The Mortician's Daughter: Three Heartbeats Away

by C. C. Hunter

  Dad: Leaving for work early. Got a meeting after work. Will be late.

  “Damn it!”

  “What?”

  “He thinks I’m home. And he says he’s going to be late tonight. He doesn’t want to face me.”

  “You know you can stay here as long as you have to.”

  “What about your mom?” I ask.

  “Are you kidding? She likes you. She was worried sick when I didn’t have anyone to hang with.” Kelsey stands up. “I’m going to take a quick shower. I’ll fix some toast when I get out.”

  She leaves. I focus back on the screen, hoping to find other compartment spaces in early model cars.

  I’m waiting for the links to come up when my phone rings. So Dad finally realized I’m not home, huh. I pull in air. I blow out air. What the hell am I going to say to him? I don’t want to do this on the phone.

  Almost hyperventilating, I pick up my phone to confirm Dad’s number. It’s not his.

  I don’t recognize it. I almost don’t answer it, then, thinking it could be from Hayden’s hospital phone, I grab it.

  “Hello?”

  “Riley?” It’s a woman’s voice.

  It couldn’t be…? “Who is this?”

  There’s a beat of silence before she speaks. “It’s Brenda Holden.”

  My brain runs my search engine, turning the name over and over. “Do I know you?”

  “I sometimes work at your school in the lunchroom.”

  “Oh.” Crap. It’s the crazy lunch lady who’s been freaking me out because she seems to know more about me than any stranger should. My hand tightens on the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think it’s time we talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Not on the phone,” she says. “I’ll meet you after school?”

  “I’m not going to school.” A thought hits, hits hard, and rolls around my brain like a ball of barbed wire. I remember thinking she looked like my mom. No, she can’t be. She said her name was… “Brenda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does this have to do with my mom?”

  My question draws one, two, three seconds of silence, then she finally says, “Can you meet me at the Daily Diner on Main Street at ten-thirty? We’ll talk there.” A click tells me she’s gone. The line is soundless, but a thousand questions are buzzing inside my head like hungry mosquitos.

  Kelsey asked if I wanted her to come with me, but I told her I needed to do this alone. After giving me a thirty-second hug, she left to check on her mom.

  I go home to feed Pumpkin. Since Dad doesn’t know I’ve run away, he won’t feed him. Realizing I don’t know when all this is going to blow over, I set up the automatic feeder. Pumpkin looks at me as if unhappy. I think he remembers the feeder means no-Riley. Feeling guilty, I give him ten minutes of TLC, apologize, then leave.

  I’m at the diner an hour early. My stomach sucks in the fumes of bacon and pancakes. I barely touched the toast this morning, but I’m too tense to eat. I sit at a booth, surrounded by red and white checkered decor and people who, unlike me, are calm, playing on their phones.

  They aren’t waiting for their whole life to be upended.

  I brought my computer, telling myself I’d continue looking for trunk spaces. Instead, I order coffee, then I pull out the few images of Mom that I brought from home. I try to envision the lunch lady’s face as I compare it to the woman in the pictures.

  The hair and eye color are the same, but without seeing the lunch lady again, I can’t be sure.

  If she’s my mom, I’m going to be so pissed that she didn’t tell me. And even more pissed that she abandoned me when I was four.

  But what else will I feel? In my memories, I loved her. She loved me. But are my memories accurate? Did I idealize what I felt because I wanted to believe it? How could she have loved me and abandoned me?

  How can I forgive her?

  As ten-thirty draws closer, I look up every time the bell over the door rings as someone comes or goes.

  She finally walks in. My heart stops short of flying out of my chest. I study her face. Oh my God, it could be her.

  She sits across from me. Our eyes meet. I try to speak, but my throat is locked. Hurt swells inside my chest, crowding out all my vital organs. I suddenly feel claustrophobic again.

  “I know you have questions,” she says.

  The waitress stops at the end of the booth. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” she says.

  The waitress leaves.

  She leans forward. “You look tired. You get purple circles under your eyes just like I do when I haven’t slept well.”

  I blink, swallow, and force the words up my throat and out my mouth. “Are you my mom?”

  “No. I’m your aunt. Your mom is my half sister.”

  The room seems extra quiet while I digest her words. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie to me, too?” Anger burns my empty stomach. I feel deceived, abandoned.

  She leans back into the booth, and the cushions sigh. “I didn’t lie. I just…”

  “You kept it from me.”

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

  “So here you are? What’s changed?”

  “I know you went to your mom’s gallery. I just wanted to explain a few things that might help you understand.”

  “If you know I was there, then so does my mom. Why isn’t she here?”

  The waitress shows back up with a cup of coffee. “You ready to order?”

  “Not now,” I say, trying not to sound rude, but the quickness of her exit says I failed. I stare at this newfound aunt. “Answer my question.”

  “She’s worried that you might resent her.”

  “I do.” I flatten my palms on the tabletop. “How could I not resent her?”

  She looks down at her cup with steam rising off the top. “You have good reason to feel that way. But shouldn’t you know the facts before you judge?”

  “The fact that matters is that she left me. That I haven’t seen her, didn’t even know she was alive, for thirteen years. Do you know how much I’ve missed her? How long I’ve grieved for this vision of her in my mind?” Emotion makes my chest ache.

  “I understand.” She glances down, then up. “She’s missed you, too.”

  I shake my head. “Do you have children?”

  She nods. “A boy.”

  “Have you walked out on him? Have you just turned your back on him?”

  “No.” Her answer is low but honest. “I’m not saying I agree with what she did. She was wrong. She knows that. But it’s not… She loves you. She regrets what happened.”

  “Well, of course she does.” Sarcasm gives my tone an edge. “That’s why she’s here.”

  “Don’t judge her until…”

  “Until when?” I swat away a wayward tear gliding down my cheek. “Give me one reason good enough to abandon your child.”

  Her answer comes quick. “At the time she thought… She thought she was having mental issues.”

  Just like that, I remember Dad saying Mom was hearing voices. “Spirits?”

  She nods. “Your mom can’t see them, but she can hear them. It started when she was a teen, but it got worse when the city dug up the graveyard behind your house in Dallas to put in that apartment complex.”

  I recall hearing about the graveyard when I lived there. Some people swore the apartments were haunted. “Didn’t she know it was spirits?”

  “She suspected it, but she’d always been able to ignore them. Still does. But then there were so many. It got so bad that she started having migraines, and eventually she got depressed. After a while, it started affecting your parents’ marriage. Her relationship with you.”

  “So she just left me.”

  “She was worried she wouldn’t be able to take care of you. She didn’t have a job or a place to live.”

  “That was thirteen years ago. Are you saying in all those years she never got well enough to come see
her daughter?”

  “I’m not saying she was right. I’m saying she was scared. At the time, she wasn’t talking to her mom and dad. Our father was an alcoholic, and she didn’t have an easy childhood. We’d only learned of each other a year before and had barely spoken. She felt she had no one to turn to for help. She thought you’d be better with your father.”

  “Again, that was thirteen years ago. She has her own gallery now, so she obviously landed on her feet. And those damn feet never led her back to me.”

  “She tried. Your dad told her you thought she was dead and that it was better that way. He made her feel so guilty.”

  “She is guilty!” I press my hands on the tabletop. “Does she know you’re here?”

  “No. I…I took it upon myself.”

  “But she does know I was at her gallery?”

  She nods.

  “Did she know you worked at my school?”

  “Yes. She asked about you every day I was there.”

  “But she still didn’t come see me!” While the hurt stirs around my insides, another question comes to the surface. “You were there when I almost wrecked my car. How did you know?”

  “I…I was in Catwalk that day. I saw a vision of you crossing over the median into oncoming traffic. I rushed over there. Not knowing if…” She inhales and pulls her coffee closer. “I don’t see or hear spirits. I see auras, and I sometimes get premonitions. Glimpses of what’s happening in the future. That’s how I knew you had moved to Catwalk. The whole family, we all have something. I’ve always tried to embrace it. Your mom, she calls it a curse.”

  I sit there. So tired. My heart so full of woe I want to curl up in a ball and cry.

  “I know your mother would love it if you went to see her.”

  “And I would’ve loved to have had a mother growing up, too.”

  I snatch my purse, my computer, and the fifty pounds of hurt I’ve gained since sitting here, and on shaky knees, I bolt out the door.

  A couple hours later, a ding of a text rouses me. Opening my eyes, I stare at the white ceiling. For one blissful second, I forget all the things that are hurting me. Then it all comes back.

  I left the diner and came straight to Kelsey’s, where I crawled in her bed and fell into a much-needed slumber. My phone chirps out with a reminder ding. I still don’t stir. A few minutes later, I get two more dings. And two more reminder dings.

  Is it one super obnoxious person, or three semi-obnoxious ones? Giving up, I roll over and grab my phone. One text is from Kelsey, and two from Hayden. Neither are obnoxious.

  I click on Hayden’s.

  Hayden: Jacob said you didn’t show up at school. Everything ok?

  His next text reads: I’m home. Please come over if you can. He added his address.

  I stare at it, and an uneasy feeling twists my emotions. I claim to be in love with this boy, but a simple thing like his address reminds me of how little I know about “this” Hayden. What if spirit Hayden is not the same as in-the-flesh Hayden? What if we don’t share the same bond now? Or if the bond he had with Brandy before the accident is stronger?

  Wow. That hurts.

  I move to Kelsey’s text, which reads: Just checking in. Call me when you can.

  I swipe Kelsey’s number.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You okay?” she whispers.

  “No. But I will be.”

  I hear her moving around. “Just a second, I’m going in the hall.” Then, “Is she…your mom?”

  “No. But she’s my aunt.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why did she want to see you?”

  “She heard I was at the gallery. She wanted to come to my mom’s defense.”

  “What defense?”

  I sit up higher and tell her what Brenda said.

  “Do you believe it?” The question seems to float from the phone.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s not enough.”

  “I know.” Her voice is pure empathy.

  “How’s your mom?” I ask, remembering I’m not the only one with problems.

  “We’re waiting on the doctor to sign off on her release papers now.”

  “How is she emotionally?”

  “She doesn’t talk about it, but I can tell she’s upset.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words flow naturally. “Did you mention I was at your house? Is it okay?” The thought of facing Dad is too much.

  “Yeah. She’s fine with it.”

  “Thanks.” I close my eyes. “Hayden texted me. I’m supposed to go see him.” I let out a deep moan. “What am I going to tell him when he wants me to explain things?”

  “You could try telling him the truth.”

  “And risk that he’ll think I’m batshit crazy.”

  “What? You don’t want him to know that? Heck, that’s what makes you so charming.” She laughs.

  I’m not in a laughing mood. “What if everything we shared isn’t…isn’t as strong as what he shares with Brandy? What if all I was supposed to do was help him live?”

  “Don’t what-if this thing to death. Go talk to him. Be your charming, batshit crazy self.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I say.

  She pauses, then says, “Maybe you’re right in not telling him now. I guess when I saw you put that letter in my mailbox, I had some time to wrap my head around it. Maybe Hayden needs a little time. If he keeps remembering stuff, sooner or later he’ll be like me and he’ll half-ass figure it out himself. Then, when you do tell him, it won’t be so hard to believe.”

  “Maybe.”

  As soon as we hang up, I get another text. I see who this one is from. It’s Hayden again, and it reads: I remember other stuff. I think I know what happened.

  I pull up at a one-story redbrick house with a green door in a subdivision only a mile from my house. Hayden’s house. As I get out of the car, my hands are slick with nerves, and my heart feels swollen with both hope and fear. What does Hayden remember?

  It took me an hour to get ready and to add multiple layers of cover stick to hide my purple circles. My hair is still damp, and a fresh-scented spring breeze stirs it around my face. I forgot my straightener at my house—so it hangs down my back a little wet and wavy.

  I lift my hand to knock, and suddenly the door’s not green. In fact, the sun, the breeze, the clean scents of spring, are all gone. All I see is a door painted black.

  I blink, hoping it’ll all come back, but it doesn’t. Looking around, I see I’m in a dark room that smells musty and reeks of cat urine. Somewhere, right below the panic that’s swelling, I know what’s happening. Or rather, I know this isn’t really happening. This is another vision, but I still pound my fists on the door. My head pounds with them. “Let me out!”

  I breathe in, trying not to focus on the stench. Blinking, I can feel my pupils dilate, growing accustomed to the darkness. On the floor, pushed in the corner of the tiny room, rests a twin mattress. On a hook on the wall hangs the clear plastic carrier with the wedding dress.

  Her dress.

  Air, dirty air, catches in my lungs.

  I reach up and touch my chest, knowing what will eventually happen. Fear takes another lap around my mind, tightening my stomach and shoulders. I want out of here.

  Looking around, I spot a sliver of light dancing across the dirty white wall. I turn, searching for the source of light. There on the wall, almost to the ceiling, is a boarded-up window. A small rectangular window. Between the boards, there’s a small crack, and light streams inside. I move back, then lean up on my tiptoes, trying to see out of the gap. If I can recognize anything, I might be able to figure out where the killer took Shane.

  Reality hits. It’s too late for her. That thought brings on more panic. But if he kidnaps another girl…

  Then I see something through the tiny crack between the wood. A sign. I read the letters D-e-l-i-c…and under that is D-o-n… I shift to the left, then to the right until I can spot
a few other letters. I start working the puzzle until I know what it reads. Delicious Donuts.

  I think I’ve seen that store. No, I know I have. Dad and I went to one for breakfast.

  Then in the distance I hear noise, rhythmic noise, clunk, clunk. Sounds like heavy shoes falling on a hard surface. I look down and see the floor is concrete. Is this a business, not a home? Then suddenly I don’t care what it is, because those footsteps are getting closer. Closer. Closer.

  They stop right in front of the door.

  “Let me out!” I scream.

  A piece of paper is shoved under the door. There’s writing on it. I reach down for it, and just like that, it’s all gone. The note. The darkness. The godawful smell.

  I stand in front of the green door, and my fisted hand is against the wood as if I’ve already knocked. Biting my lower lip, I worry I banged on the door and demanded my freedom.

  I hear footsteps nearing. It’s not terrifying like before, but the urge to run still plays across my mind. The knob turns, and Hayden’s grandmother appears in the doorway.

  “Hi Riley.” Her smile is huge, but not nearly as big as the hug I find myself in. I use the time to bury the remnants of fear, to tuck it away to be sifted through later, to see what all I might learn.

  When she releases me, she says, “He’s in his room, waiting for you. Been waiting for you since we got here.” She sighs. “My daughter told me how you…you’ve been there for her and Hayden when…none of his other friends could handle it. Thank you.”

  She hugs me again, then motions down the hall as if I know where his room is. But I don’t.

  I follow the hall and stop at the end, where there’s an open door. Leaning in, I see him sitting up on his bed, his laptop on his lap. He’s wearing jeans and a dusty blue T-shirt that makes his blue eyes pop. His eyes are darker than mine, but just as noticeable. He must not have heard me knock at the front door, because his attention is on the screen. Then I see he’s wearing earbuds. I wonder if he’s listening to music. I remember him telling me he liked Coldplay and The Kooks. I remember us laughing about lyrics of old songs. I remember everything about the boy who came to me in spirit form. And yet right now what feels important is what I don’t know.