“Five. She’s in room five,” Deirdre said.
I could hear Deirdre following me as I got up, opened the door, walked down the hallway, and stopped in front of the door to her mother’s room. I rapped my knuckles against the door.
“Who is it?” her mother’s voice asked.
“Timothy,” I said.
There was a pause.
“I have nothing to say to you,” the voice came through, sounding closer.
“I suggest you open this door. Now,” I said. A flimsy lock was not going to keep me out. I was ready to bust right through that door if I had to.
But I didn’t have to.
She opened the door, and then beat a hasty retreat across to the other side of the room, putting the bed between us.
I stepped inside, and Deirdre came in after me and shut the door.
“What do you want? Did you come to finish off what you started?” Nora’s mother demanded. “I’m half-dead already. You might as well finish the job,” her voice was high-pitched, edged with hysteria.
Even angry as I was, I could see that she did look terrible. But I felt no pity. My only thought was that if she wasn’t strong, that would make her easier to break. And I was ready to do whatever I needed to do to make that happen. I had come to get an answer to my question. But as I looked at her, I knew. I can’t tell you how, but I knew without even having to ask. In that moment I knew what it felt like to be angry enough to kill.
“You are sick. Do you know that? What kind of person kills their own child? What kind of monster must you be to have done that? And how can you even live with yourself?”
As I spoke, she backed up until she was half-cowering in the corner and her whole body was shaking. She pointed a wildly trembling finger at me. “It was you. You did it. It was your fault. You took my daughter from me.”
I stepped closer. I wanted to hurt her, and I used words instead of fists simply because I knew that would cause the most pain. “You know I didn’t take her,” I said. “That’s what you couldn’t stand. You knew that she couldn’t wait to get away. Nothing in the world would have convinced her to go back with you.”
“Lies. It’s all lies. Nora changed her mind. She said she was going to come back with me, and when she told you, you killed her.”
I pounced. “How do you know that she was going to go back with you? Deirdre was there when you told Nora you were dying and asked her to come back with you at the rehearsal dinner, and she said no. When did Nora change her mind? When you went to her room later that night?”
Nora’s mother didn’t answer me. She just shook her head.
I went on, twisting the knife of my words deeper. “You know that Nora loved me. That Nora chose me. Even when you told her you were dying, she still chose to stay with me.”
I had never seen someone come apart quite like she did. She was trembling so much it was as if someone had her by the shoulders and was literally shaking her.
I don’t know what made me say it. It just burst out of me. “What I can’t understand is how you could be so sick as to kill her. It’s monstrous. Why not me? Why wasn’t it me?”
It was like hitting the magic button.
“It was supposed to be you,” she half shrieked. “It should have been you. But I couldn’t get the door open. The door wouldn’t open. It was your fault. Your fault. The door wouldn’t open.”
As she spoke, I remembered. Just before I’d fallen asleep, I’d had the thought that Celia might try to come back, so I had gotten up and locked the door.
I had come to get a confession. I hadn’t bargained on this. This last piece. This twist of fate that made her mother’s accusations true. It was true: it was my fault. It should have been me. I would have done anything for it to have been me. And it was my betrayal that had caused me to lock that door. One little action, done on the verge of sleep, turned out to be the difference between living and dying.
I would never lock another door in my life. Not even the door to my heart. Believe me, I tried—but it turned out that the lock had been broken.
THE INVESTIGATION
STATISTICS
Parental murders of children have occurred for centuries and have been documented in virtually every known society, from advanced, industrialized countries to indigenous groups.
—From Why Mothers Kill: A Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook, by Geoffrey R. McKee
Nora
Postmortem
The story has ended for me, as it will end for everyone. I suppose it’s somehow fitting that I should end this story as well, even though I have never liked endings—not in movies or books or life. My favorite endings were always the ones that gave me the illusion of things continuing, on and on, forever. Happily ever after.
But even after everything has been told, there are always more questions. The questions are the heart of the story when we’re alive. We think the answers matter. We think the facts add up to something.
Timothy wanted my side of the story, and so I have added it to his. I believe he will be able to hear me if he listens. And here is the rest.
After I left Timothy’s room, I went straight back to my room. I took off my clothes and put on my nightgown. I did it automatically, my mind a blank. Then I had the thought, “Timothy was having sex with Celia.” There was a kind of clutching pain with it. It passed, and I went into the bathroom to wash my face. Then I had the thought, “I have to decide if I going to marry him tomorrow.” That brought with it a kind of panic. Then it passed as well, and I put toothpaste on the brush, ran it under the sink, and brushed my teeth. Then the thought came, “I can’t marry him after what he’s done.” That came with a wave of rage. And I got out the night cream and put it on my face and hands. Then I had the thought, “I love him.” I can’t describe that feeling. I guess it was love. I turned out the light and went and climbed into bed.
Then came the knock on my door.
I thought about pretending to be asleep, but I hadn’t yet turned out the lamp by my bedside, and I knew that the line of light would show under the door, and I didn’t want Timothy to think I was ignoring him. I didn’t even consider the fact that it might not be Timothy.
I climbed out of bed and went over and opened the door. My mother was standing in the hallway, and she was crying.
“Mom, what happened?”
She didn’t answer me. I’m not sure she could have, she was sobbing so hard. She was having those shuddering heaves when you can’t quite seem to get enough breath.
“Come in, come in,” I ushered her in. “Lie down, okay? I’m going to get a wet towel.”
I went into the bathroom, took one of the washcloths, and ran it under cold water. Then I wrung it out, laid it on the counter, folded it, and brought it back out. She was lying in the middle of the bed, but she was still crying as hard as before.
I sat down on the bed, and I leaned over and was about to put the towel on her forehead.
Her face twisted as I watched it, and she raised her hand and pushed me violently away—at least that’s what I thought at the time.
If I’d had to imagine what it was like getting stabbed in the heart, it would have been completely different. I would have predicted a sharp, piercing pain. But there was only a pressure, like she had thumped her fist against my chest. There wasn’t even any pain, just a kind of thud, but the kind of thud you feel rather than hear. And I had the thought that I needed to put my head down on the pillow for a moment.
I would have guessed that dying by bleeding to death came with dizziness and cold sweats, like the one time I fainted at the doctor’s office while getting blood drawn. But it wasn’t like that at all. I lay there, and a kind of warmth spread through my body, like being immersed in warm water, but from the inside.
At the time I didn’t know what was happening.
But now I know everything. I could even tell you what my mother was thinking. I can see the thoughts from here. It’s like being on the top of a tall mountain; you can
see vast distances, but it’s all very small and far away. I can see thoughts, see intentions, see past and future—though with past and future sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference and get the order right. It’s like with things way off in the distance: it’s hard to get the proper perspective and see which are farther and which are closer.
The police came and did their investigation. The forensic team arrived to work the scene. They took a lot of pictures of the knife that had slipped easily through my ribs and pierced my heart. They were careful with the removal of my body, and they took the sheets as well.
Of course, it was all for nothing, since my mother had come into the room before the police arrived. She said later she didn’t know what she did or what she touched—so the prints on the knife (which were hers), the hairs and fibers on the bed (also hers), all those things that help build a case, they were all useless.
The evidence might not have been quite so useless if it had pointed to Timothy. Because that’s what usually happened. That’s what made sense. Men kill their girlfriends; husbands kill their wives. Mothers don’t kill their children. That’s what we think anyway, even though it’s not true. And as the police have discovered again and again, people don’t believe the facts. They believe what they believe. And when the facts contradict belief, belief usually wins.
The only reason they were able to get an indictment was the confession my mother made to Timothy and my sister. My sister was the one who told the police the truth. She went down to the station and told them everything she’d told Timothy, and then she described the scene afterward between Timothy and Mom. At first they didn’t believe her, but she told them things they could check: like how my mother had lied to me about having cancer to get me to come home, and about the weekly trips to the hospital, where I would sit in the car, and my mother would go and sit in the waiting room until it was time to come out. And it was only after they started to check out the things Deirdre told them that they started to believe.
Now I can see the things that even Deirdre didn’t know. How my mother would sometimes, on her way out of the hospital, stop a passing nurse and tell her she was dizzy. They always got a wheelchair and wheeled her outside. And how my mother would search the Internet for little things to tell me, to keep me worried and convinced. That’s also how she picked the type of cancer to get: leukemia so it would make sense that she didn’t look sick or have surgery. But the truth was, it never even occurred to me to question whether she was sick. As my sister said, my brain just didn’t work that way. In life, what we see is limited by what we believe. It is a justice that needs no laws to enforce it.
So now I have shared what I can see of the past. The future is more dangerous to visit, but there are a few things I can reveal, make of them what you will.
My mother would be charged, but the case would never go to trial. Sometimes life has a dark sense of humor. The whole time she was pretending to be sick, she didn’t ever go to a doctor. How could she? So the real cancer that it turned out she actually had—one that would have been treatable—went undetected. She died before her trial date.
Not long after that, Timothy’s father died of a heart attack on a Monday morning. He hadn’t been expecting it, and he hadn’t taken care of his estate planning. The government took a huge cut. And then the rest went to Timothy’s mother, who finally got to try her hand at investing. She lost half the principal within six months, before she learned her lesson. The family dinners came to an end, and when that happened, they became what they always were: strangers.
And Timothy?
For years he kept a shrine in his heart for me. He was so certain he would never get married. And he held out for a long time. Then he met someone at a charity event for the prevention of family violence. She was twenty years younger than he was, but she’d had more tragedy in her life than he had. She’d lost her three children when her ex-husband set their house on fire, and she’d been badly burned where her nightgown caught on fire. Despite all this, she still smiled and laughed and lived more than most people who were healthy and had every reason to be happy and still weren’t. It took another five years, but Timothy eventually married her.
But in his heart, he was faithful to me. For years he thought about me every day. Then, eventually, less often—and he felt guilty for it. After days of happiness, he would lash himself for forgetting. He’d ask himself how he could be happy when I wasn’t there? He told himself that I was the one who should be alive and that he should have died. But I can tell you that any sentence that starts with “should have” is a lie.
Timothy carried with him the certainty that I was his true love. And that was the real tragedy. Because the fact is, he was actually happier in his life the way it was than he would have been with me. It’s true, he loved me more—in the way that the world thinks of love. But that kind of love consumes you. It eats you up; it gives you no rest. He loved his wife in a gentle way and if she had died before him, he would have mourned her in the same way—gently, with fondness, but without the tearing sorrow he felt for me.
Those are the facts, and in life we always seem to want the facts. We look at statistics. We seek out explanations and hard evidence. We hope, with facts, that we will be able to control the events in our lives, or that if we can’t control them, at least the facts will explain them. We hope they’ll help us understand. That suddenly it will all make sense. That the mystery will be revealed. But have you noticed that the facts are like a blanket that’s not quite big enough? There’s always something of the unknown that’s left exposed.
Now that the story is over for me, I can see that the unknown isn’t something frightening. It is love itself. And when it comes, it is the one thing that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, unlimited. Even from here, where everything makes sense, that remains a mystery.
a cognizant original v5 release october 06 2010
Through the Heart Page 25
