Mother May I(32)

I wondered if she knew yet that Spence was dead. She hated him, or so he’d cried to Trey. Would she be sad or relieved? I doubted that Spence had thought to change his will. The police might suspect her of the poisoning, actually, but she ought to be safe. She hadn’t been at the party.

I doubted I’d be a suspect either, if we stayed silent. I’d had no reason to want Spence dead. I still didn’t want him dead. I only wanted Robert.

“I want to wait until nine at least,” I told Gabrielle. “It’s rude to call anyone before that.”

I almost laughed when I heard myself say it. It was so surreal. As if the woman who’d stolen my baby and tricked me into killing Spence would be sitting by her phone, waiting out the clock for the sake of social mores.

A sound came from the coffee table, widening our eyes, stopping our breaths: the buzz of a phone against the antique brass.

I was up off the sofa, reaching, before I realized it was my own. I could see my husband’s handsome face smiling up at me from the lit screen.

“Trey,” I told them.

Marshall blew his breath out, his eyes on me kind and sorrowful, and in his gaze I understood that this was the end of it. The night was truly over, for all the storm was keeping us in darkness. She would not be calling.

I lifted the phone with shaking hands. Once I told my husband, it was real. Not just for me. For the girls. They would never trust anything again with the kind of innocence that they had now. It would change Trey, too, and our marriage. It would wreck my mom and leave Trey’s family reeling as well. I couldn’t see the world very clearly past this moment, but I saw enough to know it wasn’t a place where I wanted to live.

My free hand, of its own volition, pressed the red circle that sent Trey to voice mail.

I was not ready to give up. “She could still call. It’s still morning.” Until noon I would leave the world intact for the people I loved most.

Gabrielle’s voice was gentle. “You have to talk to your husband. He must know about Spence by now. My work-group texts are blowing up. If he doesn’t hear from you, he’ll call friends or family to come check on you.”

She was right. God, if he called Mom! She would panic. She would come straight over and bring the girls. Here, to this house, where the world was as frightening as she had always believed. I didn’t want the girls in this place, where life was dangerous and terrible and we were sheep, sweet and dumb, ready to be preyed on by monsters like the woman who’d taken Robert, or like my father. He was the one who’d made my mom see the world this way.

She’d started dating him when she was fourteen and he was twenty. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school and they got married, left the state. She stayed with him, too, right up until she realized she was pregnant.

“I used to smoke. Did you know that?” she told me back when I was Peyton’s age and asking pushy questions. All I knew about my dad was that he was in prison. She wouldn’t tell me what state, much less the facility. I hadn’t yet connected this information to her nerves, her deep mistrust, her many calls to the police about noises on the roof or at the windows. In my aggrieved adolescent imagination, my father yearned to know me. He probably wrote me long, hopeful letters from his cell. Letters that my mother kept from me, unjustly, the same way she made me keep a chore chart and a ridiculous sunset curfew.

“I don’t see what smoking has to do with it,” I told her, snotty-voiced, one insolent hip cocked at an angle my elder daughter would reinvent and throw at me before her age hit double digits.

My mother shrugged. “A pack a day, for years, right up until the test said I was pregnant. I knew that smoking killed people. It said so right on the package. I’d heard of lung cancer, emphysema. Still, I couldn’t stop. Smoking only hurt me, and I was used to being hurt. My husband made sure of that.”

Her gaze was so serious, her words so calm. She talked to me like I was a person. Not her kid. Like I was some adult she’d met on the bus, and she was telling me some factual information. It made my eyes ache and my mouth go dry.

“He hurt you?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I had nine broken bones before I was old enough to order a cocktail. That was when people could order cocktails at eighteen. Then my period was so late. I took a home pregnancy test. Back then it was all test tubes, and you had to wait two hours. While I waited, I smoked. Chain-smoked, even. I’d just lit up a fresh one when I saw that the liquid had turned blue. I dropped the cigarette in the toilet, and I never smoked again. That blue color said the cigarette wouldn’t only hurt me. It would hurt you. So I flushed it, and then I left your father. He was at work. I knew if I didn’t go, he would beat you right out of me, maybe that very night. I could never be sure with him. I put as many of my things as I could carry into a Hefty bag and hitchhiked all the way to Georgia, to my mother’s house. He never let me have a car. I was pretty sure he would come after me and kill me. He’d always said he would, if I left. I slept on her sofa for weeks with a loaded shotgun right by me, hoping I wouldn’t be too scared to use it. What I didn’t know was, he was cheating on me. He was actually glad to have me gone. He moved the other woman right on in. He loved her more than me, I guess. So much more that she was the one he eventually beat to death. That’s why he’s in prison. Do you have any other questions about when you’re going to meet your dad?”