Chapter Twenty-Seven

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The long drive back to Coldlake Falls left us exhausted. Eddie was keyed up; he was used to constant physical activity in the army, and exercise was how he got out of his head. Almost as soon as we parked the car in Rose’s driveway, he said he was going for a run.

I nodded. Rose wasn’t home, and the house was empty. “I’m going to call the bowling alley,” I said. “They’re expecting me back. I’ll tell them it will be a few more days.”

Our honeymoon—the one we’d originally planned—was almost over, but there was no discussion of going home yet. Eddie nodded and said, “I should call Paul, too. I’ll do it later. He won’t mind.” Paul was his boss at the garage.

After Eddie left for his run, I took a seat in the phone nook in the corner of the kitchen. This was a chair with a padded seat next to a table with a telephone on it. Predictably for Rose, the phone was the ornate kind, the headset resting on two upstretched hooks. She probably imagined it was the kind of phone they had at Buckingham Palace. Still, even as I squeezed into the fussy space, I realized I was getting used to Rose and her aesthetic. It was almost calming. I let my gaze rise to a picture of Princess Diana on the wall as I picked up the phone and dialed. Since the number was long-distance, I made a mental note to pay Rose for the charges.

My boss at the bowling alley in Ann Arbor wasn’t happy to hear what I had to say. “I had you scheduled for tomorrow night,” he complained.

“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve been delayed. I won’t be back by then.”

“This is inconvenient. I was counting on you, April.”

“I know it’s—”

“You’re being irresponsible.”

I stared at Princess Diana, and suddenly I was gripped with an exhaustion so deep it was almost transcendent, an exhaustion I had never known I was capable of. How many arguments had I had in my life, with how many useless bosses, at how many dead-end jobs? I wasn’t being paid for my days off—it made no difference to his bottom line whether I showed up or not. I was disposable, and yet I was treated like a disappointment for acting that way. Just like every other job I’d ever worked.

The thought bubbled through my mind, unbidden: I don’t want to do this anymore. I want more.

Surviving to tomorrow wasn’t good enough. Not anymore.

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said, unable to keep the sharpness from my voice.

“I might have to let you go.”

I should care. I had to pay rent, bills. The bank account had been emptied. I needed a job. I should care.

Rhonda Jean had bled out in the back seat of my car, scared. Her bloody hand had gripped mine as the life seeped out of her. And the Lost Girl was still on the road, murdered and unidentified, begging for help.

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said again, and hung up.

I let the silence seep into my brain as I steeled myself. If I was let go from my job, we would need money while I looked for another one. I picked up the phone again and dialed a number I knew by heart, one I had been dialing for years.

It took a few minutes to connect. I had to talk to an operator, then another, and then wait as beeps sounded in my ear. But finally, at long last, the phone on the other end was picked up and I heard the familiar voice.

“Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me,” I said.

There was a beat of silence, enough to tell me everything I needed to know about the money. “Hi, baby.” My mother’s voice was rough, a smoker’s voice. She had been a smoker for as long as I’d known her. I supposed she still smoked in prison, too.

Even though I was angry at her, maybe as angry as I’d ever been, the first words out of my mouth were the usual ones. “Are you all right?”

“As good as I can be.” This was her usual answer. “How sweet of my girl to ask about me. I tell the others here that my daughter calls me regular. I don’t know if they believe me, but it’s true.”

My throat was dry, and I licked my lips. I had to get this call finished before Eddie came back from his run. “Mom, I’m calling for a reason.”

Her voice went cold. “Don’t start.”

“I’m starting.” My voice was as icy as hers; she was the one I’d learned it from. “I went to the bank. You cleaned the money out of the account.”

The money was ours, Mom’s and mine. Seven thousand dollars, sitting in a bank account that had both of our names on it. It had been nearly twenty thousand dollars once, but I’d withdrawn half of it over time to pay for Mom’s first set of appeals. It was a mistake I wasn’t going to make again.

Where did the money come from? If you asked Mom, you would get a different answer each time. She’d say it was left to her by a distant relative, or it came from the sale of her dead mother’s jewelry. She’d never even told me the truth, most likely to protect me—and herself—in case I was ever questioned about it. One of Mom’s rules was that whatever I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell the police under questioning.

But since Mom had left my life when I was eighteen, taken back to California to stand trial for what she’d done the night we left, I’d done a little digging. I couldn’t trace most of the money, but some of it, incredibly, was my father’s life insurance. I didn’t know how she’d gotten her hands on it, or how she’d managed to siphon it into a bank account the police couldn’t find. The rest—well, I didn’t know exactly where it had come from, but as my mother’s daughter, I could make an educated guess.

She’d had plans for that money, I was certain. Then the police had found her when we lived in Fort Lauderdale—they’d tracked her somehow through the life insurance check. She’d been arrested while I was working a shift at Olive Garden. When I got home to find her gone, I’d had to pack up and get out of town. Alone.

After spending half of the money trying to free Mom, I’d been careful with the remaining half, reluctant to use money that dirty unless I had to. I’d withdraw a hundred or two at a time, only when I needed it. The fact that it was my father’s blood money didn’t bother me—I had a cracked molar and a badly healed broken pinkie finger because of him. It was the rest of the money that made my conscience stir.

And yet that money, that number in the bank, was my buffer against starvation, against homelessness. Just knowing it existed helped me sleep at night. It was the barrier against me taking a man home and taking his fifty bucks so that I could eat. I earned my own way, but if things ever got bad, I could still withdraw a hundred bucks’ worth of dignity. And now that dignity was gone.

“My lawyer says we can appeal. But appeals take money,” my mother said.

Cold sweat made my hand slick on the receiver. “We spent so much on the first appeal, and we wasted it. It isn’t going to work.”

“It could work,” she argued. “My lawyer says it could be self-defense. People pay more attention to that than they used to. Ever since that woman cut her husband’s dick off. And O. J. is on TV nonstop. It’s all over the news.”

Here’s one thing: I loved my mother. It sounded crazy after all she’d done, but I did. I really, truly loved her. For most of my life, she was the only person in the world who understood me.

Here’s another thing: My mother was a murderer.

My earliest memories were of my father hitting my mother, my father hitting me. I had lived in a constant state of fear, the only state I knew. All I had ever wanted, as a child, was to get out of that house.

So maybe it was self-defense. If Mom had shot Dad while he was coming at her, it could have been.

But that night when I was twelve, Mom had bludgeoned Dad to death with a baseball bat while he slept. She’d set the bed on fire to try and cover it up. Then she’d pulled me from the house and we’d escaped, my mother driving, me egging her on.

I’d told Eddie we had escaped my father and changed our identities that night, that my mother was dead. Because when you tell a lie, you should stick to the truth as closely as possible. We had escaped that night; we had just left behind a dead body instead of an angry abuser. Years later, after they’d finally caught her, when she called me collect from California, her instructions to me were clear: Cut your losses, baby. I’m dead to you now. Do you understand?

I’d disobeyed her, just a little. I called her regularly in prison, made sure she was all right. I couldn’t help it; she was all I had.

But if I had followed her instructions—if I had withdrawn our shared funds from the bank account and never contacted my mother again—I would still have the money. How hilarious was that?

“How did you do it?” I asked her now. “How did you get the money out from inside? You’ve never been able to access the money before without me.”

“People help me,” Mom said, and in her voice I could hear my own flat inflection, the tone I used when I was a shiny, hard surface that no one could penetrate. I hated myself so much in that moment that I felt bile in my stomach. “It doesn’t matter how I did it, honey. We always said that money was for emergencies. This is an emergency.”

“I needed that money,” I croaked.

“For what?” She waited, and when I didn’t answer, she kept talking. “You don’t tell me anything about your life, do you know that? Not ever. You think I don’t notice?”

“I have told you,” I argued. “I live in Ann Arbor. I work in a bowling alley.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s the money for? Rent? A house? Clothes?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Is there a man?” Mom paused, as if I’d spoken. “My God, there is, isn’t there? Who is he? Tell me everything.”

My temples were pounding and my eyes stung. Leave it to Mom to be able to smell a man from prison a thousand miles away.

“There’s no man,” I said.

“There’s a man.” She was sure of it now. “Who is he?”

“There isn’t a man,” I said again. “I date every once in a while. That’s it.”

“Liar.” Her voice was flat with anger. “That’s what you wanted the money for? To spend it on some man? I taught you better than that. I taught you the hard way.”

She had. The way she taught me the lesson of her life—never let anyone in—was very, very hard. She had been beaten bloody for that lesson. She had killed for it. She had fled her life, changed her name. She had left her old self dead by the side of the road, along with the husk of the little girl I had been. She was sitting in prison now for that lesson. She had sacrificed everything for it.

She had taken all of our money in her final lesson to me. I should never let anyone in—even her.

And for what? The day I married Eddie, I had gone against everything she taught me. I’d thrown away every word of her hard-won advice. I’d done it the day I’d first seen him in the hall outside my bedroom, to tell the truth.

If she knew about Eddie, I had no idea what my mother would do. But I knew her first instinct would be to destroy him in any way that she could. Now that she’d stolen my money and was asking about my husband, I was relieved that I’d never told my mother the name April Delray. She still didn’t know it, and she didn’t ask. When she used my name—which was almost never—she called me by the name of the dead girl she’d given birth to, who I’d left behind in California.

“There’s no man,” I repeated, because she had to believe it. She simply had to. I had finally learned my lesson. “I wanted that money. I earned it as much as you did. I never told on you. I never went to the police. I kept your secrets. You know that.”

“Then make more,” Mom said. “I taught you to be resourceful. This appeal is life or death. I hate to be a Prime Bitch, but if I lose this time, I lose. I looked out for you long enough. I have to look out for me.”

I closed my eyes. She had robbed me—my mother had robbed me. I didn’t know why even a small part of me was surprised. I didn’t know why it stung. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know why it mattered.

“I’m in a situation,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll get out of it.”

My mother’s words were sure, her confidence the only mothering she could give me. “You’ll get out of it. Do you know how I know? Because I made you, in more ways than one. And if it was me in your situation, no matter what it is, I’d get out of it. I’d do whatever it takes.”