Everything You Want Me to Be(68)

“What did you want to tell me about Hattie?”

“I’ve been thinking.” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t remember it when you came to the house. There was too much . . .”

She shook her head, looking like she was willing the tears back so she could get out what she needed to say.

“It was three weeks ago, during Hattie’s spring break. She was supposed to be working on Friday, but when I stopped up at the pharmacy for my pills, she wasn’t there. She’d left in the morning wearing her smock and her name tag. The girl who checked me out said she hoped Hattie was feeling better. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.

“When I went home, Hattie was still gone and she didn’t answer her phone. She wasn’t at Tommy’s or Portia’s. After another hour went by, I went into her room. I usually don’t. Teenagers like to be left to themselves, you know, and Hattie never did anything that made me worry, so I gave her space. But when I still hadn’t heard from her I went in and started looking around.”

She took a deep breath. “It was in her computer.”

“What was?” I asked, wondering if I already knew the answer, but I didn’t.

She pulled some papers out of her purse and pushed them across the desk.

“I printed it before she got home. I’m not exactly sure why. I knew I wasn’t going to show Bud. Hattie was his little girl, his angel. He’s loved that child stupid since the day we brought her home from the hospital.”

The paper was a chart of some kind. On the left side there was a column that said Character and then a bunch of names. I skimmed down until I saw Tommy. Next to the character column were other headings. Under Through line, she’d written Sex and acceptance; under Needs she’d written To be told what to do, to fit in, to slobber all over me; and under the last column, Stage Direction, was Tell him he’s just like Derek. Keep him in social scenes. No more private parties.

“What is this, Mona?”

I looked at a few more. Bud’s Through line was Farm and family. The stage direction for Portia was Talk about Portia as much as humanly possible without puking. Hard not to smile at that one. I’d done a fair amount of talking to Portia lately, myself.

“That’s what I asked her when she came home. She looked sad and a little windblown, red nose and eyes. She’d been outside somewhere. I demanded to know where she’d been and why she lied to her boss. She said it wasn’t any of my business, that she was eighteen and an adult and could do whatever she wanted.”

“Typical teenager.”

“Typical teenager—not typical Hattie. I’d always gotten the feeling that Hattie told people what they wanted to hear. I couldn’t ever prove it before, but a mother knows when her child is putting on a show. I can see their hearts, Greg and Hattie, whether they want me to or not. Hattie was a people pleaser, although I could never quite figure out if she did it because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone or if she just didn’t know what she wanted for herself.

“Anyway, she yanked the computer out of my hands and said it was her property; she’d paid for it fair and square and I didn’t have any right to touch it. Then she stormed off to her room and slammed the door. I followed her in there and told her it was my door, that her father and I had paid for it fair and square, and she didn’t have any right to shut it in my face. Then I asked her about that spreadsheet. I said, what are you trying to do with that? People aren’t characters in one of your plays. She claimed it was just an exercise. Something to help her be a better actress like her camcorder was.”

Mona shook her head, remembering. “I said something like, who do you think you’re fooling? And then she started crying. I went over to the bed and held her for a while, stroking her hair just like when she was little.”

Mona teared up and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “It’d been a long time since she’d let me that close. She was her daddy’s girl. Always kept me at a distance. I never knew why . . . why she did that.

“But that day she needed me. She let me in a little. She cried and I held her and she said that the only person she’d been fooling was herself. I told her to stop thinking about what she could be for everyone else, stop putting on shows and people would respect her for it in the long run.

“She said it was hard to think about the long run, so I told her just what you said to me right now. Take it one day at a time. She had to figure out what she wanted and concentrate on that. I kept talking for a while, just rocking her back and forth and trying to get through to her. It felt like I had my baby girl back for a moment.

“She never told me where she’d been that day and I didn’t push her on it. I didn’t want to break that fragile bond, to have her shut me out again. Now, though . . . now I wonder if she was mixed up in something that got her killed. If I had just made her tell me, or grounded her . . .”

She broke off again and wiped her eyes with the tissue.

“You can’t think like that, Mona. You can’t blame yourself.”

“I don’t blame myself. I blame the murdering bastard who did it. But maybe I could’ve prevented it. Maybe if I’d been more strict with her—”

“She’d have run just as hard in the opposite direction,” I interrupted. “That’s what kids do. It’s how they’re wired at that age.”