“Mom, I swear. It’s me. It’s Rosie!”
“Oh, stop it,” Joyce said. “I had to identify Rosie’s body. Do you think a mother doesn’t know her own child? You’re Vanessa Frye, the girl who ruined my family forever, took my child from me.”
“Mom—-”
“Stop calling me that!” Joyce shouted, throwing out a shrill of feedback because the phone couldn’t handle the volume.
Joyce wept, beautiful, melodic, practiced sobs. This was the role of a lifetime for her, and she was giving it her all.
“You left Rosie there alone to die. What did you care? I tried to get the police to go after you, to find you and punish you, but they don’t care about finding a junkie. In LA, they only care about junkies if they’re actors’ children.”
She said those words bitterly, biting them off one by one. Then she broke down crying again.
And Nessa wept with her, remembering that day, remembering her attempts to keep Candy conscious, the foam and blood dripping from her nose and mouth, the half--shut eyes, her soul and spirit so far receded into her body that it would never return. That face had haunted Nessa’s dreams ever since and would until the end of her days. And she deserved that. It should have been her who died that day. She should have taken the first shot.
Her mother said the words that described exactly what Nessa was feeling: “You’re so selfish you didn’t think twice about the trail of devastation you left behind, did you? You just went on and lived your life, your perfect, charmed life.”
Nessa was now crying so hard she could barely see.
“I see that you’ve stopped. You have three minutes to get home.”
Nessa pulled the gearshift into Drive and pulled onto the road again. She tried not to speed, tried to clear her eyes. Lucky she’d driven these roads so many times. She turned off the highway onto the county road that led home.
“There’s no point turning you into the police because the statute of limitations has run out for several of your crimes. For murdering Rosie, you’d only be charged with second degree murder or manslaughter.”
But it had been an accident. A tragic, stupid accident.
“When you get home,” Joyce went on, “I’m going to give you the chance to write about all of this on your blog. You’re going to write a suicide note confessing to Rosie’s murder. And then you’re going to do what you should have done seven years ago. You’re going to kill yourself the same way you killed Rosie.”
Nessa was less than a mile from home now, and she was filled with the desperate and threadbare hope that her own mother would recognize her, would realize her mistake. That it could be true that her mother loved her this much that she would commit murder to avenge her.
“I’ve tried and tried to help you redeem yourself on your own,” Joyce said. “To do the right thing. I set up circumstances that I thought would put enough pressure on you so that you’d self--medicate—-”
“You murdered John,” Nessa whispered into the phone.
But Joyce couldn’t go off--book. “But no matter what we did, you wouldn’t start using again. We called Child Ser-vices anonymously. Sent you the syringe. Put the heroin in your living room.”
We?
But before the word had fully formed itself in her head, Nessa knew who the other half of we was.
BIG on the guitar pick.
Weird eyes. Not just weird eyes, but different. Different from one another.
Heterochromia. One blue eye, one brown.
BIG. Brandon Isaac Gereben.
Her brother.
She had to stop the car again because she couldn’t see, couldn’t handle the steering wheel, she was so racked with sobs. Her brother. Her family. Her blood.
“Don’t stop,” Joyce said. “You have less than ninety seconds to get to your house, and you’re stopping? You obviously care as little about your son as you do about—-”
A roar arose from Nessa’s throat, filling the car and deafening her own ears as she jammed the Pacifica into gear and spun out the tires. It was the roar of a mother lion. The tires threw dust from the dirt road into the air, and the Pacifica fishtailed toward the house as she savagely wiped away her tears.
She raced toward her home and almost plowed into the side of it. Nessa jammed the Pacifica into Park, threw open the door, and ran without closing it or turning off the car. A clock ticked in her mind as she stumbled in the yard, willing herself not to fall or drop the phone, her son’s lifeline.
“I see you’ve arrived,” Joyce said into the phone as Nessa opened the back door. “Welcome home, Candy.”
Chapter Twenty--Four
NESSA WOULD CONVINCE her mother of who she was. She had to. This thought steadied her as she walked inside, until she saw Isabeau dead on the floor.
She covered her mouth with her hands to keep a scream from escaping. Daltrey was in the house somewhere, and she didn’t want to scare him more than he probably already was.
More tears flowed for her only friend since Candy, dead like Candy.