Sins of the Mother

by August Norman

  Looking out at the water, Johnny remembered the first time he’d taken Promise out on the bay on his Boston Whaler, fishing and eating bologna sandwiches and exploring coves and inlets until sunset. Hearing her laugh, seeing her smile, all with the sun reflecting off the water—Johnny wasn’t gonna give that up, and he definitely wasn’t going to back off of Caitlin Bergman.

  He reached behind his seat, pulled out the bag of trash from the Lumberjack, and threw it out the window. No one was gonna mess with his beautiful home.

  CHAPTER

  15

  BEHIND THE LOCKED door of her hotel room, Caitlin slid the envelope’s contents onto the bed’s floral-patterned comforter. At first glance, she guessed there were a hundred pages of material printed on standard white copy paper, plus a thumb drive. The top page of the stack was a typed note on Coos County letterhead.

  Miss Bergman:

  While my office still cannot definitively verify that the body in question is your mother, we can confirm that fingerprints found on the notebook in the safety deposit box match those on file from Maya Aronson’s prior arrest record. When the lab returns a verified familial DNA identification against your buccal swab, we’ll be glad to return your mother’s belongings. In the meantime, here’s a copy of the entire spiral notebook, faster than expected. Hope that helps you get back to your life in Los Angeles.

  Once again, the people of Coos County are sorry for your loss.

  Caitlin had a lot to do. A shower, first of all, then some sort of dinner; then she’d write her State of Jefferson piece. She didn’t want to get sucked into the handwritten journal of a dead woman, but sitting on the edge of the bed, her laptop bag still slung over one shoulder, she couldn’t fight the urge to read the first entry.

  * * *

  How can I describe the feeling?

  I want to get this down before the sensation fades, but my handwriting’s shit and I’m not good with words.

  I feel electric, wired, out of my mind, like coke and crystal got together with a handful of Ritalin and went straight up my nose. My whole brain is working, but not just my brain, my soul, if I have one.

  He said I did. He said he could see my soul, trapped inside, burning bright like liquid gold.

  He didn’t even want to fuck. I mean, that’s why I thought I was invited.

  I’m messing this up. I’ll start over. I don’t want to forget anything.

  It’s seven AM on a Monday morning and I am sober as a nun.

  February 15, 1993

  I’d run into Bev on Friday at one of Larry F’s parties in Calabasas. Bev looked amazing, skin glowing and everything, and she’s two years older than me. Damned if she didn’t look twenty-five instead of forty-two. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year, figured she’d been back in Passages, or at least a county hospital. First time I’d seen her sober in a decade. Not that I was. Not with rails of blow on every surface, every flavor of Citron they made behind the bar, and two of the guys from Guns N’ Roses jamming by the pool.

  She invited me to this Valentine’s Day party on Sunday, said I had to come. Honestly, I forgot all about it until I woke up around four the next day and checked my machine. She’d called to remind me, left the address, and said show up at seven PM.

  Last year, we’d worked some parties together, oil shows for frat boys or businessmen, fetish dates for older types. I always walked away with five or six hundred bucks, sometimes more, so I figured I’d make enough to cover next month’s rent.

  Yesterday afternoon, I broke out the Thomas Guide and my party bag and drove from my place in Encino to some narrow road off Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills.

  I got to the top of the hill, drove through an open gate that led past a couple of eucalyptus trees, and parked on the grass next to ten other cars. No Porsches, one Mercedes—but like ten years old—the rest were shit boxes like mine. The house was a wood-paneled A-frame that perched over the edge of a valley looking west, and I could see the sun setting over the ocean past Santa Monica. I can’t remember the last time I noticed the sunset. The mix of gold and pink and purple seemed impossible, like an Easter dress had caught on fire.

  But it was almost seven, so I walked up a little wooden walkway to the front door and rang the bell. I can’t say who I expected to answer, but I wouldn’t have imagined the woman who did in a million years.

  Short and at least seventy, this little old lady opened the door in a pair of slacks and a light sweater, her white hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, her arms out, like she was gonna hug me.

  Her, this nice old lady; me in a pink halter, fishnets, and four-inch stilettos with a bag full of condoms, dildos, and lube.

  “I think I’m lost,” I said, cause yeah, duh.

  She smiled and stepped closer, hugging me.

  “We all are.”

  She smelled like flowers; not roses, but something light and pretty.

  I told her Bev had invited me.

  She let me go and looked up into my eyes. “I’m Linda Sperry. Welcome to my home.”

  My name slipped out, my real name. I have no idea why. It didn’t even occur to me to lie to the woman.

  “Maya?” she said, like legit happy. “We call my niece Daya. Please, come in.”

  The whole thing had a walking-into-a-trap feel, like I’d turn a corner and see all my friends and someone would announce another intervention, which would be bullshit, cause they’re all worse than me, but I followed nice old Linda inside—and that’s where I saw the orgy.

  Well, I thought it was an orgy. Six people, two guys, four women, were all laying in a pile in a living room to the right. Except they were all clothed. Their hands traced each other’s bodies, but hugging not tugging, and everybody had a blissed-out smile on their face. I didn’t smell anything but incense, but the way they were moaning and laughing, they had to be smoking something.

  I set my bag down and looked for a light switch. I’d worked parties like this before. Sometimes the vanilla crowd needed a pro to start the ball rolling.

  “Dear?” Linda waited for me down the hall. “Beverly’s out on the porch.”

  Again, I had no idea what to think.

  We passed another room where a young woman played guitar and sang to a handful of other young women. The song sounded familiar, like “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles, but on the chorus, she sang, “All you need is light. The light is all you need.”

  A sliding door led onto a massive porch with a mind-blowing view, except the twenty or so people seated on couches were watching a man, not the sun. I couldn’t hear the guy from that distance, but his crowd listened like he had the secrets to life. Over on the right, Bev’s blond head bobbed along with everybody else’s, until he brought his hands together at his chest, smiled, and turned toward the remains of the sunset.

  The people on the couches got up, some hugging, others stretching like they’d been there for hours. Bev scribbled something in a notebook, then closed her eyes.

  Linda pointed me toward the porch. “Go ahead, dear.”

  I got two steps before Bev looked up, smiled, and screamed, “You made it!”

  She jumped off the back of the couch and ran over, hugging me like we hadn’t seen each other in years.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Maya. Did you hear Desmond?”

  I told her I’d just gotten there. “What is this place, Bevvie? I’m not exactly dressed for whatever this is.”

  Bev grabbed my hand. “It doesn’t matter what you wear or don’t wear here. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  She tugged me toward the deck’s railing, where five people surrounded the speaker.

  “Desmond,” she said, pushing through the others. “She came.”

  The lingerers parted and I saw the man, Desmond, for the first time. He was taller than me in my heels, and better looking than me on my best day—or most men I’d known—like one of those guys from the shaving cream ads. But his
eyes—his eyes locked onto mine.

  Gray, like a cloudy sky with a storm on the way.

  “I’m Desmond Pratten,” he said, reaching out with both hands.

  I raised my hand to shake. “Sharon.”

  He took my hand with his right, then wrapped his left over my wrist. It only took a second, but a feeling of safety and comfort washed over me, like a weighted comforter on a cold night.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you, Sharon.” He pulled me closer. “But that’s not your name, is it?”

  Not many people know my real name. Bev does, obviously, and for some reason, I’d told the Linda lady at the door. Besides that, it’s the banks and the landlord. But here this man was, waiting to meet me.

  “No,” I stammered. “It’s Maya.”

  He nodded, not letting go. “Yes, it is, for now. But I see something else burning inside you.”

  Normally I’d laugh at a line like that, but there, locked in his firm grip, I could only whisper, “What do you see?”

  “Your soul. Hot, but damaged, bright like liquid gold.”

  My skin got warm, all over, and I started to shake. I don’t know why. Bev and the others might have still been standing next to me, but I had no idea. “Liquid gold?”

  He nodded. “Soon we’ll let it out, and the light inside you will fill the heavens.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said, stuttering.

  He let go of my wrist and put his arm around me, bringing me into a hug.

  “You will, but first you need to know that he can’t hurt you anymore.”

  I pulled back. “Who can’t hurt me anymore?”

  Those gray eyes looked at me, through me. “Your father.”

  I told him my piece of shit father had been dead for over twenty years.

  Desmond’s eyes held me in place. “In this world, yes, but not in your soul.”

  I don’t remember anything after that.

  They said I passed out, there in his arms. I woke later in a big, soft bed, still in my same clothes, next to Bev and two other women. A clock on the wall said it was just past five in the morning.

  I tapped Bev until she opened her eyes. “What the hell is this?”

  She smiled. “I don’t have the words. Only the light.”

  She told me how I’d passed out, and how Desmond told everyone that my arrival meant a great new chapter had been begun in their story.

  “I gotta go,” I said, though honestly I’m not sure why. Just a feeling, like I needed to get back to some sort of reality.

  I found my things on the floor near the door.

  Bev followed me out of bed. “Will you come back?”

  I didn’t know then. I didn’t know if the feeling was real, if anything that had happened made sense.

  “Sure,” I said. “Call me.”

  She smiled and hugged me. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Maya.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  “DAMN, MAYA.”

  Caitlin dropped the page onto the stack. In 1993, she’d been a senior in high school. Her mom had been living in the valley, maybe twenty minutes away, snorting coke and grinding on bachelor parties for money. Plus she’d known the guys from Guns N’ Roses. Even at the dawn of grunge music, having a rock and roll mom would have been helpful around Fairfax High. That, or the smallest modicum of mother-daughter personal contact. Instead, Maya had met a man named Desmond Pratten and a woman named Linda Sperry who had a niece named Daya. Somehow, somewhere, all of that had ended with a body in an Oregonian forest.

  It was too much to process.

  She crammed the stack back into the envelope, then tucked the package into her suitcase. She had no idea how many years of Maya’s life were captured in those pages but guessed they’d take longer than one night to get through.

  The second shower of the day cleared her brain. She’d plotted a rough outline of her Jefferson story and felt ready to work, but as she stepped out of the bathroom, her eyes drifted back to her suitcase.

  Too tempting.

  She threw a blazer over her last clean outfit, grabbed her laptop bag, and went in search of dinner and dependable Wi-Fi. She passed several modern-looking places bustling with Saturday night crowds, ready to settle for the previous night’s waterfront dive.

  “Wait a second.”

  She pulled up her phone and took a chance, searching for a restaurant called the Lumberjack. For whatever reason, the Larsen family had inserted themselves into Caitlin’s stay in town. After two decades in journalism, she knew that kind of interest in her work meant a fight was coming.

  She thought back to when a group of girls in her high school had accused her of stealing one of their boyfriends, going so far as to publicly label Caitlin a slut, and the advice her dad had offered that night over dinner.

  Don’t let anyone back you against the ropes, Slugger. Take the fight to them.

  It wasn’t until the next day, after he’d talked the principal out of expelling Caitlin for breaking a girl’s nose, that her father clarified that he hadn’t literally meant to fight.

  The Larsens knew who Caitlin was and where she was staying. Her dad’s advice still rang true. Take the fight to them. The least she could do was see what years of their family tradition had brought the people of Oregon.

  Four blocks off the main strip, an old-time wooden Paul Bunyan statue told her she’d found the right place. The solid eight-foot carving of the mythical lumberjack stood guard in front of a rustic side-alley bar. Pickups and motorcycles outnumbered sedans in the half-full parking lot, and the scent of burgers and fried onions wafted from an unseen kitchen vent. She reached for the doorknob, an actual ax handle, and entered to the sound of Mick Jagger singing about honky-tonk women over an infectious cowbell groove.

  A handful of men with pool cues ran the trio of green tables to the left, a couple in their sixties occupied one of the ten red vinyl booths arranged in a U in the center, and a long bar ran the length of the wall to the right. Caitlin went that way, taking one of the many empty stools.

  The bartender, a skinny but strong-looking brunette in her late fifties with more than a few tattoos poking out of her Harley-Davidson tank top, looked up from her phone.

  “You here about the license?”

  Caitlin laughed. “Not unless the license is a rum and Diet Coke, in which case, I’m here about a double.”

  The woman set her phone aside and reached for a pint glass. “Sorry, we don’t get a lot of blazers in here. Usually they end up over at the microbrewery sucking down IPAs.”

  “I can’t stand IPAs,” Caitlin said, taking off her jacket. “I’m in town for a funeral.”

  “Sorry to hear that, hon.”

  “Thanks, but we weren’t close.”

  The bartender reached for the rum on the shelf behind her and made the drink. Caitlin saw a familiar green rectangle behind the whiskey selection: the State of Jefferson flag once again.

  “I don’t want to sound like some insensitive out-of-towner,” she said, pointing, “but what are your thoughts on the whole State of Jefferson thing?”

  The bartender pushed Caitlin’s drink forward with a smirk. “It’s backwoods lost-cause bullshit, like the Confederate flag. But for some reason, these things have been popping up everywhere over the last decade.”

  Caitlin took a sip of her beverage. “Because people in these parts don’t feel represented in Salem or Sacramento?”

  The bartender crossed her arms and snorted. “More like every asshole needs someone to blame for their life not coming up roses.”

  The strong drink tasted more like a quadruple than a double. “Oh, I like you. I’m Caitlin.”

  “Hazel.”

  “Hazel, I need a burger, fries, and Wi-Fi. Any chance you’ve got all three?”

  * * *

  Half an hour and twelve hundred calories later, Caitlin had completed both dinner and a rough draft of her Jefferson piece. She checked her email. Right on time, Lakshmi had sent a c
omplete transcription of the Anders interview. She’d also sent a three-line personal message:

  What’s happening with your mother?

  Are you all right?

  How are you working on a story right now?

  Caitlin answered the personal message by sending thirty dollars through a money-transfer app, then compared the sections of the Anders interview she’d included from memory in her rough draft with what had actually been said. She made a single correction, then reread her piece. Of her three interviews, one read as neutral, the other two pro-Jefferson.

  She went back to the bar, handed Hazel one of her official cards, and asked if she could use the woman’s thoughts on Jefferson in the article.

  “Quote me?” Hazel laughed. “Hell yes, all you want.”

  “Even though you work for the Larsens?”

  Hazel shook her head. “I work for the Lumberjack. They pay me enough to make drinks, not to tell me what to think.”

  Hazel’s contribution and another cocktail did the trick. Caitlin finished her piece, sent it off to Lawton, then visited the bathroom. When she got back to her table, a handwritten note waited where her dirty plate had been.

  You should have a cigarette out back.

  Caitlin glanced over to the bar. Hazel looked up from washing glasses and gave one slight nod toward the pool tables. Caitlin didn’t know if he’d been there the whole time, but Sheriff Martin, in plain clothes, leaned over a table and racked a set of balls.

  Caitlin slid her computer into her bag, left the booth, walked back toward the restroom, and took an exit out into to an informal smoking area. A plastic ashtray overflowed onto a stack of milk crates next to a ripe dumpster. At first she watched the door, expecting Hazel’s arrival, but after a full minute she turned toward the dark parking lot. Floodlights revealed four cars parked directly behind the back door in a small lot butting up against an alley.