Trespassing(80)

“Most of us have some sort of issues.”

“True.” I take in the span of the beach. The moonlight reflecting off the waves. The foam of the tide lingering on the sand. The boats lolling at the pier. I scan the names lettered on the hulls: MERMAID, JOANIE, AZUL . . .

Blue. “Micah used to say friends were silver and gold,” I continue. “Ironic because we didn’t hang out with anyone. Never got close to anyone. I had friends when I was younger, in high school, but they were up here”—I float a hand at eye level—“on the surface. I couldn’t afford to get close because of how things were with my mother.”

Realizations hit me like a roundhouse kick across the jaw.

“That’s why Micah chose me,” I say slowly. “He couldn’t have pulled this shit on Natasha. He needed someone vulnerable, someone broken.” I meet Christian’s gaze.

Micah needed someone who could fall into him to the extent she’d lose herself.

And I most certainly did that.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Christian says.

“No, it’s true. I’d just been through a god-awful few years with my mother, and it was always just Mom and me. And . . . she wasn’t well. My mother . . . she wasn’t normal.”

“How so?”

I’m going to tell him, I realize. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or maybe it’s just that not telling Micah everything didn’t exactly work out as expected. I never told my husband the whole story. He never knew Mom had attempted an overdose. He never knew she’d tried to blame me when her attempt failed. He doesn’t know about the very bitter end, either, because I didn’t know how to broach the subject; and it turns out he didn’t know how to tell me a lot of things, too. But I take a seat on the beach and allow myself to enter the twisting, coiling corridors of my history. And I begin to tell him what I lived through.

It happened slowly. So slowly that I can’t pinpoint a moment when I knew she was different. But it started with the jewelry.

“The jewelry had faces. Those faces had mouths, and when those mouths opened, the most terrible thoughts were spoken, but only Mama could hear them.”

It’s all so vivid, as if I’m spiraling through dimensions of time and space, and I’m there again, or she’s here.

The ocean becomes a window.

The waves are the table at which she worked so diligently on the beautiful pieces of artwork that wormed into her brain like parasitic assassins.

And I feel her all around me, whispering:

He wants me to kill you, kill you, kill kill kill kill . . .





Chapter 43

Christian’s fingers curl around my hand. “You poor kid.”

“I’d try to explain it to her,” I say. “I’d remind her that she made the jewelry, that the jewelry wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t meticulously placed every crystal into every prong. The jewelry couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do, but eventually, I guess I realized that she did want to do it. I wasn’t enough for her. I couldn’t bring her back when she’d already gone off the deep end.”

I see her drowning in my mind, slipping deeper and deeper into the tub, while the water overflowed, creating a freshwater sea over the hexagonal ceramic tile, splashing against the pink pedestal sink.

I’m so deep in the memory that I feel the lukewarm water soaking from the hallway carpeting into my thick, cotton socks as I near the bathroom door, hear the splash of the overflow as I step onto the tile.

“I found her,” I say. “They say I saved her life. I pulled her out of the water, gave her mouth-to-mouth . . .”

My fingers pressed into my mother’s soft, waterlogged skin—she felt like a velveteen sponge—as I fought against the weight of her and lugged her out of the tub. She landed facedown with an enormous, thundering thud. But I’d gotten her out in time, breathed life back into her.

I’d wrapped her in blankets and rocked her, barely conscious but breathing, until the paramedics arrived.

They praised my efforts. Called me a good girl. Thanked God I’d gotten there in time.

But she hated me for it. The voices hated me. They hated the doctors who prescribed the medicine to silence them. They knew how to play the game. Stay quiet, stay hidden until the doctors let her go home.

I’d told them about the voices, but Mama denied it. The doctors turned their microscopes on me after that. Mama lied for those voices. She chose to honor the voices, even if it meant sending me upriver. I think they knew something was wrong in her head, but as it turned out, there wasn’t enough time for them to diagnose it.

“It was almost as if she wanted them to think I was crazy. She wanted them to think the voices were in my head, that it was my sickness that drove her to what she used to call a simple case of the blues. She accused me of letting the water run in the bathtub that day. She said she’d fallen asleep after drinking a tea I’d given her.”

“You gave her tea?”

“I wasn’t even there, but she planted the seed. They did toxicology tests, to see if I’d drugged her, and they found traces of a sleeping pill. She said I’d turned on the faucet with the intention to drown her. She said I’d saved her because I had second thoughts about killing her.” I shiver with the memories, but I’m too numb with them to cry.