When No One Is Watching(62)
Her eyes are so filled with hurt, a hurt I understand completely—the pain of grabbing a proverbial hot doorknob, pulling the door open, and not being able to let go as your mother’s bad decisions flambé you in their backdraft.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what to do, so I gently pry away the cigarette that’s burned down to the filter and put it in the ashtray before holding her hand.
“I came back after the divorce and she didn’t tell me anything then, either.” Her voice is hoarse, breaking every word so I have to lean in to understand her. “She didn’t tell me anything until she got sick, and then she only told me because she realized how they’d fooled her, stolen all her hard work from her so that it added up to less than nothing. She got mad then, and told me, ‘Don’t you let them take my house. Our house. No matter what happens to me.’”
Sydney’s eyes are unblinking and empty as her gaze meets mine.
“She’s in the garden. Mommy is in the garden.”
Chapter 16
Sydney
I START SHAKING NOW THAT I’VE SAID IT OUT LOUD—I FEEL like I might shiver myself right out of my seat.
I can’t believe I’ve told him. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. Why him?
Mostly because he was there, but maybe because he looks so concerned. Maybe because I’m fucking lonely, and he told me that I’m beautiful and held my hand.
No.
It’s because this secret has been turning me to ash from the inside out and I’ve hit the I’m not feeling so good, Mr. Stark threshold. If I hadn’t told him, I would have been lost.
Theo is still holding my hand, and I expect his grip to slacken but it gets tighter. “Hey. Whoa. What do you mean she’s in the garden?”
“Um.” My throat tightens painfully and I try to breathe through it so I can speak the words that have tied this house I love so much around my neck like an albatross. “She got really sick and—and she didn’t want to be a bother anymore. The money she’d gotten from the people who stole the house was gone so fast with all the medical bills. Her health insurance was shit. My savings went like that.” I snap, or try to but my hands are shaking too much. “We were watching her favorite movie in her bed. Con Air. Con Air! God, Mommy has such bad taste in movies. If I would have known—”
I suck in a breath, caught off guard as I think about the last night with her. How I’d snuggled up next to her too-thin body and kept cracking jokes about how bad the movie was—how she hadn’t told me to stop interrupting, like she usually did.
“That’s an underrated classic,” Theo says calmly, like this is a first date and we’re making small talk. “I grew out a mullet after watching it.”
I sniffle and swallow the tears and the snot and the pain. “She told me she loved me when the credits rolled. She told me that if she died before we were able to get the house back legally, I couldn’t let anyone know because she wouldn’t be able to rest knowing she’d failed me, and any kids I had, and any kids they had. Generational wealth all lost because of one mistake.
“I found her bottle of painkillers empty the next morning. And she was . . . she was . . . There couldn’t be a death certificate, right? Then they’d know. I buried her in the garden that night.”
It hurts thinking about her face so still, her body so . . . empty. About wrapping her up in her favorite blanket.
I jam my fingertips against my forearm and rub—I remember how cold and slack she was beneath my fingers. I can’t stop feeling that memory.
Theo breaks the silence. “You moved her by yourself?”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t need to know about Drea. After that night, we never mentioned it again. And I told her if anyone ever asked, I would never, ever take her down with me, would deny it even if she tried to confess. But it’s been so heavy on my soul. And Drea’s, so I thought. But there’s that check. That check with the name of the company that tricked my mother in the “issued by” area: Good Neighbors LLC.
The lawyer told me that sometimes companies like this give money to a person who helps them convince their marks to sign the house away. But Drea couldn’t have . . . she’d never . . .
Theo stands up and his sneakers squeak on the tile behind me. Maybe he’s going to call the police.
I hear the fridge door open and the snikt of a bottlecap being twisted off. He places a bottle of water in front of me, sits back down, pulling his chair slightly closer to me. His right arm is along the back of my chair, and his gaze is locked on my face.
“Drink the water.” He waits until I pick up the bottle and take a sip, urges me to take another, then says, “So your mom . . . died. And you buried her in the community garden?”
I nod, waiting for him to tell me the thing that keeps me up at night: what an awful, evil daughter I am. How I failed her. Buried her like a dog, and didn’t even give her soul the chance to have her memory honored and celebrated. I’m not religious, but I wonder all the time if I’ve somehow damned her along with myself.
“Where in the garden?” Theo asks.
The words fall out of my mouth. “Behind the shed. There’s a strip of sunflowers. She’s under them.”
I can’t bring myself to look at him in the long silence that follows, but glance at him from the corner of my eye when I hear him shift in his seat.