I pressed five for all other inquiries. Then I was put on hold for nearly three minutes. I put the phone on speaker phone during this time and set it on the counter. I stared at it, drumming my nails against the counter, waiting.
“Heritage Testing, this is Karen, may I help you?”
I snatched up the phone. “Yes, I have an inquiry about a test that was done for my sister. I want to know where the results were mailed.”
“Your sister, you say? Are you your sister’s legal guardian?”
“Well, no, but she’s, um, she passed away.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, it’s been hard, but that’s not important. Someone did this DNA test on her, and I want to know who did it, where they had the results sent.”
“I’m afraid I can’t release that information.”
“What?”
“Well, I can only release the information to the person whose results these are.”
“Then you can’t release them at all, because she’s no longer among the living.” I was feeling a little annoyed.
“Well, so you say,” she said. “But I don’t know that’s true.”
“What? You think I’m lying to try to get the results from you?”
“I don’t mean to judge your character, ma’am, but you must understand that our lab is used very often in paternity cases, and for custody battles, and we have very strict rules about who is allowed to access the data, and we can’t legally release that to anyone. It’s just a way that we cover ourselves in the case of legal action.”
“Look, I’m not going to sue you—”
“But your sister might.”
“My sister is dead!” Oh, hell, I’d just yelled that, and I didn’t think I’d ever really said it like, so baldly. Suddenly, a lump rose in my throat. I struggled to swallow it. “Okay, you know what, never mind. The thing is, these are my results. I am Violet Farrow, and I have my ID number from the testing right here. I’m holding a copy of the results, so it’s not about that. I just want to know who you mailed the information to in the first place.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, you must understand that I can’t possibly—”
“Oh, forget it.” I hung up the phone.
Damn it.
* * *
After I’d calmed down a little bit, poured myself a glass of wine, I thought about calling the place back and pretending to be Violet. But the thought of that made me feel ill at the moment, so I didn’t. Instead, I spied the website on the other upper corner of the printout. I went and got my laptop and plugged the site in.
Once there, I saw that there was a link to sign in with ID number. Well, hell. I had the ID number.
I plugged that in.
It took me to the next screen. Enter password, it said.
Oh, geez. I glared at the screen.
Actually, I knew the password that Violet used to use for everything. I didn’t know if she still used it or not. But she used to use “fluffy” as a password, because it was the name of our beloved dog who’d been with us since we were little kids.
We’d got him right after we left the Wainwrights, and he’d outlived Mom by a few months, but he’d been really old then and needed a lot of care. Violet had wanted to take him, but I’d argued her out of it, because I said she didn’t have the time to give him the care he needed. He needed a special diet and he needed to be carried outside to do his business, and he was really fading fast.
I remembered that I’d tried to get hold of Violet when he was in the vet’s office, and they said it would be a mercy to put him down because he was in so much pain, but she wouldn’t answer my calls or my texts, and so I had to make the decision myself.
I still felt awful about all of it.
I put in “fluffy.”
Incorrect password.
Well, she’d probably changed that. She probably didn’t like thinking about Fluffy anymore, anyway. I mean, heck, losing that dog had practically broken me, because it had been like my last family member. At the time, it felt as if I’d already lost Violet. If I’d known that she was going to be gone too, it might very well have really broken me.
As it was, I think that my meltdown over the loss of my mother and my estrangement from my sister and the loss of my dog was what ultimately torpedoed my last relationship.
I still remembered the way that Trey had shaken his head. “You used to be fun,” he’d said.
At the time, I’d been livid. How dare he tell me to be fun in the wake of all my losses? He was an asshole. A jerk. A piece of shit. And saying that to me really was a horrible thing to do.
But he apologized. He said he didn’t know what I was going through, because he’d never lost a family member. But then he said, “And I want to know. I want to be there for you. But you just shut me out. You just hide in the kitchen and make recipes, and whenever I try to do anything with you, you freeze me out.”
He wasn’t wrong about that.
I glared at the screen. I didn’t want to think about this crap. I rubbed my temples, shutting my eyes.
I opened them. I typed in Violet’s middle name, Marie.
Incorrect password.
I typed in her birth date. Her astrological sign. Mom’s birth date. Mom’s middle name. On a whim, I typed in the first name of our estranged father, who occasionally sent us cards with money in them on our birthdays when we were kids, but who neither of us had heard from in years.
Incorrect password.
Every time.
Annoyed, I slammed my laptop shut and refilled my wine glass. I wanted to cry again, cry for Violet, cry from Mom, even cry for Fluffy, because he was part of the family too. There had once been a family of Farrows, and now I was the only one left. But for some reason, I couldn’t cry. Maybe I was cried out.
Abruptly, there was a knock on the door.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I jumped. I spilled my wine.
I snatched up a napkin to clean the wine from the floor, my heart pounding. I didn’t know if I should answer the door or not. I got out my phone and went scrolling through for the number of Oliver the cop. Maybe I should call him and tell him everything and—
I saw who was at the door through one of the windows.
It was Charlotte Porter.
I hurried over to open the door. “Charlotte? What are you doing here?”
She wrung her hands. “Oh, Emilia.” She pointed at the glass of wine I was holding. “You have more of that?”
“Absolutely, come in.” I moved aside to let her and then shut the door after her.
She looked around like a deer in the headlights. Her hands were shaking.
I gestured. “Kitchen’s this way.” And we walked to the open kitchen area together. I poured her some wine. “How did you know where I was?”
“I got a text,” she said. “The text said I had to come here, had to tell you about what happened at the Wainwright household, or this person would tell my husband what happened. And I don’t want him to know. I never wanted him to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”
I handed her the glass of wine. “I’m sorry. But, you know, maybe if you tell me, it will help. Maybe it’ll be good to get it out.”
She tipped the wine glass back and drank the whole thing down. Then she set it down and wiped at her lips with the tips of her fingers. “I don’t think so. But I have to tell you.” She sucked in breath. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She grabbed the wine bottle and poured herself some more wine. “If my husband found out, he’d be so angry. He’d want me to do something about it. And I just want to forget it ever happened.”
“Forget what happened?”
She drank more wine. She walked out of the kitchen area and over to one of the windows. She put her fingers against the glass. She let out a little whimper. “Oh, Emilia, I don’t even know how to talk about it.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I did know that your m
other left. I knew that she was a victim too, because she contacted me once, after it happened to her, and I told her I didn’t want to talk about it, and to leave me alone.” She turned back to the window. “I’m so sorry I did that. But I don’t like to think about it. If I don’t think about it, it’s as if it didn’t happen.”
“Something happened to my mother?” I said in a tiny voice.
She nodded, without looking at me. “Yes, it was Roman. He did it to both of us. Not just us. There were others. I know there were others. But no one stood up to him. No one stopped him. And there was no way to prove it. He’s got so much money, and if you tried to bring a case against him, without evidence… Oh, and we were stupid back then. It’s not as if we were going to Take Back the Night rallies in our college dorms. Heck, I never even went to college.”
Take Back the Night? I shook my head. “No.”
She swallowed and she turned to look at me, nodding. “Yes.”
“But…”
“Roman Wainwright. He attacked your mother.”
I shook my head.
“He forced himself on her. I know, because he did it to me, too.” She finished the rest of the glass of wine and drew herself up. “There,” she said in a strange, distant voice. “There, it’s done. I did what that bastard wanted.”
“Wait a second, you’re saying that my mother was… was…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
She nodded once, her expression unreadable. “Raped,” she said, almost matter-of-factly. “That’s what happened.” And then, she turned stiffly and made her way toward the door.
I watched her, not doing anything. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. I could hardly breathe.
She opened the door.
“Wait,” I managed.
“No, that’s it,” she said. “I’m done with this.” And she walked out of the house, leaving the door open, the muggy September air reaching its tendrils into the coolness inside.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I didn’t close the door right away. I simply stood there, clutching my own glass of wine, looking out into the night.
Finally, I lurched forward and made my way over to the door in jerking movements. I shut it. I leaned my back against it, and I tried to gulp in as much air as I could. But as I drew in breaths, I seemed to be drawing in something else.
Now, I wasn’t in the house here anymore, but back in the Wainwright house, back under the stairs in that closet, clutching Violet’s hand, both of us crying.
In the distance, a woman screaming.
My mother. It was my mother’s voice. I started to shake.
It was dark under the stairs, and I was scared, but I knew I had to be brave for Violet, because I was the only one who could take care of her. Mom was out there, and she had told us to hide when the Boss had come into the suite we shared in the house, stumbling around, his voice slurred and booming.
“Take your sister and hide,” she’d told me, pushing both of us out of the room.
But now, I was wondering if we should be hiding. Maybe Mom needed me. Maybe if I helped, we could fight off the Boss. That was what Mom always called Mr. Wainwright. The Boss. In my head, I called him that too.
I had never really liked him before, but I’d never found him so scary until tonight. He was like a monster in a story. The troll who lived under the bridge in “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”
I turned to Violet. “We need to help Mom.”
She shook her head. “No, she told us to hide.”
In the distance, my mother’s voice, shaking and frightened. “Roman. Roman, please.”
“What’s he doing to her?” I said. I opened the door to the closet.
“No!” Violet tugged on my hand.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to her. “You stay here, shut the door. He won’t find you here.”
“You can’t leave me alone. Stay here.”
“I have to help Mom!” I pulled my hand out of hers and opened the door to the closet.
She seized my hand. “Ems!”
“Mom needs me,” I said. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. The Boss was big and scary, but maybe I could hit him over the head, like in the movies, and knock him unconscious. I started out the door, trying to get my hand free of hers again.
But she held tight. “Fine, I’m coming with you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, then.”
We stepped out of the closet into the dark, shadowy hallway. We carefully tiptoed down to the edge of the stairs.
My mother was sobbing. She sounded beaten and hurt, and I’d never heard her cry like that. That was the way that I cried when she told me that I couldn’t have something that I wanted. It wasn’t the way a grownup was supposed to cry. Grownups never felt that beaten and out of control. The sound of those sobs scared me more than anything.
I almost climbed back into the closet with Violet.
But I had an awful thought that spurred me on. What if the Boss killed Mom? I couldn’t let that happen. Violet and I didn’t have anybody else. Our dad had left us when Violet was still a baby, and he wasn’t coming back. We didn’t even know where he was. If we didn’t have Mom, we wouldn’t have anyone at all, and I didn’t even know what that would mean for us.
So, we kept moving. Violet and I inched our way down the hallway toward the door to our suite. Her hand gripped mine tighter and tighter the closer we got.
The door to the suite wasn’t completely closed. It was barely open a crack, and the sounds of Mom’s sobs were filtering out into the hallway.
We got there and pushed the door open.
Now I knew why I’d blocked this memory, cleaned it out of my brain. It was something that I never wanted to see again. Seeing it now was like seeing it for the first time. If I had to process this memory, integrate it into myself, it would traumatize me, and even now, I struggled to unsee it.
The door opened onto our living room, and it was in shambles. Several of the lamps had been broken, the cushions had been pulled off the couch, the bookshelf had been knocked over. My mother had fought.
But she was pinned down on the cushionless couch and the Boss was holding her arms over her head, and her face was pressed into the couch’s back, and he was against her. And she wasn’t wearing clothes, and the Boss’s pants were down, and…
I didn’t understand what I was seeing, not really, but some part of me did understand. It was an ancient sort of knowledge that sung inside me, like the way you just knew that it was dirty to see boys in the bathroom and that there was some reason you were making your Barbies kiss without their clothes on.
I screamed.
The Boss turned and saw me there in the doorway, saw Violet and me.
Violet wasn’t making any noise at all. Her fingernails were digging into my palm.
“Stop it!” I said to him, pointing at him. I knelt and picked up one of the books that had fallen off the bookshelf. A big, heavy hardback. I hurled it at him, and it glanced against his forehead.
And he did. He stopped. He backed away and stumbled because his pants were around his ankles, but then he pulled them up, and he left.
Mom was still sobbing.
I went into the bedroom and got her a blanket and covered her up.
And she still sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
* * *
My phone was ringing.
I came back to myself, back to the house down the beach from the Wainwright house, and I was shivering. I staggered in the direction of my phone until I found it on the counter in the kitchen. It was Phin calling me.
“Phin?” I said in a weak voice.
“You said you were going to call me back!”
I didn’t say anything. I was still shivering. My whole body was being racked with these awful tremors. I stumbled to the thermostat and turned off the air conditioning. Still shivering.
“Mila?”
“I’m here,” I said. I knew where I needed to go. I opened the door out
onto the porch. Immediately, I was enveloped in warm sea air. I gasped, breathing it in, welcoming its warmth.
“You okay?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.” I made my way over to a chair on the porch and sat down. “Give me a second here.”
“Are you hurt? Do I need to call an ambulance?”
“No, nothing like that,” I said. “I just…” I took several deep breaths.
“Okay, you’re scaring me here.”
“Charlotte Porter came to my house,” I said.
“How does she know how to find you?”
“She said that the same person who texted her gave her the address. She told me that she was raped by Roman Wainwright and that my mother was too.”
“Oh, God, Mila.”
“It’s true,” I said. “I remember now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know those nightmares I have, the ones where I can never remember them when I wake up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re saying that’s about—”
“I saw it.” My voice cracked.
“Oh, hell,” he breathed.
For several long seconds, neither of us spoke.
Finally, he did. “That’s so horrible, Mila. I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say.”
“I want to unsee it,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chest. “I liked it better when I couldn’t remember.”
“Well, of course you would feel that way. Your psyche blocked that out to protect you.”
“Yes.”
We were quiet again.
“After it happened, we left,” I said. “That night, Violet and I came in and saw it, and I chased him off.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I mean, I think… he was obviously drunk, now that I think about it. He was acting drunk. And I don’t know why he stopped, but he did, and he left, and then my mother was so upset, and I didn’t know how to help her. Eventually, Violet and I got her into bed, and she just kept crying and crying. And we climbed into bed with her, and we all slept. Then she woke us up when it was still dark, and we packed up, and we left. The sun was coming up, and we drove away and never went back. And we never talked about it. And my mom didn’t do anything. She didn’t go to the police. She didn’t report it. She just…” Suddenly, I was angry. “Why didn’t she do anything?”
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