time were the shadow of someone that I had never met. But now that you're here, and I'm here, you're not a shadow anymore. You're a real person. My intention has changed now."
"Ha," Tim laughed. "now you're changed, how come?"
"Because I've learned the real truth, not the false one that I was fed all my life. Ask Diana, she was in the bedroom with me when I talked to my mother. She even talked to my mother herself. My mother admitted that she had been misleading me about my father all my life. She confessed to me and to Diana!"
Rosa felt faint. The surge of love she had felt earlier now was changed to an abyss of disillusion. In a small second of this brawl, she recognized the immensity of her own mistake. Everything was revealed to her now. She wondered, very aghast, how she had nurtured such a deceitful idea that her mother had planted in her for such a long time and with such an inhumanity!
Before, just a short time ago, before she had met Jacob and Diana officially, she had been a woman with no sense of prodding, someone whose nature had made her to wait without hopelessness; however, the events in this house since yesterday evening confirmed to be much powerful than her merit.
Only a day ago, she did not love her father. It was more than that; she hated him as a child that hates when she would not get what she wants. She hated Jacob a day ago with all her love; but now everything was different. Her heart, the feeling that occupied it for so long, had been an absoluteness of sinking into darkness. For so long, she hated the conventional marriage life, establishing family, having children. She had wondered about the cruelty that happened in her own life, the callousness of her own father; and she had come to the conclusion that in today's society children were afraid to be born because they would not know the kind of parents they would get. It was like a light switch- it was either on or off. Hers was off for so long.
Her first love, she had no first love, or love for the wrong person or right person; everything in her life was planned, a delicate, calculated plan to find a man, whom rejected his love from her, her father. That was what she was fed by her mother since she was a child, a teenager, and a grown up woman.
When she moved to Dallas, just to get away from her mother, she thought she could just forget everything and start anew. But even her choosing Dallas was her mother's plan, now that she thought about it, when she casually told her that she thinks her father is in Dallas. But she was never able to begin afresh. The thought of being abandoned by a man who was supposed to love her no matter what, was so overpowering that she kept following her mother's recommendation to find him for revenge. She had no idea that she was set up by her mother. She did not even know that being in Dallas was her mother's idea; she thought she was the one that had chosen it for the reasons that she had learned to count. Her mother knew exactly what Jacob was doing. She had made sure to follow Jacob's footstep throughout his life; and knew everything about him. She told all she knew to Rosa.
Among all the universities in Dallas, Rosa chose the one she knew Jacob was a professor there. She had seen him, followed him, known everything about him, and gradually found out that Tim and Jacob were friends.
She turned away from all things, all the beliefs she was fed. To find a source to give her a little solace, she turned to nature. Perhaps that decision had nothing to do with her being fed up with all other things should she known that her father was also a naturalist. For her it came on a trip she took with a girl friend to Niagara Falls.
Standing down bellow in the caves that rocks had created, the roaring flow of water filled her ears, her view, and her heart. It was like nothing she had experienced before. The great abundance of water clashing down from such a height overwhelmed her. It went on and on, for ever, always, on and on. She felt little, nothing, insignificant. She was awed in the silence of her bewilderment, listening to the roar of the water. That experience to her was the wordless power of nature. That day nature became her God.
At that moment she even thought about going back to the top just to sit on the white water and to experience the fall, the fall of human being with water. Niagara Falls, however, continued to do what it had always done, going its way, for ever, always...
When she returned to Dallas from that trip which was supposed to be a fun vacation, she was a different person. She thought how benevolent nature could have such an inauspicious power to place her where she was. She knew all animals always took care of their young, protected them from any danger. That was the nature of living things. Then she wondered about her own life. She made a decision that she would not rest until she would confront her father, just to embarrass him and spit on his face for turning his back against what nature created him to do. That became her mission in life.
To her all religion, sciences were metaphors for something she did not know. She chose the one that made sense to her, nature. Nature was God.
Now in this house, she had to confess to what she had become because of her mother's evilness. She rose and began walking around the room, gripping her elbows, ignoring the stare of the others, thinking with exasperation how could she tell her story, to prove it to others and mostly to herself the change that happened to her that night.
The numbness she had felt when change began in her, now was faded. In place of it, she felt an anger, a consuming anger that she feared it would make her to scream without being able to stop. She trembled, but that shaking was neither for her youthful vacillation, nor it was for the rancorous, captivating warning of the sudden assertion that possessed her. It was a fervor that overpowered her, it was a sincerity that filled her up, a painful and sweet eagerness, not an inflamed one, completely the opposite of it.
All the feeling of revenge she had had for many years towards Jacob, now had changed to a passion of not losing him again. She wondered if by telling the truth, she would possibly lose this second chance. But Tim was there; and he would not rest until everyone would hear her story. she quickly walked back to a different seat, next to Jacob, and sat down with her head down. She almost stuttered:
"I tell you my story." Then she faced Jacob: "But you got to believe me that I'm a different person now."
To Be Continued
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