Burn Our Bodies Down(79)

“Yes,” Anderson says. He shuts his eyes, tips his head back. “But she’s dead.”

Thanks to me. Because I did what had to be done. What my mother taught me to do.

Maybe I should be the one to call her. Maybe I should be the one to tell her I did what she never could.

“Do you need me to give you her number?” I say. “You probably have to call her, right?”

Anderson shuts the folder and looks up at me with a frown. “Who? Your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t have to call her.” He gets up, nods to one of the rooms off the bullpen. “She’s already here.”

I feel half myself as I watch him open the conference room door. As he leads me into the bullpen, my legs unsteady, my hands clutching the blanket. She’s here. She’s here. She left but she’s here.

The room Anderson leads me to is somebody’s office, but they’ve put Mom there. She’s behind the desk, slumped over, and by the number of seltzer cans on the desk in front of her, she’s been there a while.

How long has it been since they took me from Fairhaven? It could be years, or heartbeats.

“Miss Nielsen?” Anderson says, and my mom jerks upright. Circles deep under her eyes, grease thick in her hair. She lurches to her feet the second she sees me. I stare at her close-bitten nails, at the raw skin of her cuticles. A wreck of a person. That’s what she is.

And we’re the same. That’s me, standing on the other side of the desk. And I’m her. And we’re both of us really Vera underneath it all, and I don’t know how to hold that together. I don’t know how to look at Josephine Nielsen and not see my mother.

I bet Anderson expects one of us to say something. But we just look at each other, the promise she made and broke echoing between us.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” Anderson says at last. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

Just a few, I think, and he shuts the door.

“So,” I start with. “Hi.”

Three days ago I’d have done anything before making the first move. It would’ve been so important to me to make her go first. To make her be the one to reach out. It doesn’t matter anymore.

“Hi,” Mom says. She sounds hollowed out, her voice rough. When I found her room empty at the motel, I thought she’d be happy to have left me. That’s not what this looks like.

Maybe it’s a chance to change things between us. After all, she’s not really my mother, not when we’re both pulled from Gram like Adam’s rib.

But then, this is who we are. Mom and me, the imprint of that left in both of us. There’s no changing that. There’s only moving forward.

“You know you didn’t have to come back,” I say suddenly. “I can handle myself.”

Her expression crumples into something too soft. I have to look away.

“I know,” she says. “I know you can.”

“So you can leave.” I shrug. “Tell Anderson I’m fine as I am. I’m almost eighteen anyway.”

A breath of quiet, and at first I wonder if Mom’s considering it. But when I look at her again, it’s something else. She’s biting her lip. She’s nervous.

“No,” she says. “No, I’m here.”

Her hand shakes as she tucks her hair behind her ear, and my chest tightens. Everything about me, Mom and Gram is the same, down to our blood, but this, the way Mom tries and tries to hold herself apart. It’s only hers. Because Gram could do it—Gram did it every day—but it’s hard for Mom, and I can see the work she has to put in.

“Here now,” I say. “Where did you go? When you left the motel?”

“Um.” Another pause. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me. “Rapid City, I think.”

“You think?”

“It’s been…,” she starts before trailing off, looking away. And I hate that I know exactly what she means. “Actually,” she says, so loud it startles me, “I brought you something.” She ducks down behind the desk and comes up with a plastic bag.

I just stare at it. Of all the things we’ve said to each other, all the scenarios we’ve run, I never expected this.

“It’s a shirt,” Mom says, when she realizes I’m not going to open it. She pulls out a giant navy blue T-shirt with Rapid City written on the front in that stylized font they use on postcards.

“You brought me a shirt from Rapid City,” I say. That’s all I have in me. Because she was supposed to stay here. She was supposed to wait. I would rather have had that.

“I know,” she says, deflating. “I panicked. I got a call from your grandmother and I just…I’m not proud of it.”

She sounds so tired. Usually we’d have hit a wall by now, but we’re both too drained to do anything more than talk. Just talk to each other, like people do. Maybe this is what we needed all along.

“I know it doesn’t make up for anything.” She drops the shirt back into the bag, sits down heavily in the desk chair. “I made you a promise, and I broke it. I just wanted to fix it somehow.”

“That would be a first.”

She recoils, and I wait for the warm rush of pride, another point scored, but it never comes. She wanted to fix it. She tried. With Gram, with Fairhaven. She tried to tell me.