Angela groaned and buried her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry. They are awful. We’re awful.”
Leah waved that away. Though her tone was light, Angela thought she looked pale and strained. Just the pregnancy? Or the stress of being in the vicinity of a murder of Drakes?
“It’s fine. Are you the only Insighter your family’s produced?”
“Well, so far. We’re not all done having kids yet. Heck, some of us haven’t even started. You and Archer are way ahead.”
Leah put a hand on her stomach for a moment. “Yes, well. It’s not a contest. Or a race.”
Angela snorted. “Good thing, because as far as I can tell, your fiancé is the only actual adult in the family. Besides my wrongfully convicted uncle . . . No, wait, he frequently throws ‘I’m not speaking to you, so don’t you dare come visit’ tantrums, so I stand by the original assessment.” Who would have thought?
“Paul was telling me about his girlfriend—”
“Oh, that . . . that won’t last. He goes through women like a cat goes through cat litter. A short cat.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Not for a while.” She held up a hand, traffic cop-style. “And before you say anything, it’s not the work and it’s not the murder. I’ve got other priorities, is all. So when I do date, they don’t get my obsession and I don’t get their ‘but tons of people get murdered every day and this happened ten years ago, so can we fuck now?’ indifference. Or the Horde runs them off. Usually both. It’s too exhausting to fix.”
“‘Fix’?”
“Look how we live.” She made a gesture encompassing the house. “More than a half dozen people in a 2400-square-foot house. Most of us are legal adults. None of us have lived away from home for very long. Or if we do, we always come back. Archer was the first who didn’t. And before you blame my mom—”
“I wasn’t going to,” Leah said mildly. “Though it’s interesting that you immediately went there.”
“It’s not just that she’s . . . y’know, shattered.”
“Is she? Forgive me, because I haven’t known any of you very long, but her grief . . . it’s almost vengeful in nature.”
“That’s just how she grieves. You didn’t, uh, pick anything else off her after you shook her hand?” Like—ha-ha!—maybe she was the killer? Or knew who was?
Bad path to go down, so Angela got back on track. “Our mom doesn’t want to be alone, and if it was just that, we could fight. But we don’t want her to be alone, either. So we stay and get older and Mom never leaves the house, much less dates, and Mitchell handles the taxes and balances the checkbook and I’m the main breadwinner and Jacky’s the cook and Mom’s a ghost and the weeds grow up on our father’s gr—” She stopped herself. “Sorry. You’re probably as sick of hearing this as I am of talking about it.”
“So you’re all—”
“Trapped,” she finished. “In a very nice cage that we locked ourselves. A comfortable cage with great food where we can be with people we love. But it’s still a cage. Archer grew up. The rest of us are in limbo. By choice, but there it is.”
“But what if you did meet someone? What if you wanted children, what if Paul got married tomorrow?” Leah was leaning forward, her small hands clenched together almost like she was at prayer. “Would you leave? Would your mom? Sell the house and start chapter three of your lives?”
Angela gave Leah a long look. Pale face, dark circles under her dark eyes—so her face was color coordinated, if nothing else. One of Archer’s button-downs. Khaki shorts. Bare feet. Comfortable but tired. Engaged but holding back. Where is this coming from? This is more than getting-to-know-the-in-laws chitchat. “There’s no long-term plan here, Leah. I don’t know what Mom would do if Paul stopped measuring himself long enough to get married. I don’t even know what I would do. Jacky’s going to college in a couple of years and he’s leaning toward the University of Chicago. He won’t consider anything out of state. He won’t consider anything out of Chicago. This is nothing anyone asked him to do. Paul and I flat-out told him he had the grades to go anywhere in the country and we’d support wherever he wanted to go. Mom even weighed in. But as far as he’s concerned, if it’s not within a two-hour drive of the house, it’s off the board. Because he grew up in the cage, you see? So do we kick him out? Force him to go to, I don’t know, UMass? Dad’s alma mater? Or fresh ground, a place that no ever Drake has even been near, help him make his own way? Even if he doesn’t want to?”
Leah leaned back, loosening her grip on herself. “Your mother. When I shook her hand. She’s—”
“Not there,” was Angela’s flat reply. “I know. I had to be around her for years before I figured it out; I don’t get entire lives from a handshake.”
“It’s less fun than it sounds,” Leah said dryly.
“Sure it is.” Still. She couldn’t help being envious, the way a minor league pitcher envied a big league superstar. “But Mom—she’s lived before, like most of us have. At least three lives.”
“Seven,” Leah fake-coughed into her fist.
“Do you live in 1995? Nobody fake-coughs insults anymore.”
“Smart-ass,” she fake-coughed.
“God, stop it.” Whoa. Did I just giggle? I think maybe I did. “But yeah, I get where you’re going: In every life, she’s always alone.”
“In every life she’s alone by choice,” Leah corrected. “Which isn’t the same thing.”
“Choice or not, that’s the reason I can’t leave. I figure she deserves at least one lifetime where she’s not totally abandoned by the time she’s in her forties.”
“So keeping her company . . . that’s the purpose of your life this time around?”
Angela didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing. Leah leaned forward again. “Please listen to me. And forgive me for talking to you like a client, when I’ve got no right to butt into your head or your life.”
Oh, shit. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not, you’re just being polite.” When Angela laughed, Leah smiled a little. “You are. You’re also too hard on yourself, but that’s an inappropriate chat for another day.”
“Oh, boy. Can’t wait.”
The smile was gone. “I have done exactly what you’re doing. It never works out. It never works out, do you understand? The end result is always two lives wasted, and then you’re born again, only this time with a predisposed habit to put yourself second and you spend that life doing the same thing and around and around we go.”
“It sounds like we’re talking about my mom. But it feels like we’re talking about yours.”
“This may sound strange,” Leah almost-whispered, as if confiding a great secret, “but being pregnant has made me ponder mother/daughter relationships.”
“What an odd coincidence!”
“Right? What are the odds?” For the second time in ten seconds, the smile dropped off Leah’s face as if it was never there. “Don’t do it, Angela. You’re not doing either of you—any of you—any favors.”
Angela thought about that for a few seconds, and Leah let her. Finally, Angela said, “Thank you for the advice. I mean that sincerely. But what’s this really about?”
“Mothers and daughters. Families—old ones and new ones. The ones you’re stuck with and the ones you make.”
“Funny you should say that,” she said slowly. “I was giving serious thought to hanging it up earlier this week. Letting Dad’s file go back into cold storage—not that it’s up to me, but you know what I mean—and just . . . letting it all go. Poof!” She waved good-bye to the imaginary file flying off to CCD. “And I won’t lie, the idea of doing that—it was as tempting as it was frightening. Like standing in the doorway of the plane with your parachute, ready to jump. You want to jump, you paid the instructor to bring you up there and you jump, but it’s still scary.”
“Ooooh, metaphor.”