In retrospect, I should have known that it couldn’t be her. Lanie never knocked. But I was too anxious to think clearly, and I raced through the living room, picking my way through the aftermath of my earlier rampage, and yanked open the door.
Poppy Parnell stood on the front porch, her strawberry blond hair professionally blown out, her glasses nowhere to be seen. She smiled a predatory, lipsticked smile, and my stomach sank even before I saw the cameraman behind her.
“Josie,” she said, her voice frothing with enthusiasm.
“Go away,” I barked, trying to shut the door in her face.
“Not so fast,” she said, wedging herself in the door. “I have something I think you’ll want to see.”
“You’re a little late,” I said bitterly. “Didn’t you see our white flag waving? You were right. Warren Cave didn’t kill our father.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the cameraman. “Did you catch that?”
“What is all this?” I demanded. “Adding videos to your website? What’s the point? You’ve gotten what you wanted. Don’t you think enough is enough?”
“Not hardly,” she said, laughing a little. “And, trust me, you want to see this.”
Barely able to contain her triumphant grin, she held up a thick book. It was missing a cover and held together with duct tape, but I recognized it immediately: my mother’s copy of Anna Karenina.
“Where did you get this?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“I have a friend in the LFC.” Poppy smirked. “She found this in your mother’s room and thought you and your sister should have it.”
“The LFC sent us our mother’s things,” I said, confused.
“What can I say? She wanted to make sure it reached you. She sent it to me, hoping I could personally deliver it.” Poppy smiled magnanimously and held the book out to me. “And here it is.”
Sensing a trap but unable to keep myself from falling into it, I snatched the book from her hands.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I couldn’t help flipping through it. Anna Karenina is one of my favorites.” She paused to nod to her cameraman, and then turned to me, her cheeks nearly trembling with excitement. “Look at page 880.”
“No,” I said, my heart beating so fast I felt dizzy. I didn’t know what Poppy was up to, but I would be damned before I was her puppet.
Poppy’s expression flickered, and she yanked the book out of my hands. She flipped the pages roughly, ripping some of them in her haste, and then shoved the open book at me. Cheeks pink with excitement, she stabbed at the page with a finger.
“Look.”
I resisted for as long as I could, stubbornly glaring at her rather than following her orders, but finally a sick sort of curiosity overtook me and I looked down. My heart skipped a beat. The margins of the page were filled with scribbled words, the handwriting undeniably my mother’s.
Darling girls,
Those two words alone were nearly enough to undo me. The edges of my world went black, and I nearly dropped the book. Leaning against the doorframe for support, I took a deep breath and read on.
I write this knowing I will never see you again. There are so many things I want to say to you, but I don’t have the words to say them all, and so this will have to do: I love you. More than I had ever loved anything, and that was why I had to leave you. I loved your father, too, and that killed us both. I beg you not to think poorly of either of us. Your father made mistakes, but they weren’t fatal mistakes, and I shouldn’t have treated them as such. I thought my unhappiness was all his fault, but that was only partially true. Am I being oblique? I’m sorry. I killed your father. I was out of my head. You might think I’m the same way now, but I promise you, I’ve never been so sure of something in my life. You were better off without me, and you’ll be better off with me dead. Take care of each other. Love, Mom
By the time I finished, my legs were trembling so badly I could barely stand. We had thought she hadn’t left us a goodbye note, but she had. More than that, she had left us a confession. I pictured my thin mother, sitting in a dark room at the commune, hunched over the worn book, pouring her guilty heart out into the margins, and I had to gulp back a hot wave of tears. I ached for the power to turn back time to when things had gone wrong for us, to stop my father from straying or at least to force my parents to confront each other, air their grievances before they mutated into lethal jealousy.
“Tell us how you’re feeling, Josie,” Poppy said, her smile almost leering.
“You disgusting vulture,” I whispered. “Get out of here.”
The cameraman stepped from behind Poppy to zoom in on my face.
“Get out of here!” I screamed, lunging forward, covering his camera lens with one hand and shoving it downward.
“Jo?” Caleb asked, jogging into the entryway just as I slammed the door on Poppy and her one-man entourage. “What’s going on out here?”
I broke down in sobs, and collapsed on his shoulder.
After holding my sister without charging her for more than twelve hours, it took only fifteen minutes for the police to release her once they had seen the copy of Anna Karenina. Even I, who had stormed into the police station nearly incoherent with rage—at Poppy Parnell, at my mother, at my sister, at everyone—was surprised by the relatively quick turnaround. After I had slammed the book into the hands of a poker-faced police officer and explained what it was and how it had come to be in my possession, I had been directed to a small, windowless room. I wasn’t sure if it was an interrogation room or a waiting room, and the officer who showed me inside slipped away before I had the presence of mind to ask him. I sat on a molded plastic chair under buzzing fluorescent lights, aggressively picking at my cuticles and ignoring calls from Aunt A and Caleb, both of whom thought I shouldn’t have gone to the police station alone. I expected to sit there for an hour or more and halfway wished I hadn’t relinquished the book so I would have something to help pass the time, but it wasn’t long before a different officer escorted my sister into the room.
I couldn’t help but gasp at her appearance: under the harsh lights, she looked like death barely warmed over. Her hair clung greasily to her scalp, her complexion was sallow, and her under-eyes were a sunken, bruised purple. A capillary had broken in her left eye, leaving her iris swimming in a sea of bright-red blood.
“I wouldn’t leave town until that handwriting can be authenticated,” the officer gruffly warned Lanie. He cast a hard look at me. “You, either.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lanie sneered as he walked away, handcuffs jangling from his belt.
“You look terrible,” I said.
“Trust me, I feel even worse.” She grimaced. “Let’s get out of here.”