by Kit Reed
Figures are nothing to him.
There is only the file that he stored at the last minute. Cal took it off the neat little tablet his sister Carla used to take everywhere with her. It’s the heartbreaking document that she left for him, with instructions to mail a printout to their father’s office, for reasons. He won’t need the flash drive to retrieve Carla’s last message to him.
He has it by heart. They were that close. It’s Carla Leighton’s testimony, unless it is her living will. She entered it the day she died, so he would know.
Carla was doing the only thing she could do, she wrote, knowing exactly what would happen next. She made this document for Cal because she loves him too much to let him blame himself. He loves his sister more, and this fragment is all there is of Carla Leighton left in the world.
Damn Theo for bringing the forgotten grief back to life. Mindless, carefree Dell Duval went out the window as soon as he read the note. Memory flattened him, and when he got up, his real self was back. That fucking note. Damn kid planted it in a spot that would arrest a gorilla in mid-charge. Damn the pushy red block letters and damn the blunt black lines underneath.
It was the first thing he saw, coming in. It sat there like a ticking bomb. The kid’s careful list of particulars, numbered 1 to 4.
4. THEY SAID TELL HIM THAT HIS FATHER FORGIVES HIM.
And in that second his throat dried up and his belly trembled. Memory roared in on Cal Leighton like an express train, and it smashed him flat.
Before he left his father’s house for good, Cal stored everything he needed on the flash drive he despised and could not lose. He made it for protection, he thinks, although at this point he forgets why. Finality, he thinks. So we both know that I’m never going back. The memory stick holds: details of all of Dad’s transactions, numbers and passwords for the millions hidden in vaults in Geneva and Hong Kong, and the holdings stashed in a half-dozen offshore accounts. Before he fled his old life, the second Calvin Leighton …
My name is Cal Leighton.
Cal Leighton stored all the whos and the whats on Calvin Leighton LLC that, put together, would convict his father in any court in the universe. They’re loaded on the USB stick he kept as insurance long after the hearings in the matter of the death of Carla Leighton were done, along with the document that reduced him to tears, composed to exonerate him.
What Carla wrote grieved him every day of his life until the taxi hit him and he forgot. Including the detail that caused such grief, even though she wrote it to guarantee that in spite of what she planned, her brother would walk free, and the forgetting? It was like a gift from God.
After the taxi hit him, the guy he was yesterday woke up happy and free from all anxieties, well, sort of. He woke up nameless and homeless, free, except for the card with this Florida address and the flash drive that couldn’t possibly belong to him. That newly minted man, that bootless, carefree Dell Duval ran ahead of the guilt until last night, when he finally came home to his squat and found the note.
Four items numbered. The first three, he could handle. The kid’s warning. The kid’s needs. The suits.
This.
THEY SAID TELL HIM THAT HIS FATHER FORGIVES HIM.
WHATEVER.
T.H.
Calvin Austin Leighton, brother of Carla Leighton, the dying girl who left the world in an act that threatened his freedom. Yes. He got through that summer on denial, although a fool could have guessed, and his sister never let on. She knew she was dying long before she did what she did. At the hearing, the senior Calvin Leighton’s high-end lawyers argued the case on his son’s behalf, after which Cal took what he needed and walked out on the rest.
It was not assisted suicide, he tells himself now, although he knows. It was an accident. She couldn’t have murdered herself. Doubt and guilt plagued him from that day until the speeding car plunged him into oblivion. It was hard, not knowing who he was, or what or why, but it was better that way.
Now here he is.
He knew Carla was sick when he left for Cambridge in January of the year he finished his MBA; she was too sick to come visit over spring break; she was too sick to come to his commencement that June, and Dad? Business abroad. The day he flew home with his Harvard diploma, Calvin Leighton sent his driver to meet his son at the plane; he’d cut Cal a check in honor of the occasion, but, Carla?
When he came home, she was waiting at the door. He was shocked by the change. Lovely Carla Leighton, diminished. His kid sister was gaunt and tremulous, thinner than he’d ever seen her, even during her anorectic phase. She was in a wheelchair but when he walked in she stood up and threw her arms wide. They hugged and she fell against him, hanging on because they both knew what would happen if he let go, she was that weak, but he had hope.
His joyful kid sister was ashen and trembling when he eased her back into her chair, but he hoped.
And his father? Never mind. Congratulations and nice to see you. Leaving for Switzerland. Business, you know. He said, “Good man, Cal. Good job.”
He supposed it was. He had nothing to say.
Calvin Senior did. He said the usual. “You came home just in time. Now, take good care of your sister,” he said, and he left for three months in Bern. Carla laughed just the way she did before the other surgeries, the radiation, all those doomed experimental therapies that kept hope alive. Cal fell silent. She kept her voice bright, “Don’t worry, Dad. He will.”
“Business,” Calvin Senior said, and it usually was, although his son thinks it was the bastard’s clean getaway. Well, the hell with him. Cal took Carla everywhere that summer: family camp in the Poconos in June, down to Sanibel, Florida in July for a month at the spa, as though the waters would cure fourth-stage ovarian cancer; to their summer cottage in Maine. Carla wanted to make this a summer of last good times, but Cal kept going on the only drug left in his arsenal: hope. In September, he’d drag her back to the Mayo Clinic; they’d find some way to fix her. They’d do something.
She wanted to see their favorite promontory at the top of the rocks on Mount Desert; it was hard, but Cal made it happen for her. On the overlook at the point, he set the brake and begged her not to get out of the chair; reluctantly, she acceded, and together they looked out on the world for a while, not talking, just letting it be. He steadied the chair with his hand on its back as the wind came up over the water.
“Oh Calvin, look!” Carla’s hand lifted his eyes to a great blue heron, pointing as the bird took off and soared; Cal raised his right hand to the sky, following hers.
Together, they traced the bird’s path and in that last second, at the peak of the heron’s arc, his sister soared; wheelchair, lovely woman, everything in stasis in midair until she plunged to her death.
Of course he killed her. No. He set the brake on that thing. He did! Kill her? He couldn’t have. No wonder he laughed when the cab sent him flying into the snow; he flew, just like Carla, and his heart lifted, What a relief, but he didn’t die. Why couldn’t he die?
Now he is up here on the steamy top floor of the Ellis sarcophagus, why? That urgent voice needled into him from somewhere in the belly of the house for— yes— it was for the second time last night. The same three words dropped into the dark. Woman’s voice, he thinks, although he can’t be certain; he will never be certain of anything, but he thinks he heard. Give it back. Dakin’s testimony. Carla’s? They will never have Carla’s, but he brought the journal here.
Mysteriously, the objects and cartons around him are at a slight angle and beginning to slide; the contents of the attic are sliding, as though the house itself is crippled and walking cranksided, and, what?
New words come in, somebody, a woman, some woman, old woman, cries from the depths of the house. Look Out.
“What?”
The kid, that first day: This house is under a curse.
Look out, my darlings. You.
He shudders. Mormama.
Then the kid’s shout rises from somewhere below. “Dell.
Yo, Dell!”
“Mormama?”
Yes, you!
Kid’s voice is closer now. “Yo, Dell!”
Look out for them.
“OK!” Released, Calvin shouts, “OK!”
As Theo opens the door at the bottom of the stairs.
Running, Cal finds himself bouncing off walls because every step down is on a slant. With Theo in tow, the freshly minted Calvin Leighton rushes to alert the others, and get them out of the Ellis house. Together, they run to collect Lane and her belongings from Sister’s room: laptop, printer, a small canvas bag.
As the three of them explode into the hall outside the big front room, a door to their left flies open, exposing the two old ladies camped out on the second-floor porch. Those twins! Don’t alarm them, Leighton. Don’t piss them off. “Ma’am, Ma’am!”
Lane says, “Get up. We’re leaving!”
“Hurry.” The house lurches. As the matched Adirondack chairs begin their slide across the slanting screen porch, Calvin shouts, “I’m trying to help you. The house is going down!”
Annoyed, the old women wave him off with identical snarls. “Don’t bother us.”
The sound as the layered mass of sand, shale, whatever the house sits on, crumbles and begins its slide into the void drowns out whatever he says next, but he thinks he can hear Mormama saying, So much for them.
By this time it’s all Calvin can do to get his two charges down the slanting staircase and into the street before the driveway and the porte cochère drop off the façade on the side and go crashing into the void, and beginning tremors threaten the outer wall as the first clapboards snap. At the curb, Theo digs in his heels. “Wait!” He wants to watch.
Cal turns Theo with one hand, gripping his shoulder to hold him in place. He looks to Lane. They don’t need to speak. He abandons the printer, Lane, her bag; they exchange nods. She starts across the street while he unwinds Theo’s fingers from the laptop. They’re only things. “Let’s go.” They move fast. Without looking back, he propels the kid through the muddy gutter and across the road to the relative safety of the walk on the far side of May Street where Lane waits on solid ground.
He plants Theo next to his mother. That smile!
Grinning, she pulls Theo to her. Planting him in front of her, she crosses her arms across his midsection, holding him in place while across the street, the earth has stopped sliding, at least for now.
“Mom, the car!”
She is radiant; we survived. She says, “Forget the car. Let’s go.”
Cal is poised, listening as bits of asphalt and stone drop into the pit. The house is listing now. Foundation’s still sound, he thinks, but when that goes … Deep breath. Think. He asks. “Where?”
“Good question.” They are together in this. She grins. “Just say when.”
There is a crack as the ground supporting the porte cochère goes and driveway, pillars and all, drop into the void.
“Soon,” he says, and it is a promise. The bank where the main house hangs could go any minute now. Still …
When he left her there, he set the brake. He’s sure he did, he thinks, and he could not tell you whether he means his sister Carla or the old woman on the back porch.
Ivy. Those hopeful eyes. Deep breath. OK!
“I have one more thing to do.”
One more thing, Calvin tells himself, calculating the building’s rate of collapse. The film of mud on the street has more or less dried, and he kicks cakes of dirt aside as he heads back into the dying house and hurries through the long front hall, aware that he is running on a slant. Everything’s on a slant. That back porch. If the rail holds, she’s still safe, he tells himself, crashing through the kitchen and out the back door. Forget the chair. I’ll carry her, and at some level he is wondering if this is what brought him here.
The underpinnings of the porch: the back steps, studs and beams and fragile lattice, pop and crack as they separate and fall away, but he reaches Ivy just in time.
Her arms fly up. “Oh, Randolph. You came back!”
“We have to hurry.”
She is enraptured, singing. “I knew you’d come!”
“Look at you,” he murmurs, studying the intricate knotwork of scarves, sashes, clothesline and monofilament that Ivy made to hold herself in place, like a clever spider securing her position in the design.
She beams. “It wasn’t hard.”
“That’s great, but we have to work on this,” he tells her. Cal tugs on the knots, strongly aware that the foundation on their side of the house is crumbling as, block by block, bits of the house that has become Manette Robichaux Ellis drop into oblivion. Ivy’s chair won’t budge. The brakes are locked. Ivy’s knots shrank until they froze. He shouts over the increasing racket, “When this is over, we’ll have to get you a nice new chair.”
Then Ivy shouts, loud enough to be heard over cascading rubble, “No!”
“Oh, lady.” His heart rushes out.
But she already knows what Calvin, Dell, whoever he thought he was before this happened, is just discovering, as the porch floor pitches man, Ivy, mechanized chair against the rail. In their pain and confusion, they lock hands and she cries, “Oh please, Randolph. Don’t leave me!”
“I won’t, I promise. I love you and I’m sorry,” he says to Carla, to Ivy, to the pretty, anxious girl waiting for him out there on the street and to her son, as the layer of earth beneath the house gives way in a tremendous explosion of the physical, and Little Manette’s creation slides into oblivion. It will vanish seconds before the news trucks plow through the mud in front and the first helicopter circles overhead.
Lane locks Theo into her hug as Little Manette’s failed mansion plunges into the void, wood and stone, plumbing and pretentious marble, all the designer’s good things and cheap ones disassembled. Despite all her best efforts, the woman’s legacy is lost to the world, along with all the envy and resentment, the hatred and the accidental follies of the repressed children she tried to train, and moved around like ornamental shrubs. All her silk wallpaper and draperies unfurl as the walls fly apart, disassembling what remained of Little Manette Ellis in this world. In seconds, her monstrous house dies, consigning all her gifts and purchases, her years of bribes and her warnings, the thousand fabrications of vanity and folly, to the earth. The evil that created this cries out from the depths as its brittle carapace smashes to bits.
Then it plunges, and all the souls trapped within it fly up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was going to begin by thanking John Silbersack and David Hartwell for everything they did to bring Mormama as far as they have, but between the beginning and now, David exited the planet without giving us a chance to say goodbye. It’s been fun, David. I’m sorry it was over so soon.
Special thanks to John for telling David, “say she’s a national treasure,” and to Jen Gunnels for pointing out that in its shaggy, slouching-toward-Bethlehem way, Mormama is “a woman’s novel,” all this well before David’s unexpected departure. His last email to me “… but I’ve finished Mormama…” is time-stamped the Sunday night before he died. I mailed back, but I wish I’d said, “What do you think?” but I am way too polite.
We picked up the pieces in your absence, dude.
With astute readings from daughter and amazing first reader Kate Maruyama and Associate Editor Jennifer Gunnels, who is picking up the pieces for David’s many orphans with grace and tremendous skill, Mormama shaped up, and I can’t thank you enough. And as always, many thanks to Joe.
And Ko, Ko, the fucking candelabra made it into the book. Now it’s a pair. I wonder if there actually used to be two.
TOR BOOKS BY KIT REED
@Expectations
Thinner Than Thou
Dogs of Truth
The Baby Merchant
The Night Children
Enclave
Where
Mormama
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kit Reed is the author of the A
lex Award–winning Thinner Than Thou and many other novels, including The Night Children, her first young adult work. Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has been a James Tiptree, Jr. Award finalist. Kit Reed lives in Middletown, Connecticut, where she serves as resident writer at Wesleyan University. You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1: Dell
Chapter 2: Theo Hale
Chapter 3: Dell
Chapter 4: Charlotte Robichaux: Mormama
Chapter 5: Ivy
Chapter 6: Lane
Chapter 7: Mormama
Chapter 8: Theo
Chapter 9: Mormama
Chapter 10: Dell
Chapter 11: Theo
Chapter 12: Lane
Chapter 13: Mormama
Chapter 14: Dell
Chapter 15: Theo
Chapter 16: Lane
Chapter 17
Chapter 18: Lane
Chapter 19: Mormama
Chapter 20: Dell
Chapter 21: Theo
Chapter 22: Iris
Chapter 23: Theo
Chapter 24: Dell
Chapter 25: Lane
Chapter 26: Mormama