Chapter Forty-Eight

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

I'm seven years old, and I'm all alone.

My mother went out earlier tonight, leaving a few lights on and our old television tuned to a staticky game show. She promised she'd be home soon, but she forgot to give me Eskimo kisses before she left. I can hear her going down the hallway, her flip-flops slapping against her heels so rapidly it sounds like she is running away.

I wait for her to remember about the kisses and turn around. But she doesn't.

I check under the bed we share and in the closet of our little one-room efficiency, and no one is hiding. But when it grows dark outside, things look different.

The bedsheets smell sour, and I wish my mother would take them to the laundromat, like we used to do on Saturday mornings, and make them smell like Tide. We haven't been there in months. My mom is always so tired in the morning these days; she asks me to bring her a Coke from the fridge and a frosted Pop-Tart, but even though she used to tell me that sugar would make me hyper, it seems to have the opposite effect on her. She barely moves from the bed to the couch until late afternoon.

I know I should sleep, but noises keep jolting me—the slamming of a door down the hall, a man shouting, a woman rhythmically crying out in what sounds like joy, music from cars that roll by the front of our building, blaring so loudly the walls of the apartment seem to shake.

I stare up at the ceiling with water stains all over it that I try to pretend look like clouds. It grows ink-black outside, and the noises come fewer and farther between, which makes them even more frightening when they do happen. I want to get out of bed and check the little clock on the stove, but I'm too scared to move.

My mom has never stayed out this long before. She doesn't drive because we no longer own a car, so a deer couldn't have jumped in front of her and caused her to crash, like one did to my dad.

But something terrible must've happened. She has never left me alone all night before.

I lie awake for hours, until the sky outside my window turns from black to light gray to blue. Finally I hear a key scraping into the lock. I run into the living room as my mom stumbles inside. Her long hair is tangled, and her makeup is so smudged she looks like she has two black eyes. She's missing a flip-flop, and the sole of that bare foot is covered with filth from the city's streets. Her eyes look strange; it's like she doesn't even see me. Like it didn't matter that she was gone so long.

But she must have seen me because she speaks.

"Could you get me a Coke, baby?"

"Stella?"

Charles's voice rips me out of the past. I take the napkin he passes me and wipe my face.

If a simple notation on a document noting my mother's arrest a few months before her death is enough to plunge me into this terrible memory, what will happen when I examine the photographs of her splayed out on the floor?

I knew my mother had been arrested the night she lost her flip-flop because I heard her telling a friend about the cops who chased her into an alley and caught her. She said she spent the night in a holding cell alongside a few prostitutes.

Now a few of the details from that long-ago night are in front of me in black and white: Mary Hudson, 40, arrested for possession of heroin. She was released the next day with a court date scheduled for the following week.

I make a note on my legal pad. I need to get those court records.

If someone bailed out my mother or testified on her behalf—a friend or lover or neighbor—I could try to track them down. Maybe they knew her well enough to give me information about the people who were in my mother's life at that time. They could potentially even lead me to the man who rang our doorbell that final night.

"I can turn to the next page whenever you're ready," Charles tells me.

I'm not ready, my mind cries. I won't ever be ready.

I force myself to say, "Go ahead."

The next page is the responding police officers' report, written the morning my mother died. It says paramedics came, which I don't remember. It notes the time of the officers' arrival: 7:06 a.m.

I must have been in the closet for about twelve hours.

I'm able to hold it together as I read the terse report, and I can even get through the autopsy findings by reminding myself it's only words on a page. I note the name of the medical examiner, even though I doubt he'd remember any specific details about a thirty-year-old case. Still, I have to try.

When I take out my phone and bring up the pictures of my mother's body, my stomach bucks and my heart rate explodes. Charles leans forward, and I tilt the screen so he can see them.

"Oh, no, Stella." Anguish fills Charles's voice. Somehow it pulls me back from the brink.

"She didn't—she didn't always look like this," I say haltingly. "She was so pretty. She smiled a lot, and sang to me at bedtime. She used to make me lunches for school and put in a surprise every day: a note or a sticker or a piece of candy."

He shakes his head. "You were so little. It's so damn unfair."

I force myself to look at the pictures again. This is where I need to be my sharpest, to scrutinize the images for clues, even though I'm so dizzy I feel like I'm on the verge of passing out.

I'm the only other person who lived in that apartment. If there's anything unusual in the photographs, I'm the lone person who can identify it.

I don't look at my mother's body. I know that's too much for me to absorb right now. Instead, I take in the other objects in the room, using my fingertips to zoom in on details: The cheap wood coffee table with burn marks and an overflowing ashtray. The ugly couch and big, clunky TV with bunny ears. The brown shag carpet. A memory flash loosens—that carpet always felt a bit stiff and crunchy under my feet.

I study the two glasses on the coffee table, each with an inch or so of watery brown liquid at the bottom. The glasses are close together. Did that mean my mother and her guest were sitting close together, too?

They must have been drinking cheap whisky; my mother couldn't afford anything name-brand. I wonder if the police bothered to fingerprint the glasses.

I can try to track down the responding officers. They may be retired now, but perhaps they'll remember the young, mute girl who opened the apartment door for them, revealing her mother's body on the floor. Maybe there's a bit of information that didn't make it into their report, some seemingly flyaway detail that could unravel the story of what happened that night, now that someone finally cares enough to ask.

"I can't do this anymore now," I whisper to Charles.

I close my eyes and tilt my head back against the couch. Exhaustion descends on me like a powerful wave, pulling me into its undertow. My mind begins to shut down. I feel tears dampening my cheeks, but I can't move.

In the stillness of the night, I hear him whisper, "I'm so sorry, sweetheart."