Several women came up to Violet and told her how wonderful her mother had been and how much they’d miss her. She smiled and nodded and spoke to them softly, unable to remember their names. Others came to her as well, and the hour passed quickly. People had their coffee and their memories and their moment to tell Violet what they would have said at the memorial service, and then they left to go on with their lives.
She would have reconstruct hers. But she had done that before. She was an expert at picking up the pieces.
“Violet?”
She started, even though she was prepared to hear his voice, even though she knew it would come. She heard his voice in her dreams sometimes, its warmth, its tenderness. Its fear.
She turned. He was standing so close to her that it took her breath away. How could a man’s face remain essentially unchanged after twenty years of living? His eyes had the same vulnerability, his lips the same self-conscious quirk, his skin the same lucent quality that it had always had.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.” Tom had come up beside her. He put his arm around her, pulling her close.
Skeeter didn’t look at him. “Violet, please. I’ve respected your wishes not to see me for the last seventeen years. At least let me talk to you now.”
“I don’t think what you have to say matters,” Violet said. “We won’t see each other again.”
“It matters to me.”
“She doesn’t want to listen to you,” Tom said. “And I don’t think she has to listen to the guy who shot her, not on the day of her mother’s funeral. Not ever.”
Skeeter’s beautiful eyes widened. He looked at her, then at him, then at her again. “Is that what you told him? That I shot you?”
“You did,” she whispered.
His lower lip trembled. For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to be able to speak. Then he said: “Violet, what purpose does lying serve? Especially now?”
“Don’t call her a liar,” Tom said.
Violet put her arm around him, in part to hold him in place, and in part to maintain her own balance.
“He didn’t shoot you, Violet Marie.” A quavering voice spoke behind her, and for half a moment, Violet thought that it belonged to her mother. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Anita, the head nurse of the children’s wing of Sacred Heart. She had spent as much time in Violet’s hospital room as her mother and grandparents, holding her hand, and telling her that there was more to life than a pretty face.
Once Violet had awakened to see Anita holding Violet’s sobbing mother. I don’t know how she’ll live like that, her mother had whispered. I don’t know how to give her a future anymore.
Just be thankful she’s alive, honey, Anita had said. A quarter-inch to the left and you wouldn’t have to worry about nothing ’cept how to bury her.
“You never got your memory back,” Anita said, “did you, honey?”
Violet felt the flush in her face grow deeper. “No.” Then she looked at Skeeter. “But I remember you holding the gun.”
“I took it away from you twice,” he said softly.
“But you went to jail.”
“Juvie,” he said. “For the drugs.”
The drugs. They had been such a part of that night. They had been such a part of that year. Her mother hadn’t known, not until the accident, and even then she hadn’t wanted to believe.
“He pushed the gun away from you,” Anita said. “You kept staring down the barrel.”
“How do you know?” Tom’s voice was so low as to be menacing. Violet tightened her grip on him. His presence was good for her, his voice echoing her thoughts. How would Anita know? How would anyone know except Violet and Skeeter.
“There was a witness,” Anita said.
Jake. Jake who had brought the drugs. Jake who had been laughing when she took out the gun the first time. “Where’s he?” Violet asked Skeeter.
“Joliet,” Skeeter said. “Trafficking charge.”
“He lied for you,” Tom said.
“He wouldn’t lie for anyone,” Skeeter said. “I barely knew him. Don’t you think they investigated? A good girl like her, a boy like me. It was his gun, and she had the powder burns on her arm.”
“Skeeter,” Violet said.
“Stephen,” he corrected. “Stephen now.”
“You didn’t try to see me.”
“I was arrested,” he said. “I had my brother get you flowers with money I should have used for the lawyer, but they got sent back.”
“They made you scream,” Anita said to Violet, and she remembered those, like she remembered the gun. And Skeeter’s name, along with the pain.
She closed her eyes. Tom tightened his grip.
“Then when I got out,” Skeeter said, “your mother said you were gone. And she wouldn’t help me find you. She said you refused to talk about what happened, that you’d scream or cry or leave the room whenever someone mentioned my name.”
“But she gave you money,” Tom said. “To stay away.”
Violet opened her eyes. So that was why. To keep her safe. The explanation felt good.
But it also felt wrong.
Skeeter — Stephen — shook his head. “She gave me money,” he said, “to go to college.”
Violet leaned into Tom. She felt her breath stop in her throat, her body so tense that she seemed frozen in place once more.
Stephen misunderstood her silence. “She was a good woman, your mother,” he said. His nose was turning red. “She told me that I had a choice. She said I could be like my brother or my sister or my friends, and end up in prison for the rest of my life, or I could make something out of myself. She said no one would take me as a risk now, that I wouldn’t be able to get aid or help or maybe even a job, not yet. So she loaned me the money. She put in it an account and paid my tuition and my room and board and my books, and she told me that it was an interest free loan, and she said I didn’t have to pay it back if I made something out of myself. And I did. I own a chain of restaurants in Minneapolis, and they’re well known, reviewed in all the best magazines. I paid her back. All of it, a little at first, then the full amount last December. I paid her back with interest, and she didn’t want the money, but I had to, Violet Marie. I had to. Don’t you see? She gave me my life back. The only thing she couldn’t give me was you.”
He reached out to touch the right side of her face, the ruined side, and Tom caught his hand.
“No,” Violet said, bringing her own hand up to grab theirs. Stephen’s fingers were cold, Tom’s were warm, and the single fist they made was too big for her small hand. “Tom, let me talk to Stephen.”
“Violet —”
“Please,” she said.
He let Stephen’s hand go, then pulled her against him. She could feel his heart pounding, saw in his face his desire to stay. But this wasn’t about him. It hadn’t been about him from the start.
Finally he let her go and then he went into the hall. Anita smiled at Violet, then followed, picking up Tom’s coffee cup as she went.
“Protective,” Stephen said.
Violet nodded. Tom had always been protective. She had liked that. It had made her feel safe. Safe, she used to think, from the Skeeters of the world. But Skeeter had protected her too. She simply hadn’t remembered, that’s all. How strange her memory was, how fickle, and how her mother had never contradicted her, had simply let her go on, just as she was supposed to.
“What happened?” she whispered.
Stephen stuck his hands in his pocket, ruining the lines of his suit. “Jake brought the LSD, and it was a better grade than we were used to. You went first, and it was clear right off the trip would be messy. You got Jake’s gun. You thought it was so beautiful. You kept staring down the barrel, and Jake kept saying, ‘Take it away from her, man.’ So I did. Twice. And you kept reaching for it, like a baby seeing something pretty. Finally something else caught you and I thought it was safe. I was about to get high myself when I saw you had the gun. Your f
inger was on the trigger. I shoved it away—”
He stopped, swallowed, shook his head. She felt as if she were encased in glass.
“I’ll never know,” he whispered, “if I’m the one who made the gun go off.”
She turned away from him. She had to find a chair. Her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer. There were still some folding chairs out, metal, sturdy. The Auxiliary was cleaning up the cake. She and Skeeter — Stephen — were the only mourners left in the room.
“Mother knew,” she said.
“Everyone knew,” he said. “Jake ran, but it didn’t take the cops long to find him. I went to the hospital with you. I thought you were dead.”
She tried to see it from his perspective, the only one still sober in the room, the blood, the fear. But she couldn’t. She still remembered the gun, and how pretty it looked. That memory had never gone away.
“I don’t even drink any more,” she said.
He smiled. It was a sad smile. “I don’t either.”
“Mother forgave you.”
He grabbed another chair, pulled it close, sat on it backwards so that he could rest his arms on its top. “She said it was all our faults. Her for not watching you more closely, me for buying drugs, and you for being stupid enough to try them.”
Violet swallowed. Her mother had never spoken that candidly to her. Had she?
“I still think it was me, Violet. You wouldn’t have done it without me. Without my contacts. Without Jake and his gun.”
He had lived with this as long as she had, and it had scarred him just as it had her. Only he hadn’t found someone like Tom, someone who had told him that the scars were a part of him, and beautiful for that reason alone.
“I’m sorry, Violet Marie,” Skeeter said. “I’ve been wanting to say that for twenty years. I’m so very sorry.”
She had her hands clasped in her lap. She unthreaded her fingers, extended her right arm, and took his left hand. Then she placed it against her ruined cheekbone. He touched the scar gingerly, as if it still hurt her. She put her hand on top of his, and pressed it against her skin.
“We were young,” she said. “Stupid. We’ve lived with this every day. Mother did her best to make sure there was no damage.”
“There’s always damage,” he said.
“But it heals,” she said.
He bowed his head. “I wanted to say thank you to her. I wanted there to be a memorial service so that I could let everyone know just what she did.”
Violet swallowed hard, the lump in her throat so large she almost couldn’t move it. “I don’t think she wanted anyone to know what she did. I think that’s why she wanted the ceremony she had. She always kept secrets. Your loan. My father. God knows how many others there were.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment. Dishes clattered in the kitchen, and a woman sang, softly, one of the hymns from the service.
Then he raised his head. “I loved you, Violet.”
She stared at him for a moment. There were lines on his skin, visible in the fluorescent light of the church basement, sorrow lines around his eyes, worry lines around his mouth. The boy was there, but hidden in the man’s face.
“I loved you too, Skeeter,” she said. Then she kissed his wrist, let go of his hand, and stood. She ran her fingers through his still thick dark hair, wondering what would have happened without the drugs, the gun, the shooting. Wondering if he would have a chain of restaurants, and she would be content with teaching children how to enjoy their lives.
She doubted it. She wondered if this was what her mother had spoken of, whenever she mentioned the gifts that tragedy could bring. How strange to think of it in a different context. Violet had always thought her mother had been referring to Violet’s birth.
Stephen smiled at her, nodded, as if he knew that the conversation was at an end. There was nothing more that they could say to each other. They would never exchange addresses or phone numbers or pleasantries. There was too much between them for that.
She left him, sitting alone in that large room, empty chairs around him.
As she stepped outside, the heat of the day wrapped itself around her like a hug. The sun had lost some of its brilliance and had gained a mid-afternoon diffuseness. Tom stood at the edge of the parking lot, beneath an oak tree whose roots were pushing through the concrete. He was rocking on the fissure like a boy.
She walked up to him and put her arms around him. He held her for a long time, his face in her hair, and she could feel him shaking. What had he been afraid of? That Skeeter would hurt her? That she would leave without him, chasing a shattered dream?
Finally Tom let her go. “What happened?” he asked.
She slipped her hand through his, and led him to the car. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “when we get home.”
Her mother’s home, where there were pictures of a pretty girl that Tom hadn’t known, where there were ledgers filled with secrets that Violet wasn’t sure she wanted to find.
But she would find them. They were all there, waiting for her, and she didn’t need to fear them any more.
The first one taught her that.
“Her Mother’s Secrets” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March, 1999.
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