Burn Our Bodies Down(57)

“My mom came to get me today,” I say. Turn away from her, stare into the afternoon. It’s easier like this. “I left her in Calhoun to come here. And I didn’t think. I didn’t expect her to show up here. But she did.”

“And?”

“We’re not like you and your mom. I mean, I don’t know your shit, and I know everybody has something, but—”

“I understand,” Tess says. “Don’t worry.”

“She’s everything,” I say, and I knew it, I’ve known it for a long time, but saying it out loud, that’s something else. “And we’ve fucked each other up for a long time, but I guess I thought that under it, somewhere, I was everything too.”

Tess’s hand brushes my arm. The barest touch, like she knows I’ll shy away from any other comfort. When I look over at her, her chin is propped on her knees and her eyes are gentle. Just letting me tell her. Just wanting to know. That’s a gift I could never have known how to ask for.

“And then today,” I keep on, “today she comes back for me and I think I’m right, I think I finally have the proof I wanted.” Until the attic. The boxes. The dress. Yes, she kept me. But the trip to the clinic, the guilt she’s put on me every day of my life—she’s never forgiven me for existing in the first place. The original sin I will never, ever be clean of.

“You didn’t go with her, though,” Tess says.

“No.” Because…I don’t know how to put it. I try anyway. “The thing is, I’m starting to understand a lot more than I did. About her. About why she is the way she is.”

Tess shifts next to me. “But?”

It spills out of me, ungrateful and nasty, and I hate that this is who I am, that this is what I can make out of knowing a person. “Does understanding her mean I have to forgive her?”

Quiet. I reach up, tuck my hair behind my ear and risk a look at Tess. She’s staring out across the fields, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“I don’t think so,” she says at last. “I mean, maybe it helps. But maybe it makes it worse.”

I tip my face up to the sky. Worse, to know that Mom hurt the way I did, that Mom had a mother like I did, and despite all that, to know that she didn’t do better with me.

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”

For a while we just sit there. I can feel Tess’s body going tight next to me, can feel the tension coming off her. She’s thinking about something. I want to ask what, but she just gave me the peace I needed, and I can do the same for her. If she wants to talk, she can. I won’t make her. Not when there’s so much else going on.

And sure, I ran here on nothing but instinct. Not Fairhaven, that’s all I was thinking. Anywhere but there. But I’ve got questions curled in my throat, scratching each other deep as they wait their turn, and Tess can help me put the answers together.

“You get out of the station okay?” I start with.

She shrugs. “I should be asking you that.”

The girl in the morgue, and Connors watching me as I took her in. His face, so unsurprised as I fell apart over Katherine. He knew. But I wonder if that story made its way out of Mom’s generation. If it reached Tess.

“I found out about the fire in the apricot grove,” I say. “And I found out about Katherine, too.” A test, one I’ve given to Gram: how well can you lie when you’re looking right at me?

Tess frowns, her mouth dropping slightly open. “Who?”

“Everybody knows.” My voice too sharp, too near to breaking. “I get it. You don’t have to pretend.”

“No, seriously. What are you talking about?”

I let her sincerity ease through me, let it loosen the knot in my chest. Don’t I know better than anyone how things can be kept over our heads? On the highest shelf, in a locked room. Jo, part of Phalene legend. Katherine, wrapped up and put away.

“My mom’s twin sister,” I say, and the surprise on Tess’s face is real. “I found her name in one of the files, and when I asked my grandmother, she said Katherine died. But she lied to the police. It just…” I drop my head into my hands, press my palms against my eyes. “It doesn’t fit together.”

“What do you mean?”

I mean the girl in the morgue. I mean the way I need a word for her. Sister, or cousin, but neither one works. “Connors showed me the body from the fire.”

Tess tilts her head, sun catching her eyelashes. “What does that have to do with Katherine?”

I think about the diary entry, about the X-ray sketch. How it matched the report at the morgue. “I don’t know exactly. But I keep finding these lines, these things that must tie together. From then to now. Only…”

“Only what?”

“I thought that girl could’ve been Katherine’s daughter,” I say. It feels almost embarrassing somehow. “A cousin. But she looked exactly my age, and even if Katherine had her right before Mom had me, even if Gram somehow kept her hidden here all that time, or even if she just showed up, there was something else weird about her.” I sigh, stare down at my hands. “Her body. She looked…I don’t know. Wrong.”

“Wrong how?” Tess leans forward. “She seemed fine on the highway. I mean, dead, but normal dead.”