Flame Out

by M. P. Cooley

  I didn’t think any such thing was true, and I wondered if she had just made assumptions about Dave or my dad’s emotional state. She liked to do that.

  “And Dad’s doing OK?”

  My mother put down her fork. “No, he’s not. We both know that, June.”

  It wasn’t hard to avoid conversation with Lucy next to me babbling about her day. She showed off her bathing suit and the artwork she and Grandma had done, where half the page was Lucy’s abstract versions of houses and a sun, next to my mother’s mellow beach scene, all soft blues and greens with a dolphin visible on the ocean. I was happy to let Lucy chatter away if it meant I didn’t have to discuss the elephant in the room—or rather, the one that was out trying to keep Dave from hunting down Bernie Lawler and thrashing him.

  “I want to go to Florida and visit the dolphins,” Lucy said. I shot a look at my mother, but Lucy had captured her complete attention, babbling on about flamingos, Grandma, swimming pools, and summer before suddenly changing subjects.

  “I made dessert,” Lucy announced. She ran for the kitchen and returned with three bowls of strawberry rhubarb crumble topped with vanilla ice cream. It was perfect, if a little early in the season.

  “It’s always in season at Whole Foods,” my mother said. Normally I would have tried to knock my mother off her high horse, pointing out the gas she burned driving to Colonie to buy organic produce, but Lucy knelt next to me, bobbing up and down on her chair, and asked, “Do you like it, Mom? Grandma said it was your favorite.”

  I’m not a dessert person, but the tartness of the rhubarb made it perfect. “I love it! You did a great job.”

  “Grandma gave me the recipe so me and you can make it any time we want.”

  “That reminds me of the first time I served this to June. June and her little pals took their bikes out . . .” My mother continued telling a story of how my friends and I rode our bikes down a hill as fast as we could, splashing through a mud puddle in the final stretch. My bike got stuck and I tipped over, getting completely coated in a layer of mud.

  “Which delighted her,” my mother said. “I had to hose her off outside. I have a picture of her, wet and happy, hanging above my desk at home.”

  “And then we ate dinner,” I said, “and you served this to comfort me.”

  “It was mostly consolation for your sister, who was devastated that she hadn’t fallen in the mud puddle, too. Oh, I forgot, your sister and I talked.” Mom hesitated, and I waited for the message, no doubt a mix of New Age and sentimental. “She offered to come out, support your father.”

  I was surprised. Catherine’s relationship with my father was about as good as mine with my mother. “Maybe she should hold off.”

  It was getting late. I called my father. I’d thought he might pick up—he kept his cell phone for an emergency, and this situation certainly qualified. No answer. I called Dave, but he didn’t pick up either. That worried me. He always kept his phone close by, even at night. Finally, I tried Hale.

  “You with Dave?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t raise him. Worried?”

  “He’s with my father, which could be . . . trouble.”

  “Aw, they’ll be fine,” he said. “Your dad had a hard day. It’s good for him to help out Dave a bit, let your dad get his mind off his own troubles.”

  I hung up. Lucy was about twenty minutes away from collapse. I could take her home, but Dad had borrowed Mom’s car, and I didn’t want to leave her stranded. We were staying, if not for the night, than certainly until my dad returned.

  “I’ll get changed,” Lucy announced, returning moments later with pajamas with purple sheep frolicking across them.

  “How many outfits did you buy her?” I asked my mother.

  “A week’s worth.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Consider the clothes overdue Christmas gifts.”

  Lucy climbed into bed, and my mother pulled out an iPad. Lucy tapped the screen, picking a bedtime story. I nestled next to her, reading, Lucy flipping the pages when I proved inept until finally dropping off to sleep, despite being in a strange place. I crept out to the living room, desperately hoping that Dad had returned. He hadn’t.

  Feigning sleep seemed like a good option, and my mother was willing to give me an out: “You are welcome to take the bed in Lucy’s room tonight if you want.”

  Never one to back down from a challenge, I forced myself to sit on the couch next to her. The fluffy cushions looked plush, but that was a lie; the stuffing was packed so tightly it was almost painful to sit on.

  “Do you want some tea?” Mom offered. I agreed. She walked the ten feet to the kitchen, but we both remained silent, and she might as well have been in the far wing of a mansion.

  I spoke first. “Did you have to buy all the kitchenware?”

  “Oh, no. They gave me all the china and most of the cooking equipment. I went out and picked up an aluminum skillet—the nonstick kind they had will chip off and give you cancer.” She paused. “I’m going to gift it to your father when I leave since it sounds like he has embraced cooking.”

  I snorted. “If you use that term loosely.” I felt bad for putting my father down, as if I’d betrayed him. “Not that I’m any great shakes. But I suspect he’s gotten most of his recipes from the 1972 edition of a Betty Crocker cookbook.”

  “He very well might have,” Mom said. “I believe my aunt gave it to us as a wedding gift, noting all her favorite recipes, most of which involved suspending things in Jell-O. It’s probably still tucked somewhere in the kitchen.”

  The kettle whistled, and she poured two cups of a spicy sweet tea, a scent I connected with my childhood.

  “Sweet, the way you like it,” she said, handing me my mug. I hadn’t added sugar to my drinks since I got out of high school. Not that Mom knew.

  We sipped our drinks quietly, but by the way she frowned, I could tell she was thinking. I was seconds away from having a heart-to-heart about my Dad, or worse, discussing our mother/daughter relationship. I needed to take the offensive.

  “What can you tell me about Luisa Lawler?” I asked.

  My plan worked. “Well,” she said, “if she did what they say she did, she must have hated her husband.”

  “But . . . but why wouldn’t she get a divorce?” I pulled a leg onto the couch, a barrier between me and my mother. “It was done. She could have moved to Florida, like you. The two of you could have formed a commune.”

  “That would have been a very seventies thing to do, and we were modern women of the eighties.” My mother quirked a smile. I’d never seen her make a joke at her own expense.

  “But June,” she said, “for a lot of women, the awful ones are the hardest to leave. The men hunt you down and they hurt you, and if they have a powerful family—like Bernie did—it was practically impossible.”

  “Did he hit her?”

  “I wouldn’t have stood for physical abuse.” She reached forward and grabbed her mug. “Luisa was always watched, though, first by her mother and then by her husband and his family, handed from babysitter to babysitter. I knew her from the Hopewell Falls Hope Committee. You would think a group dedicated to running bake sales and hanging bunting on streetlights at Christmas would be above reproach, but sometimes Jake Medved would stop by claiming to be interested in our work.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think an ex-con bartender had any interest in how many Arbor Day sponsors his sister-in-law secured?”

  “So she missed a lot of meetings?” I asked.

  My mother tilted her head. “Not too many, now that I think about it, but she had to push hard to attend. Luisa wanted nothing more than to dye hundreds of Easter eggs or stick American flags on cupcakes, and I would have been happy to leave her to it.”

  I had a memory of my mother sitting up late at the dining room table gluing yarn hair onto clothespins for a fall carnival game, muttering, “I don’t need this bullshit.” She still made the most clothespin people. I could get why some people might not enjoy it�
�I certainly wouldn’t—but it wasn’t like Mom was chained to the chair and forced to continue.

  “Mom, I was alive and reasonably aware during this time. Luisa had options.”

  “Not many. When your father and I divorced, he could have chosen to make my life miserable—cutting me off from you and your sister, ruining me financially. But when you were under someone’s thumb, like Luisa—back then it was almost impossible to pull off. In those days no fault divorces didn’t exist.”

  “But if he was as bad as you say he was, surely someone—Dad, the courts, someone—would have helped her get free.”

  “Bernie didn’t beat her. He controlled her and treated her like a child, but law enforcement and the courts would never intervene in that. To get away from that type of situation, Luisa would have had to be aggressive, and Luisa? She’d do anything to avoid people getting mad at her.” My mother pulled her legs up so she was sitting Indian style. “Sounds like hell to me, June.”

  I had to agree. In my work I’d learned the importance of silence, both to keep secrets and to let criminals have time to run their mouths, but having to keep my mouth shut in every area of my life would drive me crazy.

  “So you found out how emotionally abusive Bernie was at the trial? The way Dave’s Aunt Natalya described it in court, Luisa barely left the house.”

  My mother leaned forward. “Luisa confided in me. We were paired up stuffing scarecrows for the hayride, and she mentioned how she wished she could come to more meetings, but Bernie wouldn’t let her. After she disappeared, it came out that she’d gone to a lot of people, telling them how much of a tyrant her husband was.” She paused. “Although now that I think about it . . . if she set him up, she might have been planting the information.” Her eyes got wide. “Everybody seemed to know . . . because she told them.”

  Mom was absolutely right. What I still didn’t get was why Luisa had resorted to such extreme measures.

  “There are two odd things about this situation, June, details that make me believe someone else came up with the plot.” My mother took a sip of her tea. “First of all, as I said, Luisa avoided confrontation.”

  “Ah,” I said, “but this was about as far as you could get from direct confrontation. I don’t have all the details, but it was more a sideswipe, a sneak attack against her husband. The perfect option for someone who wanted to get out without having a confrontation.”

  “However, my dear Watson”—Mom held up her finger—“there was the blood.”

  “We now think the blood in the basement came from Vera,” I said. I didn’t mention the blood we’d found in the bathroom of the Lawler house. That was law enforcement’s secret until Annie got DNA results.

  “I’m talking about the blood in the trunk of Bernie’s car. The bloody handprints. Luisa couldn’t have pulled that off.”

  “Why?”

  “The Hope Committee did a volunteer blood drive. Poor Luisa fainted at the sight of blood—any blood. And when I say faint, it was more like a seizure, eyes rolling back, shaking.”

  “A vasovagal response,” I said. “We’re told to keep an eye out for them at crash scenes.”

  “Right. We had a volunteer blood drive. We put her in the cookie room, thinking it would keep her from collapsing. It still wasn’t enough. Down she went. We had loads of orange juice on hand to boost her blood sugar, but she was done for the day. Anyway, the point of all this is that bloody handprint in the trunk. No way could it be her blood.”

  This was interesting, and it added to my sense that someone was in on it with Luisa. The question was whether that person was invested in keeping Luisa disappeared, going so far as to kill her.

  “I hope the information helps you solve the case fast, June.” I was about to thank her when she added, “I don’t want you falling into the same negative patterns as your father. Focusing on the job at the expense of everything else.”

  Rage rushed through me, filling my chest, choking me. I pulled my arm away. “So running away from the situation would be the better option?”

  “Running away, no. But setting boundaries between yourself and your father, yourself and this work, would give you more balance in your life. You could have fun with Lucy, or develop a spiritual practice, or date a little. It’s been three years—”

  “Are you saying I don’t spend enough time with Lucy?”

  “Juniper, you are a very good mother doing a very good job. But the time with her will be gone before you know it, and you will regret it for the rest of your life.” She reached out and grabbed my arm. “You can’t make this right for him, as much as you’d like.”

  I stood up. This fight was bound to happen sooner or later, and it might as well happen now when Lucy was asleep and Dad was out. “Mom, you need to realize I will never, ever take any advice on how to treat family from you.”

  My mother let her voice go low and even. “You need to let your anger go. It’s poisoning you.”

  “You know, I like you better when you are being a real person, not lapsing into this magical earth mother thing.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  “Barely. Dad was always there for me. Always.” I lowered my voice so as to not wake Lucy. “He made sure I got to the dentist to get my braces off, took me to watch the Star Wars movies, explained the birds and the bees to me. That was fun: Dad explained the mechanics of making babies and then offered to pay for the pill.” I felt myself start to hyperventilate and struggled to talk. “He helped me, day in and day out, when my husband was dying.”

  “I tried to help, but you wouldn’t let me.”

  “You helped in the ways you wanted, not in the ways I needed.”

  My mother dropped the serene act. “You didn’t know what you needed.”

  “I was pretty clear, Mom. Helping me change the sheets when Kevin threw up bile on the bed. Picking up late-night prescriptions. Making me sandwich after sandwich because Kevin couldn’t stand any cooking smells in the house. Getting Lucy off to preschool. That’s what real family does.”

  “When are you going to let this go, June? I’ve apologized. I’ve reached out. I’ve invited you into my life.”

  “But it was always your life. You would crash into my life periodically and make assumptions about me and what was important. And I had made peace with you for the stuff that happened when I was young—”

  “No, you haven’t. You have never forgiven me for leaving your father.”

  “Listen! For once. I was good with your New Age cures and your free spirit ways and the fact your marriage to Dad was a bad idea for everyone involved. But when you showed up at Kevin’s funeral and did your mumbo jumbo over the body, making yourself the center of attention on the day that should have been all about him—”

  “No one noticed,” she said.

  “Everyone noticed. And your lack of respect would have been funny, except you took it to the next step, making that comment on how I had lost Kevin months ago. I hadn’t lost him months ago, Mom. He was with me right up until the end, and even when he couldn’t speak, he could listen. He was with me.” I felt tears pricking my eyes. “He still is.”

  I brushed the tears away, but I was helpless to stop. My mother went to the kitchen and brought me a paper towel. I rubbed hard, and the skin on my cheek was raw. Mom left again and returned with a washcloth soaked in cold water. I settled back on the couch, the washcloth resting over my eyes.

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” she said. With my sight cut off, I focused on her words. “I am sorry if I caused you pain at the funeral. I was trying to comfort you.”

  I didn’t say anything, letting her words wash over me.

  “You and your father, June, the two of you were always a team. I wanted the two of us to be that close.” She paused. “When your father and I separated, I knew you’d pick him. I never doubted it for a minute.”

  She was quiet, and I thought she was done, but then she took my hand, gently folding it between both of hers.

  “I wi
ll have to meditate and journal on what happened at the funeral.” I tried to pull my hand away, and her grip went from tender to fierce. “No. Please don’t. Please don’t pull away, just as I understand . . . everything. I need to think hard on how I’m going to make this right. But between now and then . . .”

  She went quiet again. I pulled the washcloth from my face with my free hand. Normally, I described my mother as willowy, with strength running through her airy grace. Right now, she looked fragile.

  “Mom—”

  “Sorry,” she said, lifting my hand and kissing it. “I just love you so much.”

  I thought of Bernie, absolving my father of guilt, and Dave, whose mother had left a trail of wreckage through everyone’s lives before disappearing forever, and I left my hand in hers, not pulling away.

  “Let’s try,” I said. “Let’s both try.”

  My phone rang, and I jolted, pulling my hand from hers. I stretched forward and grabbed it from the table.

  “It’s Dave,” I said to her. “I have to take it.”

  It wasn’t Dave.

  “Hold on, June,” my dad said. I heard a car door slam, and then my father was back on the line, breathing heavily. “There. Sorry.”

  “What are you doing with Dave’s phone?”

  “Went over to his place to talk, but he was gone. I drove around a bit and saw his car parked outside Jake’s tavern. Dave was going to help with Bernie’s welcome home.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “The gods were smiling on us though,” Dad continued, “because Bernie Lawler decided to skip his own welcome home shindig, and I only had to protect Dave from dirty looks by the bartender, Jake’s son?”

  “Brian.”

  “Yeah. He looked ready to kill Dave, but he didn’t. We’re leaving now, and I’m going to take Dave home and get him settled in.”

  My dad sounded like his own self, not chipper, exactly, but like a man ready for action. My mother and Hale were right. Maybe letting Dad help out Dave was for the best. “Sounds like a good plan.”