The Rumor, page 25
Marie’s face twists in disgust. “You’ve never understood. Always going on about coming to terms with the past. You haven’t a clue—”
“Marie, please!” Mom cries. She clasps her hands together and sways in silent pain. “It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. What do I have to do to make you believe me?”
Marie shuffles on the sill. Her eyes are wild. The wind catches her wispy hair. Michael moves closer.
“No!” Karen screams. “Don’t you see what she’ll do? She’s going to tip herself backward if you go anywhere near her.”
“Come on, Marie,” Michael says. “You don’t have to do this. Is this the last thing you want your daughter to see you doing?”
Marie turns to Karen. “She confessed. I recorded it.” She glares at Mom. “You might have gotten away with it again, but I heard you confess. And so did your daughter. You murdered my little brother.”
“A forced confession,” Mom says. “It would never stand up in court. You know it wouldn’t.”
Tears roll slowly down Marie’s cheeks. “That wouldn’t have mattered. Your life would have been over once it was on the internet and people knew your face.”
Suddenly her features change. Oh God! She’s really going to do it.
“Don’t do this, Marie,” I plead. “I know you’ve suffered, but this isn’t the way.”
But Marie isn’t listening. She’s staring at Mom, her knuckles white as they grip the windowsill. Her eyes narrow. Her teeth bite down on her lower lip. I sense the tension in her upper body, watch her rock slowly backward and forward, an almost imperceptible movement, her right foot flexing in midair. And in that split second I know what she’s going to do. She’s not going to tip herself backward. She’s going to use every last ounce of her strength to launch herself forward. She’s going to jump off the windowsill and hurl herself at my mother, shove her into the void of the staircase.
I think of the broken floorboards at the foot of the stairs, see them splinter and collapse under the weight of my mother, her body plummeting like a stone through the rotting plaster of the ceiling below and landing on the concrete floor of the kitchen.
No one could survive a fall like that.
I try to warn her, to scream at her to get away from the doorway, but it’s as if I’ve been paralyzed, my tongue welded to the roof of my mouth. Can’t any of them see what’s going to happen?
As Marie pushes herself clear of the windowsill, I know what I have to do. Whatever lies Mom told, whatever secrets she withheld, my life with her was real, wasn’t it? The things we did together, the things she taught me. The love that’s enveloped me all my life like a blanket, keeping me warm and safe. Wherever she came from, whatever happened in her past, she’s still my mother and she doesn’t deserve to die like this because of one terrible mistake she made as a child.
Marie is a ball of compressed rage, just like her little brother must have been when he charged at Mom all those years ago, incensed at being held against the wall, overcome by a surge of adrenaline and white-hot fury at the injustice of it. Unless I can cross the room and push Mom out of the way, it’ll be too late.
Marie’s feet touch the floor and time, which has stretched like elastic, snaps back into place and I’m throwing myself across the room at a right angle to her moving body, hitting Mom side-on and pushing her clear of the doorway. She staggers under my weight and the two of us stumble headlong into the eaves and crash onto the floor in a tangled heap of arms and legs. Something clicks at the front of my shoulder and a splinter of pain shoots up my arm and across my chest. Then I hear another crack, but this time it’s the sound of wood splitting.
The pain in my shoulder intensifies. My fingers land on something sharp and wet. My collarbone has not only fractured, it’s protruding through the flesh. My chest heaves and pain skewers me to the floor. My vision narrows to a pinprick, then fades to black.
The last thing I hear is a piercing scream and a sickening thud.
53
“JOEY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
Michael’s voice is soft in my ear. He’s holding my hand. “The doc says you’ll be good as new in a couple of months, although it might take a little longer to regain full strength in your shoulder. They had to pin it.”
I open my eyes and blink in the bright light.
“Where is he? Where’s Alfie?”
“Alfie’s fine. Kay’s just taken him to buy a comic book in the gift shop. They’ll be back any minute.” He strokes my cheek. “He slept in her spare room last night. I stopped in to see him while you were in surgery and he was fast asleep, clutching a soft giraffe called—wait for it—Long-Neckie Boy.”
Relief floods my veins like a drug. It’s better than any painkiller they could have given me.
“And Marie?”
He shakes his head. “Once you pushed your mother out of the way, there was nothing to break her forward momentum.” He winces at the memory. “She went headlong down that staircase and straight through the floorboards. They were completely rotten—they couldn’t take her weight as she landed.” He pauses. “You saved your mother’s life, Joey.”
I close my eyes, but all I can see behind them is Marie’s body sprawled on the floor like a broken doll, her limbs sticking out at weird angles, dark crimson blood seeping out of her ears and into her wispy hair. In saving Mom’s life, I made Karen’s mother lose hers.
“Your mother and I had a hell of a job, what with making sure you were all right and trying to stop Karen charging downstairs to get to Marie. That place is a deathtrap—she could have fallen through, too. She only stopped trying when the paramedics arrived and told her there was nothing anyone could do to help Marie. She must have died on impact.” He sighs. “I suppose that’s some consolation for poor Karen.
“As soon as I got to the hospital and realized Alfie wasn’t there, I started to panic. Then Karen said it was okay because she’d left him with Kay. She thought that would be better than leaving him with her sick mother, so when I told her I’d been to her apartment and couldn’t get any answer she started to worry that something bad had happened to Marie. Karen had left her phone behind in the rush to take Hayley to the ER, so she tried calling her mother on mine but there was no reply. Then I tried you, and when I couldn’t get ahold of you on your cell I tried your mother’s landline and couldn’t get an answer there, either.
“Something twigged in my brain then and I knew something was wrong. I asked Karen what her mother’s name was, and when she told me it was Marie my blood ran cold. I asked her a few questions and my worst suspicions were confirmed. I knew she was Robbie’s sister.”
He runs his hands through his hair. “I didn’t want to endanger you both by telling Karen who you were, but when I said I thought you and your mother might be in danger, she guessed. She guessed right away, Joey. It was Karen who first told her mother about the rumor. It’s why Marie asked to come and stay with her in the first place, to see if it was true.”
I close my eyes and let that sink in. So it was me telling them about it at book club that started this whole thing.
Michael takes hold of my hand again and massages my palm with his thumb. “Karen thought her mother was done with all that fighting-for-justice stuff and that she’d finally turned a corner. She thought Marie just wanted to come and stay with her because she had cancer and needed looking after. But of course Marie would go with her sometimes to pick Hayley up from school. That’s when she must have recognized your mother.”
“But how did you and Karen know where to find us?”
“We were wracking our brains trying to work that out. Then Karen mentioned how her mother always seemed drawn to that derelict house on the beachfront. Every time they walked past she told Karen it stirred up bad memories. It all just clicked into place. How it was a derelict house where Robbie got killed. We drove there as fast as we could.”
“Where was Hayley in all this?”
“Karen’s husband came to the hospital to take over. Karen had already phoned him before she left and asked him to meet them there when he finished at work. Karen didn’t tell him much, just said her mother was ill and she needed to get back.”
“She’ll have told him now, though, won’t she? It’ll be all over Flinstead in a few days.” My eyes are wet with tears. “Seems like Marie got her way after all. We’ll all have to move now. Mom won’t be safe. None of us will.”
Michael bites on his lower lip and looks down.
“The thing is,” he says, meeting my eyes at last, “your mom’s already gone.”
“What? What do you mean, gone?”
“Liz and some old guy named Brian have taken her somewhere safe while they decide what to do.”
“Brian. Yeah, she told me about him. He’s the ex-cop who’s been helping her all these years. But where have they taken her?”
He shakes his head sadly. “I don’t know, Joey. I honestly don’t know.”
“Will I be able to see her?”
He looks down again. “Brian said they’ll try to find a way, but I don’t know how long it will take.”
Before I have a chance to fully register the implications of what Michael has just told me, I hear a familiar little voice chattering away in the corridor.
“If she’s not awake yet, Long-Neckie Boy’s going to tickle her ear with his nose until she is.”
“Poor Mommy might not want to be tickled.” It’s Kay. Lovely, kind Kay, who’s been looking after him all this time.
And here he is. My beautiful little boy. My darling Alfie. If only I could sit up and take him in my arms.
He runs toward the bed, but Michael catches him just in time, before he clambers on top of me. He holds him up so he can give me a kiss without hurting me. Not that that would matter. A kiss from Alfie is worth all the pain in the world.
“Why are you crying, Mommy? Does it hurt?”
“I’m crying because I’m so happy to see you, darling, but yes, it does hurt a bit.”
“Long-Neckie Boy wants to kiss you better, too,” he says, and he lifts the soft giraffe and touches its head gently on my bandages.
“Where did this come from?” I ask him.
Kay clears her throat. “It was supposed to be a present for my grandson, but…but Gillian sent it back. It’s a long story, Jo. We had a terrible argument once. I said things about Gillian’s life I shouldn’t have. I’ve begged her to forgive me but, so far…” She shakes her head sadly. “I shouldn’t have lied about the Skyping, but I was ashamed to tell you the truth. I didn’t want you to think I was some horrible woman who’d alienated her own daughter.”
“Oh, Kay, I would never have thought that.”
“I know. It was just my silly pride.”
She squeezes my hand and leans in to kiss me on the cheek. “But what about you! Promise me you won’t take up jogging ever again. I couldn’t believe it when Michael told me what happened. The sidewalks around here are treacherous even when it’s not raining. If you want to keep fit, you should try the Zumba class I go to. Much safer, and a whole lot more fun than jogging.”
Michael winks at me from over her shoulder.
I smile. “You’re on. But give me a while to get better first, okay?”
54
Two weeks later
IT’S A TYPICAL FAMILY SCENE on a cold November Saturday. Alfie playing with his Legos on the living room floor, lost in an imaginative world of his own. Michael on one end of the sofa and me on the other, my arm in a sling and supported by cushions. We’re watching back-to-back episodes of NCIS.
The warmth of the radiators is making me sleepy.
Michael hooks his ankle around mine absentmindedly and I allow myself to close my eyes and drift off briefly. I haven’t been sleeping well for the last two weeks—hardly surprising in the circumstances—so lazy afternoons like this allow me to catch up.
We said goodbye to her yesterday. Michael, Alfie, and me. It was all very clandestine. We drove to a garage on the outskirts of Cambridge where we met Brian (probably not his real name—he looked more like a James or an Anthony to me), and then we were driven to a state park where Mom was waiting for us at a picnic bench. My heart lurched when I saw her, sitting there all alone. She looked old all of a sudden. Old and sad and defeated. But then, when she turned to face us, all I could see was a frightened little girl. The one who used to cower in her room waiting for her dad to come upstairs and torment her.
Alfie sobbed when she told him she was moving away but, actually, I think he’s taken it pretty well. She knew exactly what to say to him. She told him that someone had been very mean to her so she was moving somewhere else to make new friends. He understood that, just as she knew he would. He could relate to it because that’s sort of what happened to him, too. She also told him that, one day, when she was settled in her new house, he could come and see her.
We all could, she said, switching her gaze from Alfie to me and lowering her voice. If we wanted to. Tears well up as I think of her face. The sadness in her eyes.
I know that, in time, Alfie will adjust to not having his grandma around the corner. Having Michael move in full-time has helped, of course. Michael and Sol, who’s snoring near the radiator at the moment.
Whether I will adjust is another matter.
“I still don’t see why they had to move her,” I say when Alfie runs upstairs to fetch his action figures. “There’s no video and Marie is dead. Surely she could have stayed in Flinstead. She loved it here.”
Michael sighs. We’ve been over this so many times he must be fed up with it by now, but somehow he still has the patience to go through it all again.
“It’s too big a risk. We don’t know who else Marie might have told. Just because she didn’t tell Karen doesn’t mean she didn’t mention it to someone else. And Karen knows now, doesn’t she? I know she’s sworn never to go public, but how do we know she won’t change her mind at some point in the future? And can you honestly believe she won’t tell her own husband? I know she’s promised she won’t, but he’s her husband. Why wouldn’t she confide in him?”
He gives me a sidelong glance. “Maybe she already has.”
I know what he’s thinking—that if word gets out, maybe we’ll have to move, too. Either that or ride out the storm. Put up with people whispering behind our backs, reporters at our home. What a story that would be: Devastated daughter discovers her mother is notorious child killer Sally McGowan.
I pick up the letter Karen has sent me, the one that arrived a few days after I came home from the hospital, the one I’ve been reading and rereading ever since. This time I just stare at the envelope.
“Karen’s spent her whole life in the shadow of her uncle’s murder. She’s seen firsthand what it did to her grandmother and her mother, and she wants it to end. She doesn’t want Hayley to grow up knowing what her grandmother did, using an innocent child as a pawn to get revenge. She says if she’d known Marie had recognized Mom, she might have been able to talk her out of it, but Marie knew Karen’s feelings on the matter so she kept it to herself. You’ve read this letter. You know all this. She’s not like her mother. She understands that Mom was as much a victim in all this as poor Robbie was.”
“The trouble is, some people will never be persuaded of that,” Michael says. “It doesn’t matter to them that Robbie ran into the blade. That it was an accident. In their eyes, your mother was a bully with a knife in her hands and that makes her guilty.”
“Is that what you think, too?”
He shakes his head. “No. She was a bully because that’s all she’d ever known. She might have hated what her dad did to her and her mother but, somewhere deep down, she must have loved him, too. Because he was her dad and he won’t have been vicious every single minute of every day. He’d have been nice to her, too, sometimes. And to her mother. That’s how abusers get away with it for so long.”
He shuffles nearer and kisses me. I don’t know what I would have done without Michael looking after me and Alfie these last couple of weeks. There are so many emotions swirling around in my head. Most of the time, I just sit on the sofa and stare at the TV. The worst part is how I keep reliving it, over and over again. Not just the shock of finding out about Mom and who she is—who she was—but the horror of what came next, how terrified I was that Alfie was in danger.
We spoke on the phone yesterday, Karen and I.
“Your secret’s safe with me, Jo,” she promised. “This has gone on long enough. It needs to end now. With us. My mother and grandmother destroyed their lives seeking revenge. I’m not going to let the same thing happen to me and Hayley.”
I told her how sorry I was for what happened to her mother, how I felt responsible, but Karen told me I shouldn’t. She said it was better than the kind of death Marie might have had. Being in pain for months on end as the cancer destroyed her.
The awful thing is, I feel like I’ve lost my mother, too, for although we’ll be able to write and speak on the phone, Skype or FaceTime each other maybe, it won’t be the same. And as for seeing her again, Liz has hinted that there’s a strong possibility she’ll have to go abroad this time. It’s not going to be easy.
The phone rings and Michael leaps up and takes it in the other room. He’s so fiercely protective of me at the moment I feel like I’m in a bubble, sealed off from the real world and its intrusions. It won’t last forever. Sooner or later I’m going to have to pick up the pieces and get back to some semblance of normality. We all are. Our new normal.
Five minutes later, he’s back. “That was Dave. He and Carol send their love and hope the pain is easing off. He said to take as long as you need.”
