Shattered (Reflections Book 2)

by A. L. Woods

  Looking at Ma had always been hard, because there was so much of Holly Jane in her that it made me forget for a split second that my sister was dead. My ears strained when I was here in hopes of hearing my sister’s laugh tucked away in one of the bedrooms, or catching sight of her hair flowing behind her from the corner of my eye.

  Ma cleared her throat, her eyes cast downward until my eyes followed their path. Her hungry palm was open, fingers flitting with impatience. My eyes bounced from that forever opened palm and my mother’s eager stare. The price of admission to Thanksgiving was the envelope stuffed in my pocket. My jaw clenched, I pulled the envelope out and dropped it into her greedy hands.

  A satisfied smile took its rightful place, and she purred, “C’mon in,” stepping out of my way, disappearing into the innards of the first-floor apartment of the triple-decker. Tan carpet ran throughout the living room and the bedrooms. Dated vinyl flooring in burnt orange made up the narrow kitchen tucked to the right.

  My eyes landed on the stovetop, which was devoid of any signs of a Thanksgiving feast. Our meal was still tucked away in the freezer and required all of three minutes on high in the microwave. I wasn’t surprised. Ma didn’t cook, never had, never would. The microwave was the most used appliance in this house. Cooking had been Dad’s area of expertise…that is, if you considered Irish stew and grilled cheese sandwiches fine dining.

  It sure as shit beat the Hungry Man shoe leather and car varnish she was going to serve me.

  “Are you coming in, or what?” Ma crooned from the off-white kitchen table as she settled herself into one of the chairs. She fished a cigarette and her Bic lighter out of the carton, sticking one between her lips and lighting it, before her eager hands dove for the envelope I had given her.

  Smoking was the only thing we had in common. She had given me my first cigarette at thirteen when Dad was doing a stint in the slammer and my stomach wouldn’t stop snarling from hunger pang—there was no food in the house. I knew better than to complain about being hungry, so the proffering of one of her precious Pall Malls had been akin to being told she loved me—words I wouldn’t have been able to draw out of her even if I paid her to say them.

  Truthfully, she had just wanted my stomach to shut up. With the cigarette dangling between my thirteen-year-old lips, she had lit the tip herself while explaining that the nicotine would help suppress my appetite.

  As fucked up as that was, it was the nicest thing Ma had ever done for me. She had been right, too—the hunger did stop. It made it easier to forfeit what little food there was so Holly Jane could eat.

  Impatience flashed in her eyes now as she stared at me, clearing my mind with a nod. Keeping my expression neutral, I watched as she counted out the bills, stacking them in a neat pile, her mouth moving, though no sound came out as she counted to confirm that the amount she asked for was there.

  “What did you need three hundred dollars for again?”

  Ma was so entranced by the fast flurry of money that she almost told me the truth. “New pair of bo—”

  She caught herself, pegging me with her jackal eyes and shrewd smile. Pauline was perceptive, sharp as a tack—but I’d almost caught her. Almost. My eyes met hers as I settled in one of the recliners in front of the TV.

  I would never know if the word she’d been about to say was boots or boobs. Not that it made a difference.

  My ma was...on a good day she was a handful. As a hungry thirteen-year-old who had taken up smoking, I had wanted to be like her. She had been beautiful in that vixen kind of way when she was younger. Now at forty-six, her skin was still smooth, with a nary a wrinkle between her brows, but there was something different about her that I couldn’t quite place.

  “You wanna go to the cemetery?” I asked, watching her from the corner of my eye, temporarily diverting my gaze from the Gilmore Girls rerun playing on the TV.

  Her lips pursed as she contemplated my question. “No.”

  A heavy sigh left me; she seldom went. I think she hated that the little amount of Flannigan money had been tied up in cemetery plots that my own nan and grandad had sunk their life savings into. The only thing my grandparents could guarantee was that one of my parents would eventually kill the other. I doubted they ever would have anticipated that Holly Jane would be occupying the plot they had purchased with my ma in mind.

  Ma had despised them. I hadn’t known them long enough to really formulate strong memories, but Dad’s parents had been described to me as typical Irish Catholic greenies who decided to follow Dad when he abandoned the Emerald Isle in the eighties. They had hoped he would settle down with another good, American-born Irish Catholic (hell, they might have settled for a Protestant) girl who was college educated and kind…someone who would help them get along in their old age.

  What they had gotten instead was Pauline, South Boston’s finest slam pig. That was when their fantasy died and their nightmare began.

  Ma would never confess to being a prostitute, and if you asked her about her past working history, she would tell you any funds she received had been gifts, and the man who had taken sixty percent of her earnings was just a good friend who had fallen on hard times who she was helping out.

  Dad had seen right through that, and after Ma appeared at his door pregnant and with a black eye, he’d all but married her the next day. That’s how yours truly came to existence. If you’re wondering how he knew I was his, well, take one look at photos of Dad and you’d see the physical similarities between us are uncanny. I didn’t need to spit into a tube to prove shit.

  “When was the last time you went?” I asked Ma.

  The only time I knew she was there for certain was when she was trying to strong-arm one of her lovers into giving her something by showing off the graves of her dead husband and kid and crying the crocodile tears that only suckers bought into. Like the people on this street, none of the simpering idiots who got entrapped by my Ma’s cunt could seem to resist the widow and brokenhearted mother routine. Ma woulda gone places, had she opted to head west for Hollywood vs. working D Street six nights a week.

  From her spot at the table, she shot me a petulant look, the kind that vaguely reminded me of the way Holly Jane’s features used to cloud over before she was about to have a fit when she was a kid. Her face grew ruddy, her breaths racking in and out through her parted lips. It was the twitch of her hand that separated her from my sister.

  Ma was a striker. Holly and I had always cowered. We’d learned to hide.

  “What business it of yours, Raquel Marie?” Her stare could burn holes through solid brick.

  “I was just wondering,” I said with a shrug, carefully controlling my expression. If she thought I was antagonizing her, it would take a miracle to get her off of me.

  Concentrating on the TV, I observed with camouflaged amusement as Lorelai Gilmore embraced her daughter Rory in a hug that made me sick to my stomach.

  Ma used to purport that she saw a lot of herself in Lorelai. “She knows what it’s like to fight and survive. Being a single mother is no walk in the park, no suh.” The neighbors who judged me humored Ma with a smile. Ma was a survivor all right, but the only kind of fighting she was interested in doing was of the confrontational variety, not self-sacrifice. Of course, no one had the balls to call her out on it, ’cause no one liked getting on her bad side. Ma was one of those vengeful types who could make your life hell if she thought you were snubbing her.

  I would know.

  “Is this your way of trying to look down at me?” she spat, her slipper-clad foot slamming onto the floor.

  “That’s not what I intended by that question, no.” I kept my tone even, my concentration on the TV. If I met her stare now, it would all be over. Something would set her off. The length of my eyelashes, the color of my eyes, the number of blinks I took.

  She was as mercurial as a volcano, and when she erupted, her lava would burn.

  “‘That’s not what I intended by that question, no’,” she mimic
ked acidly. “I know what your problem is,” she huffed, throwing her weight back against the chair. “You’ve been spending too much time with that blond bitch. You got a mouth on you now, and no respect.” She snapped her fingers at me, and I could practically see the cogs of her mind spinning in search of Penelope’s name. “What’s that little golden-haired princess’s name again?”

  My blood pressure spiked, the tempo beating behind my eyelids. Do not react. Do not give her satisfaction of your reaction. I blew out a breath through my nose, maintaining my gaze on the TV.

  I wished I could offer her name instead of Penelope’s just out of spite, but I knew that would be like wearing a New York Giants jersey to Gillette Stadium after last year’s Super Bowl—pretty damn stupid.

  My reticence bothered her enough that she mumbled to herself while she resumed counting the money I’d given her. I caught her reflection in a glass vase she kept on the coffee table. Ma’s hair wasn’t her natural flaxen that had been going gray over the years; it was a box-dyed magenta red that spilled to the small of her back, because “long hair makes me look younger.”

  From my perspective, it made her look like she was in denial. Her face may have still been smooth thanks to the Botox, but not even she could deny the reality of aging. Things that had once been firm had started to succumb to her indulgences. The wine consumption had made her rotund around the middle. Nicotine had stained her fingers and teeth. The whites of her eyes weren’t so bright anymore; they were tired.

  Ma still had lots of lovers, a different boyfriend every week, but there was one thing that no amount of dicking would ever change—she was getting old.

  “I want you to move back home,” she demanded out of nowhere.

  My head snapped in her direction, eyes narrowing.

  “Home?” I repeated.

  Ma looked at me like she had dropped me on my head—which for all I knew, she had—that sure as shit woulda explained a ton.

  “You were raised here. This is your home.” She spoke to me like I was a blundering idiot. There was a question in her eyes, as if she couldn’t discern whether I was playing coy or actually that out to lunch.

  This dilapidated piece of shit, nearly condemned triple-decker was the furthest fucking thing from my home, not even close. This place had been my hell for eighteen years, my cage. Being here reminded me of every godawful thing that had ever happened to my sister and me. The wall near the front door still bore the hole my dad had put his fist through fifteen years ago. The console table against the hallway wall covered up the bloodstains when Dad had knocked Ma around after he caught her in bed with another man and Ma fought back while her lover took off through their bedroom window. It was hard to know who the instigator was in the majority of their arguments, but sometimes in circumstances like her need for variety in her life, the answer was clear as day. The landlord hadn’t even bothered to replace the busted screen from the first time our apartment got broken into while Dad was doing time in Walpole. Holly Jane’s bedroom door still didn’t shut properly from the time Ma rammed her body into it and nearly taken it clean off of its hinges in a performance that would have given Joan Crawford a la Mommie Dearest a run for her money.

  “This,” I vehemently declared, “is not my home.”

  “That so?” Ma mocked, one corner of her mouth lifting into a smile that made my skin crawl as she lifted herself from her seat and rounded the recliner until she was standing in front of me. “Where’s your home then, sweetheart? Dorchester? Beacon Hill with that well-moneyed whore?”

  At that, a curtain of red dropped over my eyes, blinding me enough where I relinquished the hold on my temper. I kicked the footrest closed and stood up, meeting her eyes dead on for the first time in my life.

  “You can go fuck yourself.”

  Regret sizzled inside of me as soon as the words were out of my mouth. It was one thing to be smart with Ma on the phone, where I had the safety of the end button to protect me, but it was another thing entirely when she was mere inches in front of me. Ma leaned forward, and I hated that my spine instinctively leaned back, as if those inches would buy me the distance needed to lessen the blow of her strike. Her wine-stench breath fanned over my face, assaulting my senses. Her eyes shook with rage, my stare flitting from them to the fist she was clenching against the inside of her thigh.

  I decided then that if she hit me, I was going to hit her back. I wasn’t doing this shit anymore. Not with her, and not with Cash. I wasn’t going to be her human punching bag, someone for her to direct all of her anger toward.

  I jerked my head away when her hand rose to my face, but instead of striking me, she smoothed my hair away from my face with a tenderness that left me uneasy.

  “You remind me so much of myself sometimes that it’s scary,” she said softly, not looking at me. My heart hammered in my chest, counting down the seconds until she exploded. “But then you go and open your mouth and I realize, nah, you’re all him.”

  Him. Meaning my dad.

  My smile was brittle as I looked up at her from under my lashes, my heart squeezing in protest when my brown eyes met her green ones—the same color as Holly Jane’s eyes, the green nearly lime with speckles of brown and gold circling the rims. It was a beautiful feature wasted on the likes of Ma.

  “There are worse people I could be like,” I retorted.

  “It would be better if you were like me.” She pulled on the strands she had tucked behind my ear, and with horrifying certainty I had a vision of her next move coming. “’Cause then at least you would know when you had the upper hand and when to shut the fuck up.”

  Then she made her move. The hand that had been twirling a strand of my hair sandwiched itself in the length of my short hair at the base of my neck and dragged me closer to her. Ma was a little shorter than I was, so I bent forward at my waist to try to temper the pain that burned at the roots of my hair the harder she pulled.

  “You don’t fucking learn, you stupid little bitch.” She jerked me forward, grabbing my chin with her free hand, glowering up at me. “I gave you life, and I can take it away.” Then she swung her poorly curled fist back and struck me in the face.

  My molars clenched at the contact, the pain spearing right through me until it died out in my toes. I braced myself as she reared her fist back and clocked me again right over the eyebrow. White dots speckled my vision, the warmth of blood prickling my skin as an ache settled in my eyebrow. The punches wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for that stupid ring she wore with the initials CZ in the center of the band.

  “They call that murder, Mother,” I gritted through clenched teeth, wiping the blood away with the back of my hand.

  “You’re dumber than I thought if you think I would ever let anyone find the body.”

  “No one would help you bury me.”

  Ma laughed, the sound reverberating over the tinny sound of the Gilmore Girls theme song as the next episode came on, her eyes burning into mine. “Like I said, you don’t learn—but your sister did.”

  “A whole lot of fucking good that did her.” I curled my arm behind my head, grabbing the hand that was buried in my hair, sinking the nail of my thumb into her palm until she winced and wrenched her hand back. With two outstretched hands, I shoved her backward, buying myself some space. The look of her awe at my physical response belonged on the cover of Time magazine: her mouth popping open, eyes wide and blinking.

  The awe faded, and all that was left in its wake was its unfiltered rage.

  “Everything Holly knew about life came from me,” Ma hissed, a violent firestorm in her eyes. “She learned how to survive. I made her a fighter.”

  Her imparted wisdom had done jack shit for Holly Jane in the long run. “And then she died under your watch.”

  “No,” she hissed with a violent shake of her head, “she died because of you.”

  Her comment landed right where she wanted it to, and for a moment, my anger ebbed away, that familiar sadness encompassing
me again. Tears sprung to my eyes, the stress of the last couple of weeks making my head spin, kicking up a thunderstorm in my chest that pounded in my ears.

  No. She was wrong.

  Holly Jane died because of her. Not because of me.

  “Do not make me responsible for your piss-poor parenting,” I spat. “I won’t shoulder the blame for you anymore.”

  “Please,” Ma hissed. “You think I don’t know that you had your legs spread for Tobias that day?” She kicked her chin in the direction of his Nan’s house across the street.

  I blanched, my face growing ashen.

  Ma smiled, looking triumphant. “I know everything, Raquel. People talk a lot around here. I know how much you bled when he fucked you. I know who he was fucking around with while he was with you. I even know who your sister’s baby daddy was.”

  “Who?” I shouted at her, not caring which answer she replied with first. It wasn’t a mystery to anyone that my sister had gotten around a lot, and I felt strongly in my belief that it was Dom who had fathered my sister’s unborn child. I was fairly confident that he had made Holly Jane a pill-head long before she was snorting rails of anything, and I fully believed that with her lack of money, he had taken his payment between her legs.

  Who had Cash been seeing behind my back? It didn’t make a difference to me now, but that curiosity had eaten at me for years. It was the missing piece in an incomplete puzzle.

  Ma held the answers to so many long unanswered questions that I didn’t know which one my question of “who” had addressed.

  She just tossed me another grating smile that had me questioning what I felt I had always known, as she smoothed the flyways of her hair away from her face.

  “Each answer will cost you.” She flitted her fingers at me, raising her brows. Hot anger struck me like a live wire as my dark eyes met her green ones. I knew she was baiting me. That she was hungrier for my reaction than she was for the stupid Hungry Man Thanksgiving slop she was going to serve me. Why couldn’t this woman just be my mother? Everything about the last ten years rushed at me, the rage from the last six weeks I’d lived through like a trail of kerosene, and my mother’s smile had been the lit match dropped on the trail that led to a vat that housed what was left of my lingering stability.