“Could you hear what they were fighting about?”
“Mostly I couldn’t make out the words. But the one time I just happened to be standing on the lawn, and I heard him say, ‘God damn it, Leah, don’t you make me do this!’ Just like every abusing lowlife scum ever says, blaming the woman for his behavior. And then she said, ‘And when I’m dead, then how are you going to feel?’”
My stomach twists and twists, putting my own spin on these words rather than the one Mrs. Carlton has manufactured out of her own perspective. I can picture my father, pushed to the breaking point. Mom hammering away at him with a combination of logic and manipulation, with that final, masterful thrust of guilt to finish him off.
“Well,” I say, “I suppose you told this to the cops? That’s why they believe he’s been beating her. Did you ever see her injured? Did she have a black eye?”
“I’m not stupid,” Mrs. Carlton retorts, confirming my suspicions in the way her blue-veined arms unconsciously hug her rib cage. “Men hit where the bruises don’t show.”
I initiate a silent count to ten, trying to rein in my temper, but I’ve forgotten about Elle.
She bounces up off the couch and unexpectedly turns on me, rather than on Mrs. Carlton. “Seriously, Mom? You’re going to just let her say this shit? Grandpa would never hit Grandma. Right? Tell her!”
“Elle—”
“What? This is all so stupid! And they think Grandpa’s crazy.” She bursts into tears and runs out of the room. In the stunned silence that follows in her wake, the slamming of the door is loud and clear.
“Well. I never,” Edna exclaims, but there’s no venom in her words.
“Excuse me. I’ll check in later about the funeral,” I manage, and then I’m down the hall, out the door, and after my daughter. I catch up to her before she makes it across the lawn.
“Elle.” I grab hold of her arm, but she jerks it out of my grip.
Tears track down her cheeks. “How could you let her say all of that . . . shit? She’s a horrible old woman. I hate her!”
“Elle. Elle!”
Back ramrod straight, she marches up the steps and into the house. I follow, all the way down the hall to my old bedroom, where she flings herself facedown on the bed in an abandon of dramatic misery.
Memory of the thousand and one times I pulled a similar move almost makes me smile, despite my own heartbreak and confusion. It never helped me when Mom followed and tried to talk me out of a fit of despair, so instead I just sit there and stroke Elle’s hair.
She allows this, which is a good sign, and after a few minutes she asks, “You don’t really believe that bullshit?” Her voice is garbled by the pillow, but I’m skilled at deciphering.
“I don’t believe it. No.”
“Then how could you let her?” She rolls over and stares up at me, flushed and tearstained and utterly beautiful in her outrage.
The decision to tell her sort of makes itself. One minute I’m trying to think up an evasive half-truth and the next my mouth is moving.
“I was gathering intel. Like a spy. So I wanted her to keep talking.”
“What kind of intel?” Curiosity has trumped her grief. I recognize the tone of her voice. I consider, for the umpteenth time, sending her home to her father. And then I figure, what the hell? She already knows half of it and will put the rest of the pieces together all by herself if I don’t bring her in.
So I tell her about what I found at the bank. About the fact that my father is apparently not my father. By the time I’m done, she’s sitting up cross-legged in bed, looking like she’s never shed a tear in her life. Her eyes glow with enthusiasm and curiosity.
“We have to find out,” she says, bouncing a little on the mattress.
“Grandpa is not exactly a good source of information right now.”
“Google,” she says, off the bed and rummaging in her backpack. “What was your sister’s name again?”
“Marley.”
“Last name.”
“Garrison. I hardly think we can just type in a couple of names and presto, magically find people who have probably been dead for years.”
Elle plops back down with her iPad in her lap. “I can see why they wouldn’t tell you about your father. I mean, if Grandma left him, then there’s a reason for that, right? And I can see why she wouldn’t want to talk about that. But why wouldn’t she tell you about your very own sister?”
This is a very good question. Elle is not content with asking questions; she’s already on a hunt for answers.
“Do we even have wireless? Oh, never mind, there it is. WalterandLeah. Not exactly imaginative. What’s the password?”
“A12345.”
She stares at me. “You’re kidding.”
“It’s been that ever since they first got wireless. Neither one of them are—were—big on creativity. I told you.”
“All the neighbors are probably getting a free ride on their wireless,” she says, tapping away.
“Especially Mrs. Carlton.”
Elle giggles. “Probably using their wireless to watch porn.”
“Elle!” My reprimand is spoiled by laughter of my own. The concept is so ludicrous.
“Holy shazam,” Elle whispers, staring at the screen. “I mean, I thought we’d find something. But this?”
“What? Show me!”
I climb up on the bed beside her, and she turns the tablet so I can see, not some sad old obituary for a baby, but an advertisement for a country and western band called Forsaken. Three men with guitars and a woman holding a violin. The picture was taken in front of a crumbling barn, a red sunset vivid in the background. The effect is apocalyptic and unsettling.
“What does this have to do with anything?”
Elle stabs her finger at the woman with the violin. “Meet Marley Garrison.”
“Oh, come on, Elle. That’s just way too easy. How many Marley Garrisons are there in the world?”
“She lives in Washington. In a place called . . . Finley. Where’s Finley?”
“Right outside of Pasco. This is insane, Elle.”
“Wait. Let’s make her bigger so we can see if she looks like you.” She moves her fingers apart and Apple does its magic, enlarging the woman’s face. “Whoa. That’s freaky.”
“What? Let me see.”
Elle has the tablet up close to her face, squinting at it with one eye and then the other. “This Marley person looks more like Grandma than you do. She could be Grandma. Well, if Grandma wasn’t dead, I mean.”
The word dead splatters over me like a bucket of ice water over the head, breaking through the numbness of my shock and raising a terrible, empty ache at the center of my chest where my heart is no longer beating. I can’t get a breath either in or out, and for one eternal moment I think maybe I’m going to die here and now.
Heat comes rushing back in, and with it breath whooshes into my lungs. My heart makes up for lost time, running way too fast.
“Look,” Elle says, turning the screen. She’s magnified the photo of the woman so that her face fills the screen. I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.
This is my mother’s face. The same lips, the same cheekbones—even the way the hair swirls up and off her forehead in a smooth wave. The hair is blonde and curly, not dark and smooth, but a perm and some bleach could pull that off easily enough.
What haunts me most is seeing my eyes in my mother’s face, wearing an expression that could never be mine. They are the same wide-set, blue-green eyes that look at me out of the mirror every day. But where mine always seem to be asking questions, hers have all the answers.
The screen wavers in front of me, and I realize my hands are shaking. I close my eyes to break the spell, to shut out this face, and immediately see the child version, the imaginary friend Marley of my childhood. I can’t begin to understand what happened here. How my over-responsible, zealous, helicopter parent of a mother could have somehow forgotten a child.
Waves of dizziness wash over me, and Elle barely rescues the tablet from a plunge to the floor. I fall back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.