I turned. Doro, her face twisted in an ugly sneer, was charging at me. I swung the cup, and it clanked, connecting with her skull. She staggered sideways, a spray of blood arcing from her face. I pounced again, aiming for her nose, and connected. She howled and skittered back.
I turned to check Frances. The mare had clopped up to her, stopped right beside her still form and dipped her head. But my mother wasn’t moving. In front of me, Doro was staggering to her knees.
“It has all our blood on it now,” she said, panting. “Kimmy’s blood and Frances’s. Mine.” She grinned. “Yours.” She nodded at my hand. I’d cut myself and was bleeding now too.
I pictured myself smashing the cup on her head. Cracking her skull with it. I could grab the shotgun and blow a hole through this crazy woman. My mother.
A shadow moved behind the jagged mission wall. I remained motionless, then it moved again, and a man stepped into the weak light. Rivulets of blood from the stray shotgun pellets ran like tiny, gory, dark-red ribbons down his face and neck.
I froze.
The shadow lifted his clasped hands, tilted his head slightly, and squeezed the trigger of a black-and-silver pistol.
The bullet ricocheted off the stones to my right. He fired again, and this time I heard a strange thudding sound, and Doro collapsed. I stood, paralyzed, waiting for something else to happen. For her to jump up and whirl and attack again. She looked so normal, lying there just beyond the fire ring—with her green bikini top and frayed jean shorts. But then I saw the pool of blood under her head.
The cup clanged on a log we’d been sitting on and rolled to a stop in the sandy grass. Billy stepped over the rubble of stones and looked down at Doro. Then me.
“You were a difficult baby,” he said in a monotone. “You wouldn’t breastfeed. You wouldn’t sleep. Cried all the time.” He knelt beside Doro, and his voice gentled. “It was what we did to the foals rejected by their mothers, to put them out of their misery. I shouldn’t have been surprised it was what she thought to do to you.”
I felt the heat, the tears, the horror rise up in me. I covered my mouth with my hands to keep myself from vomiting.
“I followed her down to the middens and saw what she meant to do. But I pushed her and she missed . . .” He cleared his throat. “Mostly. You were bleeding, though, from a couple of the pellets, and I knew the situation was bad. I took you, got the cup, and ran. Crossed the sound. I couldn’t think what to do. I couldn’t take you to the hospital. If anyone saw your little leg torn up the way it was, they’d get the law involved. You know what they do to a person who takes a shotgun to a baby?” He shook his head, swallowed heavily. “So I called Frances. She had the means to take you. And I trusted her. I knew, for her own reasons, she would keep the whole situation quiet.”
“You told Frances you would drop the lawsuit if she took me,” I whispered.
He nodded. “We came to an agreement.” His jaw was working now, shuddering with the pain, and his chest heaved.
“She told me she thought Doro killed Kim Baker, right when she got here.” Even as I said it, I could hardly believe it. “She was telling the truth. She knew it all along. Both of you did.”
And then it all made sense. Why Frances couldn’t tell me who I was. She would have had to admit her appalling litany of sins—that she had always suspected Doro, but instead of reporting her suspicions to the police, she wrote a book about it. Then, when she realized her reputation—and millions—were at risk, she took me to keep the story quiet.
I backed away—from the cup, from Billy and Doro, then remembered Frances was behind me. I ran and knelt over my mother. Lowered my ear to her mouth.
“She’s breathing,” I said to Billy. “We need to call for help.”
But he’d already lain down beside his daughter. His head was turned toward her, and his eyes had gone unfocused and glassy with shock.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 20
Kitten slipped between crumbled arches and crawled under a tunnel-like pile of rocks until she reached a small, shadowy room in the center of the mission ruin.
Herb and Delia, slumped together against the rock wall, head to head, appeared to be posing for a family picture. They were not. Their mouths and chins and clothing were stained purple from where they’d been sick, deathly sick from the berries Kitten mashed into their jam.
Kitten put the ashtray in Herb’s lap and arranged his hands around it. She sat back. Imagined his voice: “When you were born the moon and the sun met in the sky, and the four directions each blew their winds, all at once.”
Her voice answered. “This island is mine, Father? Really?”
“Of course, my little Indian princess, every square mile. Created for you by the Maker of Breath. But we’ve forgotten our poem. Why don’t you start us off?”
A child’s voice carried through the mission, high and clear and full of promise.
You tell me a story,
You weave me a tale.
But I travel alone
Down the dark, twisted trail.
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Ready?”
“Yes . . . No. I don’t know.”
“We can leave. Right now. There’s a cab behind you.”
“No. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
As I walked into Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, Edgar’s old haunt, silence fell, and the sea of people parted. Eyes focused like lasers, and a murmur, low but insistent, rose around the wood-paneled edges of the room.
The launch party for the fortieth anniversary of Kitten had been underway for at least an hour, but my entrance managed to record-scratch everyone into stunned silence.
Koa stood beside me. He was wearing a dark suit—tailored in all the right places—which made him look like a movie star. A gorgeous, nearly bald movie star. The doctors had shaved off all his hair in the process of reattaching his scalp, and a scar, shaped like a crescent moon, glowed red against the pale skin and brown fuzz.
But it was me the people were staring at. I didn’t feel a single pinprick—I hadn’t had an episode in weeks, thanks to the surgery that removed the two pellets of birdshot in my ankle and the continued chelation. But I still felt a knot of dread in the pit of my stomach. I briefly considered running out of the place and never looking back.
I inhaled shakily and let Koa guide me across the room to my mother. I air-kissed Beno?t, then hugged Mom, trying to avoid the wound still healing on her back. She pressed her face against mine, hard, her lips to my ear.
“You’re here.” Her voice was fervent with gratitude.
Yes. I was there, with my mother. Because in the end, I was Megan Ashley, daughter of Frances Ashley. I was making peace with it. We both were. Even while the real world raged around us.
And, my God, how it raged.