The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Did you keep me to have someone to love you?” she asked after a moment.

  Her mother bit her lip and looked down at the counter in front of her. “Not consciously,” she said. “All I know is that I was desperate to keep you safe. Your mother said to me, ‘Don’t let her die,’ and I—”

  “She did?” Corinne asked. She felt soft inside, hearing the only words her biological mother may ever have spoken about her.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “When she knew she was dying…and I believe she knew it…she asked me not to let you die. I fell in love with you very quickly. I’d helped bring you into the world and survive your first few days of life. It gave me a huge emotional attachment to you. I was barely past the age of needing a teddy bear to cuddle with, and you were so much better than that.” She smiled. “It’s hard to describe how desperately I needed to keep you safe. I wanted to be with you every single moment to make sure you were still breathing. I stayed awake all night sometimes to make sure you were. You were so many things to me. You were the most important and most priceless thing in my world. And you were my responsibility. I owed it to your mother to keep you safe. I know I went overboard, honey. I know I created fears in you and I’m so sorry for that. Maybe you needed to cut yourself off from me to make your own path. Maybe that was the right thing for you to do, no matter how hard it’s been for me.”

  “Why didn’t the guy—Timothy Gleason—tell the police about you? Why did he protect you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he developed a conscience somewhere along the line and knew he’d been wrong for involving me in the first place. I just don’t know.”

  “You could have stayed quiet,” Corinne said. “You didn’t need to admit to anything.”

  “I had to,” her mother said simply.

  “But, Mom,” Corinne said, “how will you survive this? You can’t go to prison. You’re sick. They won’t give you your medication.”

  “I’m all right, honey. I’ll get my meds and I’ll be okay.” Her mother paused for a moment. “Tell me what’s going on with you,” she asked.

  Corinne couldn’t shift gears that quickly. She looked down at the counter, uncertain what to say.

  “You mean besides learning I’m not who I thought I was?” she asked.

  Her mother gave her a rueful smile. “I guess there isn’t much room for anything else, is there,” she acknowledged.

  “Well, actually, there is,” Corinne said suddenly. “I pressed Ken to let us set a date. And guess what? He told me he never got divorced from Felicia. His wife.” The words spilled out of her, and she was surprised to be taking her mother into her confidence.

  “What?” Her mother’s mouth fell open in disbelief. “Oh, honey. Do you mean he’s been lying to you all this time?”

  “Lying through the omission of some crucial information,” she said. “He said she was sick and it would have been too hard on her if he divorced her.”

  “How about too hard on you if he didn’t?” Her mother looked angry. “Oh, Cory, I’m sorry. I know how it feels to be betrayed by the man you love.”

  “I want to have this baby, Mom.”

  “Will you still marry him?”

  Corinne hesitated. Did she even love him anymore? She wasn’t sure she could ever live alone, with no one to turn to when she needed to drive more than a few blocks from her house. She started to say that she needed him, but wasn’t it need that had pulled her mother to Timothy Gleason? She thought of Ken waiting outside in the car and was filled with resentment.

  “I’m so afraid of being alone,” she said.

  “Cory,” her mother said, “as long as I’m alive, you’ll never be alone.”

  Her mother pressed her palm against the Plexiglas, and almost without thinking, Corinne lifted her own hand and pressed it to the glass as well. Her hand looked smooth and youthful against the misshapened knuckles and swollen wrist of her mother’s. Aside from that, though, their hands were a perfect fit.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  “So, are you going to tell me how she’s doing?” Ken said. They’d driven a mile from the jail and neither of them had said a word.

  Corinne hesitated. “It was hard to see her there,” she said. “Locked up like that.”

  “Did you have to talk to her through Plexiglas?”

  She nodded. “That was hard, too.” She thought of telling him about the wheelchair, the swollen knuckles, but didn’t bother. She didn’t feel like telling him anything at all.

  “She’s where she belongs. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Ken.” She looked at him. “I want some…time apart.”

  “From your mother?”

  “No. From you.”

  He stared straight ahead at the road, the muscles tight in his jaw. “I swear,” he said. “You spend two minutes with her and she’s got you back in her clutches.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with her,” she said, although she knew it did. She’d just witnessed courage. Maybe she didn’t have Eve Elliott’s blood in her, but surely she’d picked up some of that courage along the way.

  “I’m going to get a divorce,” he said. “I told you that. It will only be a matter of weeks. Then we can get married whenever you want.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You weren’t honest with me.”

  “I’ve been extremely good for you, Corinne. How many other men would have put up with your fears?”

  “I won’t stay with you out of need,” she said.

  “What are you going to do about the baby?”

  “My mother raised me alone in the beginning.”

  “Oh, right, and look how great you turned out.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Well, that’s a first. The f-word coming out of Corinne Elliott’s mouth.”

  She wished she could tell him to let her out of the car right there, but she couldn’t. They were too far from home.

  “I’m done talking about this,” she said.

  “Do you expect me to move out?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The house is in both our names.”

  “I’ll buy you out,” she said. She would find a way. Russ would certainly give her the money, but she wanted to do it on her own.

  “I’m not leaving,” he said. “You’ll make me move all my stuff out and then the next thing I know, you’ll call me in the middle of the night to say you hear a noise. And I’ll have to drag myself back over there to rescue you.”

  “Well, if I’ve been that hard to live with, you should be happy to go.”

  “Corinne.” He sounded frustrated. “I love you,” he said. “This is silly. Let’s get married and have this baby and—”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Cor. You’re not thinking straight. Your mother did some number on—”

  “Let me out.”

  “What?” He laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound.

  They were less than two miles from their house. Two measly miles. She could manage. “Stop the car and let me out,” she said. “I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

  He pulled over to the curb and she got out of the car. She watched him drive away, amazed he would actually leave her there. She looked at the street stretching ahead of her into the distance and felt nauseous. It was hard to swallow around the knot in her throat.

  One foot in front of the other, she told herself as she started to walk. Just keep going.

  She thought of her mother getting out of the wheelchair to walk to the little cubby in the jail. She hadn’t wanted Corinne to see her infirmity or her pain. She’d always been that way; it was another way she protected her family.

  Corinne crossed the street, one hand on her belly, vowing never to protect her own children from life’s hard truths. She’d help her children cope with reality rather than hide it from them.

  What was it like, she wondered, to spend your adolescence in foster homes,
never knowing how long you’d be in any one place? If you felt love at all, you knew it was transitory. You could count on no one for the long haul. No one to stick with you when you were sick or grumpy or mean. You’d just get kicked out. Move on to another place where the only thing you could count on was change.

  Her mother had been on her own at sixteen, trying to carve out her place in the world with no one to guide her. For the first time in her life, Corinne felt spoiled. Images raced through her mind. Christmases with everything she’d asked for under the tree. What had her parents gone without so that, for one day each year, she and Dru could have anything they wanted? She saw her mother tucking her into bed at night. Reading to her, holding her on her lap when she was very small, turning the pages with her. She remembered how the paper felt, the musky smell of her mother’s shampoo. The scent filled her nostrils even now as she walked down the street, bringing with it the surprise of tears. She brushed them away with her fingers, but they kept flowing. If Ken pulled up next to her in his car, she wouldn’t even notice him.

  She’d been overprotected, yes. Smothered, yes. There were worse things than being smothered with love.

  She looked up to see that her house was less than a hundred yards in front of her, and she broke into a run. She raced up the front steps and turned her key in the lock, and knew she was home now, in more ways than one.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  “I’ll take time off from work and come stay with you,” Dru said over the phone. Corinne had called her the minute she walked in the house, breathless and a bit euphoric from her walk home alone. She’d told Dru that she’d asked Ken to leave, but had not yet mentioned her visit with their mother.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I’ll be all right.” She hoped she wasn’t kidding herself. The house felt so empty it echoed. Although she’d been alone in the house plenty of times in the late afternoon, this felt different. She knew he wasn’t coming back tonight. He might be waiting for her to call and beg him to come home, but she wouldn’t do that. She would ask a friend to stay with her before she’d ask Ken to return.

  “I suddenly feel…” Corinne hesitated, searching for the word. “Well, scared, to begin with.” She laughed. “But safe, in a way. I feel like the baby and I are safe. I don’t have to fight to have this baby anymore. It’s my decision and I don’t have to justify it to anyone.”

  “That’s so good, Cory,” Dru said.

  “I’m going to call a security company tomorrow and have them install an alarm,” Corinne said. “I just have to get through tonight.”

  “Well, we can talk on the phone all night then,” Dru said. “It will be like I’m there with you.”

  “You’re the best sister.”

  “You should have the locks changed, too,” Dru said.

  “I don’t think Ken would try to get in or anything.”

  “It’s not that. I was just thinking that if he did come in, it would scare you if you weren’t expecting him.”

  “You’re right,” Corinne said. She pulled the shade on the kitchen window. “I want to have this baby, Dru, so Ken’s going to be in my life one way or another. Maybe he can change. Maybe we should go to counseling. But I don’t want him back if he’s going to smother me again. Why couldn’t I see that he was doing the same thing to me that Mom did?”

  “You were too close to see it,” Dru said.

  “Could you?”

  Dru hesitated. “I could see that he needed you to need him,” she said. “Think about it. His ex-wife—his wife, actually, I guess—still needs him, according to Ken. So he stayed married to her.”

  “He told me I was trying to deal with too many of my fears too quickly,” Corinne said, angry with him all over again.

  “I know you’ve been doing it on your own, Cor,” Dru said. “But maybe it’s time to get some help.”

  “I know.” Ken had talked her out of seeing a therapist and she’d agreed with him. Her mother being a therapist had colored her confidence in any other therapist’s ability to help her. “I don’t want to have a child and screw her up. I don’t want to pass my fears along to her. Or him.”

  “You won’t,” Dru said. “You’re going to be the best mother.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke.

  “So,” Dru broke the silence. “You told me all about Ken letting you out of the car and you walking home and everything, and nothing about seeing Mom. How was it?”

  Corinne pictured the guard pushing her mother into the visiting area in the wheelchair.

  “She doesn’t belong there,” she said.

  “Whew.” Dru let out her breath. “I’m glad to hear you say that.”

  “She doesn’t,” Corinne repeated. “She did some terrible things, Dru, and I guess she needs to pay in some way, but not this way. This is brutal. What’s her lawyer doing to get her out of there?”

  Dru sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “President Russell has a whole legal firm working on it. Dad and I met with her attorney yesterday. We’re going to have a bunch of character witnesses, including me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Mom committed so many crimes,” Dru said, “I lost track of them while her attorney was going through them, and she’s totally guilty of every one of them. She confessed to everything, which I guess was a mistake.”

  “Maybe a mistake in terms of her defense, but not a mistake for her conscience,” Corinne said.

  Dru hesitated again. “You sound like the sister I knew years ago,” she said finally. “I wish you’d dumped Ken long before now.”

  “It’s not Ken,” Corinne said. “It was seeing Mom. Seeing how…I don’t know, Dru. She looks bad and she’s obviously in a lot of pain. She feels terrible for hurting everyone but…I think this has freed her somehow. It’s given her a kind of peace. I just felt it from her.” She thought of her hand pressed against the Plexiglas. “I realized how much I love her,” she said. “I know she raised me the best way she knew how.”

  “Oh my God!” Dru said. “Do you mean that, Cory?”

  “I do.” Corinne couldn’t help but smile at her sister’s enthusiasm.

  “I’m so relieved to hear you say that!” Dru said. “Would you… this might not be fair to ask.”

  “What?”

  “Would you be a character witness for her?”

  “Oh, Dru, I can’t,” she said. Just the thought of sitting trapped on the witness stand was enough to make her heart gallop.

  “Mental-healthwise?” Dru asked.

  “Yes.” She paused. “But also…no matter how I feel about her, she’s still responsible for my biological mother’s death and for taking me from my family.”

  “I know,” Dru said. “Can you talk to President Russell, though?” she asked. “Mom’s attorney said that he can influence the case. He has a lot of clout and he’s the one pushing to keep her in prison for a long, long time. Can you talk to him about it?”

  Corinne cringed at the thought. She was embarrassed to realize that she was intimidated by him.

  “I could talk to Vivian about it,” she said.

  “Well, maybe she could talk to her father, then?” Dru asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “They really think Mom is scum, though.”

  “You can’t blame them,” Dru said. “But I think it’s worth a try, don’t you?”

  A siren sounded in the distance and somewhere nearby, a dog barked. It was growing dark outside, and she felt the anxiety creeping in. She wished she could keep Dru on the phone all night long.

  “I’ll call her tonight,” she said in a fit of courage. “Let me get off and I’ll do it right now.”

  She locked every window and pushed a chair in front of the back door with the broken dead-bolt lock. Then she picked up the phone to call Vivian, but cowardice overcame her. How could she word her request? And she’d be putting Vivian on the spot. She would e-mail her instead. It would be easier on both of them.

  Chapter Sixty-
Four

  Dear Vivian,

  I visited my mother—Eve Elliott—today. She’s in pain from rheumatoid arthritis and hasn’t yet received her medication. It’s awkward to describe to you how I felt. She’s the only mother I’ve ever known. I certainly don’t condone what she did, but she was a good mother to me. I know I didn’t make her sound that way when you and your father were here. I was caught up in the horror of learning what she’d done and in the realization that I’d been kidnapped and kept from my biological family. But she did her best to raise me well. She was a good therapist at the university and helped a lot of young people over the years. She’s been a good citizen—maybe even a model citizen. I’m writing to ask you and your father to take it easy on her. Remember she was a juvenile when your mother died.

  Corinne

  Dear Corinne,

  I’ve thought about your e-mail and how to respond to it all day. I’ve reread what you wrote several times, trying to imagine how you must feel. I’m sorry to say, I can’t get past my own emotions to really put myself in your shoes. I know you didn’t know our mother, so you can’t get in touch with what it was like to lose her, but try to imagine losing someone else you love—your sister, perhaps?—in a terrible way.

  I guess you can see that I can’t let go of my anger toward Timothy Gleason or your mother. They were in it together. Your mother has said as much. She may have been “only” sixteen, but she was old enough to know right from wrong, and she made the wrong—and very illegal—decision at every turn. (By the way, sixteen is NOT considered a minor in the North Carolina legal system, so that argument is moot.) People have to pay for the choices they make. It doesn’t matter whether they’re someone’s mother. It doesn’t matter if they have a terrible illness. That doesn’t exempt them from paying their debt to society. I could never share your e-mail with Dad. It would hurt him to know you feel this way. He adored my mother. He never remarried or seriously dated anyone after her death. He devoted himself to taking care of me and grieving for her. Even though I can somewhat understand your feelings, he would never be able to and I don’t want to say anything to him to make him dislike you. He thinks you’re beautiful and perfect.