The Girls I've Been(88)

I’ve known about the appeal since the start of the summer. Lee and I had a fight about it. She’d wanted to run then and there. I wanted to wait and see. No. That’s not exactly true. I want to wait and fight. That’s who I’ve become.

That’s who loving and losing and then making Wes family has made me. That’s who loving and keeping Iris has made me. Maybe not hopeful, but determined.

“Natalie, he will kill you.”

“And you’ll help him, won’t you?” I ask, looking at her dead-on, wishing it was different. “When it comes down to it, you’ll do whatever he asks.”

She looks away. Her shrunken chest rises and falls in deep breaths. I can see her collarbone jutting out from under the khaki scrubs. She’s thinner in here. And not in the cultivated gym-rat way she’d been when I was a kid. In a the food’s shit, sleep’s shit, everything’s shit kind of way.

“Baby,” she says, her voice breaking, and it’s the answer, even if she doesn’t want it to be. A woman torn, that’s my mother’s constant state. Teetering between her daughters and her man, between good and bad, true and fake, love and hurt. She is all blurry lines and bad ideas, and too drawn to danger. I hate how much I see myself in her, even now.

But her loyalties are not with me, no matter how much I wish they were. And my loyalties are not with her, no matter how much she wishes I’d fall back into her hold.

“I have to survive. I’m in here a long time because of what you did.”

I let out a laugh. “You’re in here because of what you did. You let him put shell companies in your name and laundered money through them. And you refused to turn on him even after he pointed a gun at you.”

“You always antagonized him—”

“Bullshit.” I bark it, and I sound so much like Lee, I think it startles her. She flinches in her seat. “You can’t con me anymore,” I tell her. “You have nothing left to teach me. How does it feel to realize that I didn’t only outsmart you, but I outgrew you . . . at twelve?”

“I’m so damn proud I can hardly stand it,” she snaps, and it’s this bolt of truth between us, shearing our anger in half. “You are everything I wanted you to be. Everything I raised you to be, and everything you have to be. But you won’t be anything if you don’t run. You’ll just be dead.”

“Fuck you.” And I want to snarl it, but it comes out in a sob. She’s just said everything I’ve ever wanted to hear from her, but it doesn’t mean shit anymore, because she’s going to go to him. She’s going to tell him everything I said, and if he gets out . . .

That’s it. That’s it.

“You and I are the same,” she says. “You should be able to understand why I do what I do. You and I, we survive. No matter what life throws at us. We find a way. I know you’ll find a way. Just like I did.”

“Life didn’t throw this shit at me, you did. You made me like this. You brought him into our life. You brought all of them into our life. We aren’t the same. I would never do what you did.”

“But you did,” she says. “You chose yourself, baby. You left me behind, with the Feds coming in. I would never have done that to you.”

“Yeah, you just let me get beaten in the name of love and molested in the name of the con.”

Her chains scrape against the ring on the table. I’ve never said those words out loud. Not to her, at least. I’ve said them to my therapist and . . . well, that’s it. Just Margaret. Lee knows because it happened to her, too, Wes read between the lines of all the stories, and Iris I told in the way girls sometimes tell each other. But those words, that bare truth, they are hard to say just like that . . . out loud, and I was taught to be quiet. It’s harsh, and I was taught to soften my words. It hurts. Me and her.

“As soon as I realized—” Her recovery is so damn swift, like she’s had it ready this entire time.

“Stop,” I say. I order it, because I’m afraid if she continues, it’ll spill out of me: the stories Lee told me, about the con that came before the sweetheart con. I can’t. They’re not my stories. And I think I might kill her if the words exist in this room between us, and I can’t, I can’t. (Some of me wants to, for Lee, for myself.)

“You know what I did to get us out of Washington,” she hisses.

“Too little, too late.”

“That’s—” Her mouth flattens, her lips nearly disappear. My skin crawls, terrible little shivers up my spine. She’s angry. Not remorseful. Not guilty. No, just pissed that I even brought it up.

I want Iris’s hand in mine, squeezing tight. I can almost feel it, I want it so bad. I nearly close my eyes, imagining it. But I steel myself instead.

“I came here to deliver a message,” I say. “I want you to tell Raymond something for me.”

She raises an eyebrow, expectant.

“If anything happens to me, there aren’t just people who will make sure certain items on the thumb drive go to the FBI. I wrote an entire program that’ll trigger if I die. All that blackmail material he spent so much time gathering and dealing in will flood the market, and it’ll look like he’s the one selling it. Do you think he’ll survive long in or outside of prison then? Do you think you will?”