She was there, at the crash.
“What did you do?” I shout, the unexpected loss of the possibility she dangled bringing a strange new rush of grief.
Her head jolts up, her pupils wild dark pools of bitterness. “You were the one who was supposed to die. He should be here. With me.”
The woman juts her chin out, the expression on her face shifting from bright contempt into something with softer edges and a deeper, blacker center. Her lips move into the anguished bow of disgust.
And then I see it. The traces of him in the set of her jaw, the cut of her cheekbones. Something snaps into place in my mind.
“You’re Justin’s mother.”
She starts, as if from a stupor, and gives me that feline smile again.
“Legally that’s Jean McBride,” she says, her voice tepid. She takes a sip of her water. My mouth is parched and my head’s begun to throb at the base where she knocked me unconscious. “But I’m Justin’s real mother.” That flash of hot white anger in her voice again. And just as quickly, she settles back into her chair, rubbing her shoulder bones against the wooden slats as she relaxes her body.
Even though I know in every neuron in my body that I need to hold my shit together, I can’t stop the terror from rising up my throat and out of my mouth. “Were you there? Were you there at the accident?”
She absorbs my questions without a single movement or twitch. She’s not worried at all, the truth pings around my skull. I think of Justin, and Jean, and Justin’s dead dog, and my mind works itself over to what I know about the genetics of psychopathy personality disorder. This woman, Justin’s mother, looks as though she could be waiting for her favorite television show to come on, or standing in line at the grocery store.
I can’t find any sign that she is nervous about what she is about to do.
Because I’m certain now.
Justin’s mother is going to kill me.
For the first time in my entire life, I am thrilled to realize that I’m about to throw up. It lands on the front of my sweater, the tops of my thighs, and a few beads settle into the frizzy halo of the woman’s head.
I may have aimed in her direction.
My captor reaches up to touch her hair, a grimace working at her mouth, and then abruptly slaps me across the face with the back of her right hand. A diamond or some other gem cuts into my face, and the warm pulse of blood oozing from my skin confirms that she’s cut me with her ring. I try to straighten my face again, to see the jewel on her finger and what it might tell me about her—whether it might confirm that this house, her car, the outfit she’s wearing, is some sort of persona she’s playing at—but the sleeves of her nasty sweatshirt are longer than her arms and the cuffs naturally lie as cover over the tops of her hands.
“You always were a little cunt,” her voice remains soothing. “Such a grasping, demanding cunt. Always wanting more.”
It’s the word “always” that catches at the corners of my skull. She knows me, I realize. She’s known me for some time.
She’s busying herself with something in her kangaroo pocket, and so I have a few moments to think through the parade of foster parents I had over the years. Bible-thumping charity seekers, barren couples testing the waters of adoption, those just in it for the “easy” money. The ones I can remember, at least, because the first few placements I had are trapped in the supposed trauma-induced amnesia of my placement into care in the first place (or so sayeth Dr. Koftura).
None of them draw a tendon to the woman holding me captive. To Justin’s mother.
But of course, I want to throttle myself, why would she be a foster parent? She had her child taken from her. Think, Morgan. Think!
“I can’t believe I’ve got you here, finally,” her voice cuts in, the sound like sandpaper over stone.
“Who are you?” I ask again, because a name would expedite things in my mind.
“Call me Marlene,” she says, smiling sweetly into my face. “Does that suit you?”
I hold my tongue from saying that nothing about this situation really suits me. Maybe Marlene is right—maybe I am a cunt.
“You said you wanted to help me. In your texts.” I picture the messages from Justin’s phone, the phone that Marlene now has tucked away into her vast sweatshirt. “Marlene, I need your help.” I’m trying to rub the remnants of my expectorant from my cheeks and onto the shoulders of my sweater, but it’s no use. And then, as if to prove that she was some kind of mother, once, she pulls a tissue from inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt and wipes at my face. I jerk away at her touch at first, but she clucks her tongue and tells me to be still.
The tissue is not fresh, and smells of something sour.
“Why should I help you?” Marlene says when she’s finished cleaning my face.
I stare at her for a moment. She turns the broken wicker chair she’s sitting in around, the back facing towards me and her legs spread like a baseball manager across the seat. She leans the billowing arms of her shirt against the top of the frame. As she does so another distinctive crackle emanates, this time from her chair.
I glance around the room and notice a few things I hadn’t noticed before. Sure, there’s her diamond ring, which I can see poking out from the folds of her hands. It sparkles, even in the dim light. Her hair is frizzy, but the color beneath the frizz is a rich auburn that doesn’t occur in the natural world. I think back to her water glass, which wasn’t really a glass at all. It was the bottom of a Nalgene water bottle. Her shoes, beneath the stained sweatshirt and ill-fitting jeans, are new, puffy Reebok sneakers. They are entirely white and without a stain of salt or a scratch from misuse on them.
It’s as though she’s wearing a costume. As though Marlene is playing at being poor.
But why?
“It might be about time for us to move along to the next stage,” Marlene says.
A trickle of ice runs through my chest.
My phone rings.
38
Marlene pulls my phone from her pocket—the never-ending kangaroo pouch—and reads the incoming call. It’s a normal ring, not the strains of Tori Amos, so I know it isn’t Annie.
Annie. My mind stutters at her name. Does Marlene know what I did to Annie?
“Speak of the devil, and he will appear,” Marlene chirps as she looks at my phone, a laugh suddenly playing at the tip of her voice. “Or, in this case, she. It’s your Detective Ormoran.” She holds the phone up to me, and I see a plain number flashing up. “Or maybe Detective Miller.”
I freeze, my jaw slack, and Marlene must think I’m surprised that she knows who’s calling just from the number, because she explains, “I memorized the Youngstown Police numbers a long time ago.”
But that isn’t what’s throwing me. It’s that phrase that’s set my mind on fire, déjà vu seeping into every cell.
Her voice has changed over the years, morphing into a caricature of what it once was. Of the voice I’ve been hearing in my head for my entire life. But the words. The words are the same.
Marlene pulls her chair closer, scooting the legs of it across the dusty floor towards me. My phone keeps ringing and the screen flashes its connection to the outside world. Even though it is so close that I can almost touch it with my bound fingertips, I don’t care. Right now, all I want to do is look at her.
Her eyes level on me, the look on her face appraising.
She is still only a few inches from me, and I am near enough that I can see once again the gold circle flanked by green in the iris of her eye. Looking at her, hearing her voice—memories long-dead burble to the surface.
I know those eyes. I remember how they looked at me with a mixture of hatred and ambivalence. Just like they are doing now.
What’s your play, Morgan?
I know fear. I knew it when I heard tires squealing and felt my small, seven-year-old body slap up against the windshield of the oncoming car. I held it in my mouth when Patty and Dave said they wouldn’t keep me, and it swallowed me
whole as Justin veered the car into that massive tree. But I’ve never felt anything like this before. Primal, smelling of iron and licked batteries. Bloody and electric.
Survive and thrive.
The words burst into my mind, pummeling the panic threatening to take me over.
I have to do this.
“I’m sorry for whatever I did,” I tell her.
She glances up from where her eyes had drifted, to a distant corner of the room.
“No, but you will be,” she tells me calmly. I swear I hear a hint of resignation tugging at her voice.
I keep going.
“Mom, I’m so sorry.”
She flinches at the endearment. But her face holds something more than just darkness and pain. Or the rough friction of malice. There’s a hint of pride at the corners of those eyes I knew so well. Once.
“So you’ve figured it out,” is all she says.
Almost, I think, but I don’t say.
The silence sits between us for a few breaths. Almost companionable. Until I can’t wait any longer. Because a deep, dark worry has hatched and is creeping out of its shell. I have to know.
“Was Justin my. . .” I begin. His name tastes like ash in my mouth.
I try again. “You’re my mother,” I say, over-enunciating the words to keep my voice calm. “And I didn’t have any siblings. . .”
I watch her carefully, and when I see pity flit across my mother’s face, I know. But I need her to say it, anyway.
She leans forward in her chair, her elbows pressed into her thighs in a way that reminds me of Detective Ormoran. “Justin was my son. And you were—excuse me, are—my daughter. The two of you were half-siblings. I’m not quite sure who your fathers are.” She says this matter-of-factly, and as she gestures with her hands the diamond in her ring manages to glint in the dim light. “Although I’m certain you both don’t have the same father. Loving men like that is too much work, and I had plenty to keep me busy already.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I feel like I have no skin.
Or, rather, I wish I had no skin.
Because every part of me is marked. My arms, my legs, my neck and breasts—every part of me bears the stain of Justin’s touch.
My brother’s touch.
I manage a “Why?” between my clenched teeth. A surge of energy rushes up inside of me, and I rail against my restraints, flailing my arms and banging my wrists on the ugly, decrepit chair I’m tied to. Like I’m trying to shake myself out of my body.
Inside that syllable lives so many questions. Why did Justin pretend to fall in love in with me? Why don’t I remember having a brother? Why did no one tell me?
Does Annie know?
Marlene stares at me as I have my little fit, her expression placid. When I’ve finished, hands and legs still tied to the chair, she reaches out to smooth a strand of hair behind my ear.
I valiantly resist the urge to bite her.
“Why?” She repeats my question, her face an emotionless mask.
The blow comes swiftly from the side, smashing into my right temple. She uses something harder than muscle and bone. The metal makes a dull thud as it connects with my skull. Blood trickles down through my hair, its warmth spreading across my scalp and underneath the collar of my sweater. I can’t see clearly through my right eye, but my left eye spies Marlene place something back into the pocket of her sweatshirt.
It’s a gun.
“You didn’t deserve him,” she says quietly, and despite the lack of volume to her voice the fury embedded in it electrifies the air. “He shouldn’t have died—you should be dead, not him.”
I wait, still stunned by the violence of the last few moments.
I listen.
Talking hasn’t done much for me so far.
Just like I did a few minutes ago, full on shudders start to wrack Marlene’s body. Her shoulders flop up and down like a gutted fish as she heaves, and words spill rapidly from her mouth. I have to turn my left ear towards her in order to catch all of what she is saying, because my right ear is plugged with the blood draining from the gash my mother has made in my skull.
“It was because of that stupid article you wrote. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t shown up with that awful smirk on your face, acting as though you knew better than everyone else. Acting as though you didn’t have a mother who taught you everything!”
Spittle flies from her mouth on the last word.
It dawns on me, like turning on a light after stumbling around in blackened rooms for hours. She’s talking about my op-ed personal comments in the Plain Dealer this past summer. I scan back in my mind to what I’d written, and the photo that they featured with it. It was just the same faculty headshot that my department uses on their website. I was smiling in it. Just a normal smile.
The opinion piece mentioned lots of things. Foster care. Group homes. Shuttling myself back and forth between “placements” and sometimes not knowing where I was going to sleep from one night to the next. Never having anything that was my own. I spoke about how I ended up going to college, graduate school, and my work as a professor at Youngstown State helping students from backgrounds similar to mine.
I’m trying to make sense of why that article—this piece of pseudo-journalism that I wrote in one Sunday afternoon after a long, reminiscent talk with Annie—would bring my mother back into my life.
It didn’t mention anything about my mother, because I didn’t remember anything worth mentioning.
Oh my God.
A siren blares across my thoughts.
She wanted credit for what I’ve become.
She wants credit.
As if reading my thoughts, Marlene jerks her head up from where it had sunk, in an arc towards her chest, and she takes a long look at me.
I wait, wondering if I should say something. Maybe if I apologize for leaving her out, for forgetting her, she’ll let me go. And this will all be over.
But there’s no way I am going to apologize to this woman. I’d rather die.
You might just get your wish, I remind myself.
She wipes at her face and takes a long swig from her water bottle. I watch her as she shakes her shoulders and her head, as if she’s clearing her mind.
“Now, you know that little article isn’t the entire story, don’t you?”
She takes another sip from her bottle.
“Revenge is an excellent motivator, isn’t it, sweetheart?” The word oozes out of her mouth.
When I don’t respond, she says it again, softer still. “Isn’t it?”
I nod in response, and stutter out, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
Marlene nods and then stands to start pacing the floor as she talks. “You see, when your brother pushed you into the street because you were being a little cunt—just like you always were—and that car hit you, one of our neighbors called the ambulance, and then when the emergency medical technicians came they called the cops. While you were recovering like a queen in that hospital bed, my entire life was collapsing. The drugs, the dealers, the clients—I owed a lot of money. And they took it out on me in prison.” She pauses in front of my chair and puts both hands on either side of me. I brace for her to hit me again, but I also scan for a weak spot; somewhere I can grab my mother with my teeth and make her stop. But she sees me looking, and instinctively backs away from me.
“I lived like that for years,” she goes on, now several feet away from me. “All because you wouldn’t listen to your brother.”
I can’t reach her now.
My mind whirs inside my skull, working at putting the puzzle pieces into place. So far, I only have the edges framing in the full picture, with the middle image fuzzy and undetermined.
Marlene is my mother and a drug dealer. Justin is my half-brother.
My chest spasms involuntarily again. I force myself to keep thinking.
When I was seven years old, I was struck by a car because Justin pushed me into the road, and then I was take
n into child protective services.
Almost twenty years later, Marlene and Justin plan to have me fall in love with him and then die in what appears to be a car accident.
Afterwards, when Justin died instead of me and the police are closing in on their case against me, I find myself kidnapped by my mother and tied to a chair in this desolate building.
And Annie, I think suddenly, picturing her bleeding on my bedroom floor because of what I did to her. Where does Annie come in?
I look at my mother, and wonder how much of who I am is because of her.
A door slams from the direction of the kitchen. With it, a gust of cold air billows into the room, rousing the makeshift curtains and the hairs on my head not stuck to the side of my temple with my drying blood.
“Marlene?” a voice calls, and the tenor of it provokes a reflex in my body. One of feeling safe. But I can’t place it, the wind from the door and the strange acoustics of the room distorting the sound, until I see a figure emerge from the shadows into the fading light of my captive room.
The figure—a woman, I can tell, by her build and gait—is staring at me intently. I can’t see her face yet, because she is almost entirely backlit. She takes another step forward when she speaks, her voice more familiar now that she is talking in the same room I’m in. “What did you do? You were supposed to wait for me!”
“You were gone a long time,” Marlene says, the calm of her voice replaced with an irritated urgency. She jerks her head over her shoulder to cast a sideways glance at the figure in the doorway.
“I had things I needed to take care of,” the woman says, and as she moves further from the window and into the light, her face and voice connect.
It’s Dr. Koftura.
39
“Morgan, how are you?” Dr. Koftura makes as if she’s going to approach me, her hands reaching to scan the bloody matting on the side of my head, but I jerk away from her.
“Okay, okay,” she moves back, arms raised in a signal of surrender and an unfamiliar bite to her voice. “I know you must be scared. I was just trying to help.”
It Was Always You Page 20
