Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  Paula took off her sunglasses. “What about them?”

  Andy tried not to gawk. One of the woman’s eyes was milky white. The other was streaked with red as if she had been crying, or strangled, or both.

  Paula asked, “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “To talk—my mother. I mean, do you know her? My mother?”

  “Who’s your mother?”

  Good question.

  Paula watched a car drive past her house. “Are you going to say something or stand there like a little fish with your mouth gaping open?”

  Andy felt her resolve start to evaporate. She had to think of something. She couldn’t give up now. Suddenly, she remembered a game they used to play in drama, an improv exercise called Yes, And . . . You had to accept the other person’s statement and build on it in order to keep the conversation going.

  She said, “Yes, and I’m confused because I’ve recently found out some things about my mother that I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not going to be part of your bildungsroman. Now cheese it or I’ll call the police.”

  “Yes.” Andy almost screamed. “I mean, yes, call the police. And then they’ll come.”

  “That’s kind of the point of calling the police.”

  “Yes,” Andy repeated. She could see where the game really required two people. “And they’ll ask lots of questions. Questions you don’t want to answer. Like about why your eye has petechiae.”

  Paula looked over Andy’s shoulder again. “Is that your car in my driveway, the one that looks like a box of maxi pads?”

  “Yes, and it’s a Reliant.”

  “Take off your shoes if you’re going to come inside. And stop that ‘Yes, And’ bullshit, Jazz Hands. This isn’t drama club.”

  Paula left her at the door.

  Andy felt weirdly terrified and excited that she had managed to get this far.

  This was it. She was going to find out about her mother.

  She dropped the messenger bag on the floor. She rested her hand on the hall table. A glass bowl of change clicked against the marble top. She slipped off her sneakers and left them in front of the aluminum baseball bat. Her wet socks went inside the shoes. She was so nervous that she was sweating. She pulled at the front of her shirt as she stepped down into Paula’s sunken living room.

  The woman had a stark sense of design. There was nothing craftsman inside the house except some paneling on the walls. Everything had been painted white. The furniture was white. The rugs were white. The doors were white. The tiles were white.

  Andy followed the sound of a chopping knife down the back hall. She tried the swinging door, pushing it just enough to poke her head in. She found herself looking in the kitchen, surrounded by still more white: countertops, cabinets, tiles, even light fixtures. The only color came from Paula Kunde and the muted television on the wall.

  “Come in already.” Paula waved her in with a long chef’s knife. “I need to get my vegetables in before the water boils off.”

  Andy pushed open the door all the way. She walked into the room. She smelled broth cooking. Steam rose off a large pot on the stove.

  Paula sliced broccoli into florets. “Do you know who did it?”

  “Did . . .” Andy realized she meant Hoodie. She shook her head, which was only partially lying. Hoodie had been sent by somebody. Somebody who was clearly known to Laura. Somebody who might be known to Paula Kunde.

  “He had weird eyes, like . . .” Paula’s voice trailed off. “That’s all I could tell the pigs. They wanted to set me up with a sketch artist, but what’s the point?”

  “I could—” Andy’s ego cut her off. She had been about to offer to draw Hoodie, but she hadn’t drawn anything, even a doodle, since her first year in New York.

  Paula snorted. “Good Lord, child. If I had a dollar bill every time you left a sentence hanging, I sure as shit wouldn’t be living in Texas.”

  “I was just—” Andy tried to think of a lie, but then she wondered if Hoodie had really come here first. Maybe Andy had misunderstood the exchange in Laura’s office. Maybe Mike had been sent to Austin and Hoodie had been sent to Belle Isle.

  She told Paula, “If you’ve got some paper, maybe I could do a sketch for you?”

  “Over there.” She used her elbow to indicate a small desk area at the end of the counter.

  Andy opened the drawer. She was expecting to find the usual junk—spare keys, a flashlight, stray coins, too many pens—but there were only two items, a sharpened pencil and a pad of paper.

  “So, art’s your thing?” Paula asked. “You get that from someone in your family?”

  “I—” Andy didn’t have to see the look on Paula’s face to know that she’d done it again.

  Instead, she flipped open the notebook, which was filled with blank pages. Andy didn’t give herself time to freak out about what she was about to do, to question her talents or to talk herself out of having the hubris to believe she still had any skills left in her hands. Instead, she knocked the sharp point off the pencil and sketched out what she remembered of Hoodie’s face.

  “Yep.” Paula was nodding before she’d finished. “That looks like the bastard. Especially the eyes. You can tell a lot about somebody from their eyes.”

  Andy found herself looking into Paula’s blank left eye.

  Paula asked, “How do you know what he looks like?”

  Andy didn’t answer the question. She turned to a fresh page. She drew another man, this one with a square jaw and an Alabama baseball cap. “What about this guy? Have you ever seen him around here?”

  Paula studied the image. “Nope. Was he with the other guy?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.” She felt her head shaking. “I don’t know. About anything, actually.”

  “I’m getting that.”

  Andy had to buy herself some time to think. She returned the pad and pencil to the drawer. This whole conversation was going sideways. Andy wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t know she was being played. She’d come here for answers, not more questions.

  Paula said, “You look like her.”

  Andy felt a bolt of lightning shoot from head to toe.

  You-look-like-her-you-look-like-her-you-look-like-your-mother.

  Slowly, Andy turned around.

  “The eyes, mostly.” Paula used the point of a large chef’s knife to indicate her eyes. “The shape of your face, like a heart.”

  Andy felt frozen in place. She kept playing back Paula’s words in her head because her heart was pounding so loudly that she could barely hear.

  The eyes . . . The shape of your face . . .

  Paula said, “She was never as timid as you. Must get that from your father?”

  Andy didn’t know because she didn’t know anything except that she had to lean against the counter and lock her knees so she didn’t fall down.

  Paula resumed chopping. “What do you know about her?”

  “That . . .” Andy was having trouble speaking again. Her stomach had filled with bees. “That she’s been my mother for thirty-one years.”

  Paula nodded. “That’s some interesting math.”

  “Why?”

  “Why indeed.”

  The sound of the knife thwapping the chopping board resonated inside of Andy’s head. She had to stop reacting. She needed to ask her questions. She’d made a whole list of them in her head on the seven-hour drive and now—

  “Could you—”

  “Dollar bill, kid. Could I what?”

  Andy felt dizzy. Her body was experiencing the odd numbness of days before. Her arms and legs wanted to float up toward the ceiling, her brain had disconnected from her mouth. She couldn’t fall back into old patterns. Not now. Not when she was so close.

  “Can—” Andy tried a third time, “How do you know her? My mother?”

  “I’m not a snitch.”

  Snitch?

  Paula had looked up from her chopping. Her expression was unreadable. “I’m n
ot trying to be a bitch. Though, admittedly, being a bitch is kind of my thing.” She diced together a bundle of celery and carrots. The pieces were all identical in size. The knife moved so fast that it looked still. “I learned how to cook in the prison kitchen. We had to be fast.”

  Prison?

  “I always wanted to learn.” Paula scooped the vegetables into her hands and walked over to the stove. She dropped everything into a stew pot as she told Andy, “It took over a decade for me to earn the privilege. They only let the older gals handle the knives.”

  Over a decade?

  Paula asked, “I gather you didn’t see that when you googled me.”

  Andy realized her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She was too astonished to process all of these revelations.

  Snitch. Prison. Over a decade.

  Andy had been telling herself for days that Laura was a criminal. Hearing the theory confirmed was like a punch to her gut.

  “I pay to keep that out of the top searches. It’s not cheap, but—” She shrugged, her eyes on Andy again. “You did google me, right? Found my address through the property tax records. Saw my course schedule, read my shitty student reviews?” She was smiling. She seemed to like the effect she was having. “Then, you looked at my CV, and you asked yourself, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, West Connecticut State. Which one of those doesn’t belong? Right?”

  Andy could only nod.

  Paula started chopping up a potato. “There’s a women’s federal corrections facility near West Conn. Danbury—you probably know it from that TV show. They used to let you do a higher ed program. Not so much anymore. Martha Stewart was a guest, but that was after my two dimes.”

  Two dimes?

  Paula glanced up at Andy again. “People at the school know. It’s not a secret. But I don’t like to talk about it, either. My revolutionary days are over. Hell, at my age, pretty much most of my life is over.”

  Andy looked down at her hands. The fingers felt like cat whiskers. What awful thing did a person have to do to be sentenced to a federal prison for twenty years? Should Laura have been in prison for the same amount of time, only she had stolen a bunch of money, run away, created a new life, while Paula Kunde was counting the days until she was old enough to work in the prison kitchen?

  “I should—” Andy’s throat was so tight she could barely draw air. She needed to think about this, but she couldn’t do that in this stuffy kitchen under this woman’s watchful eye. “Leave, I mean. I should—”

  “Calm down, Bambi. I didn’t meet your mother in prison, if that’s what you’re freaking out about.” She started on another potato. “Of course, who knows what you’re thinking, because you’re not really asking me any questions.”

  Andy swallowed the cotton in her throat. She tried to remember her questions. “How—how do you know her?”

  “What’s her name again?”

  Andy didn’t understand the rules of this cruel game. “Laura Oliver. Mitchell, I mean. She got married, and now—”

  “I know how marriage works.” Paula sliced open a bell pepper. She used the sharp tip of the blade to pick out the seeds. “Ever hear of QuellCorp?”

  Andy shook her head, but she answered, “The pharmaceutical company?”

  “What’s your life like?”

  “My li—”

  “Nice schools? Fancy car? Great job? Cute boyfriend who’s gonna do a YouTube video when he proposes to you?”

  Andy finally picked up on the hard edge to the woman’s tone. She wasn’t being matter-of-fact anymore. The smile on her face was a sneer.

  “Uh—” Andy started to edge toward the door. “I really should—”

  “Is she a good mother?”

  “Yes.” The answer came easy when Andy didn’t think about it.

  “Chaperoned school dances, joined the PTA, took pictures of you at the prom?”

  Andy nodded to all of this, because it was true.

  “I saw her murdering that kid on the news.” Paula turned her back on Andy as she washed her hands at the sink. “Though they’re saying she’s cleared now. She was trying to save him. Please don’t move.”

  Andy stood perfectly still. “I wasn’t—”

  “I’m not saying ‘Please don’t move’ to you, kid. ‘Please’ is a patriarchal construct designed to make women apologize for their vaginas.” She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. “I was talking about what your mother said before she murdered that boy. It’s all over the news.”

  Andy looked at the muted television on the wall. The diner video was showing again. Laura was holding up her hands in that strange way, four fingers raised on her left, one on her right, to show Jonah Helsinger how many bullets he had left. The closed captioning scrolled, but Andy was incapable of processing the information.

  “The experts have weighed in,” Paula said. “They claim to know what your mother said to Helsinger—Please don’t move, as in Please don’t move or the inside of your throat will splat onto the floor.”

  Andy put her hand to her own neck. Her pulse tapped furiously against her fingers. She should be relieved that her mother was in the clear, but every bone in her body was telling her to leave this house. No one knew she was here. Paula could gut her like a pig and no one would be the wiser.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Paula leaned her elbows on the counter. She pinned Andy with her one good eye. “Your sweet little ol’ mother kills a kid in cold blood, but walks because she thought to say Please don’t move instead of Hasta la vista. Lucky Laura Oliver.” Paula seemed to roll the phrase around on her tongue. “Did you see the look on her face when she did it? Gal didn’t look bothered to me. Looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, right? And that she was a-okay with it. Just like always.”

  Andy was frozen again, but not from fear. She wanted to hear what Paula had to say.

  “Cool as a cucumber. Never cries over spilled milk. Trouble rolls off her like water off a duck’s back. That’s what we used to say about her. I mean, those of us who said anything. You know Laura Oliver, but you don’t know her. There’s only the surface. Still waters don’t run deep. Have you noticed?”

  Andy wanted to shake her head, but she was paralyzed.

  “I hate to say it kid, but your mother is full of the worst type of bullshit. That dumb bitch has always been an actress playing the role of her life. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Andy finally managed to shake her head, but she was thinking—

  Mom Mode. Healing Dr. Oliver Mode. Gordon’s Wife Mode.

  “Stay here.” Paula left the room.

  Andy could not have followed if she’d wanted to. She felt like her bare feet were glued to the tiled floor. Nothing this scary stranger had said about Laura was new information, but Paula had framed it in such a way that Andy was beginning to understand that the different facets of her mother weren’t pieces of a whole; they were camouflage.

  You have no idea who I am. You never have and you never will.

  “Are you still there?” Paula called from the other side of the house.

  Andy rubbed her face. She had to forget what Paula had said for now and get the hell out of here. The woman was still dangerous. She was clearly working some kind of angle. Andy should never have come here.

  She opened the desk drawer. She ripped the drawings of Hoodie and Mike out of the pad, shoved them into her back pocket, then pushed open the kitchen door.

  She was met by Paula Kunde pointing a shotgun at her chest.

  “Jesus Christ!” Andy fell back against the swinging door.

  “Hold up your hands, you dimwit.”

  Andy’s hands went up.

  “Are you wired?”

  “What?”

  “Bugged. Mic’d.” Paula patted the front of Andy’s shirt first, then her pockets, down her legs and back up. “Did she send you here to trap me?”

  “What?”

  “Come on.” Paula pressed the muzzle into Andy’s sternum. “Speak, you little monkey. Who
sent you?”

  “N-n-body.”

  “Nobody.” Paula snorted. “Tell your mother your stupid deer in the headlights act almost got me. But if I ever see you again, I’ll pull the trigger on this thing until it’s empty. And then I’ll reload and come after her.”

  Andy almost lost control of her bladder. Every part of her body was shaking. She kept her hands up, her eyes on Paula, and walked backward down the hallway. She stumbled on the stair down into the sunken living room.

  Paula rested the shotgun on her shoulder. She glared at Andy for another few seconds, then walked back into the kitchen.

  Andy choked back bile as she turned to run. She sprinted past the couch, up the single stair to the foyer, and stumbled again on the tile floor. Pain shot into her knee, but she caught herself on the side table. Change spilled out of the glass bowl and tapped against the floor. Every nerve in her body was trapped inside the teeth of a bear trap. She could barely wedge her foot into her shoe. Then she realized the fucking socks were wadded up inside. She checked over her shoulder as she jammed the socks into her messenger bag and shoved her feet into the sneakers. Her hand was so sweaty she almost couldn’t turn the knob to open the front door.

  Fuck.

  Mike was standing on the front porch.

  He grinned at Andy the same way he’d grinned at her when they were outside the bar in Muscle Shoals.

  He said, “What a strange coinci—”

  Andy grabbed the baseball bat.

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa!” Mike’s hands shot into the air as she cocked the bat over her shoulder. “Come on, beautiful. Let’s talk this—”

  “You shut the fuck up, you fucking psycho.” Andy gripped the bat so tight that her fingers were cramping. “How did you find me?”

  “Well, that’s a funny story.”

  Andy jerked the bat higher.

  “Wait!” he said, his voice raking up. “Hit me here”—he pointed down at his side—“you can fracture a rib, easy. I’ll probably drop like a flaming sack of shit. Or punch it into the center of my chest. There’s no such thing as the solar plexus but—”

  Andy swung the bat, but not hard, because she wasn’t trying to hit him.