“So,” her mother went on, as if describing a mundane but arduous task like cleaning out the gutters, “we cut him down. Went in the house, found your gun, shot his corpse and then—-it’s actually harder to make a dead body bleed than you’d think.” She shuddered at the memory. “Anyway. We drove down to the river and put him in the water. We were sure he’d be found, and all the evidence would point to you. The police will discover that gunshots didn’t kill him, but—-well, it’s a moot point now, isn’t it?”
She looked at her watch. “I know you want to know how the story ends—-you never could wait. You always read the ends of books first. Had to know how the movie ended before you’d watch it. So I won’t keep it from you now. The long--suffering mother finds out that, unbeknownst to her, all these years, she’s had a grandson. And now she can be part of the charming, though mute, little boy’s life.”
How heartwarming it would be for the viewers. She could just hear the awwws coming from the audience.
“And his uncle will be overjoyed to discover he has a nephew.”
“But once Brandon realizes—-”
“He’ll get over it,” Joyce said. “I knew it would be easier on him if he thought you were actually Candy. But he knows we need money for treatment. His lymphoma has come back.”
“What?” Nessa said.
“That’s right. If he doesn’t get chemo, he’s going to die.”
“So I have to die instead.”
Joyce looked away from her. “You’re dead already.”
“Mom,” Nessa said. “You don’t have to do this. It’s going to ruin your life and Brandon’s. It’s not going to turn out like you think.”
“It’s going to turn out exactly like I think.”
“I’ll pay for Brandon’s treatment.”
Joyce’s lips curled in a derisive smile. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not going to just swoop in now at the eleventh hour and get to be the hero. Absolutely not.”
“Right,” Nessa said. “That’s your part—-‘hero.’ My part is ‘bad seed.’ It’s ‘black sheep.’ I don’t get to change roles in the middle of the show.”
“What’s done is done.”
Of course. Joyce needed to control everything.
“Mom,” Nessa said. “There’s a problem with your plan. It’s not perfect. Because how are you going to explain that I stayed away all these years? That I never came back to you?”
Joyce’s expression didn’t change.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through in the last -couple of years,” she said. “Once all the work dried up, your brother suffered. The things I had to do to make sure he had his insulin. If you’d have just continued to come home, I wouldn’t have been mad about the heroin. I would have understood.”
A part of Nessa was desperate to believe this. “But I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
“I know, honey,” Joyce said, starting to reach for Nessa’s face, but then pulled her hand back and looked away.
“I just couldn’t do the show anymore,” Nessa said. How could she make Joyce understand? That allowing producers and cameramen and writers watch her every move and comment on it and try to shape it was exquisite torture.
“We did what we had to do,” Joyce said, her expression hardening. “But then you decided to throw it all away, walk away and leave your brother and me with nothing.”
The words themselves were full of Joyce’s patented melodrama. The manipulation, the emotional blackmail, were achingly familiar. But something about the way Joyce said it, in a fragile, tremulous voice, summoned a shocking impulse within Nessa—-to mother her own mom.
“Oh, Mom,” Nessa said, swallowing, hoping that Joyce could hear the authentic emotions behind what she was saying. “I know it’s been hard. Dad screwed you over, no question about it. You got left with a chronically sick kid that you had to take care of and worry over all by yourself. You gave him the injections. You watched his diet, drove him to all his appointments.”
Nessa watched her mother luxuriate in the praise like a cat in a patch of sunlight and realized that she meant what she was saying. Joyce really had been alone. She really had been the only one who took care of Brandon. And she was mentally ill, a borderline personality or a narcissist. What she really needed was help. She was twisted up inside because she’d been abandoned, and she couldn’t protect her children from illness or predators or death.
As a mom, Nessa felt in her heart that her mother, in her own deranged way, had done the best she could. But somewhere along the way, she’d fallen off the deep end, and there was no water in the pool to catch her.
Maybe Nessa only imagined it, but for a moment, she felt like her mother saw her.