His wife had fainted and the kids were now
trying to help her feel better in the car. Meanwhile, he was still staring at
the house, as if it was going to magically change it’s looks from the old and
almost destroyed state it was in to the almost mansion he had thought he
purchased some weeks ago. He didn’t feel good at all but his body was suddenly
not able to respond to anything. He only reacted when his boy, who was around
ten years old, came from the car and told him his wife wanted to talk to him with
urgency. He turned around slowly, still in disbelief.
The only thing his wife wanted to tell him was
that they should be going to the police and tell them what had happened. They
had to do it as soon as possible because maybe, just maybe, the person that had
done that to them may be closer than they thought. He drove back to the nearby
small town and explained the situation to the police officers. The one that
took care of them put a hand to his forehead to clean the sweat off his face
and told them they weren’t the first to come saying they had been robbed in
such a way. At least four families had gone through the same thing that year.
He explained that they had always used that
house because the owner had died many years ago and no one could claim ownership
of it. Actually, the state still had to wait ten years in order to be able to
take possession of the house and then sell it or do whatever they wanted with
it. And, of course, everything they showed was false and people never cared to
check before they spent all that money in a new house. The family man, called
George, explained to the officer that they were precisely there to check out
the house because it was supposed to be finished in six months.
Again, his wife had sit down. She asked for a
glass of water and tried to relax but her heart was beating too fast. Norma,
that was her name, had already begun planning so many trips and so many other
fun stuff around that house. The amount of money they had spent was nothing
next to the emotional investment they had obviously already done in that place.
It was just a very cruel joke to play in them and she just could not believe
someone would do such a thing. She still wanted to think it was some kind of
mistake.
But it wasn’t. They had been robbed of
millions and they did all the paperwork to sue the people and the alleged
company that had processed the whole thing. Of course, the company was a fake
and the possibility of being reimbursed was almost impossible but they needed
to do everything according to the law. Because, when the time came, they would
need to prove they did not have a country house or anything like that. It was a
very long process and a very slow one too. But after several months, it finally
ended.
The relationship between George and his wife
was not the best. The situation with the new house had deteriorated everything
they had before they realized they had been cheated on. They stopped being
close to each other and after what happened, they rarely even spoke when they
were alone. They tied to maintain normalcy for the children but it was obvious
they were not idiots and could realize very easily that their parents didn’t
really like each other anymore. However, they did not have a big response to
it.
In time, about a year after the robbery, Norma
decided to file for divorce. She realized she simply didn’t trust her husband
anymore and she actively blamed him for having been robbed off all the money
they had paid for the country house. She realized she could never forget that,
so the intelligent thing to do was to just get a divorce. Of course, she
wanted to keep the kids and George wasn’t going to just give them to her. It
was a very ugly situation in which every person they know had an opinion and
that helped their marriage to die quickly.
They finally agreed that they would share
custody of the children with them living most of the week with their mother and
the weekends with their father. They were still young and they both knew it was
going to be a very hard thing to live with but they agreed they could do it for
their children. The kids felt everything was their fault somehow, and began to
behave in different ways, from hitting classmates back in school to just stop
talking and turning into a repressed little kid which obviously wasn’t great
for such a young age.
They each had less and less money to spend,
because they had many more things to pay for: gasoline for all the car rides
during the week, the shrinks for both of the kids, the allowance George had to
pay his wife in order to support the kids, the amount of groceries they had to
buy each in order to supply everything necessary for the children… It was just
too much and every month things seemed to get pricier and more complicated. One
kid began fighting in school too much and the other was accused by a teacher of
being autistic.
It was just a very ridiculous situation that
had came from one bad investment, one bad moment in which they hadn’t had the
brain to check on the product they were buying first. They both knew it was
both of their faults that they had been robbed but it was easier to blame the
other because confronting the truth was always very hard and embarrassing. But
both George and Norma were to blame. They wanted to seem rich in a moment and
never cared to think of their children or about anything else.
Their marriage was destroyed and when the kids
became older they stopped seeing each other and just moved on to have their own
lived. Norma remarried first and George killed himself two months after that.
He had been tired of calling his children and never getting an answer. That
fatal day, he wrote a letter to them, including Norma, telling them how sorry
he was for what he did. However, he also reminded them they used to have been a
family and they all just bailed on him the first moment they could, not thinking
about anything they had gone through.
In the last few lines, he blamed himself and
all of them for the implosion of their perfect family. He said it was their
entire fault that just because of something other families could have rallied
around, they all just began to fall apart and try to run away from each other
as far as they could. Now one of his kids was on drugs, the other had social problems
and he made them see what they had become, hoping they could change their ways
once he wasn’t there anymore. Of course, he never knew that letter was too little,
too late.
