“Ready for your gift?” George asked once Vera was settled back at the table, fresh drink in her hand. He crossed the kitchen and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. From the right pocket, he pulled out a small present wrapped in tissue paper.
“For you,” he said, handing it over to Vera.
She put down her cigarette and accepted the gift. George watched, expectant and nervous, while Vera unwrapped the tissue paper, revealing a tiny, beautiful carved wooden bird.
“This isn’t like any duck I’ve ever seen,” she told him, turning it in her hand. Reggie leaned in to see that it had a long, gracefully curved neck, the feathers of the wings carved in perfect detail.
“Yes it is,” he said, smiling and adjusting his glasses. “It’s the ugly duckling,” he told her. “All her life she compares herself to others, thinks she doesn’t fit in; then she grows up and realizes she’s really a beautiful swan.” He stared at Vera, who kept her eyes on the carved bird in her hand.
Reggie held her breath, expecting her mother to come out with some mocking comeback line—Who are you calling an ugly duckling, Georgie?—but Vera was silent as she studied the swan, her head dropped down. Only when she raised it, Reggie saw that Vera’s eyes didn’t look mischievous or even angry—only sad.
Lorraine made a disapproving clucking sound and went back to cutting the tomato. “Damn!” she yelped, dropping the knife and clutching at her finger. Blood dripped onto the cutting board, mingling with the tomato juice.
George jumped up and went to her. “Let me see,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” Lorraine snapped.
George gently unwrapped her fingers from the cut hand. “You got yourself good,” he said, grabbing a paper towel from the roll and folding it up. He held the towel against her hand, said, “Let’s go clean it up and get a bandage and ointment on. The last thing you want is an infection.” Together they moved down the hall toward the bathroom, George’s hand on Lorraine’s.
Reggie and her mother sat in silence, listening to the ticking of the oven, the water coming on in the bathroom sink. George said something and Lorraine laughed.
Vera turned the swan over, running her fingers over the feathers of its belly.
After a minute, she stood up, swaying, steadying herself on the table.
“You okay, Mom?”
Vera offered Reggie a forced smile and said, “I’ll be right back.” Her voice sounded shaky and strange.
Vera went across the kitchen and down the hall. Reggie heard the front door open, then close. In a minute, her mother’s car started.
Reggie leaned forward and put out her mother’s cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, giving off a poisonous chemical smell. The swan was perched at the edge of the table, like it was thinking about taking flight.
“Where’s your mother?” Lorraine asked when she reappeared in the kitchen, Band-Aid on her finger.
“She said she’d be back,” Reggie said, biting her lip.
“The last thing she should be doing in her state is getting behind the wheel of a car,” Lorraine announced, tugging at the bottom of her fishing vest. She went to the kitchen window and looked out at the driveway, eyes sweeping over the place where Vera’s Vega had been. “I have half a mind to call the police.”
George went and stood behind her, put a hand on her back. She leaned back into him, then, as if thinking better of it, swayed forward, resting her hands on the counter.
“Who’s up for a game of rummy?” George asked, turning away from her, opening the drawer the cards were kept in.
Reggie, Lorraine, and George sat around the kitchen table, playing cards while they waited for the lasagna to cook. Vera did not return. They ate in uncomfortable silence, all of them listening for the tires on the gravel driveway, the wooden swan in the center of the table abandoned.
When Reggie got to her room, she went to the desk, found her X-Acto knife, and drew the blade slowly, tentatively, across her forearm. The pain was bright and beautiful, driving all the darkness away.
NEPTUNE’S HANDS WERE AROUND her throat, tightening. She was someplace deep and cold—the underground chamber of a cave, the bottom of a well. She was tied up, held down, unable to move.
She heard Tara’s voice: The whole universe is there in your hands.
Reggie opened her eyes, focusing on the clock radio beside her twin bed.
Red fingers, reaching for her.
No, she told herself, blinking, only red numbers: 2:20 A.M.
Her heart was pounding, her skin damp. The fresh cut on her arm stung.
She felt her mother’s hot gin breath on the back of her neck. Vera was curled around Reggie under the twin-size Space Invaders sheets, pressing her ruined hand against Reggie’s chest and holding her tight, so tight Reggie could barely breathe. Vera put her lips against Reggie’s good ear and whispered, “Wake up.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“I have news.”
“Jesus, Mom! Can’t it wait until morning?” She was getting tired of these middle-of-the-night, after-the-bars-closed confessions. And she was pissed off that her mother had just walked out on them at dinner, leaving behind George’s gift like it meant nothing.
Maybe Lorraine had been right—maybe it was time to start locking her door.
“It’s important,” Vera hissed, squeezing Reggie tighter.
And Reggie felt a little dark stab of fear, starting as a flutter in her rib cage.
Her mother moved her lips to Reggie’s one remaining ear again and sighed into it, her breath sharp with the piney gin smell that reminded Reggie of Christmas trees. “I’m getting married.”
Reggie felt a fist close inside her chest.
“Did you hear me, Regina? Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Great. Great.” Liar. “Is it the new guy? The one you met at the bowling alley?”
Vera laughed. “No, silly. It’s not him.”
“Well, who is it, then?”
“It’s a surprise. But you’ll see soon. I want you to come and meet him.”
“Now?” Reggie asked. She tried to shift around to face her mother, but Vera held Reggie in place. Her mother’s strength often surprised her. But then again, this was the woman who had twirled a gigantic dog through the air to save her. Reggie reached up from under the covers and touched her mother’s scarred hand, remembering.
“No, silly. Tomorrow. Meet me at the bowling alley. Seven o’clock. Will you come, Regina? Please say you will.” Her voice sounded hopeful, pleading. The words buzzed the back of Reggie’s neck like worried bees.
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Good girl,” she said, kissing Reggie’s cheek. “Oh, and do me a favor, huh? Don’t say anything about my news to Lorraine. I want to tell her myself. But I want you to meet him first.”
“Whatever you say,” Reggie told her.
“Good girl,” she said, kissing Reggie’s ear. “We’re going to live in a real house. Maybe get some cats. Have a flower garden. A nice, normal life. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, love?” She sounded so strangely wistful it was as if she were reciting lines from one of her plays.
“I WANT YOU OUT of this house!” Lorraine stood in the doorway of Reggie’s room, the light from the hallway coming in all around her. Her face was in shadow, but the outline of her silhouette seemed to glow. Reggie looked at the clock. It was a little after three. They had fallen asleep.
Vera slid out from under the covers and stood without a word.
“Mom, wait!” Reggie started to get out of bed. “Aunt Lorraine, what’re you talking about?” Reggie stammered. “It’s the middle of the night—”
“Shhh, don’t worry, baby,” Vera said. “Everything’s going to be okay. You just go back to bed.”
“But— ” Reggie began.
“Everything’s under control,” Vera promised. “You get some sleep now.”
Vera left the room and closed the door gently behind her. Reggie could hear t
hem arguing in the hall. She crept out of bed, padded across the floor, and pressed her good ear to the door.
“How dare you belittle me in front of my daughter?” her mom said.
“I’ve made it clear that I will not tolerate this,” Lorraine said. “This is not some flophouse where you come and go as you please. What do you think it does to Regina, seeing you like this? Having a drunk for a mother?”
“You have no right,” Vera hissed.
The floor creaked with the sound of footsteps.
Then a third voice, low and gentle, chimed in. “Let’s all calm down.” It sounded like George, but what would he be doing there in the middle of the night?
Lorraine said something Reggie didn’t catch. Then “My decision is firm. I want you to leave. Now.”
This was followed by more whispers, then footsteps.
Soon it was quiet, but Reggie stayed, her real ear pressed against the door until she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 17
October 17, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
REGGIE STORMED BACK INTO the house after her confrontation with Martha in the yard.
“Who did you tell about Mom?” Reggie snapped at her aunt as she dropped the plastic grocery bags on the kitchen counter. One of them fell over and a plastic tub of lemon-scented disinfecting wipes rolled out.
“No one.” Lorraine turned from the sink where she’d been rinsing out the coffeepot.
“You called me. And Tara. Who else?”
“No one.” Lorraine straightened up, bracing herself against the counter.
“No one else?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone, Regina.” She reached for a dish towel and dabbed at her soapy hands.
“Martha Paquette was just here. She had a picture of Mom taken by one of those goddamn volunteer firefighters.”
“I’ll call the chief,” Lorraine said. “That’s got to be against the code of conduct. Surely he’ll be reprimanded.”
“The picture is really the least of our problems. Martha knows that Mom had been in a homeless shelter in Worcester. And she knows about the cancer.”
Lorraine’s mouth fell open, giving her the appearance of one of her much-loved trout. “How?”
“Someone told her, I’d imagine.” She stared at her aunt, waiting.
Lorraine’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t think it was me?” She touched a hand to her chest and kept it there, fumbling with one of the pockets on her ancient, stained fishing vest.
“Not directly, no. But I need to know who else knew about the shelter.”
“I told you,” Lorraine said, clenching her jaw. “You and Tara. I’m not an idiot, Regina. Don’t you think I have some concept of what’s at stake here? I haven’t breathed a word to anyone else and I resent the implication that I’m a dotty old lady who can’t keep her mouth shut. You should know I have only the best intentions as far as your mother is concerned.”
“Oh, really?” Reggie said. “That’s a switch, isn’t it? Do you think I’ve forgotten what you did? You threw her out of her own house, Lorraine!” Reggie bit her tongue before she finished the thought out loud: right into the arms of a killer.
Lorraine’s whole body went rigid. She turned away from Reggie and ran hot water into the sink. The steam came up, and Lorraine leaned into it, holding on to the counter like her legs alone could not support her; she looked like a woman being enveloped by fog.
“THERE ARE ANGELS WALKING among us,” Vera said. “They’re disguised like humans. Sometimes they’re wearing rags. Sometimes business suits. You never know when you might meet one. That’s what Sister Dolores says.”
“Sister Dolores sounds like a smart woman,” Tara said. She had a plastic tub of warm water and was giving Vera a sponge bath. Vera was half naked, her hips and legs covered with a blanket, a towel draped over her shoulders. Her breasts sagged like empty sacks onto her protruding rib cage. Every bone seemed visible through paper-thin skin.
Reggie had hurriedly pushed open her mother’s door and now stood frozen in the doorway. She looked away from her mother and down at the floor, feeling like an intruder.
Tara glanced up, apparently unsurprised by the interruption. “I’m just getting your mother cleaned up. We’ll be through in a minute.” She’d dropped the washcloth into the tub and had started to gently blot Vera’s skin with a towel.
“We need to talk,” Reggie stammered, reminding herself what she’d come for as she backed up into the hallway.
“Let me finish this up and I’m all yours.” She carefully dried Vera off, lifting her legs and arms gently, artfully using the blankets and towels to cover up whatever part of Vera she wasn’t working on, toweling off the stump where her right hand had been as if it were no different from her other arm. There was no look of repulsion or horror. She hummed a little tune while she worked, uttered reassurances—“Almost done, Vera.” “Am I freezing you to death? Sorry, my dear, nearly there.”
Vera smiled up at Tara. “I think you’re one,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I’m one what?” Tara asked, sprinkling baby powder on Vera’s torso.
“An angel.”
“Perfect, because I think you’re one, too,” Tara said, smiling down at her, carefully easing Vera into her pajama top.
Vera closed her eyes and sank back into the pillow with a look of complete tranquility on her face. Tara grabbed the bath supplies and carried them past Reggie, down the hall to the bathroom. She washed her hands, carefully soaping up each finger, while Reggie stood hovering in the bathroom doorway. Tara’s sleeves were pushed up and Reggie stared at her arms, remembering the scars, thinking she could see the faint outlines of them. Tara caught her looking and Reggie glanced away, embarrassed. Then her eyes met Tara’s in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“You didn’t talk to Martha Paquette by any chance, did you?”
“Who?”
“The woman who wrote Neptune’s Hands.”
Tara gave her a quizzical look. “No. I don’t know why she would have come to me. I didn’t know any more than you did about the killings. She was busy talking to cops and stuff. Why would she have bothered with a thirteen-year-old kid?”
“I’m not talking about back then. I mean now. Did you talk to her yesterday or today?”
Tara turned off the faucet, shook off her hands. “What the hell is this, Reggie?”
“She was just here. She knows my mom is alive and in this house. And that she showed up in a homeless shelter in Worcester. She even knows about the cancer.”
Tara began drying her hands. “And you think I told her?”
“Someone did. And the only people who knew were me, Lorraine, and you.”
Tara gripped the towel as if she was trying to throttle it. Reggie remembered the way Tara had once choked her, pretending to be Neptune. For days after, Reggie had walked around with the faint yellow bruises from Tara’s fingers.
When Tara spoke, her voice crackled and popped as it worked its way up to a roar. “Yeah, you, me, Lorraine—and all the people she met in the hospital in Worcester: nurses, doctors, aides, transport people, Christ, even the people who came in to mop the floor! Then there are all the cops who went in to interview her. You think someone like Martha Paquette doesn’t still have some police connections? What about the shelter workers or other homeless people? Any fucking one of them could have tipped her off.”
Reggie took a step back. “Of course. You’re right. I hadn’t thought of all that, I’m sorr—”
“No. You didn’t bother to think, you just went right for the one person you trust the least, didn’t you?” Tara’s eyes blazed.
“That’s not true,” Reggie said, moving toward Tara, wanting to reach out and touch her, to find a way to show her she was wrong. She felt like a kid again, at the mercy of Tara and her moods, wanting desperately to make things right.
Tara shook her head and stepped back. “You know, as much as I want to be h
ere for your mom, I’m not sure I’m the right person.”
“No. You are the right person. My mother trusts you. She just called you an angel!”
Tara twisted the towel in her hands.
Reggie gave Tara a pleading look. “Please say you’ll stay.”
There was total silence for a beat, as if they were both holding their breath.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Tara asked. “The way life works. You don’t even try to look me up in twenty-five years and now here you are, begging me to stay. Did you even think of me, Reggie? Even once in all those years?”
“Tara—”
“Did you?” Tara interrupted, the same burning look in her eyes she’d had all those years ago when she’d talk about Neptune.
Reggie reached inside her shirt and pulled out the hourglass necklace, holding it out so Tara could see it.
Tara’s eyes widened. “Oh my God! You kept it? All this time?”
“Of course.” The pink sand was running out. “Do you want it back?” Reggie started to take the necklace off, but Tara shook her head.
“No. You should keep it. It takes me back, though. Seeing it again. Total time warp, you know?”
Reggie nodded. “There’s a lot of that going around.”
Tara bit her lip. “Do you really want me to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But no more weird shit, okay? We’ve got to stick together here. Things with your mom, they’re going to get really intense in about a million different ways. If you can’t trust me, I need to know now.”
“I do trust you,” Reggie said, remembering years ago, when she’d sat next to Tara in Lorraine’s dank, fishy-smelling garage and Tara had handed her a razor blade and said, Trust me.
Tara nodded.
“Thank you,” Reggie said. “For agreeing to stay. I’m sorry for accusing you like that—it was fucked up.”
Reggie started to tuck the necklace back under her shirt, then pulled it back out, turned it over, thought, for just a second, of saying the words that would start one of their old games:
You have one minute . . .
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