What a Mother Knows

by Leslie Lehr

  Tyler ran over and gave her a big hug. Michelle smoothed a lock of hair from his forehead. “Thanks for being here. I’m sorry about Key West.”

  “Me too,” he said, cutting her off before things turned maudlin. He turned to shake hands with Kenny. “Nice play, Coach.”

  “Brilliant,” Cathy agreed. She shooed Tyler toward the snack machine, then lowered her voice. “How do you feel?”

  “Not sure,” he admitted. “I still don’t believe that none of those jurors have ever heard of Roadhouse or Killer Mom. It was probably a mistake to mention the bartender. And the jury foreman’s eyes widened when I mentioned Hollywood, as if he could see his name in lights. Undermines all that crap about being typical.” He rubbed his temple. “Damn it, I should have kept it about the car. How you put your trust in a vehicle and look what happens. These cars are known for rollovers—I could have made a case for unreliability.” He shook his head in misery.

  “He’s just nervous,” Cathy told Michelle. They both looked at Kenny, the coach who never broke a sweat at the league championships, even when his team was down two runs at the bottom of the ninth. He wasn’t nervous; he was scared, and not just for Michelle. They’d go bankrupt if he lost the case.

  Cathy pointed at a court clerk watching the Dodgers game on some portable device. “Honey, why don’t you go see how the Dodgers are doing? I’ll take Michelle to the ladies’ room.”

  When Kenny wandered off, Cathy put her arm around Michelle to protect her from Roadhouse fans. Yet, there was no need for protection now. Michelle repelled everyone equally, as if she glowed with radiation. She felt like a bomb about to blow. But it wasn’t the jury’s deliberation or the plutonium guilt that weighed so heavily in her chest. Michelle had judged herself already. It was her mother’s verdict that she feared the most.

  Michelle spotted Elyse across the lobby, deep in conversation with Drew. Elyse’s silver hair flamed like a lit match on a long fuse.

  Michelle and Cathy ducked into the ladies’ room. Cathy was chattering as she wandered back to find an empty stall, but Michelle wasn’t listening. She washed her hands at the closest sink. She wanted to powder her nose and pull herself together, but she didn’t dare look at herself in the mirror. She was afraid a murderer would look back.

  When a toilet flushed and footsteps approached, Michelle kept her head down and dug out her mother’s Chanel lipstick.

  Cathy’s voice called out. “Michelle, did I tell you that Julie offered to write Cody a recommendation for UCLA? That’s all a mother can hope for, right?”

  Michelle looked up slowly and saw Noah’s mother in the mirror. Their eyes locked, but neither said a word. Then Noah’s mother slid something across the countertop. It was the postcard of Turtle Town.

  The stall clanged open and Cathy called out. “Michelle?”

  Michelle jammed the postcard in her purse. When she looked up, the hem of the black caftan was sweeping out through the door.

  “Was that Dr. Braunstein?” Cathy asked. “How awkward. Are you all right?”

  Michelle nodded, then escaped outside to wait by the windows. Her fingers itched to feel the paper her daughter had touched, to read the lyrics she’d written, but she didn’t dare. She stared out to sea. A frothy set of waves was rolling in. She breathed deeply, but all she could smell was Chanel No. 5.

  Elyse’s reflection loomed in the window. A shank of hair hung loose from her chignon, and where was her signature silk flower? Even the lacy scarf ringing her neck looked out of place against her tired St. John’s suit. Time had taken a toll on them both.

  “I wanted to come sooner,” Elyse said. “But we had our spring recital.”

  “Let me guess: Giselle?” Michelle kept her eyes on the ocean. The horizon was clear now, a narrow strip of blue dividing the earth and sky, like the fine line that Michelle danced on. When she heard the angry click of her mother’s compact, she turned around.

  “I fly clear across the country, squeezed between a drunken letch and a fat slob who sneezed all over me, but everything I do is wrong!” Elyse flung the compact back in her purse as if it was burning her fingers. “I might as well be dead.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s just an expression. Stop being so melodramatic.” Elyse clasped the railing like a ballet barre and stretched by force of habit. “All that was long ago.”

  “True, but now we have something in common,” Michelle said. “Almost dying, I mean. Although I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing your pretty white light.”

  “Ah, but your memory remains faulty, oui?” Elyse’s glance was as sharp as a dart until she recognized the pink on Michelle’s bitten lips. Then she released the barre and almost smiled. “I knew that shade would become you.”

  “It’s just for today; you can have it back.” Michelle set her purse on the floor to retrieve her mother’s lipstick, then held it in her outstretched palm.

  Elyse reached toward the black tube, then her eyes widened and she clutched Michelle’s hand. She raised it higher in the light to see the razor thin scars on Michelle’s slashed wrist. The lipstick clattered to the floor.

  “It’s not what you think,” Michelle said, yanking her hand away. “It’s just a cut.” She saw Elyse drop her chin as if to chide her for a lie. “I’m not like you, mother!”

  Elyse spun away. She sat on a nearby bench and adjusted the Ace bandage wrapped around her thin ankle.

  Michelle tried not to care, but it was a losing battle. She’d always been her mother’s protector. Why stop now? “Are you hurt?”

  “Mes enfants,” Elyse said, waving the topic away. “Where shall we dine? They don’t feed you on the plane anymore.”

  “I could add plus one to my reservation at the jail cafeteria,” Michelle said.

  Elyse frowned as she finished wrapping her ankle. “Is that what you want? To be a martyr? To leave everyone else to clean up your mess?”

  “My mess?” Michelle asked.

  Elyse stood up. “If you have something to say, Michelle, say it now. As much as I abhor your husband’s behavior, I will not return if you don’t invite me back. Comprenez-vous?”

  Michelle nodded. For once, her mother was on her side. Too bad it was now, when she had given up on being good. She turned toward the ocean and hoped her mother would wait for her to find the right words. There was a question that had lingered all of her life, the one she’d never known how to ask. Until now.

  Michelle took a deep breath and concentrated as if this was a game show. This is Your Life—and Mine! She watched the Ferris wheel spin and felt her heart race as if she were at the carnival, crossing a cakewalk of shifting ground, as her mother stepped to the railing beside her.

  When Michelle finally spoke, she pushed the words out of her mouth one by one, focusing on the syllables instead of the meaning behind them. “When you swallowed those pills, it was never a cry for help like the doctors said, was it?”

  Elyse tucked the loose hair into her chignon. “Non, pas du tout. I wanted to be dead.”

  Michelle nodded. “But, why?”

  Elyse shrugged, as if this game was too easy. “I couldn’t understand why your father didn’t want me. J’étais dévastée.”

  There was a rush of activity behind them, an announcement on the loudspeaker that they both ignored. “Didn’t you love me?”

  Elyse pressed her eyes closed.

  Michelle wanted to smooth the lavender powder smudged across her mother’s crepe lids, but she was afraid to touch her, afraid she would be pushed away.

  Elyse finally looked up but refused to meet Michelle’s eyes. It seemed like she was staring into the past, watching an old movie. “I loved you so much, ma chérie. When Alexander left, I was devastated, but that’s not why I did it. I gave up dancing, everything I knew, to make up for not giving you a family—and it was a mistake. I burned your soup and left you backstage alone all day. I was a horrible mother. And you knew, always watching me with those big brown eyes…
” Elyse turned to face Michelle. Her accent went flat. “I thought you’d be better off.”

  “Without you?” Michelle asked.

  Elyse nodded.

  They stood in stunned silence for a moment. Then the years melted away and the wall between them crumbled. “Oh, Mother,” Michelle cried, her tears flooding from a lifetime of feeling alone. “How could you be so wrong?”

  Elyse wrapped her arms around her baby and hugged her, rocking gently as Michelle sobbed. They clung together until a man’s voice echoed across the lobby.

  “All rise,” the bailiff called from inside the courtroom.

  Kenny tapped Michelle’s shoulder. She pulled away from Elyse and tripped over her purse on the floor. Her pen spilled out. She looked down and spied the edge of the postcard. She leaned down to hide it but lost her balance. She reached out, catching her fingers in Elyse’s scarf. The woven yarn stretched until a hole gaped open. Kenny caught her by the elbow and steadied her feet.

  Michelle looked back at her mother’s ruined scarf. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

  Elyse shook her head. She pulled the scarf free and took it off. She wrapped it around Michelle’s neck as if for luck. Then she reached out for one more hug. She held Michelle close and whispered in her ear. “Je suis désolée aussi.”

  “Ladies?” Kenny took Michelle’s arm. He pulled her across the lobby, away from her mother. Elyse watched the whole way.

  Michelle reached the open door and looked back. “Mother!” she cried, afraid she might not return. The courtroom door clanked behind her for the last time. Kenny escorted her inside the dark courtroom and down the aisle. She felt the eyes of the judge, the jury, and everyone in the gallery. She blinked in the darkness as Kenny steered her limp body through the wooden gate. He sat her down at the defense table. The room was dead quiet.

  She looked back again, but her mother was gone. Kenny tapped her knee and reminded her to look down, look sad, look innocent.

  Michelle fingered the scarf nervously, studying the loose strands of purple yarn shimmering under the harsh light. It was the kind of yarn Nikki had used, the kind Michelle had found in her bedroom. Where had her mother gotten it? Then Michelle knew. She started shaking.

  Je suis désolée, her mother had said. But she didn’t mean she was sorry about the scarf or even about the trial. Elyse was sorry about Nikki. And Nikki had made the scarf that hung like a noose around Michelle’s neck.

  Kenny patted her knee, as if calming her for the verdict. Michelle took a deep breath and fought to put the facts together, to avoid showing the grief that could give her away. Elyse had said something else that rang true: she’d thought Michelle would be better off without her.

  The judge was speaking now, but Michelle couldn’t hear a word. Her head was crowded with the testimony written all over her mother’s face, the secret message in sparkling yarn. The bailiff took an envelope from the head juror and walked it back to the bench. Michelle felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around.

  Tracy offered the Star Trek pen that had rolled out of Michelle’s purse in the lobby. Michelle nodded thanks. She studied the tiny starship floating inside the barrel. Then she remembered the plane ticket her mother had sent. The one stuffed in the drawer of the hall table.

  All at once, she was surrounded. Light bulbs flashed and shouts rang out. Strangers were hugging her and shaking Kenny’s hand.

  “It’s over?” she asked him.

  He spotted the district attorney slipping out quietly past the reporters, then nodded. “Congratulations. You can go home.”

  34

  Towering columns of corn flashed past the old Mercedes in hypnotic stripes of green. Elyse’s knuckles were clamped white on the wheel, but not a word was wasted between them. An hour had passed since Michelle stepped down from the airplane stairs and stuck her heels in the soft tarmac. Each breath still held a familiar torture, as if she’d never escaped this iron lung of heat. Fifty miles outside Columbus, the land was still as flat as when she was a kid, cruising all day on her ten-speed. Now, night was falling and the devil had caught up. She was at her mother’s mercy.

  They sped past a cluster of spotted cows, then the unmistakable aroma of fertilizer whooshed in with the hot air. Michelle rolled the window up and peeled her white T-shirt away from her chest. She jiggled the lever of the broken air conditioning vent, then opened the purse on her lap for something to fan herself with.

  The envelope that Becca had given her after the trial was right on top. She pulled out the check and read her name above the dollar amount: $2,000,000. Michelle couldn’t help smiling. She’d never seen so many zeroes. She waved it a few times, but the flush of shame only made her feel hotter. She pulled out her pen and signed it: deposit to the Children’s Shelter c/o The Noah Butler Trust.

  “What do you have there?” Elyse asked.

  “Just something I need to mail,” Michelle said. She put it back in her purse, then unlatched the glove compartment. When the door swung down, spilling the contents, Elyse stiffened beside her. “Sorry. I was looking for something to wedge the vent open.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “No, I can reach,” Michelle said.

  “Have it your way,” Elyse said with a sigh. “There’s mail for you, too—a reminder for a PCR appointment with Dr. Palmer. What is that?”

  “A kind of therapy,” Michelle said, stifling a smile. She spotted her name on the reminder card printed with the address of a “clinic” at the Columbus Hilton where they’d planned to meet. She leaned down against the seat belt and extended her right arm just enough to pick it up between her fingers.

  “Must be effective,” Elyse observed.

  Michelle nodded. She saw Elyse’s furtive glance and followed it down to the mess. She leaned forward and spied a postcard of the Great Barrier Reef in a plastic sleeve labeled Australia. Michelle raised her eyes slowly toward her mother. “You sent the postcards?”

  Elyse kept her eyes on the road. Michelle knew by the firm line of her mother’s lips not to press further in this prickly heat. She hoped to find out soon enough. The last fallen item was a brochure for the Elyse Deveraux School of Dance. Michelle fanned herself for a moment. “Mind if I use this?”

  Elyse glanced over. “Non.”

  Michelle winced at how she’d dismissed the sample Elyse had brought to show her in California, when she’d just returned home from the hospital. She could apologize, but it was time to start fresh. Even her mother was looking ahead, her eyes fixed on the vaporous mirage rising from the road before them.

  Michelle studied her mother’s Degas-style portrait on the cover. For the first time, it inspired pride instead of anger. When Michelle opened it, she looked more closely at the glossy pictures. The collage of children caught her eye, especially one brown-eyed baby in a tutu.

  “Is this a picture of me?” Michelle asked.

  Elyse smiled. She slowed at the next corner where a cloud of mosquitoes circled the cottontails, then turned right past Kern’s, the general store where Michelle used to stop for apple cider. The wooden fence along the parking lot was skirted with a banner of red, white, and blue.

  “Any of this look familiar?” Elyse asked.

  “All of it,” Michelle said, fanning her damp face with the brochure. Independence Day was huge in Ohio. Police vans with bullhorns prowled the riverside at dawn to wake the sleepy neighborhoods. Children dressed like Betsy Ross and Abe Lincoln rode on crepe paper–covered floats pulled by tractors in the parade. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do when the heat hit 100 besides swim, catch crawdads, or hitch a ride down the Scioto River on a ski boat.

  Michelle marveled as they passed an empty fireworks stand and tunneled into a shady road of maples. Before leaving for college, she’d helped wire the skinny saplings to tall sticks. The middle-class houses looked like mansions now, especially the brick colonial where she grew up. She wondered about the real estate value but could barely think beyond her throbbing h
eart.

  Elyse parked on the circular driveway, then walked around to open the passenger door. Michelle peeled herself off the leather seat and climbed out. She tugged her damp shirt from her dark jeans and smoothed her frizzy hair. She was so nervous it felt like her brain was buzzing. Then the sound rose until she recognized it as the cricket’s summer song. Not Drew’s crickets—hers. Drew’s obsession had seduced her from the beginning, with the familiar sound of home.

  Elyse popped the trunk to get the suitcases, but Michelle heard music drifting from the backyard and didn’t wait. She slapped a gnat on her neck, then followed the path past the trellis of scarlet roses climbing up the side of the house. The lawns joined without fences into a common carpet of green. A cluster of fir trees filtered the shouts of children playing down by the creek. Michelle rounded the corner and spied red and green balloons tied to the porch rail.

  Nikki stood by a picnic table, a backlit dream come to life. She turned down the tune on the CD player, a love song Michelle recognized from the Roadhouse album. Then she picked up her camera from beside the silver Christmas tree on the table and tossed the strap over her head before stepping down the wooden stairs. Michelle started to run. She wanted to sweep her daughter off her feet, just like in the commercials she used to produce. But Nikki held her camera up like a shield between them, click-click-clicking with each step closer.

  The sound made Michelle pause. Panic overwhelmed the impulse and her stomach cramped with regret. She spoke as loudly as she could over the lump in her throat. “Looks like a party.”