Mothered (58)
Her mother sounded so appropriately doleful; it was unnerving. Grace inspected the feathers. They could’ve been from any pillow, from any time.
“These could be from anything.” A shiver convulsed her spine. The feathers were creepy. The conversation was creepy. Her mother was creepy. I’m living with a crazy woman. “Hope died from pneumonia.”
“Hope had pneumonia. That wasn’t how she died.”
“Mom.” The pity she’d felt was curdling. Even if her mom was senile or had some sort of brain tumor, that didn’t excuse what she was saying. “I didn’t . . . You have no right to say—to accuse me of something like that. I loved my sister!”
“I know you did. I know you loved her. When you were younger, I thought it was good that you locked it away. That you had no memory of it. I considered myself at fault too. You should never have been her caretaker. I was glad you could grow up, have a life, free of the trauma of what happened.”
“Mom—this is insane! I couldn’t forget that! You’re suffering some sort of—”
“You didn’t forget,” Jackie said, so certain of herself. “You repressed it. I don’t know what I expected when I came here, who I thought you would be after all this time. But I’ve learned . . . I see how unsettled your conscience is. Between the sleepwalking and the lying—”
“I don’t sleepwalk!” Grace wasn’t sure that was true. But she didn’t have the option of denying her fabricated personas.
“When it happened, I thought it might have been an accident—a fit of anger. Something made you snap and you didn’t mean to do—”
“I didn’t!”
“But I’ve been wondering more and more, as I’m getting to know you better, if you meant it. And I’m not without sympathy—I know I bear some responsibility for what happened. There were things I couldn’t deal with then—financially, emotionally—but I’m a different person now. You’re torturing yourself and you don’t even realize why. You’ve locked it all away so tight.”
“This is absolute bullshit.” Grace scooped up the fallen feathers. As agitated as she was, she still handled them delicately. Reverently. She secured them back in their box.
“Grace, I want to help you.”
“Help me?” Bile roiled in her throat like she was going to vomit. She thrust the box at her mother. Jackie accepted it and held it tenderly on her lap—bringing to mind the unwelcome image of a funeral, of a mourner cradling an urn of cremains.
“Help you face the truth,” said Jackie. “Set you free. So you can truly live the life you want. I shouldn’t have let it go this long.”
With every passing moment, tandem in this whirling delirium, Grace became more convinced that the pouty, petty, nasty version of her mother was the real one and the composed, sympathetic, reasonable-sounding Jackie was artificial—a persona, as well developed as Grace’s, that existed for a more malignant sort of manipulation.
“Mother. This cannot possibly be the truth. Someone would’ve known. Someone would’ve been arrested. Probably you.”
Jackie shook her head, unflappable in the face of Grace’s denials. “I saw the signs. The petechial hemorrhaging. Her bloody nose. Blood on the pillow. And when the EMTs arrived, they knew me, from the nursing home. Ambulances came to the nursing home practically every day. And I explained about Hope’s cerebral palsy. And the pneumonia was real—she’d just been to the doctor. But I told them she’d gotten stuck against her pillow, after a spasm or a seizure.”
Now it was Grace’s turn to shake her head. Her mother’s story rolled effortlessly off her tongue. But so could the lie of a demented person. Yet there was something so simple and logical about her mother’s claim: Hope very easily could’ve died that way.
“Is that what happened then?” Grace demanded. “She suffocated herself?”
“Oh Grace.”
“Do not oh Grace me! You just provided a perfectly realistic explanation!”
“What I provided for the EMTs was a lie. To protect you.”
“You’re just fucking with my head. Get out. Get the fuck out.” Though Grace pointed across the hall, she really wanted her mother out of her brain, out of her conscience. Out of her house.
Jackie tucked the chair back under Grace’s desk before wearily heading for the door. She stopped there, not quite ready to leave.
“Out!” Grace bellowed.
“Don’t you even want to ask? How I knew it wasn’t an accident?”
“No.”
“Her bloody pillow. You set it above her head, not under it. Before the EMTs came, I put it back and rolled Hope onto her side.”
“Get. Your lunatic ass. Out of my room.”
“I was protecting you.”
A murderous rage swept over Grace. It wouldn’t help her claims of innocence if she started hurling things at her mother or flung her down the stairs. She felt the flame licking its way along the fuse. Jackie must have seen it too—a bomb about to explode. Her eyes widened, and she nimbly backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
“You’re making me insane!” Grace’s skin was on fire. She pulled at her hair, screaming in frustration, hoping the slaughtering noise of her own despair would extinguish her boiling emotions.