A frisson of fear. And a big old bucket of nausea.
Normally the smell of lemongrass and curry makes me ravenous, but tonight it turns my stomach to acid. I sip at a glass of house wine, white, and wait, wait, wait, for what seems an eternity. By the time the band finally troops onto the stage, it’s all I can do to stay in my seat, fingers white-knuckled around the chair.
Marley doesn’t see us at first. She’s busy assessing the crowd as she launches into the first song. But her eyes, inevitably, find us. Her gaze lingers on the small blue bear sitting on a pink blanket. The taped-together photograph of our mother, a pink bundle cradled in each arm. Just for an instant, the hard shell cracks, and her face goes soft.
I hold my breath, realizing too late that springing this on her in the middle of a concert might seem like an emotional ambush. I will her to keep singing, not to fall apart here in front of an audience. So far, the sins she holds against me are my mother’s, but if I mess up her song, she’ll never forgive me for that.
I needn’t have worried. Her voice doesn’t falter. Her professional persona slides back into place, and she redirects her focus to other parts of the room. For the rest of her set, she avoids even a glance at our table.
Her sound guy, on the other hand, glares at me pretty much nonstop.
When the band takes a break, Marley comes over.
“Are you going to make a habit of this sort of thing, now? Groupies?” Her right hand, as if it has a life of its own, reaches toward the blue bear, stops, and falls back to her side.
“We need to talk.” I hear my mother’s tone coming out of my voice, and soften it. “Please.”
“I don’t understand what you want,” she says.
“You look like her,” Dad says. His eyes fill with tears. “Like Leah. I thought you would look like Maisey. I didn’t think—”
“None of you thought,” Marley snaps. “Or you wouldn’t be here. What is it going to take to convince you that I don’t want this?”
“You came to the funeral,” I protest. “If you don’t want anything to do with us, then why did you bother?”
Marley shifts her weight, one foot to the other. “Honestly, I wanted to know. What kind of woman abandons her child? That has always been the question.” Her eyes settle on me. “I used to worry about you, taken away by a mother who could forget her own baby. Can you imagine? Me, worrying about you. And all the time there you were with your awesome new dad and your beautiful life—”
“She told me you were a figment of my imagination! She sent me to counselors who told me I made you up. How did I know to look for you? To worry about you? You have to give me a chance.”
Her lips part. Her eyes soften. She strokes the bear’s ears with her fingertips. And then she shakes her head, more as if to ward off flies than to say no, but the meaning is the same.
“It’s too late. Not your fault. I see that. But I can’t do this now. You’re just going to have to accept that.”
“Marley—”
“Tell you what. You want to know this side of the family? I’ll introduce you to our father. And then you will leave me alone. Deal?”
“I don’t know if that’s wise,” Dad whispers.
It occurs to me that this must be hard for him on so many levels. He’s the only father I’ve ever known. Now Mom is gone, and I’m meeting this other shadow family. Maybe he thinks I won’t need him anymore. Of course I need him, will always need him.
But the need to know the secrets my mother has been keeping has become a driving force. Besides, I need just one more chance at Marley. One more opportunity to get her to agree to try to be sisters again.
So, wise or not, I nod. Yes. “Deal.”
She scribbles an address on a napkin. “Be there at eleven tomorrow. I’ll make the introductions.”
Without another word, she turns her back on me. I have been dismissed.
Leah’s Journal
She walked into the office with three solemn children trailing behind her. At a signal of her hand, they arranged themselves on the waiting room chairs while she came to speak with me at the reception desk. The oldest, a girl not more than ten, took the toddler on her lap and rocked her.
The fading bruise on the woman’s cheek was all too familiar, and I knew what her problem was going to be without asking. Still, I followed the professional script Hetty had taught me. “How can I help you?”
“I need to leave my husband,” she said. “I need help with the divorce.”
Hetty swept her away into the office and left me with those children. Not a one of them would smile. The littlest, safe in her sister’s lap, stared at me out of wide eyes and sucked her thumb. None of them fidgeted or fussed.
I could hear fragments of conversation through the closed door. Two of those fragments caught in my head.
The first was about a safety plan. “Where will you go, where will you stay, how badly will he hurt you when he knows you want to leave?”
These words, rather than weighing me down, sang to me, in that way it is when a bit of a tune gets stuck in your head. Over and over, all the rest of that day, into the night, and the days that followed.
Where will you go, where will you stay, how badly will he hurt you when he knows you want to leave?
Maybe those questions would have been enough to set me free, but it was the next bit about the children that changed everything. There they sat, unnatural in their silent watchfulness, like small animals, hoping they won’t be seen if they don’t move.
And in the office Hetty asked her, “Does he hit the children?”
And she answered, “No. I’ve taught them how to keep from being hit.”
Those were the words that took my breath as surely as a punch to my gut. Three pairs of watchful eyes on me, aware of my every movement. Three pairs of watchful eyes in a home where it was their responsibility to avoid getting hit.
I was so enmeshed in my own nightmare, I still might not have dared a break for freedom, but Boots, in perfect timing, chose that evening to come home, high and edgy. Probably he hadn’t slept since the last time I saw him. Certainly there was a craziness in his eyes.
The girls were tired. I’d been leaving them with Boots’s mom while I worked, and she hadn’t given them a nap. They smelled of stale cigarettes, and they were cranky and difficult. Dinner wasn’t quite ready when he walked in. Marley was whining, Maisey was crying.
“This is ridiculous,” Boots said. “You are not going back to that job.”
The world slowed down.
I watched both of my little girls respond to his tone. They went quiet and still. The tears stopped. The whining hiccuped once, then trailed away. They froze. And in that moment, even before the first blow came at me, I saw again the children waiting in the office, and I knew—knew—I had to get the girls away from him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We follow GPS directions, Tony driving slower and slower as we get closer to our destination.
“This can’t be right,” Mia says, when the too-cheerful GPS voice informs us we have arrived. “Maybe she wrote it down wrong.”
Elle consults the napkin where Marley had written the address. “This is what it says, all right.”
Tony pulls the car over to the edge of the road, and we all stare at a run-down single-wide trailer occupying a lot where weeds and garbage compete for space. The trailer itself is beat-up and faded. One of the windows is boarded over.
Two cars are parked in the rutted dirt driveway. One is burgundy with one black door and a rear bumper hanging at a crazy angle. The other is a nondescript hatchback, far from new but at least all one color and not looking like a kindergarten kid’s crazy drawing.
All of us stare at the trailer. I can feel Tony assessing the rest of the neighborhood. We’re out of the city, but here it isn’t suburbs. We’ve passed grassy lots with horses, goats, chickens. Even a small herd of sheep. Plenty of mobile homes, many of them well kept up, the yards clean, the animals healthy. If we were in a movie, this lot would house the psychotic murderer.