by Cole McCade
Maybe nothing. The bedroom was the same: the same massive rosewood bed, the same wardrobe, maybe different bedding. The suit jacket draped over the chair under the window was so identical to the one he’d tossed there before she’d left that she might as well have walked out yesterday. Vile heat rose up her face, and she leaned against the doorframe, pressing her hands over her mouth and breathing quickly through her fingers. This room. This room, where she’d lain under his sweating grunting mass and lied with her lips, her fingers, her body; this room where she’d lain on sheets soaked in the scent of another woman’s sweat. This room where she’d left a smoking hole in the wall, nothing left of it now except a faint bump in the plaster and paint.
She suddenly remembered the feeling of his body sliding against her own, like wet rubber, and swallowed back vomit. She couldn’t sleep in this room again, lying next to him like nothing had changed, like she’d never left. She couldn’t. She didn’t understand how she’d been dragged home from the police station last night, and somehow this morning she was supposed to wake up and shrug her old life on like a coat she’d left on the hook—while no one talked about anything that really mattered, or looked at the elephant in the room.
WASP family values.
Ignore it until it goes away.
The attic ladder had been let down and left that way, with several boxes piled at the foot. Each box was marked with labels like clothing and shoes and books in handwriting she didn’t recognize. Jacob had had a stranger package up her things. Maybe that fucking bitch he’d been humping on top of—
Breathe. Breathe. She smoothed a hand over her borrowed pajamas, squared her shoulders, and peeled back the tape from the boxes. The smell of cedar hit her, little sachets tucked in among cardigans in pastel colors and properly shapeless khakis and modest tank tops cut no lower than an inch below her collarbones. Skirt suits. Blouses. Breezy little designer dresses that said feminine but properly sexless in lovely floral colors. She picked up a pair of jeans that looked like they’d come straight from her mother’s closet. She’d tried buying other clothes, she remembered. Tried dressing in ways that made her feel pretty. Jacob had given her that look, had curled his upper lip and turned away and refused to acknowledge her until she’d changed. He’d shaped her wardrobe without a word; shaped her without a word, and she’d let him. She’d learned like Pavlov’s dogs. Positive and negative reinforcement.
“Woof,” she said and, with a bitter smile that felt so very hateful, tossed the jeans back in the box and left it behind.
Downstairs in the guest room, she showered and brushed her hair and tied it back in a prettily messy little bun, then changed into her sundress and little jelly sandals. For just a moment a hint of cloves and chocolate rose from the folds of the muslin, and a pang struck deep: a longing that reached an angry fist down inside her and found all her tender places and dug in hard. The sundress skimmed her thighs just below the fading remnants of her bruises, and she pulled it down farther to keep them secret and hold them to herself for just a little bit longer.
Muted sounds drifted through the windows: the purr of an engine, muffled voices. The front door opening and closing. She flicked the curtains aside and peeked carefully through the blinds. Her mother’s pearl-white BMW sat in the driveway, next to the Mercedes-Benz. Leigh curled her tongue behind her teeth and suddenly wished she’d paid more attention to Sister Mary Anne when she’d taught Leigh about praying for forbearance, and less attention to Sister Mary Anne when she’d taught Leigh about the sharp crack of pain across her bottom and the sick sadistic pleasure of pushing someone to ruin just for her own selfish wants.
Maybe he hadn’t come, she told herself. She hadn’t seen him since her wedding. He’d always managed to be out on some errand or another when she’d visited her mother; he’d never come when her mother dropped by for a chat, and Leigh had known better than to ask why. She wasn’t sure if she could stand to see him now, but she suddenly wanted to see her mother with a quiet desperation—and Jacob would be upset and pinch his lips together in that thin silent way, if she made them wait longer than was proper.
She slipped out of the guest room and down the hall. Whispered conversation drew her, bits of her name and other things she couldn’t make out. It stopped when she stepped out of the hall into the living area. Jacob sat with her mother at the dining table, pouring a cup of coffee.
And he sat next to her, smiling at Jacob with the easy familiarity of close friends. Cronies. Members in a brotherhood that needed no name.
Leigh waited for that hurt feeling to come. That longing. That sick, horrified anger, even. She’d thought she’d feel so many emotions at the sight of him that she wouldn’t be able to hold it all in, and she’d break down right in front of everyone.
Instead she felt nothing. And as she looked at him, really looked at him, at the sagging lines under his eyes and the silent scream in the creases of his mouth and the nervous, frightened way his eyes darted toward her, over her, then away, she realized this thin quiet shell of a man was more lost than she’d ever been. Pathetic. The man she’d loved and begged for wasn’t in this room. He’d never even existed.
He’d been a teenage fantasy she’d concocted because she’d needed to see him as something more than he was—so his touch wouldn’t make her feel like less, so she could make something more out of the nights he’d used her over and over, then thrown her away. She’d created this nameless man, him, like he was the only one in existence, the only one she needed to acknowledge. But he wasn’t some ideal. Wasn’t some dream of a man.
He was just…Steve. Fucking Steve, with his sallow cheeks and flat shallow blue eyes and the red of burst capillaries stringing across his cheeks.
Everyone was staring at her, silent. She caught that tightening of Jacob’s lips. Probably over her dress, but he wouldn’t say anything in front of her parents and she didn’t care. While everyone stared at her, she stared at him. She wanted him to look her in the eye, just once. To acknowledge what he’d done. What he was.
“Hi, Daddy,” she murmured.
In the silence that followed, her mother’s fingers squeaked against the ceramic of her cup. Jacob made a disapproving sound. But Steve did nothing, holding himself rigid and stiff while a wooden smile stretched his lips, all teeth and no heart.
“Hi, Rissa-Rabbit.” Looking over her head. Always looking over her head, while he called her that name she fucking hated. She wanted to grab his stringy yellow hair and jerk his head back until he couldn’t look away. “It’s good to see you, baby girl. I’m glad you’re safe.”
That was it. After everything, after years, after—fuck, what had she been expecting? A confrontation? Validation? People like him never gave either. They just slunk around and hid from anything that would shine a light on them. Anything that made them look too closely at themselves, and exposed the loathsomeness the shadows hid.
“Yeah,” she said numbly, shaping the words with a tongue that suddenly tasted the slime of him thrusting into her mouth, clammy and too cold and writhing like a slug, while the fine hairs on her arms stood up and pricked like thorns. “You too.”
Her mother rose, her arms outstretched; she pulled Leigh into a hug. A hug that smelled like the perfume she’d always worn, soft and powdery and a little cloying. Shalimar. That was it. A little crystal-cut bottle with a blue stopper that she’d always lovingly and carefully dabbed behind each ear while she’d told Leigh all the secrets of being a woman, all the secrets of living a double life: one outside herself, one within.
“Mama,” she whispered, and buried her face in her mother’s ribs—and pretended she was little all over again, and her mother still loved her as a girl before she’d learned to hate her as a woman.
Thin hands gripped at her. The hitch in her mother’s breath pushed her chest against Leigh’s cheek. “Welcome home, darling. Welcome home.”
The hug was quick, perfunctory, ended too soon, and Leigh barely stopped herself from reaching for her
mother when she pulled back. She wasn’t sure if it was the light in Mama’s eyes or a wet gleam; the woman turned away too quickly, while Jacob and Steve rose from their seats with those blandly indulgent smiles that meant we don’t want to be here.
“We’ll give you some privacy to get caught up,” Steve said, and clapped Jacob’s shoulder before picking up his coffee. “Won’t bore you talking stocks when you girls have a lot to catch up on.”
They walked off together, already talking about NASDAQ and trade fluctuations, completely tuning out the two women watching them. They didn’t even look back. That was it. That was it, after four years gone and everything that had happened before that. Anticlimactic didn’t even begin to cover it. She didn’t know what she’d wanted. A violent explosion. Confrontation. Even some kind of emotion.
But why should they have to care as long as Leigh was back in her proper place?
The moment the door to Jacob’s study closed, her mother caught her shoulders and dragged her close. Leigh went stiff—but her mother enfolded her in a tight hug without restraint, polite society manners gone to leave the woman Leigh still called Mama, wrapped in that sweet powdery Shalimar scent and the softness of an embrace turned fierce and almost frightening by the force of her mother’s trembling.
“Clarissa,” her mother choked out. “What were you thinking? I just…I…”
“Mama…?”
“You scared me.” Mama pressed her face to Leigh’s hair, then pulled back enough to look down at her with her eyes wide and wet and almost desperate, the lines around them—that she tried to cover with Cover Girl and plastic surgery—drawn stark and tight. “I know I don’t always act like it, but I love you. I do. If you were having problems, you could have come to me.”
“I’m not sure they were the kind of problems that could be fixed.” Leigh shrugged weakly. “Spoiled little rich girl syndrome doesn’t have a cure, does it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just…there was so much more for me out there than this, if I’d just…known how to find it, and I…” She struggled to explain, struggled to tell her mother something she’d tried to tell her for her entire life, only to feel like she was speaking an alien language. “Have you ever felt like a train desperate to jump the tracks? I guess that’s me. I wanted to be a train wreck.”
Mama stared at her, brows wrinkled. “You’re talking nonsense, sweetheart.”
“Nevermind.”
She should have known it was pointless. She smiled faintly and pulled from her mother’s grip, drifting to the wide glass double doors leading out to the yard. Outside Elijah played with the nanny on the patch of fenced-in yard, kicking around a bright red inflatable ball and tumbling across the grass. Jealousy twinged sharp in the pit of her stomach. That should be her out there, playing with her son; she suddenly wanted to know how it felt to sprawl against the sharp-edged jagged tips and biting green scent of fresh-cut grass, with that little boy wriggling like a puppy in her arms.
“He’s grown so big,” she murmured.
“He’s a beautiful boy.” Her mother pulled the glass door aside on its tracks and stepped out onto the patio. Iced tea and glasses had already been set out, waiting for them, and she poured herself a glass as she settled in one of the patio chairs. “I always wanted a grandson. You’ll have someone to carry on Jacob’s legacy.”
Jacob’s legacy. Leigh stared at her mother, but she didn’t know what to say.
And so she said nothing at all.
They sat together in the patio chairs and watched Elijah play, while condensation dripped down the sides of their glasses in the deepening, blinding summer heat; ice clinked with a musical tinkle. Leigh had watched him for nearly every day of his life, but it was different now. Different when he was within her reach, not on the other side of a playground fence that might as well be a jailhouse wall. Different when, now and then, he looked up at her and watched her with his dark, curious eyes, questioning her, knowing her.
“We should have a party,” her mother said. “A regular debutante event, to let people know you’re back and everything’s all right. It’ll be the social event of the summer.”
Leigh closed her eyes. She’d been expecting this. The society thing. That didn’t mean she hated it any less. “What did you tell people?” Her mother didn’t answer, and she opened her eyes, watching her while that pinched, careful look made Mama’s nose thin and her mouth tight. “What did you tell them about why I was gone, Mama?”
“It wasn’t really anyone’s business. We’ve rather been out of society since then, you know. Just to avoid the questions. But you needn’t worry. I’ve told people you were working overseas. They’ve been very sympathetic, knowing how hard that has to be on Jacob.”
Leigh burst into laughter—laughter that felt just a little manic, just a little desperate. She couldn’t help herself. Poor Jacob. Poor Jacob, with his stocks and this stranger he paid to look after their son so he wouldn’t have to. Poor Jacob.
Mama frowned. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Leigh took several deep breaths, until her laughter didn’t feel quite so hysterical; until she could talk without wanting to collapse into crazed giggles when it really wasn’t that funny. “I don’t want a party.”
“Why not, dear?”
“Because I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate.”
“Sweetheart.” Mama reached across the table and caught Leigh’s hand in her own. Mama’s fingers were so thin, like brittle twigs, and Leigh was almost afraid to grip back when she thought those long curling fingers just might snap. Her mother watched her worriedly. “If you need to talk about it…” Mama sighed. “I haven’t wanted to pry. I don’t—you were just gone one day, and Jacob called, so angry. We had no idea what was going on. We’ve spent years trying to figure it out. If you abandoned him for someone else, if you had a psychotic break from post-partum depression, if…” Her lips thinned, before spreading in an artificial, practiced smile. “Well. You don’t need to hear all of it. We’re just all struggling to understand why. I wish you’d come to me, Clarissa. I could’ve helped.” She shook her head. “You always had to try to do things on your own, though, didn’t you? Even when you couldn’t.”
“I wish I knew how to tell you. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try.”
But I already tried.
Leigh tugged her hand from her mother’s gently. She knew she was doing this wrong. Knew she should be clingy, grateful for the warmth and acceptance, desperate for every touch of affection that reaffirmed her place in this family. But it didn’t feel right. She didn’t belong here, like she’d been cut out of one picture and dropped in the middle of this painting, taped in place with her jagged chopped-up edges still showing.
“Mama?” she asked. “Did you love my father?” then quickly clarified, “My real father, not Steve.”
Her mother went white. Something strange and terrible transformed her face, for a moment. A glimpse beneath the mask at something raw and tortured and horrid; a dark, hateful, painful thing festering with all the rot that was just a seed in Leigh, right now. A seed that could blossom and grow and decay into this, and for that breath she saw her future waiting for her, looking back at her like her mother was the mirror over her bed on her honeymoon night.
“Why would you ask me that?” Mama rasped.
“I…I just…”
“Love doesn’t matter when you have a child to raise. You give up things you never thought you’d let go of, for the sake of that child,” she spat, fixing Leigh with a forbidding stare. “Remember that.”
“What did you give up for me, Mama?”
“Does it matter?” Mama’s upper lip curled. “You have a lot to make up to that man if you want to stay in your son’s life. I’d suggest you get started.”
“I don’t have anything to make up to him. He—”
“—paid your bail and took you back after you ran out
on him like a child.” Flat, contemptuous eyes bored into her. “That’s the story everyone will see. That’s the story you need to live. Because no matter what he did to you, in his eyes it will never match what you did to him. You’ve wounded his pride, and to a man like him pride is everything. You’re lucky he was willing to take you back at all.”
“…yeah,” Leigh said, her eyes filling. She closed them tightly. She wouldn’t cry. Not in front of Elijah; not in front of the perky little nanny; not in front of this furious crone who had replaced her mother, a furious crone she wasn’t wholly sure was wrong. “Lucky.”
“Now you listen to me, you spoiled little twit.” Sharp fingers dug into her chin; her eyes snapped open, sick hurt flashing through her, as she stared up into her mother’s eyes. Mama’s teeth bared, large and hard and ready to bite, with every word. “You settle back into your life. You play nice. And for the sake of that little boy, if you love him at all, you will be sorry, you will be contrite, you will be servile if you have to be. You will suck it up, be an adult, and accept the hand you helped fate deal you. Have I taught you nothing?”
“You taught me not to question what others told me to do.” Leigh jerked her face aside. “I guess I didn’t take the lesson very well. I can’t live like this. I was fine on my own for four years. I’ll be fine with Elijah. I can just…just take him and go—”
“And when you’re caught and dragged up before court—and you will be—I’ll be on the witness stand, telling judge and jury what an unfit mother you are.” She scoffed, letting Leigh go with a little push, like she was dirty. “My God, you want for nothing, and still you’re not happy. Your only purpose is to protect that boy, Clarissa. Do whatever you must to protect his well-being.”
“Protect his well-being.” There was a wet painful bubble in the back of her throat, waiting to pop and spill her horror everywhere in a wash of sobs, if she would let it. “Like you protected mine when you stood back and watched him rape me every night?”
