“So, are you saying you think someone put this there?” she asks incredulously.
“Well, I know I didn’t, so it’s the only possible explanation,” I say. “Although you seem convinced otherwise, I’m not the type of person to have illicit liaisons with my clients and pay-as-you-go phones hidden in my home.”
“How do you know it’s a pay-as-you-go?” she asks.
I sigh. “I don’t, it’s just a figure of speech.”
“And the illicit liaison?” she asks.
I feel like I’m a sitting duck waiting to be put out of its misery. “I’m just saying that despite what you might think, I’m not in the habit of meeting my clients outside work.”
“Not even in the Royal Garden hotel?” she asks, raising her eyebrows questioningly.
“No,” I say adamantly.
“Well, let’s hope the CCTV backs that up.”
22
Although the police left the house looking largely as they found it, I still feel violated, as if they’ve sullied everything they’ve touched. It’s felt most staunchly in the spare bedroom, and fresh tears spring to my eyes as I trail my hands along the sleeves of my mother’s dresses. I imagine them rifling through her belongings in their misguided efforts to find something that proves that I’m the person they think I am.
The cuffs of her blouses lost the scent of her favorite perfume many years ago, but when I really need to, I can convince myself I can still smell it. It immediately transports me back to happier times and I watch the four of us, as if through the shuttering lens of an old movie camera, being a normal family.
I can see us at the movies, where my father and Jen would sit behind me and Mom, throwing their popcorn over our heads to try and get it in our bucket. We’d be in hysterics until the usher came over to tell us we were ruining the cinematic experience for everyone else.
“Sorry, miss,” my father would say in a little boy’s voice, sending us all into gales of laughter again.
But then, abruptly, the picture in my head goes from glorious technicolor to grainy black and white, as the light and joy is replaced by darkness and fear. My father’s twisted face suddenly comes into view, his once soft eyes have turned into black pools, and his disarming smile has been replaced by gnarled lips pulled back, baring his teeth.
I’d ask Mom what had happened to turn him into the monster he became, but she would always try to defend him.
“He’s got a lot going on right now,” she’d say, as she knelt beside my bed and wrapped my hands in hers. “He just needs a little space to work things out and then he’ll be the dad you remember.”
“Does he not love us anymore?” I’d asked.
“Of course he does, pumpkin. He will always love you, no matter what. You’re his girls—nothing will ever change that.”
“But I don’t like it when he hurts you,” I’d say, lifting her long brown hair up from around her neck where, despite her attempts to conceal it with foundation, I would still see the yellowing bruise blotting her skin.
“He doesn’t mean to,” she’d said. “When he has a drink, he gets angry—with himself more than anyone else—and he just doesn’t know what to do with all that pent-up frustration.”
She’d lean in to kiss my forehead and the heady aroma of Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers perfume would permeate my nostrils as I fell asleep. It was the scent of safety; the promise that no matter how insecure I might feel some days, she would always be there to lift and protect me. Except she wasn’t. One year later, she was gone and the fragrance slowly faded after her.
“Why did you have to go?” I ask aloud, falling onto the bed with my head in my hands.
I used to expect her to answer with a bolt of lightning and a crash of thunder, but I’ve come to realize that she relays her messages in more subtle ways. It could be in a dream, where I can see her so vividly that I wake up crying, only to look at the bedside clock and see that it’s 3:22: her birthday. Or I’ll notice that a picture has been moved ever so slightly, or the robin that graces our garden sometimes will sit on the table outside the dining room window and just peer in.
None of which offer any definitive answers to the questions I’ve often posed, but it means that she’s around, and until now I’ve always believed that she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me.
So how come I find myself here?
“Who’s doing this, Mom?” I ask out loud.
I look to her clothes hanging in the wardrobe, and almost expect them to come to life, to morph into living objects, like the Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and go about pulling me up, brushing me down and telling me how to get through this.
I imagine her red-starred sneakers, the ones I’d coveted so much when I was a young girl, flying off the bottom shelf to show me the way forward. I rise from the bed. Where are her red-starred sneakers?
An overwhelming panic fills my chest as I scurry around in the bottom of the wardrobe, sure that they’re here somewhere. They’ve got to be.
They were the last thing she wore. She’d breathed her last breath in them, and not being able to see them sends me into a whole new world of pain.
I run into our bedroom and rummage through the cupboards, already knowing they’re not in there. Why would I move them? Why would I need to?
It’s then that it hits me. The police must have taken them when they searched the house. I hadn’t seen everything they’d seized and to look at the house now, you’d be hard-pressed to know they’d even been here, but I guess the missing parts of me are only going to be realized over the coming days. But why would they take my mom’s shoes? Unless they thought they were mine.
I try to shake off the unsettling feeling that they’re currently being analyzed in a lab somewhere and instead focus on it being a sign from Mom. This is her way of telling me that they’re going to do everything they can to pin this on me, but that she’s going to do everything in her power to get me out of it.
Pick yourself up and dust yourself off, I can hear her say. The only way you’re going to get yourself out of this is to keep pushing to find out who’s doing this to you.
I can’t help but acknowledge that every finger points to Leon. From him being at the hotel to the phone being found in the bathroom, there’s not a more likely suspect, but why would he do this to me? Even if he’d done something terrible to Jacob in a jealous rage because he genuinely thought we were having an affair, would he really go to such lengths to make it look like it was me?
If he’s killed someone, he’s capable of anything, I say to myself, answering my own question.
I need him to tell me that I’ve got this all wrong; that he wouldn’t dream of doing what I’m accusing him of.
“I can’t talk right now,” he says curtly when he picks up the phone, doing nothing to allay my fears.
“Well, you don’t have a choice,” I say.
“Just give me a minute,” he says. I think he’s talking to me until I hear a woman’s voice saying, “OK.”
A spider moves across the floor toward me and I wonder if it’s coming to claim its prey.
“What is it?” he asks, a few seconds later. “I’m right in the middle of something.”
I briefly allow my suspicious thoughts to wonder what exactly he’s up to, but pull myself back.
“The police have been here with a search warrant,” I say, leaving it there, waiting for a reaction.
There’s a loaded silence at the other end of the line.
“And?” he says, finally.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say anymore.”
“That you’re there for me,” I snap. “That no matter what the police keep throwing at me, you’ve got my back.”
“I’ve got enough to deal with, without this,” he says, selfishly.
“You make it sound as if this is my problem—that you’ve got nothing to do with it.”
“Isn’t that so?” he says bluntly.
“They know Jacob was at the Royal Garden hotel,” I say, betting he hasn’t got an answer for this one.