The Familiar Dark(12)
“I tried,” I choked out. “I tried hard to do better than you did. I read to her every night when she was little. I never hit her or ignored her. She always had enough to eat, even if it meant I went to bed hungry. I told her I loved her every day.” A wail burst out of me. “But it wasn’t enough. Cal and I are here, we’re grown and alive, and my daughter is dead.” I turned and looked at her. “After everything, you still did better than I did. Go ahead, I guess you can have the last laugh now.”
She shook her head, her eyes soft in a way I barely recognized. “I’m not laughing.” And that was the thing that undid me—not my daughter laid open on a stretcher, not Cal’s voice beside my bed, a kindness from my mother. Shame washed through me. I hated that it was comfort from her that I needed in order to cry. She leaned over and pulled me toward her, and I fell into her lap, buried my face in the dirty denim of her jeans. She stroked my hair while I sobbed, her muffled voice murmuring bits of childhood songs.
She’d always been good at this, waiting until you’d about given up on her once and for all and then reaching out with a tender hand. It reminded me of the few times she’d read to me as a child, tucked me up against her body on the couch and gave different voices to the characters in the secondhand picture book I’d gotten for Christmas. Once, she even made me a mug of hot chocolate to sip while she read. Her rare affection an offering I never could resist, even when I knew better. Because her sweetness was always short-lived, always out of the blue, so you could never predict or count on it. And that made the rest of the hours and weeks and years that much worse. Because you knew she was capable of something more, something different. And you were left always hoping for it, waiting for that rarely glimpsed side of her to show itself. Never quite able to let go.
When I finally pushed myself upright, face swollen and tear-smeared, my mama looked at me. Set down her beer, tossed her cigarette to the side, and held my face between her thin hands. “You were a good mama,” she said, stared at me until I gave a weak nod, and then tightened her fingers until I wanted to pull away, the edges of her sharp nails digging into my skin. “But the time for being good is over,” she said. “The time for bawling and feeling sorry for yourself is over. Do you understand?” This time she didn’t allow for nodding, didn’t give me any room to move or look away. Her cigarette-smoke breath bathed my face and her ice-chip eyes cut into mine. “You’re made of stronger stuff than that. You find him, Eve. Whoever did this. You find him. And you make him pay.”
FIVE
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind had never been one of my mama’s mottos. Her version of justice was less forgiving, more Old Testament. An eye for an eye. Or maybe even a life for an eye. People knew not to mess with my mama. Not unless they wanted far worse than what they’d given. She’d been known to beat the shit out of men twice her size. Had no qualms with fighting dirty or going for the jugular. Once, she’d snatched a fist-sized patch of hair off a woman’s head for calling us white trash. Her advice wasn’t a surprise to me. It was why I’d gone, really. The information about Jimmy Ray just an afterthought. What I’d really wanted was a second opinion to echo the voice in the back of my head. Permission to follow my own worst urgings.
When I pulled up to my apartment, Cal was waiting for me on the steps, bouncing his keys in his hand. “Where have you been?” he demanded.
“I went for a drive,” I said. “I needed to get out.”
He cocked his head at me. “Where did you go?” I could tell he suspected, but I didn’t want to say. Cal’s relationship with our mama was as tortured as mine, but in a completely different way. He had always been her favorite, her shining star, even when she was mocking him or making him feel small. And for his part, he loved her in a way I couldn’t. A way that involved actually being a regular presence in her life. But he also knew her, wasn’t blind to her many and varied faults. And he wouldn’t want me around her right now, not when I was vulnerable to her brand of poison. But if I didn’t admit where I’d been, I knew our mama wouldn’t, either. She liked her secrets. Leverage was always more useful than honesty. Another one of her lessons I’d be wise to remember.
“Nowhere.” I shrugged. “Just driving.”
“I tried to call you. About ten times.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I turned my phone off.” I held up my dark phone as evidence.
I could tell he wanted to press, but to his credit, he didn’t. Probably scared he’d push me right over the edge. “I was worried,” he said finally. “And you need to hurry up and change if we don’t want to be late.”
I stared at him and then down at my threadbare jeans and gray T-shirt. “Why do I need to change? Where are we going?”
He took a step closer to me, his face softening. “Izzy’s funeral, remember? It starts in less than an hour.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”
I didn’t have a black dress, or any dresses, for that matter. I pulled on a pair of black slacks, shiny and cheap, and changed my T-shirt for a plain white button-down blouse with yellowing deodorant stains in the armpits. I scraped my hair back into a ponytail. In the mirror I looked thin and exhausted, my freckles standing out against my pale skin. The scariest part was how easily I recognized myself. As if the woman who’d looked in this mirror every day for the past twelve years had been the imposter and this broken, dead-eyed version was the real me, the Eve who was always destined to reappear.