“Remember that night I came into your bedroom and woke you up?” she asked, but her mother didn’t respond, and Maria didn’t look to see if she’d even heard. She was too busy trying to formulate words to go with the thoughts in her head, but the past and present and future were twisting together in a tangled mess of memories, with no beginning and no end, and she didn’t quite know how to proceed.
“The children I told you about,” she continued, picking at the frayed and unraveling bandage on her arm. “Your grandchildren. They’re real. And I really did come back from the future. And I really am married to a man named Will, who was like a son to you. And I really am pregnant with my third child.”
There were tears in her mother’s eyes when she finally looked up, the tears of a woman who would do anything to protect her daughter but instead had to watch her spiral out of control, unable to be saved by the increasing number of medicines and specialists and therapies around them. Unable to be saved by her. In the world Maria left behind, she was about her mother’s age now, struggling to balance life, just like the woman beside her, struggling to do the right thing by her children.
“We’re going to figure this out, Maria.” Her mother wiped the tears from her cheeks and laced her fingers through Maria’s before pulling in a deep breath and sighing it out between them. “I don’t want you to worry about this. We’ll get the best specialist in the country if we have to, but we’re going to help you. We’re going to make this better.”
“I don’t blame you for not believing me, Mom. I wouldn’t believe my daughter, either, if she came to me with a story like this. But I have to make you see the truth, and I don’t know any other way to do it than to break a promise I made to you a long time ago. So, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do.”
She had somehow known it would play out this way. From the beginning, she’d known that she would have to share this story to make her mother believe her, but that knowledge didn’t lessen the shame. It was a story she’d vowed to keep secret, two years earlier, but today she would break that vow and reveal something that she was certain her mother would soon wish she’d taken to her grave.
“When I was a baby, barely even a year old, you got pregnant again.” The words covered her mother like a thick coat of ice as she sat frozen by Maria’s side, unable to pull air into her lungs. “You and Dad weren’t getting along so well at the time. The stress of a new baby, his long hours at work, your loneliness. You were even talking about divorce.”
“Stop.” Her mother pushed herself from the bed and backed away from Maria with unsteady steps that carried her to the wheelchair by the door.
“I have to make you see the truth, Mom. You never told anyone about that baby. Not Dad, not your mom, no one. Until you told me, just days before you died.” She’d never been able to shake that image: her mother, sedated on morphine, rambling on with a story that she’d begged her to stop telling, playing the role of an unwilling priest at a last confession.
“Stop it,” her mother said, stumbling over George’s wheelchair. “It’s not true. Who told you this?”
“You did. On your deathbed, two years ago. I sat by your side every hour of every day as cancer ate you away. Metastatic, stage four breast cancer. You were sixty-two years old.”
Her mother clutched the arm of the wheelchair for balance, unable to hold herself steady. “That’s impossible. I never told anyone.”
“Not yet. But you will. And I’ll promise to carry it to my own grave, but obviously that won’t happen, because here I am.” Maria held her arms wide, feeling smaller than she ever could have imagined for breaking her mother’s trust and backing her into a corner. “I promise I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone. Ever. But I didn’t know how else to make you see the truth.”
“What truth?” Her mother leaned against the wall, fear holding her in place as she watched her daughter from the other side of the room. “What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Maria said. “I’m just as confused as you are. And as grateful as I am to see you again, I just want to go home.”
“This is your home, Maria.” Her mother stepped cautiously toward the bed, the need to comfort her daughter outweighing the senselessness of the words that were being spoken to her. “Why do you keep saying that?”
She slid onto the bed beside Maria, placing her hand over the bandage on her daughter’s mangled wrist. There was only so much proof Maria could provide to her. She would have had to walk the journey beside her to fully appreciate it.
“This was my home,” she said. “But I’ve left a family behind to be here, and all I want is to be with them again. But I was sent here to do something that will cost me my way back.”
Her mother had once been her closest confidante, but that wouldn’t happen for almost another decade. She couldn’t remember the moment their relationship changed, the moment her mother’s role shifted from disciplinarian to mentor to friend. There probably wasn’t one moment; it was probably like most mother–daughter relationships: eventually, when your children start careers and get married and have children of their own, your job as a parent seems so unimportant.
She wished she could tell her mother how untrue that was, how she’d needed her every single day since her death and had spoken to her as if she hadn’t already been buried. How she needed her now. How she wasn’t prepared to make this choice. She wanted someone to tell her what to do, to make it right. But how could she ask the woman sitting by her side to do that for her?
“Good afternoon, ladies.” Dr. Johnstone’s voice thundered through the room, catching both Maria and her mother off guard. “What is this doing here?” he mumbled, as he pushed the wheelchair into the hallway and shut the door on his way back into the room. “Thanks for meeting me here, Mrs. Bethe. I wanted to discuss Maria’s hypnotherapy before we started her next session.”
The silver chain hanging from her mother’s hand glistened in the sunlight as she tried to slip it into her purse, catching Dr. Johnstone’s attention. He stepped forward to examine it.
“Is that a dog tag?”
“Yes, it’s … it belongs to…” She cleared her throat as she clutched the metal necklace, her eyes darting between Maria and Dr. Johnstone. “It belongs to Maria’s grandfather.”
“Her grandfather?” It wasn’t the usual fumbling hand that caught Dr. Johnstone’s glasses when they slipped from his nose but a dexterous index finger, which settled the glasses back into place before he reached out for the necklace. “May I?”
“Of course.” Maria’s mother dropped the dog tag into his outstretched hand. “You just missed him.”
“I didn’t realize Maria had a visitor.” He peered through the bottom half of his bifocals at the inscription on the metal disk. “No one mentioned it to me.”
“I didn’t realize you were keeping tabs on my visitors,” Maria said.
“No, of course not.” He handed the necklace back to her mother. “Was that your father or your husband’s, Mrs. Bethe?”
“Mine.” The words passed her lips without pause or hesitation as she buried the dog tag and the yellow paper deep within her purse. Maria would never have guessed that her mother could be such a proficient liar.
“I see.” Dr. Johnstone slid onto the edge of the bed, a good distance from them both. The springs creaked under his weight, but the familiar restless shifting of his body was noticeably absent. He was smoother than Maria thought he could be, this hyperexcitable, bumbling man who’d sat in the cafeteria with her just a couple of days earlier, blabbing on about the theory of relativity and how it related to reincarnation.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “I think before the next hypnosis treatment we should discontinue the medications that Dr. Anderson started. She’s agreed to this, so Maria won’t be getting her evening meds, starting tonight.”
“I think maybe it’s time for her to come home.” Maria hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until her mother’s words silen
ced Dr. Johnstone, and she finally exhaled into the space between them. “My husband and I will keep her safe. In fact, we’d be more comfortable doing it that way.”
Dr. Johnstone hesitated, his eyes searching Maria’s face as he tried to reconcile what he’d just stumbled in upon. “I can certainly understand how you’d feel that way,” he said. “And if you think she’s ready for it, we can do the hypnosis treatments as an outpatient.”
“I’m not sure I even want to do the treatments anymore,” Maria said, and as Dr. Johnstone’s eyebrows shot up and his attention went back and forth from mother to daughter, she could almost pity him for the effort it was taking to keep his mouth shut.
“You don’t want the hypnosis?”
“I don’t know,” Maria replied. “I don’t want to give up on it completely, but I need some time to think. If I could just get out of this hospital and off these medications, maybe I could figure out what I need to do.”
If it weren’t for Maria’s mother, Dr. Johnstone would have been able to undo all of George’s work. It wouldn’t have been difficult. Distracting Maria from her purpose with promises and glimpses of her family was a talent of his. But circumstance had landed him in a tough spot, one that didn’t lend itself well to frank conversation.
“You said it was your grandfather that visited you?” He leaned back and peered over the top rim of his glasses.
“Yes,” Maria replied. “My grandfather. We discussed the importance of always doing the right thing and fulfilling our purposes in life. Things like that.”
He nodded as he sighed into the space between them, conceding defeat to the man who hadn’t needed the wheelchair, the man who’d once been his own mentor of sorts, and jotted down a local number on the back of his business card before handing it to Maria’s mother.
“I’ll be in town for a couple more days, but I have to get back home soon, so if you decide you’d like to continue with the hypnosis, we would need to get started in the next day or two.” He rose from the bed and walked to the door, hesitating before opening it and turning back to face them. “And Maria,” he said, “the ‘right thing’ means different things to different people. Unless someone has walked in your shoes throughout your entire life, and shared each of those experiences with you, how can they possibly know what is right for you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
jenny
THE OTHER WIVES SAID THEY KNEW the moment it happened. They could feel it in their cores, startled awake in the middle of the night, the essences of them forever changed. Jenny didn’t feel anything at the moment the rig exploded, the moment Hank died. There was no premonition, no nightmare, no sense of doom. She learned her husband was dead when she turned on the news the morning after the explosion, five days after he left their home for the last time.
Footage of the accident reeled twenty-four hours a day as rescue crews turned into recovery crews and experts briefed the press about possible causes of the disaster. Hank’s body was never found and none of his belonging were ever returned.
For weeks, neighbors, friends, and distant relatives tried to nose their way into Jenny’s sorrow, thinking they could own a portion of her grief, but while the incessant ringing of the phone followed her into sleep every night, she never thought to answer it. She clung to her misery, unwilling to share it, fearing the pain would dull and she would forget that she deserved it and that she was not worthy of forgiveness.
But it was the guilt, more than the grief, that consumed her. It gnawed at her soul, feeding like a half-crazed, insatiable rat, devouring what was left of her and ripping her from sleep every night. The secrets that she and Hank had shared in those final moments were secrets that should have followed them both to their graves.
Her son stayed by her side for days, offering the only solace Jenny would accept, but Dean’s pity couldn’t quell the agony; it just made it worse. She had nothing to offer him in return, and the longer he stayed by her side, the more deeply the consequences of her ineptitude sliced through her. She was incapable of walking her son through the loss of his father, because she didn’t know how to grieve. The relief she’d felt upon her own mother’s death should have been a warning that something was lacking within her, something grievous, but it wasn’t until Hank’s death that Jenny realized her husband had filled that void. He’d taught her son not only how to love but also how to be loved, a lesson she’d never learned.
It wasn’t Dean, though, or the premade meals and cards that found their way to her doorstep each evening, that brought her back to the living. It was the woman in the shed. It was the fact that, for once, she could do something that might offer some justice and hope to someone in need. It was the knowledge that when fate frowns upon certain people, it is the responsibility of others to step forward.
Rachel didn’t know the plan. She’d put her complete trust in Jenny to take care of the details and agreed that she wouldn’t ask questions. She didn’t know that she’d soon be given a new identity, a new passport, a new life. She didn’t know that someone would be finding her blue sleeveless shirt and her canvas shoes washed up on the Mississippi shore near the border of Louisiana, or that investigators would soon call off the search when she was presumed dead. She didn’t know that Jenny had spent half her life savings to secure the documents that would grant Rachel a new start. Not to mention the cost of confidentiality. Jenny wasn’t proud of the connections she had from her days in New Orleans, but they had their benefits.
Jenny couldn’t think straight. The details were starting to blend together, and as she sat at the table listening to the ticking of the clock above the door, pounding into her head like a throbbing pulse, she couldn’t focus.
It was one of the few things she’d brought to her marriage all those years ago, and as if to remind her that they were alone, it seemed to grow louder by the day. Stupid clock. It didn’t know that Hank was gone and that it should have been conserving its ticks because no one would ever wind it again. She wrapped her fingers around the glass of water on the table in front of her, the sides slick with condensation and cold beneath her fingers.
Before she could fathom what she was about to do, the glass was hurtling through the air and crashing into the clock face, dust scattering in every direction when it hit the floor. The relentless ticking wouldn’t cease, though. Even when she stood above it, her foot poised and ready to smash it to pieces, it refused to surrender. It wasn’t until the full weight of her body crashed down onto it that it fell silent.
“Jenny? Are you okay?” Rachel’s voice floated through the kitchen as Jenny picked her foot up to examine the remnants of the clock. When she finally looked up, the light was fading through the kitchen window, highlighting the changes that had turned Rachel into a new woman.
She’d been staying in the shed for almost a month and had put on some weight. Her hair was finally starting to grow out and the auburn roots looked shiny and healthy. She was turning a corner, starting a new life, while Jenny was wrapping up her old one.
“Do I look like I’m doing okay?” Jenny asked, and when they both surveyed the mess of broken glass surrounding them on the floor and the crumpled clock face stuck to the bottom of Jenny’s shoe, there was nothing they could do but laugh. It felt good to laugh. Life was hard and messy and heartbreaking, but in that moment shared between two friends, it was also beautiful.
They stayed up late into the night, drinking wine, reliving memories, and telling secrets as the sounds of the bayou enveloped them in a familiar chorus. The night air was cool as they dragged log after log to the fire pit and doused them with kerosene, watching the flames dance into the sky and rain down embers and ashes.
It was Rachel’s idea, but it was Jenny who dragged the red bin from the guest bedroom closet. It banged against the ground with the protests of the condemned. As Jenny propped the photo of David on a nearby rock so he could witness the scene, the two women topped off their wineglasses and clinked them together one last time.
&nb
sp; “To new beginnings.”
Rachel retreated to the shed for her final night on the bayou, leaving Jenny to do what should have been done years earlier. A photo album swollen with memories of one-time lovers was the first to go, swallowed by the flames as the plastic sheaths around the pictures melted away, leaving distorted images of half-burned faces with ghoulish smiles staring back at her. The flames shot high into the sky, as if they were pleased with the sacrifice but hungry for more, so Jenny fed them, memory by memory, until the singed residue of her former life was all that remained.
When the ash had settled and the bin was empty, she held the last photo of David she would ever see, the one her husband had left for her, and ran her fingers over it, kissing it softly. He was as dead to her as her husband was, and when the photo slipped from her fingers and drifted into the flames, her hand drifted to her belly, where a heart had recently begun to beat.
PART III
CHAPTER THIRTY
maria
THE PHOTO HAD MADE ITS WAY back to the corkboard and the bathroom had been scrubbed, but try as she might, Maria couldn’t block out the image of her mother on her hands and knees, sobbing as she rinsed the blood from the bathroom walls and watched it swirl down the drain.
The girl in the mirror was scowling at Maria for ruining her life and destroying her future. Her hair was a greasy, tangled mess, her skin sunken on her cheeks, and the dark circles that shadowed her eyes were macabre and dreadful. She wasn’t so striking anymore. The thick, pink scar that wound its way up her wrist like a knotted rope was angry against her pale skin. It was the kind of scar that would define her throughout her life, and Maria was heavy with guilt for branding herself with it.
Sylvia would have been disappointed. Whatever insight she had offered to Maria hadn’t helped. The words spoken in the privacy of her office, the pictures and warnings from the dream, and the letter that never found Maria’s hands had been powerless to help. Even being out of the hospital had offered little clarity. Instead, it had sent her into a sort of depression, making her unable to eat or sleep or focus. She spent most of her time staring at the calendar and counting down the hours until Beth’s murder. She had forty-eight hours, plus or minus.
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