I don’t think I can go back to school in the fall. I don’t know if I can go back in the next twenty years. I’m mortified, and I’m mad at her, because it’s hard enough to be a loser whose mother’s dead and whose father killed her in a fit of crazy without becoming the laughingstock of the eighth grade.
I push Gertie away from me. “Did you call the police, too?” I ask. “Or is that still a sticking point for you?”
My grandmother’s hand comes up as if she’s going to hit me. I cringe; this would be the second time this week I’ve been hit by someone who is supposed to love me.
But my grandmother never touches me. She has raised her hand to point upstairs. “Go to your room,” she tells me. “And don’t come out until I say you can.”
Because it’s been two and a half days since I last showered, the bathroom is my first stop. I run the water in the tub so hot that a curtain of steam fills the tiny room, and the mirrors fog up, so that I don’t have to look at myself as I strip off my clothes. Then I sit in the tub, my knees pulled up to my chest, and let the water keep running until it is almost level with the edge.
Taking a huge breath, I slide down the slope of the tub so that I am lying on the very bottom. I cross my arms, coffin-style, and open my eyes as wide as I can.
The shower curtain—pink with white flowers—looks like a kaleidoscope. There are bubbles that escape from my nose periodically, like little kamikaze warriors. My hair fans around my face like seaweed.
And this is how I found her, I imagine my grandmother saying. Like she’d just fallen asleep underneath the water.
I picture Serenity sitting with Virgil at my funeral, saying that I look so peaceful. I figure Virgil might even go home afterward and tip a glass—or six—in my honor.
It’s getting harder to not burst upright. The pressure on my chest is so strong I have a quick flash of my ribs snapping, my chest caving in. My eyes have stars dancing in front of them, underwater fireworks.
In the minutes before it happened, was this how my mother felt?
I know she did not drown, but her chest was crushed; I’ve read the autopsy report. Her skull was cracked; was she struck in the head before that? Did she see the blow coming? Did time slow down and sound move in waves of color; could she feel the motion of blood cells at the thin skin of her wrists?
I just want, once, to share something she felt.
Even if it’s the last thing I feel.
When I am certain that I am going to implode; that it is time to let the water rush into my nostrils and fill me so I sink like a stricken ship, my hands grab the lip of the tub and haul the rest of me into the air.
I gasp, and then I cough so violently that there is blood in the water. My hair mats my face, and my shoulders convulse. I lean over the side of the tub, chest pressed against the porcelain, and I vomit into the trash can.
Suddenly I remember being in a tub when I was tiny, when I could barely sit up by myself without toppling over like an egg. My mother would sit behind me, propping me in the V of her body. She would soap herself and then soap me. I slipped like a minnow through her hands.
Sometimes she sang. Sometimes she read journal articles. I sat in the circle of her legs, playing with rubber cups in a rainbow of colors—filling them, dumping them over my head and her knees.
I realize then that I’ve already felt something my mother felt.
Loved.
? ? ?
What do you think it was like for Captain Ahab, in the seconds before that harpoon line wrenched him out of the boat? Did he say to himself, Well, bummer, but that damn whale was worth it?
When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn’t—mercy—did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn’t know who he was anymore.
I’ve spent years looking for my mom. And now, all signs are starting to point to the fact that I couldn’t have found her if I’d crawled every inch of this earth. Because she left it, ten years ago.
Dead is so final. So done.
But I’m not crying, like I thought I would, not anymore. And there’s the tiniest green shoot of relief breaking through the wasteland of my thoughts: She did not willingly leave me behind.
Then there’s the fact that the person who killed her is most likely my own father. I don’t know why this is less of a shock to me. Maybe because I don’t remember my father at all. He was already gone when I knew him, living in a world his own brain had created. And since I’d already lost him once, I don’t feel like I’m losing him again.
My mom, though, that’s different. I had wanted. I had hoped.
Virgil is all about crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, because so much has been screwed up in this investigation already. He said that tomorrow he’ll figure out a way to test the DNA of the body that everyone thought was Nevvie’s. Because then we will all know.
The funny thing is that now that this moment is here—the one I’ve pegged as my high-water mark for years—does it matter? Here’s the thing: I may finally have the truth. I may have closure, which is what the school counselor was always talking about with me when she corralled me in her stupid office. But here’s something I don’t have: my mother.
I start to reread my mother’s journals, but I can’t; it makes it hard to breathe. So I take out my stash of money, which is literally down to six individual dollar bills, and fold each of them into a tiny elephant. I have a herd marching across my desk.