Family Secrets

Even at ten years old, Bridgette knew that that phone call would change her life forever by the way her mother dropped the device with a shrill sob moments after answering.

Luc was gone. Dead. Not coming back.

Her hero, her older brother would no longer be around to pick on her, take her to hockey games or the park, play dolls with her, and check under her bed for monsters, which, at ten years old, was what scared her the most.

All because he wanted to take his fancy bike out for a spin.

Bridgette could not quite wrap her mind around the finality of her brother’s death, even when she watched the box that contained his body being lowered to the ground.

What she could wrap her head around was that, in the months to follow, all her mother did was cry, Charlene (his girlfriend) hardly came around the house anymore, and Kris (his best friend) came to visit her whenever he got the chance.

Kris Letang. She was three when Kris first came into her life. He was a player on her brother’s hockey team and the two fifteen year olds became as thick as thieves after that first season they played together. From day one, Bridgette had liked Kris; he always treated her like she was his own sister and never ignored her or felt that he and Luc were better than she. Unlike most older brothers, Luc, and by extension Kris, were special because they did not mind having their little sister around hanging out with them.

When Kris moved to Pittsburgh the year before Luc’s death, Bridgette had been devastated because she thought that he was leaving her forever. Kris quickly proved her wrong though, making sure to call her each night and always stopping by the Bourdon home whenever he was on break.

And now, when one of her brother’s was truly gone forever, he was there for her more than ever—his whole family was.

Due to her father dying when she was eight from cancer, after Luc died it was just Bridgette and her mom. In reality, however, it was just Bridgette. Her mom could not handle the loss; she sank into such a deep depression that she forgot how to be a mother to the child that she had left. Kris, who came home for the summer shortly after the death of his best friend due to his hockey team losing in the playoffs, noticed right away that Bridgette was becoming very much neglected in her own home. So, like any good brother would do, he swept in and saved her, bringing her to his own house, setting up a bedroom for her, and convincing his parents that she would be better off with them than with her mother (an action that was not all that hard to do because Girard and Adrienne loved her as their own already).

So, by the time she was eleven years old, Bridgette became an honorary member of the Letang family.

Life changed drastically after that. A native of New Brunswick, Bridgette had to move to the Letang’s home in Montreal. Life in Montreal was enjoyable, but it was not New Brunswick. At school, she was forced to make new friends and at home adapt to a whole new lifestyle of being the center of attention of two parental figures (this did not bother her though). Back in New Brunswick, Bridgette had been a quiet and very reserved little girl and those characteristics did not change when she moved. As a result, she struggled, mostly in school, but she never really took notice to how her classmates were treating her. She was not completely oblivious by any means, but even at eleven years old, she just never seemed to care; and if it didn’t bother her, the Letang family stopped pressing the matter and just let her be, which she was grateful for.

Every holiday, the Letangs would reach out to her mom for her, but every holiday, she was always turned away. By the time she was fifteen years old, she asked them to stop trying because she finally understood what rejection from a parent felt like and she did not want to endure it anymore.

Sometime along the way, Kris had met Catherine and Bridgette finally gained the one thing that she alwayswanted: a sister. Catherine and Bridgette just clicked in a way that told Kris she was the right person for him to spend the rest of his life with; he took Bridgette with him to pick out the ring. When their son Alex, and later their daughter Victoria, was born, Bridgette had been named godmother to both.

Not that she ever told anyone any of this. Along with being quiet and reserved, Bridgette did not like to bring up her past and the people involved in her life. Too many questions were always asked and even she could no longer hide from the pain she felt whenever her mother was mentioned and the heartbreak she felt when she had to talk about her dead brother. For Bridgette, it was just easier to pretend that her life outside of the niche she made for herself in Boston was non-existent. Lucky for her, no one questioned her lack of past and the slight French accent that no matter how hard she tried to completely hide, she just never could.

And now, here she was at twenty years old, a junior at Boston University with a past that no one knew about and a boyfriend who was about to uncover it all.

Notes