Darling Rose Gold, page 22
Rose Gold
November 2016
The stone-faced security guard at Mordant Correctional Center tapped the dotted line with his pen.
“Need you to sign here,” he said, glaring.
I signed the form, then pushed the clipboard back toward him.
“Have a seat. Someone’ll take you through.” He gestured to the row of plastic chairs behind me. I caught a glimpse of the gun on his belt. I wondered what it would feel like to shoot someone.
The prison was quieter than I’d expected—or at least the reception area was. I was the only person waiting. I stared at the ugly linoleum, feeling the guard’s eyes on me. I hoped I’d be taken through soon.
It had been over a year since my dad turned out to be the worst. I hadn’t spoken to Alex or Phil in just as long. I’d tried to make new friends at work, but none of my coworkers were interested, so I’d opted to start watching all the Oscar Best Picture winners instead. I’d also begun drawing in my spare time. To my surprise, I was actually good. Not saying my artwork will end up in a museum or anything, but my renderings of Dad’s bones breaking on a medieval torture rack were shockingly realistic. I had a gift for sketching faces.
By then I was close to having enough money to get my teeth fixed, to being someone who beamed, hands at her side instead of blocking her mouth. After my teeth, I planned to start saving for a down payment on a house. Every day at Gadget World, I reminded myself what I was working toward.
Still, watching my savings account grow couldn’t occupy all my free time. One year after Dad blew up at me at Anna’s soccer game, I realized I was miserable. I had learned the hard way that our parents didn’t have all the answers. We wanted them to. We believed they did for the first couple decades of our lives, depending on the parents and how good they were at covering their asses. But in the end, discovering our parents were mere mortals was no different than finding out about Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Now every day was the same: wake up, go to work, eat dinner in front of the TV, watch a movie, sketch, go to sleep. After the Gillespie family had ostracized me, I told myself I didn’t need them to be happy. I bought a fern, named her Planty, and told myself she would be more than enough company.
Then my coworker Brenda, the one who used to tease me about visiting Phil, didn’t come in to work one day. Or the day after that, and so on. No one knew where she had gone, until weeks later, when Scott gathered us in the break room before the store opened. He said Brenda had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. A month later she was dead. Her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son were motherless.
I had never really been friends with Brenda—she had kids, was in her thirties; we were in different stages of life—but I couldn’t stop thinking about all those afternoons in the break room with her hooked up to that breast pump. Now she was gone. I would never talk to her again. This was the first time someone I personally knew had died. It sounds stupid, but Brenda’s death made me realize I wasn’t going to live forever. If I didn’t like the way my life was turning out, no one else was going to fix it for me. I had to do something. I needed to go back to the beginning, back to the first wrong turn—which meant going back to Mom.
When I had gotten the restraining order against her, did I truly believe I would never see or speak to my mother again, for as long as we both should live? Maybe I liked to think so during fits of anger, but the honest answer was: no, of course not. I had permanently cut other people from my life for less, but none of them was my mother. Mom still held the key to so much information I wanted: her childhood, my childhood, and most of all, why?
The one-word anthem pounded in my ears when I woke up in the morning and lay in bed at night: why? Why? WHY? I needed her to explain, to tell me the truth, to say she was sorry.
Which was why I’d finally come to Mordant Correctional Center.
I was trying not to pin big hopes on this reunion. Mom was the biggest liar I knew—maybe she wasn’t capable of honesty or apologies. If so, I’d have the restraining order reinstated. Our relationship, and her second chance, would be on my terms from now on. After four years on my own, I had no interest in being anyone’s puppet anymore.
A uniformed man—enormous with thick biceps—ambled through the door.
“She the only visitor?” he asked. He had a mustache—a bad omen.
The first guard nodded.
“Follow me,” the second guard said.
I slid off the chair and wiped my clammy hands on my pants. I’d told myself I didn’t care enough to be nervous.
The giant guard led me down a long concrete hallway. A light flickered overhead. Swearwords and initials were scratched into the walls. A stain on the floor was rust colored.
We reached a door at the end of the hallway and stopped. The guard scanned his badge in a reader, and the door clicked as it unlocked. The guard pulled the door open. I followed him through. A sign next to the door read Visitors Center.
The room was filled with empty chairs and tables, set up for groups of two, four, and six. In one corner, a few children’s drawings were taped to the walls. They were Thanksgiving turkeys, traced over little fingers and palms. The feathers had been colored red and orange and brown. “I love you, Mom” was written on one. I didn’t want to think about where those kids were now or what their lives were like.
“Have a seat,” the guard said. He left the room. I was alone.
I pulled out a chair—same as the hard plastic ones in the waiting area—and sat. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.
A door opened on the opposite side of the room from where I’d entered. The same guard came back in, followed by my mother. She looked smaller than I remembered. Was it possible she’d shrunk in height? Or had I gotten bigger? Maybe it was her posture. She used to walk around Deadwick with her head held high, but this woman’s shoulders sloped forward. She was stooped, a turtle wanting to curl back into its shell. The transformation was shocking.
Her gaze flicked from the guard to me, and her whole face lit up. Christmas eyes, I thought.
Her shuffle turned into a stride as she came closer. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of an embrace, didn’t want her to think she was forgiven. But my chest ached for one of my mother’s infamous bear hugs. Before I had time to decide whether I’d allow her the intimate gesture, she had enveloped me in her fleshy arms. My body relaxed into hers.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured into my ear, stroking my hair. “You have no idea how good it is to see you.”
I forced myself to stiffen and pull away. I needed to remember that my mother’s hugs and hand-holding were never about love; they were forms of control. A therapist had helped me figure that out. I’d gone to a few sessions before deciding I’d rather spend the money on my teeth.
I reached for the back of my chair, was in the process of returning to my seat, when I saw her fat lip—ugly, purple, and split open.
“Oh, my God. What happened to your lip?” I asked, unable to hold back.
Mom sat across from me and tapped it with one finger. “Oh, this,” she said. “I was walking the track the other day and tripped and split it. What a klutz.”
I had never known my mother to be clumsy. “You fell and landed on your lip?”
“Well, no, I landed on my hands and knees. But I bit my lip on the way down.”
Her hands were on the table in front of me. They weren’t cut or bruised or bandaged—they looked fine, except for more dirt under her fingernails than usual.
I had assumed my mom ran the prison. I figured she had the warden in her back pocket, that she’d upended whoever had reigned supreme here. She was the sparkly, effervescent one; she was supposed to be untouchable. She had been the protector of the bullied.
Now she was being bullied herself.
The woman in front of me had bloodshot eyes, messy hair, and a dull complexion. To a stranger, she would have resembled the same person who had raised me. To me, she looked nothing like the woman I’d grown up with. I remembered everything I had said on the witness stand: how I had humiliated her, left no sordid detail untold. Her split lip was, in part, my fault. If I hadn’t turned her in, she would never have gone to prison.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Mom?” I asked.
I cursed myself. I’d been planning to call her “Patty” to put some space between us—and to hurt her feelings.
This is not your fault. She’s in prison because she abused you.
I was finally starting to listen to my own voice instead of hers.
She waved me off and forced a smile. “I’m fine, honey. Don’t you worry about me.” She rested her chin on her hand, then winced in pain and adjusted her position. “Now, tell me everything that’s going on with you. Are you working? Do you have a boyfriend? I want to hear it all.”
I told Mom about Gadget World, about the money I’d saved, and that I’d been named employee VIP three times in the last few years. She beamed. Then I told her about Phil, my first real boyfriend, and our visit in Denver. I left out the fact we hadn’t spoken in a year and a half—and that he was older than she was. I considered telling her about my dad, but decided to save that story for another time. Something in my gut told me to keep it from her.
“And what about Deadwick?” Mom asked.
“What about it?” I said.
“Do you still talk to anyone? Our old neighbors and friends?”
“I rarely see Mrs. Stone anymore, if that’s who you mean,” I said without thinking. I knew this news would please Mom, but it was also true. Mary Stone had failed me just like everyone else. She still treated me like a child and kept reminding me she was my shoulder to cry on. But I was tired of crying, tired of people caring more about who I had been than who I am. Mrs. Stone liked me better broken. With every good deed, she needed confirmation that she was my savior.
I’d be my own goddamn savior, thank you very much.
Predictably, Mom was pleased. When Mrs. Stone had lambasted her to reporters during the trial, my mother was not happy. Until she was arrested, no one had ever turned on Patty Watts.
“How is my old friend?” Mom’s voice dripped with fake sweetness. This was the mother I knew: color had returned to her cheeks, her eyes bright and attentive. She hung on my every word, noting every detail.
“Annoying,” I said, trying to put an end to the topic. I’d come here for answers, and so far I’d been the one doing all the talking. My mother was manipulating me the way she manipulated everyone, the way she’d controlled my entire childhood.
“Listen, Mom,” I said, giving up altogether on calling her “Patty.” “If we’re going to start over, I need you to be honest with me. No more trying to steer the conversation or deflecting my questions by turning around and asking your own.”
Mom watched me, not saying anything.
“If you lie to me, I’m out of here,” I said, staring at the table between us. I forced myself to meet her eye. “And I’m not coming back.”
A beat of silence passed that felt like three eternities.
“Are we clear?” I said.
Mom nodded. “Of course, darling,” she murmured. “I would never do anything to screw up our relationship again. I already lost you once.”
I wasn’t sure whether she was telling me the truth, but this seemed like the right tack. I had plenty of questions to test her commitment to honesty.
“Good,” I said. “Then let me ask you again: how did you split your lip?” I crossed my arms and leaned back—my best no-BS pose.
Mom folded her hands in her lap. I knew if I peeked under the table, she’d be twiddling her thumbs. She told me she had gotten that habit from my grandfather. I’d caught myself twiddling my own thumbs while watching TV one night last month. I sat on my hands for the rest of the episode.
Mom sighed. “Another inmate hit me.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“She doesn’t like me very much.”
“Mom,” I warned, “don’t be evasive.”
Her eyebrows rose in surprise. I wondered if she was questioning where I’d learned the word “evasive.” She hadn’t taught me the term during any of her hundred vocabulary lessons, so where could I have picked it up? I was supposed to be an extension of her, a product of her creation and fine-tuning.
She rubbed her eyes. “Stevens has had it out for me since I got here. Every few months, she gets her band of cronies together to gang up on me. Two of them pin me against a wall while she takes a few swings.” Mom shrugged. “Don’t ask why she hates me. I haven’t done anything to her.”
Based on my mother’s track record, I doubted that, but decided to let it go for now. I had bigger fish to fry.
“Why did you lie about how you hurt your lip?”
“Because I didn’t want you to worry,” Mom said, exasperated. “Because that’s what mothers do. We shelter the hardest truths from our children to keep them safe. We take the hit so they don’t have to feel the pain.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” I said calmly. “And I’ve dealt with some pretty hard truths the past few years.”
Mom patted my hand. “It doesn’t matter how old you are. The desire to protect your kid never goes away. I’m not going to apologize for that.” She winced. Good—she was taking my threat to leave seriously. “You’ll see when you have kids of your own,” she added.
I snorted. Like I’d ever have kids after the f’ed-up childhood I’d endured.
“I want you to tell me about your family,” I said. “Every time I’ve asked about them, all you’ve said was you had a tough childhood. I want to know specifics. What was so tough about it? What were my grandmother and grandfather like? And my uncle David?”
Mom groaned. “This is how you want to spend our first afternoon in almost five years together? Talking about our degenerate ancestors?”
“Mom,” I warned again, “you promised you’d be honest.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she grumbled. She pushed up her sleeves and leaned her chest forward on the table. “My father was drafted when he was nineteen and went to Belgium in nineteen forty-four. This was after he’d met my mother, but before they got married.”
For the next thirty-five minutes, Mom painted a picture for me of her childhood. She told me, in sickening detail, about my grandfather’s abuse. She told me about her brother’s suicide. She told me about her mother’s miscarriages: three, to be exact, between David and her. She explained the Wattses had been an every-man-for-himself family. Her mother hadn’t stood up for her. Neither had her brother. As soon as Mom had turned eighteen, she’d moved out of the house into an apartment on the other side of town and found a job as a certified nursing assistant. She cut all ties with her parents. Sometimes she’d see one of them at Walsh’s or the bank and would turn around and leave without saying a word. Mom never reconciled with either of them.
“I’m sorry I never told you any of this,” Mom said. “You deserve to know if you want.” She sat back in her chair, exhausted, and I knew she was finished.
I was exhausted too. I’d expected a sad story, but not this sad. I understood now why she had been so cagey all those years when I’d asked for details about my extended family. She wasn’t trying to hurt me: she was being protective. I thought back to the morning I’d lied to Dad about having cancer. I wasn’t trying to hurt him—I just wanted the Gillespies to accept me. Our methods might have been warped, but Mom and I had good intentions. We needed to be loved.
Nobody had ever looked at me the way my mother did. Not Dad, not Phil, not Alex. When I opened my mouth, the rest of the people in the room ceased to exist for her. When I was hurt, she ignored her own throbbing pain. Mom wanted to destroy my bullies more than I did. I might have forgiven them, but my mother would never forget.
The debt between a child and her mother could never be repaid, like running a foot race against someone fifteen miles ahead of you. What hope did you have of catching up? It didn’t matter how many Mother’s Day cards you drew, how many clichés and vows of devotion you put inside them. You could tell her she was your favorite parent, wink like you were coconspirators, fill her in on every trivial detail of your life. None of it was enough. It had taken me years to figure this out: you would never love your mother as much as she loved you. She had formed memories of you since you were a poppy seed in her belly. You didn’t begin making your own memories until three, four, five years old? She’d had a running start. She had known you before you even existed. How could we compete with that? We couldn’t. We accepted that our mothers held their love over us, let them parade it around like a flashy trinket, because their love was superior to ours.
“Thank you,” I said. “And I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through.”
Mom shrugged, cheeks flushed. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
My mother’s childhood stories were a warm-up to the questions I really wanted to ask. I felt bad about her past, but worse about my own. I wanted her to admit she’d taken my childhood from me, the same way hers had been taken from her. I wanted Mom to take responsibility for her wrongs. I needed her to look me in the eye and say she was sorry.
I had rehearsed this speech since the day I’d had the restraining order lifted. For months afterward, I hesitated to call the prison. Did I want to reopen this drama? I had no business poking a beehive.
“Another thing,” I said.
Mom glanced up. “Anything,” she said. This was the most earnest I’d ever seen my mother. She knew how to play earnest like an Oscar-winning actress.
The door on the far side of the room opened. The guard from earlier emerged. “Time’s up, Watts,” he barked.
“Already?” she said.
She stood, so I did the same. She wrapped me in another bear hug and whispered in my ear, “To be continued?”
