by Neven Carr
Mama didn’t yay or nay it. She didn’t need to. “It was just two days before you finished work for the year,” she said. “Alice wanted to wait until your last day of school. That way you’d have lots of free time to adjust, said she’d linger outside of Zephyr until you returned home.”
“You had the code to Zephyr; you could’ve let her in.”
“I didn’t want to let her in.”
It was a remorseless admission; a blind person could’ve sensed that. I captured my breath and held onto it. Reality was melting me fast, flushing my skin from the inside out. I didn’t much care for it. I glanced away, back to Mama, away again.
Was this woman really my mother? Our closely similar facial appearances said she was. I scanned the surrounding, bustling crowds and swallowed hard. I rummaged through my beaded bag, pulled out my large, tortoiseshell sunglasses and slipped them on. And it wasn’t to protect my eyes from the sun.
I needed readjustment time, piecing bits together time. When I felt I had enough, I returned to my mother. She was fiddling with her gold-hooped earring, staring at me.
“You had it all planned out.”
Mama said nothing.
“You first disguised yourself as some young hoodlum.” Normally the idea of a middle-aged woman doing so would’ve been implausible. But not my mother. Not with her small, slight figure and genetically unlined face. And certainly not combined with the right hooded jacket, dark sunglasses and one of Uncle Al’s outdated bombs from his demolition car yard. “You took Papa’s gun intending on shooting Alice while she waited outside of Zephyr; make it look like some warped, motiveless drive by shooting.”
I could barely believe what I was saying. Not only did it suggest that my mother knew how to use a gun but with a certain degree of accuracy. “But Alice wasn’t outside Zephyr, was she Mama? And when you drove by, saw she wasn’t there you panicked. Was she then waiting for me elsewhere?”
My mother sipped her champagne, faultlessly, emotionlessly.
I trembled.
Felt ill. The strong smells of a neighboring tuna salad didn’t help. “Let me know, at any time, if my over-active imagination gets out of control.”
Mama still didn’t respond.
“You drove to my school, studied me from the car park. Decided if Alice had already spoken to me, I would’ve appeared… hmmm… upset. When I looked at you, you sped off. From that point on, you weren’t letting me out of your sight. Alice was waiting for me… somewhere.”
Sharp pain stabbed my lungs. I heaved in a gush of air. “That now brings us here to The Local. I’m guessing you thought I’d have gone home from school instead.”
“It’s what you normally do.”
“Not that day. Your whole car park spectacle freaked me out and I didn’t want to be alone. So you followed me here into The Local. How you must’ve hated putting yourself in the open like that? Just because there was a small chance, a very small chance that Alice could show up. What were you going to do if she did? Shoot her in front of all those people?”
Her face colored and she avoided my eyes.
“You also didn’t account for some stranger taking a curious interest in you. Someone who would coincidently turn up at our home a few weeks later.”
Ethan.
He had always believed that the person watching me at The Local was male, someone young. He was actually impressed with my mother’s disguise. When he first saw her at my parent’s home, it was her eyes, identical to mine that made him stop, relook and put the horrific pieces together.
I sat mute for a while gazing at some boaties in the distance. How uncomplicated their lives suddenly appeared, sailing in zigzag fashions across the blue waters.
“Some family secrets need to stay exactly that. Secrets,” my mother whispered.
My mother the cold-blooded murderer.
“You have to understand, Claudia, Alice could’ve destroyed everything your father and I worked for. When you were in that horrible condition in the hospital after Araneya, your father cautioned me then that someone, someday, may come, someone not in your best interest, someone who may want to do you harm.”
Carlos Macanetti/Macey.
“It was why your father taught me how to use a gun.”
No surprises there.
“I thought Alice to be that person.” I watched Mama’s facial movements with some interest, tried to read the unspoken versions of the tale, but in the end, I could decipher very little.
“Papa never would’ve condoned such a ruthless act. He cared about Alice.”
I believed that strongly. I believed the only reason Papa was so harsh about Alice seeing me, was because of my mother.
“You didn’t want Alice in your precious life. And Papa sadly complied. He loved you Mama, he loved our family and he had to do whatever was necessary to keep it together, even if it meant hurting Alice. It’s the Cabriati blood.”
My mother swung from me, pulled out her pristinely folded handkerchief from her pristinely poised handbag. She dabbed and wiped, wiped and dabbed.
But I remained scarily detached from her.
And I prayed for my own soul.
Mama glanced at me, twisting her handkerchief. “You’ve changed, Claudia.”
I could’ve laughed had the situation not been so grim. “The truth will do that to you.” But not for one minute, did I believe all those changes were necessarily good ones.
I took a deep breath, allowing my mother time to formulate her next explanation, false or otherwise. Allowing myself time to prepare for my own painful tirade. When Mama said no more, I questioned why.
“There’s nothing more to say.”
“That’s not true, is it?” I raised and lowered my shoulders and looked squarely into my mother’s eyes. I was relieved to sense some of my original coldness return. I needed it. “Twenty-eight years ago, you made a choice. I’m not going to pretend to understand the difficult times you suffered with Papa. However, you didn’t just decide to disappear with Milo, leaving me with Papa as everyone in the family believed.”
Blood eased out of my mother’s arrogant face.
“You left me at birth, abandoned at some hospital. Papa didn’t even know I was born.”
I didn’t wait for a reaction. “I can’t imagine what it was like for Papa to scour the many Sydney hospitals in search of you, only to eventually discover me among a bunch of frantic nurses. I can’t imagine what it was like for him to return to a cold, barren home, to missing clothing and you and Milo gone.”
I took one small breath. “It wasn’t enough that you chose to discard me, that you chose to vanish with Milo, or even that you chose to leave me with a man that you didn’t think fit enough to live with yourself. But that for seven whole years you carried on as if I didn’t exist, not ever once checking to see if I was okay.”
Mama’s large, unblinking eyes stared from beneath a now unreadable expression. “Claudia, I always wanted you….”
“Wanted me? You aren’t serious, because I know about that too.” My voice had now reached new depths, somewhere amidst the dark voids of hell. “I know about your attempt to abort me.”
“Claudia, it wasn’t like that.”
Somewhere in my aching, bubbling brain, I recalled the countless times psychologists allotted my childhood difficulties to my maternal relationship. I had ridiculed them. Now I could only shake my head at how close to the mark they’d been.
“I guess, in due course you were shocked that you could’ve done such a thing. The fact that I never knew just helped in relieving any guilt on your part. As for Papa, he hid your secret from everyone, a secret far worse than his own.”
“He was protecting you, Claudia.”
“Yes, he was, but he was also protecting you.”
Mama pulled at her earring again, fast, agitated pulls, enough to make me think it’d soon fall off. “How?”
“How do I know all this?”
Her nod was wary, slight.
&nbs
p; “Milo.”
Mama gasped.
With all Mama’s planning and manipulation she had never considered the one other person that had actually been there at the time. A very confused, very aware, very clever eight year old.
And unlike me, one who didn’t forget.
“He remembers the blood, Papa yelling at you not to lose the baby. Milo also remembers me in a hospital crib, so excited to have a sister. He imagined all the things big brothers do, how he would teach me to ride a bike and so on. And then you grabbed him and disappeared. You deprived him of his family. And with no plausible explanation.”
I searched for a reaction, caring or otherwise.
Nothing.
“Seven years passed before I’m with you again. But I’m not the baby Milo remembered. He sees a girl horribly frightened, with no memory. He hears the gut-wrenching pleas of Alice Polinski, bleating her love for me, only to have a restraining order slammed on her. Milo’s fifteen by then, understands a whole lot more.
He doesn’t feel comfortable turning to either you or Papa. Instead, he turns to Aunt Lia. Lia connects the dots that a fifteen-year-old couldn’t. She reaches out to Alice, promises her unfailing support. Helped her buy the old house outside of Nambour.”
When I asked Lia about the Nambour house, its sparse furnishings and disrepair, she told me a story about a delightful little cottage, with vibrant, pristine gardens and a colorful floral archway. “That was Alice’s true home,” she had said to me. “Where her heart belonged. The Macanettis gave it to her as a gift. It’s also where you and Alice lived. It was her life-long dream that one day she could bring you back there.”
From that moment on, an unbearable sadness, one I’d never experienced before - other than Simon - permanently implanted itself in me.
I returned to my mother. “Lia kept Alice informed about me, like sports carnivals, school fetes, graduations. And Alice would loyally attend every one of them, watch me from a safe distance.”
Mama scoffed, shook her head. Not a hair fell out of place. “Your figures.”
Very likely. “Alice never once approached me. To her, I seemed truly happy. And she didn’t want to upset that.” Alice also feared that meeting me could trigger my memories of Araneya and that the bad memories would far outweigh the good.
“How very noble of her,” Mama hissed.
“Yes, it was.”
“And Milo told you this?”
I hadn’t seen Milo since Christmas day. But Milo had seen Lia, trusted her to tell me everything I needed to know. That it was time for him to search his own path.
I told Mama. She wore the expression of one betrayed.
“Milo encouraged Alice to wait inside Zephyr, argued that it was safer than being on the streets. After you killed her, he suffered tremendous guilt.”
Like a startled chameleon, Mama’s betrayed look changed colors. Tears, real ones, bubbled and fell; wet, black mascara soiled her once immaculate handkerchief. “None of it was his fault.”
“I know that. It would be nice if he did. And for him to hear it from you.”
I thought of Milo. Lia explained how, every year, without complaint, Milo would place Alice’s hand-made birthday cards under my pillow, how he protected me for Alice’s sake, and very likely for the boy who once long ago, stared at his newborn sister and vowed to do that anyway. I still had difficulty associating that Milo with my own, caused by twenty years of conditioning.
“You have to understand,” Lia had said to me, “the years away from your Papa and from a sister Milo never got to know, didn’t help him. Your mother’s family coddled him, worshipped him like some phenomenal god. But Milo was smart. He played their ridiculous games. And his often cool façade was the unfortunate by-product.”
Lia had also given Simon the photos for the wedding album, courtesy of Alice. I wonder now, if it had been intentional on Lia’s behalf, hoping that once I saw them, I would begin a series of questions that would eventually lead me back to Alice.
With much reluctance, I returned to my mother. “Lia told Alice the truth about my birth, willingly gave her the ammunition to do what she wanted in case you or Papa caused her any problems. When you refused Alice permission to see me, she threatened you with it.”
Alice Polinski’s second mistake.
“Imagine what everyone would think, what the family would think, if they knew what type of mother you really were. That was Alice’s true threat to you, wasn’t it?”
And one that cost Alice her life.
“Claudia….”
The next part was the hardest. The one that made me sick beyond any talented imagination I bore.
I wished, I hoped, I prayed I was wrong.
“Last night, when I visited Papa, he told me to be careful of whom I trusted. He kept looking over my shoulder as if that person was there. I thought he meant Lia. I was wrong. He didn’t know you had already left the room.”
“You think he was talking about me?”
She said it with such chaste innocence. I didn’t know whether to slap her or clap her.
I continued regardless. “When Ethan came to our home, you recognized him and you panicked. You then turned to the only person who could help you. Papa. You told him about Ethan. You told him about how you had killed Alice. And that’s when Papa had his heart attack.”
I didn’t need an answer. It was stamped across every disturbing, foreign line on my mother’s face. I didn’t know what was worse. My poor, trusting Papa believing that the woman he had strove to protect and love was actually a cold-blooded murderer, or the fact that she so publicly tried to blame his heart attack on me.
“You know what’s ironic?” I said. “If you hadn’t killed Alice, Iacovelli and Souza would still be alive, Milo wouldn’t have felt the need to disappear, I wouldn’t have had two attempts on my life and Papa would be home strong and healthy. My discovering your dirty secret seems so trivial now, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what my mother thought. I didn’t really care.
“You not only deprived Alice of her life, her only mistake being to love the child that you and Papa so easily gave away; you also deprived me of a mother who genuinely loved me. That is a cross I will bear through no fault of my own.”
Any sad, repentant expression that followed from my mother, I knew to be false. She apologized, asked me for forgiveness.
My answer was immediate. “No, I think not.”
In some ways, it seemed wrong. I could so easily forgive my Papa. It wasn’t because of my mother’s malicious manner or her deceitful explanations. It wasn’t even the fact that she had deserted me at birth.
It was, I believe, because of the cold hearted, manipulative execution of Alice.
“What now?” my biological mother said. “Are you going to the police with this?”
That was the next factor to consider.
“I’d love to take that burden from you,” Saul answered, when I appealed to his thoughts. “But this is purely your decision.”
I liked how he trusted me.
It was a paradoxical state of affairs, this position I found myself in, being in the same shoes my father had been in several times, the future of the family, our family lying potently in the palm of my newly strengthened hands.
Like Papa, years down the track, I’d perhaps look back regrettably at the decision I’d made. As Papa said, one is always smarter in hindsight. But, for now, I believed, as Papa once believed, that I was doing what was best for the family.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
She gritted her teeth; nervous fingers ploughed her brow. “The truth would devastate our family.”
The truth had already devastated me.
“Milo, Nathaniel, Marcus… oh my god….” Her head fell into two rickety hands where it remained.
I felt some momentary pity for her. I doubt she had really considered the ramifications of her actions, not just for herself, but also for every other family me
mber. For a glimmer, I could almost feel her anguish. “That’s why I’m not going to the police.”
My mother’s eyes shot up.
Because of Saul, I could make that decision. He would guarantee that Alice Polinski was yet another casualty of Basteros or Carlos Macanetti.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew my mother should’ve been charged, convicted and sent to prison.
But I had one very important fact to consider.
No more lies, my Papa had said. But that tenet bowed and snapped in the beguiling wind of my mother. When it came to her, there were no rules. Papa would always consider his dark days as the trigger of any wrong doing on her behalf.
And for that, he would take full responsibility. Even going to prison for her, convincing the police he had killed Alice Polinski. I knew this without doubt.
And that I could not allow.
I cast cold daggers upon the woman, who by blood, was my mother. “I can’t be the cause of any more grief for this already broken family. We have all suffered far too much.”
“And your brothers?”
“What you tell them or anyone else in our family is your decision. Fortunately for you, with Papa still in the hospital, I don’t believe, at present, it’s in their best interests to know.”
My mother thanked me.
My stomach lurched. “Whatever you do, do not thank me. This is against any moral principles I was once proud to say I had.”
I fingered my wine glass before lifting it to my lips, completely emptying it. I then stood slinging my bag over my shoulder. “But, I console myself with two things. One, that like a true Cabriati, I’m doing this for our family, our blood. And two, how Papa looks upon you from this day on, you’ll find hard to bear. That’ll be Alice’s and my final retribution.”
I then left.
Saul met me at the hotel’s entrance. He didn’t ask how it went with my mother. He didn’t need to. No outcome with her would’ve been a pleasant one.
“I need to remember Alice.” I wasn’t looking at Saul but to the blue, still waters that had previously given me so much comfort. “I need to go to Araneya.”
“You sure?”
More certain than anything else I knew. “I want to remember everything, good or bad. I want to remember Alice.”