We get something to drink and the Charlie and I start to sit at the bay window overlooking my mother’s backyard, but it is the place that we sit with my mother and Spence. It feels wrong to be there with my father.
Charlie senses this too. He gestures with a glass of ice tea. “Let’s go in the study”.
My mother’s study is where she does the work for her charity-The Victoria Project. It offers assistance to mothers who are widowed. My father sits on a chair and looks up at the bookshelf. There, on a high shelf, are his books that my mother kept after he died. My father chuckles, but doesn’t look as if he actually finds anything funny.
Charlie and I glance up at the books then back at him.
“Do you want those back?” Charlie asks.
My father shakes his head, still looking up. “That was another life.” He drops his eyes from the book, looks at me, then at Charlie. No one knows what to say now that the danger is gone, now that the ghost is sitting among us.
My mother and Spence enter the room then. It’s obvious my mother has been crying. Usually, such a sight would alarm and trouble both Charlie and me. My mother becomes depressed, ‘melancholy’ she sometimes calls it, often and usually the tears are the first sign of the encroaching cloud, the looming mood that will tinge all that comes near. But instead of seeming flat, withdrawn, and slipping away from all of us, my mother, despite her pink-rimmed eyes, seems crackling, angry, alive.
She sits behind her desk which gives her a commanding presence in the room. My mother is not usually commanding. Spence sits at the chair to her right and places a hand on her desk in a show of support.
My mother looks at her first husband. “What do you plan to do now?”
He blinks a few times then offers a small shrug. “I don’t know.” He shakes his head and once more chuckles without mirth. “I have always known what to do with my life, even when it required leaving all of you.” He takes us all in with his gaze.
Spence drops his eyes momentarily as if not wanting to intrude on this family scene, but then immediately lifts them back up and protectively scans the faces of the people he loves.
“But now,” my father continues, “I don’t know what to do.”
My mother looks at him with an uncharacteristic steely stare. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it. I knew it.” She shakes her head, her jaw set firm, eyes flashing with that strange anger. “I knew you weren’t dead. Do you know what that did to me? I lost myself because of that battle, because of the battle in my head that said you were alive when everything else said you were dead.”
My father shakes his head, mute. None of us knows what to say. We all stare at my mother who seems so vibrant, twitching with emotions and questions.
She opens her mouth, her eyes glaring again, then shakes her head. “We all need to process this. We all need to think.” She sounds very authoritative, and again none of us know how to respond to this new Victoria McNeil, or perhaps this is the old Victoria McNeil.
“You’ll stay in town for a while,” she says. There is no question mark at the end of her statement, and she gives my father a look that shows she will tolerate no dissension.
My dad, the one who had kept the Camorra on the run, the one who has managed to stay alive when so many others have died, looks relieved that someone is issuing the orders now. He looks at us, taking us all in, and he nods.
Laura Caldwell
Laura Caldwell, who lives in Chicago with her husband, left a successful career as a medical malpractice trial attorney and a partner at a successful firm to follow her dreams of becoming a novelist. In the span of 18 months, she sold four chick-lit novels to the Red Dress Ink imprint and three suspense novels to the MIRA Books imprint, the first of which is Look Closely.
But in addition to her now-successful writing career Laura does have two other jobs. She’s an adjunct professor of law at her alma mater, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she teaches Advanced Legal Writing. Laura is also a writer and contributing editor for Lake Magazine, a lifestyles publication based in the Indiana/Michigan area where Laura has a second home. Her freelance magazine work has been published in Woman’s Own, The Young Lawyer, Australia Woman’s Weekly and many other magazines.
***
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