“Already did.” She waves the food away, her eyes glued on the old tube TV in the corner and one of her daytime soaps. I’ll bet she couldn’t tell me what the show is called. And she’s lying about eating. She lives off of melted cheese sandwiches and, when she does remember to eat, I come home to a counter of bread crumbs and torn-apart slices of bread, and a fire-conducive layer of processed cheese in the toaster oven. Today, the countertop is exactly as I left it after cleaning up last night.
Mom has always been thin but she’s a waif now, her dependence on hard drugs gripping her, leeching away fat and muscle, leaving nothing but sallow skin and bones, stringy mud-colored hair, and hollow cheeks where a striking face once resided.
I’m not going to fight with her about eating though, because you can’t reason with a heroin addict and that’s what my mother has become.
“I’m gonna get some sleep. Don’t burn the place down,” I say between mouthfuls, moving toward my bedroom. At least there’s a fan in there, and I know enough to tuck towels under the door to keep the stench of smoke from overwhelming me.
“Jackie Marshall’s dead.”
That stops me in my tracks. “What?” I would have thought she’d lead with that news.
Mom uses her hand to mimic a gun and points her index finger at her temple. “She put a bullet in her own head. So they say, anyway.”
Jackie Marshall. My father’s old police partner and one of his best friends. The woman who turned her back on us when we needed her. The woman my mother is convinced had something to do with framing him almost fourteen years ago.
Apparently I knew her, back when we lived in Austin, in a nice bungalow with a picket fence surrounding it. In a past life. That life ended when I was six, and I don’t remember much from it. Shadows of faces, glimmers of smiles. The echo of a child’s giggle as a man tossed her in the air, before that man stopped coming home.
That old life paved the way for my new one, where I remember a lot of hurt, a lot of tears. And a lot of hatred toward the Austin Police Department and a woman named Jackie Marshall.
“Where did you hear that?” We’re in Tucson, two sprawling states over, and we severed ties when we left, even changing our surname to Richards, my mother’s maiden name.
“It’s all over the news.” She struggles to hold her phone out for me.
My mother let go of reality a long time ago, and yet Texas still has a bitter hold on her. She couldn’t tell you who the governor of Arizona is, but she trolls the Texas news pages like a conspiracy theorist during her lucid moments, keeping tabs for the sake of keeping tabs. Since she stumbled on the news story that Jackie Marshall had been named chief of the Austin Police Department two years ago, that vicious obsession has grown.
So has her drug addiction.
I’m surprised she’s kept up with her scrutiny lately, given how bad she’s getting.
“Austin’s Top Cop Commits Suicide.” I scan the news article from this morning, cringing at the gruesome details. Mom prefers the tabloid newspapers to the reputable ones. She says there’s less political bullshit and riskier truth. They also care little for people’s privacy, it would seem. “Her son found her.” Noah Marshall. Mom says I knew him, too. I vaguely remember a boy, not that I’d be able to pick him out of a lineup.
“What kind of mother does that to their own kid?” she asks.
“A sick one.” I could make a strong pot-and-kettle comment, seeing as I’ve had to rush my mother to the hospital twice for OD’ing, but now’s not the time. “It says she couldn’t handle the pressure of the job.”
“I’ll tell you what she couldn’t handle . . .” Mom’s head more lolls than turns, and she settles haunting, bloodshot eyes on me. “The guilt. The festering kind, that eats you up from the inside out after you’ve betrayed someone.”
Someone like my father.
“Told you. All these years of lying. Of pretending . . . There it is . . . the proof.” Mom’s gaze is once again glued to the TV. “Chief Marshall . . . It’s all caught up to you, hasn’t it.”
“Where’s the proof?” This isn’t proof. That’s the problem—Mom has never once given me a shred of evidence that Jackie or anyone else on the police force framed my father. She just believes it down to her core, because she loved him that much, because she can’t accept the alternative.
When it first happened, she told me that he’d had an accident and wouldn’t be coming home. That’s what I believed, up until I was ten and at the library working on a school project. Curious, I searched his name on the computer. That’s when I saw the articles.
The headlines.
The truth.
I ran home, crying, and confronted her. She told me not to read that crap, that it was all lies, that my daddy was innocent.
Again, I bought her story, because what else does a girl do when her mother tells her these kinds of things? I wanted to believe that my father wasn’t a corrupt drug-dealing cop who got tangled up with criminals.
Then I got older, wiser. I asked questions my mom couldn’t answer. I watched her mental health deteriorate as she embraced her denial full-heartedly. And I accepted that what I want to believe doesn’t matter, because everyone else has gone on living their lives while Mom is stuck in the past. Along with me, in this hellhole, unless I figure a way out.
I’ve long since come to terms with reality: that the evidence pointed to a corrupt cop who got what he deserved. That my father was not the good man she swears he was. That he didn’t give a damn about me or this little family of three, and he deserves my hatred for what he’s done to us, for what has become of my mother, thanks to his greed.
And now Jackie Marshall has to go and kill herself. It’s fodder for my mother’s delusions. As if Austin’s chief of police would be so twisted up with guilt fourteen years later that suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore.
I’d be an idiot to believe that her death has anything to do with us.
I scan the rest of the article out of curiosity. There’s plenty about her fast-tracked career through the ranks to assistant chief, then chief. Jackie Marshall was a “highly motivated” police officer, according to this. Stalwart, focused, career-driven; determined to succeed.
So how does a woman like they’re describing rise through the ranks and then fall apart when she gets to the top?
Near the end, I find mention of her corrupt ex-partner, Abraham Wilkes. To this day, my stomach still clenches—with anger, with humiliation, with pain—when I see that name. I guess even the woman they eventually made chief of police couldn’t fully separate herself from the scandal.
“There’s nothing about a suicide letter,” I note.
“You think they’d let a suicide letter get out?” Mom snorts. “Come on, Grace. I’ve taught you to be smarter than that.” She fumbles for a cigarette, lights it. “God only knows what she would have admitted to in there. They’ll bury it in the official report, like they buried your father. Use some bullshit excuse, find some loophole. Freedom of Information Act, my ass. That’s the way that world works. They made me stay quiet and so I did. But, I know what she helped do.”
“Who made you stay quiet?” I ask the question, though I know I’ll never get an answer. I never have.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them one day.” Her fingers fumble with the charm on her necklace, her thumb running along the edge of the heart—half of a heart, to be specific.
The other half is six feet underground, deteriorating along with my father’s bones.
I can handle being near my mother when she’s high for only so long, and I’ve reached my limit. Plus, the stench of her cigarettes is churning my stomach. Setting her phone down, I quietly head for my room. I shed my shorts and work shirt and dive into my twin bed, the mattress lumpy from age. If I turn the fan on high and lie still, flat on my back, the heat is almost bearable. Maybe I’ll fall asleep.
So . . . Jackie Marshall killed herself last night.
Does it matter? Should I give it a second’s thought?
My dad’s still a corrupt cop who got shot while dealing drugs.
My mom’s still a heroin junkie with one foot in her grave.
And I’m still their by-product, stuck here, in this shitty life.
No, Jackie Marshall being dead doesn’t change a single, damn thing for me.
CHAPTER 4
Austin Police Department Commander Jackie Marshall