Confidential(70)

How proud Dr. Baylor would have been. I was so in touch with my anger.

I pulled up in front of my house, and I blinked. Was that a mirage?

No, it was my mother, on the front steps. She stood up and waved. She looked so gray in her hair and in her pallor. So old. But it was my mommy.

I ran to her, and she held me as I cried. “I’m so sorry,” she said over and over. She thought she’d done this to me. But I knew I’d done it to myself.

Finally, I was cried out. We sat down on the steps. “I’d invite you in,” I said, “but I have roommates.”

“We could go out to eat.”

“I don’t think I can eat.”

“I made you a pie. Apple rhubarb.” She patted the paper bag I hadn’t noticed.

She’d disappeared for months, refused to answer any of my calls or texts, and she’d brought me pie, like that was supposed to make it all okay?

But it was my favorite, and I really could have used pie right then.

Like she could hear my thoughts, she pulled it from the bag, removed the cellophane from the top, and handed it to me, along with a fork. I devoured it, which was both a stalling tactic and a comfort. She was a great baker. It was something she’d taken up after her recovery, and during my elementary school years, the house had smelled heavenly.

“I wanted to reach out to you sooner,” she said, “but I didn’t know what to say. I was having so many feelings; I didn’t know how to sort them. Feelings about you, and about Adam, and about me and my role in all of it. I was having to rewrite my whole life, if that makes sense.”

I certainly understood about rewriting, and about too many feelings to sort. But I just kept eating and let her keep talking.

“Not for the first time. The truth is, before Adam got sick, before he made his big confession, we were already in trouble. Things had been deteriorating for a while.” So that was why the house looked like that. “I’d found out that there were a few other women, and he swore it was nobody serious, so I was trying to forgive him. When he started losing weight, I thought it was guilt eating away at him. Once he got the diagnosis, it sounds so stupid, now that I know what he did to me all those years ago, but I panicked at the thought of losing him. It reactivated all my love for him. He seemed like he was giving up, refusing the chemo, and I was trying so hard to keep him alive. And then he told me the first time he cheated on me had been with you.”

I put my fork down. I was bloated and sick.

“I went back over everything, dredging up all my old memories. I should have seen what was happening back then, but to tell you the truth, I had no idea. Zero. As in, not one suspicion. Not even when you started to pull away from me. I just thought it was teenage hormones. I thought it was developmental. You know, like teenagers aren’t supposed to be as close to their mothers as you and I were.”

She was right; we had been. Until Adam, we used to talk for hours, and cuddle, and laugh. We were the envy of every other mother/daughter pair we knew.

“My friends with older children said that’s just how it was, that I needed to let go and let God, like they say in the meetings, and you’d find your way back to me. But the distance remained, long after you grew up, and I still didn’t get it. I just thought you stopped liking me or something. I didn’t know, and what I realize now is that I never asked. I was too afraid to hear the answer.”

“Because on some level, you did know.” If not about Adam, then about what one of her dealers had done to me all those years ago.

“No. I didn’t. That’s what I mean about going back over my story, over all the stories. I’m looking for moments when I overruled my own intuition, but they’re not there. I wish they were, believe me. But I was just oblivious, and that’s the worst part. Denial would be preferable to this kind of blind ignorance. To being so disconnected from you that I had no idea you were being abused by someone I’d brought into your life.”

Tears pricked my eyes. “Adam wasn’t the first,” I said.

“What?”

“When you were still using. When I was five or even younger. I’m in therapy, and I’ve uncovered all these old memories. I used to hide in my closet when we were home. But there was this one man, and you’d take me to his house with you, and there was nowhere to hide.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh God,” she moaned. Then she was the one shaking and crying. I should have reached out to hold her like she held me, only I couldn’t do it. I hated that some part of me wanted her to hurt, but I couldn’t deny that it was there.





CHAPTER 55





FLORA


“You want to know how I’m doing? You really want to know?” Kate demanded.

“Yes, of course I do. That’s why I’m asking.” It really was. This was my first night in my own bed since the mugging. I had curled up and called Kate, hoping that we could push past the bullshit chasm and just be friends—be family—again. “I don’t want to fight with you. I love you.”

She snorted. “Yeah, you’ve been acting like it.”

“Things have been tense since you came out here, that’s true. You hate my boyfriend.”

“It’s bigger than that. I think he’s a monster.”