“But that night it was Em.” A darkness slipped over his expression. “She was beaten bloody. Makeup smeared across her cheeks, her hair wild and jutting up in spots like it’d been yanked. And some of the blood was dried, like she’d been bleeding for hours before I got there. But I didn’t notice any of that at first, on account of her hands.”
His expression cleared, and I thought he was just excited to tell me the next bit, but he seemed somehow proud as well. “Her hands were coated red, like she had gloves on, but it was all blood on her hands, and none of it her own.” Definitely pride. He was proud of Mum for coating her hands in someone else’s blood.
I couldn’t decide if I should act repulsed or fascinated, so I kept my expression neutral, which seemed to irritate my father. I wondered, though, if he knew my real reaction to his little story, would he understand it? Because under my neutrality, I wasn’t scared or horrified or anything close to what he might have wanted. I was angry.
I didn’t believe my mother could ever have been involved in something like that, but I believed Emily was there. I was sure he saw the scene exactly as he described, but it still seemed like a story about a stranger. The mother I knew wasn’t the kind to go to an hourly motel, much less allow herself to be beaten there and bathe her hands in blood.
And that was why I was angry. There was a time when I wished to know all her secrets. But in the months since Mum had died, I felt like I’d lost track of her completely. She’d somehow become all these different people, most of whom I didn’t know at all. She was this lofty sainted thing to my brothers, more concept “Mother” than actual being on most days. She was a Robin Hood–esque folk hero in the stories Alice had told me. Dad had always painted her as some tragic victim, an abused angel worth destroying everything to avenge. And now I was supposed to believe she was also a battered grifter who killed men in cheap hotels.
Maybe I could have laughed off all those versions of my mother, maybe I could have even forgiven my father for constructing this latest portrayal, but I was losing track of what I knew about her—of who she was before all the pictures and stories and secrets. I wasn’t even sure I remembered my version at all. And I wanted my mum back.
Dad went on with his story about a con gone wrong, and how Emily had to fight for her life and freedom from an angry mark. In the end she’d had no choice but to kill him. That much had been obvious from the beginning of his fairy tale. None of the details mattered, though he seemed to be embellishing the story as much as possible. Especially the parts where he turned himself into Prince Charming, dirty-cop version, who let her run off instead of forcing her to go through the physical exams, evidence collection, and statements that the police would demand from her in order to prove self-defense.
They were supposed to meet at a café on the corner later that night, to make sure they had their stories straight, but she’d never showed.
“Never did ask her why,” my father reminisced.
I let out a gruntish laugh. “Because she was smart enough to realize that you’d end up using it to get something from her.”
The monster returned with a sharp glare. My father clenched his fists and banged one on the table before he came back to himself and realized what he was doing. When he’d calmed down, he said, “We found each other. ?Your mom and I were meant to find each other again.”
I could guess the rest of his story. He saw her at the Tea Dance. She agreed to go out with him to keep him quiet about the dead mark and realized too late what he was. Maybe she even let herself fall in love with him for a time. But I was absolutely sure that it was the threat of jail that made her leave the safety of Alice’s farm and take us back to him when she was pregnant with Freddie. She probably didn’t yet know what he would become, but she knew she couldn’t protect us from him if she were behind bars.
“I barely recognized her, what with her face all healed and all dressed up to play to those pensioners like she—”
“Why am I here?”
“I’m not done with my story.” His words came out a little clipped.
“Why tell me this story? What is it that you actually want?”
“She was all dressed up,” he started again, but I was done. I stood up and he yelled, “Sit!”
I let loose a hiccup of angry laughter and glared at him with clenched fists. “This isn’t fun anymore. Rot in here. Die in here. I’m done with you.”
He sat back in his chair, trying to play at calm with a pose that every feature on his face was betraying. “You’ll be back.”
I laughed again. “You seem pretty confident for a disgraced ex-copper who’s about to shack up with all the criminals he’s sent to jail.”
He smiled. “Won’t happen.”
“You can live your delusions without me.”
“You’re why it won’t happen. Not if you want to see those boys again.”