She looks up at me, then, for just a second.
That brief flash is enough for me to tell that she’s putting on an act. Renee always wore her emotions on her sleeve. It is what made her so vulnerable to the type of men that she attracted.
I see, in that brief moment, that the façade of strength she’s trying to convince me of is just a cover for the emotions she’s desperately trying to hide.
She looks back down and continues sweeping, the bristles of her broom going over and over the same clean spot.
“No,” she continues. “No, I’m done worrying. Raise a child for eighteen years. Give her love, food, shelter. Give her affection. Give her a warm place to sleep at night. Protect her from all the badness in the world. And then what? One, day, the child gets up and leaves. Poof! Gone! Just like that! Vanished without a trace.”
The motions of her broom become harsher. Sharper. They morph from sweeps into angry jabs.
“What’s a mother supposed to do? Is she supposed to go after her? No. No, not after the things that have been said. Is she supposed to call the cops? No, because cops are the scumbags of the earth, and why would they give two shits about her problems? But is she supposed to simply forget, to pretend the child she carried for nine months had simply never been born?”
She stops, rips her attention away from the floor. Her eyes pulse at me.
“No. She can never do that. No mother can do that.”
I feel the torment, the pain behind her words. And from that, a surge of guilt tries to rise within me. I struggle to shove it back down, but I cannot. Not when I know the things I do now: about her, about Paul. Not when I can see the strain the last five years have added to her face.
She looks…weary. Exhausted. Stretched thin, as Tolkien once said: like too little butter on too much toast. The makeup she’s wearing to make herself presentable, and hide the true state of her skin, is caked on twice as thick as I ever remember.
So a part of me—a small, hesitant, cautious part—begins to feel pity for her. I find myself breaking the promise I made never, ever to feel even a semblance of that emotion towards Renee.
She turns her back on me and keeps talking. “So you wander in here, looking like a stray dog, and you want me to worry about you now? I’m past that. I worried the first week you were gone. The first month. The first year.
“Do you know what it’s like to feel abandoned? No.” She scoffs a laugh. “Of course you don’t. You’ve never been abandoned. I was always there for you, despite what you thought. I always cared. Always. And how did you repay me? By saying all those vile things and then leaving without a trace!” She stares at me for a minute. Then shrugs.
“So I’m through worrying. As far as I’m concerned, you’re no more than a stranger. A stranger who happened to stop in at the diner on a lousy night. So what? We get tons of those here. Drifters. Hitchhikers. Highwaymen. You name them, I’ve seen them. Dealt with ‘em, too. Don’t you be mistaking. So tell me what you want, and I’ll see it cooked up in the back. Otherwise, if you have no business here, I expect to see you soon on your way. We don’t take well to loiterers, no matter what you might have heard. No matter what—”
She’s rambling. I can tell. So I cut her off with a soft, and simple, “Mom?”
She glares over her shoulder. “What?”
“I love you.”
She stops, shock-still. Slowly, she turns to face me. She blinks, in disbelief.
“What did you say?” she whispers.
“I love you, mom,” I repeat. I stand up. “I never got to tell you that before I left. I don’t want to make that mistake twice.”
I look at the floor. “That’s all. That’s why I came.” I start back toward the door, into the dark, heavy sleet outside.
Where do I go next? I don’t know. Maybe it’s time for me to swallow my pride and call Jeremy. I could head back the way I came. There was another roadside motel I passed on the way, and if I check in tonight I could get him to wire me some money by the morning…
I’m two feet from the door when I hear a sob. “Wait, Lilly!”
I turn around. My mom is running toward me. She collides with me and wraps her arms around my neck. She holds me tight, tighter than I’ve ever been held by her before. Her body shakes. Even through the layers of wet clothes I have on I can feel her fragility.
She starts to cry. I feel emotions welling up inside, too. Ones mixed with warmth and compassion, yet tainted by those permanent staples of resent and distance. I refuse to cry. I won’t.
But then she pulls back, cups my face, and strokes my cheeks the way she did when I was a child. My walls come crashing down. I start to cry, too.
“Shh, shh. It’s okay. It’s okay,” she coos. “I just… I can’t believe it’s really you. You’re here, Lilly. You’re not a dream. You came back!”
“I did,” I say. I wipe my eyes. “I came to find you. To fix my mistake.”
“Don’t,” she warns. “Don’t you dare blame yourself, Lilly Ryder.” She tries to scold me, but through the tears, through the growing radiance of her face, it comes without any feeling. “You’re here, and I…I just can’t believe it.”
I blink, trying to prevent more sobs from escaping. I look at my mom. “I got your uniform all wet,” I say.
She looks down at the front of her shirt. She seems almost surprised by what she finds. She chokes out a laugh.
“Don’t you worry about that,” she tells me. “Come on, come on, we’ve got to get you out of those dripping clothes. I have something that should fit in the back.” She takes my hands between hers. “You’re absolutely frozen solid. Like a glacier! Quickly now, I’ll get you some hot chocolate, maybe some soup. You still like clam chowder? It was your favorite as a little girl.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
***
Half an hour later, I’m hunched over on a stool, a wool blanket over my back, scooping up my third, hot bowl of clam chowder.
Mom had to take care of a group of truckers who came in shortly after I changed. So we haven’t had an opportunity to talk. In a way, I’m glad. It gives both of us a chance to steady our emotions. Moreover, it gives me an opportunity to warm up and actually feel like myself again.
I watch her as she works. There’s a cook in the back serving up dishes, but otherwise, it’s just her. She runs the place with strict efficiency that I would have never expected of her. It’s completely at odds with the mess and disorder I remember filling our home.
We make small talk in the short intervals she has before her attention is demanded by the other diners. I think that both of us are simply waiting for her shift to be over. Then, we can really talk. Talk, and perhaps, most importantly, patch things up between us. Or at least try.
Even though the start of our reunion was happy, I still feel like there’s an enormous gulf between us. I need to know the truth. About Paul. About her behavior. About whether my father really is who I think he is, who Jeremy wants me to think he is.
I also want to know how she’s been. She looks like she’s getting along okay…but for some reason, it’s hard for me to put a finger on whether that’s actually the case or not. Once the other patrons came in, she became determined and business-like. It stands at odds with the woman I met…the one with too much makeup on her face.
I realize, watching her now, that I’ve been unfairly harsh to her in my mind ever since our fall-out. My impression was tainted by the way we left things. Whenever I thought of her, I remembered only the bad. Never the good.
And yet, seeing her in person, seeing her with the benefit of the perspective I gained during my time with Jeremy, casts a new light on things. I remember that Renee always had a big heart. A good heart. There was just an inherent disconnect between her heart and her mind.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, that I can see things from her perspective. She was hurt, time and time again, by the people she allowed close. But such was her nature: Her hea
rt would not allow her to stay detached or distant from anyone she met.
And it’s not like she was a total idiot. I got my genes from somewhere, after all. Part of the intellect that got me into Yale came from her.
I think, reflecting back, that Renee became a product of her environment more than anything else. A victim of it, more like. Maybe if she’d had a better upbringing, or made better choices in her youth, she could have prospered.
Another tendril of guilt floats up inside me. She must have seen the way I tried my best not to be like her in high school. She’s no moron. And how hurtful must it have been, to watch the daughter you raised grow up to resent you so?
You always think you know everything as a teen. You do not. You do not know a tenth of what you think you do, and a tenth of what you think you do is more than you’ll ever think to know a tenth of in your life. I thought I hid my resentment well. But I must have been so absolutely, mind-numbingly transparent. Renee knew the truth of her life, of her situation, of how she and I ended up in the place we were. I did not. My knowledge of our lives was flawed. Bless her heart, she let me hate her in my ignorance. Only because I did not know any better.
Only because she loved me enough to shield me from the truth.
Thanks to Jeremy, the drapes have been cast from my eyes. I know about Paul. Thanks to Fey, I know what he did after I was born…and the type of man he really was. If he preyed on someone in a position as vulnerable as Jeremy’s mother…
But, no. I stop short. I can’t make myself deal with those thoughts. Not when I have my own mother in front of me, right now.
“It’ll be another hour or so before this place calms down,” she tells me as she stops to pour herself a glass of water. She wipes the sweat from her brow. “And then, you can tell me everything that’s happened to you since you disappeared from my life.” She sips her water.
I realize, after a startled moment, that she’s drinking water. Water! I’ve never seen my mom drink straight water since she picked up the bottle…
“Are you…” I look at the glass, and then at her face, cautious. “Are you…you’re not sober now, are you?”
“Three years and counting,” she says softly. “Thanks, in a way, to you. It was worse at first, right after you left. But when it finally sunk in that you weren’t coming back…well, it made me reconsider the priorities in my life.”
“Wow,” I say, truly shocked. “That’s amazing. I’m so proud of you, mom.”
“Ahh,” she waves the comment away. “It was long overdue. Maybe I just needed a wakeup call. Well, you gave me that.” She looks around the room, and then her eyes dart back to me, full of mischievous excitement. “But I should be congratulating you, not the other way around.”
“Me?” I blink. “For what?”
“Oh don’t play coy. I didn’t believe it at first. Didn’t believe it was actually you, but then—oh!” She stops short, as she notices someone calling her over. “I’ll be right back.”
I watch her as she goes. In my mind, the wheels are spinning. What could she be referring to? Surely, not Jeremy…
Then I tsk, and clench my jaw in irritation. Of course it’s going to be about Jeremy. What else could it be?
She rushes back to me after a moment.
“Mom,” I say levelly, “if there’s something you think you know about my life, you better tell me now!”
She looks suddenly ashamed for letting her excitement show. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t think you’d be…well, you wouldn’t show up here looking like that if you were still—”
“Mom,” I cut her off. “Does this have anything to do with a certain Jeremy Stonehart?”
Her eyes go wide, and she brings her hands over her mouth to cover a gasp. “So it’s true?” she says. “I mean, I read all the magazines, saw the stories, but I couldn’t believe…” she trails off, and jumps at me with a hug. Lilly, I’m so happy for you!”
Don’t be. I almost grumble. You wouldn’t be, if you knew the truth.
This is a definite trait that I never envied in my mom: She always let herself be defined by the men she was with. Though she never verbalized the thought, she definitely acted on it. In her mind, the mark of a successful woman was the success of her man.
So if she knows about Jeremy and me, she’ll never let me play it down.
A thought occurs to me. “Wait,” I say, touching her arm just before she leaves. “When did you see the stories?”
“Just this week,” she tells me. She laughs. “At least they let me know you were still alive. I never thought you’d show up in person here!”
“Mom,” I warn, “whatever you’ve read, don’t let it get to your head. Like I said, we have a lot of catching up to do.”
“Oh.” Her face falls. “Lilly, honey, I’m sorry. Does that mean you and…” she looks around then whispers the words, “…Mr. Stonehart…are no longer together?”
“Oh no,” I say. “We’re very much together.” And bound tighter than you can ever believe. “Just don’t make any assumptions until you hear things from me. Okay?”
“Yeah,” she nods. “Yeah, that’s fair.” She looks over her shoulder. “I gotta go. But I’ll be back soon. After my shift, we’ll go to my place. Okay? And I’ll get you some proper fitting clothes.”
“Thanks,” I say. “That sounds nice.”
She smiles at me, and returns to work.
Chapter Thirteen
I face the rain one more time as we make a dash for the bus stop. I half-expected the truck outside to be mom’s. I should have known better. She doesn’t drive.
The trip doesn’t take long. The bus takes us right to the entrance of a trailer park. We get off. I follow her through the unlit yard. A dog starts yelping at us from inside one of the trailers. Somebody curses. I hear a solid thud, and pained whimper. Then silence.
I wince.
“Here we are,” mom announces, stopping outside a trailer indistinguishable from all the others. “Home, sweet home.”
She unlocks the door, turns on the light, and steps inside.
I follow, shutting the door behind me, glad to be out of the weather. But inside, it’s still freezing cold.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Renee exclaims. “Damn heater keeps turning off. I keep asking them to fix it. But it’s always ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’.” She pulls the plug and then reinserts it into the wall. A moment later, the fans inside start pulsing.
“Lilly, honey, come here. Warm your hands.” She takes me by the shoulders and positions me in the direct line of heat. “Now you just stay there and keep warming up, okay? I’m going to go change out of these clothes. I’ll bring you something warm to wear. Okay?”
“Sure, mom. Thanks.”
She leaves me with a smile and goes into the other room.
I get my first real chance to look around. The place is cleaner than I expected it would be, but not by much. Maybe it’s because there’s simply so little stuff.
Mom has a foldout futon against one wall. A rickety coffee table in front of it is strewn with magazines.
“I wonder…” I look the way mom went, but see no sign of her. I walk over to the table. I leaf through the magazines, looking, looking, looking. Then I see it.
We don’t make the main feature, but here is a side story on the front page.
‘Industrial tycoon spotted with mystery woman,’ read the headline. Below, a two-line snippet: ‘Mega Billionaire Jeremy Stonehart courts a stunning employee of his firm amidst growing allegations of insider trading and regulatory non-compliance just weeks before the IPO. Details on the identity of the woman, and their shocking love-life on page 46.’
“Shit,” I curse. This is the type of stuff I was in charge of keeping quiet. I look at the date on the top right corner of the magazine. It’s from—Jesus, it’s from this morning!
I sit down and rifle through the pages, landing on 46. And right there, smiling back at me, are the photographs Jeremy claime
d to have retrieved from whoever followed me to the café.
I scan the article. There’s nothing alarming there. Just the regular, unfounded hyperbole that is so typical of these publications. However, when I turn the page to continue reading, my heart lurches.
Taking up a good two-thirds of the page are photographs taken of me and Jeremy on our vacation. The ones Hugh gave me. The ones that were not in the envelope that Jeremy handed over at the end of the day.
I feel sick. Nauseous. The room starts to spin. I have to grip the sides of the coffee table to keep it from slipping away from me.
Jeremy lied. That’s the only explanation I can think of. He lied. I wasn’t going crazy. He just…planted things to make it seem that way.
How else do I explain the photographs? The ones of us kissing on the beach? The ones of us on the yacht? The ones that Hugh handed to me?
I still can’t explain the video. But the memory of Monday recurs, stronger than ever now. Hugh was not a figment of my imagination. The collar he took from his desk was not a sign of me breaking. It was all real. It happened. I’m sure of it. I can still remember it clearly, while the false memory that came from whatever I saw on tape is fuzzy, fading. Like a hint of a dream or a programmed simulation.
Something sketchy…something deeply suspicious…is going on inside Stonehart Industries. Jeremy is at the heart of it. But, somehow, I’ve become involved as well. It’s something past his vendetta for me. Hugh was real. These photographs are proof! They have to be. But Jeremy wanted me to believe otherwise.
Oh, my God. I nearly smack my head as I realize how stupid I’ve been. Jeremy did not fly me off to find my mother from the goodness of his heart. He did it to get me away from the company! Away from Stonehart Industries, while he did…whatever it is he’s been meaning to do.
Unless…oh, Jesus, unless Jeremy leaked those photographs to the press. I refuse to believe that a man as obsessed with privacy would be careless enough to let a photographer this close to his island. There is no way it could have happened. Not without his knowledge. No way.
Uncovering You: The Complete Series (Mega Box Set) Page 66
