A Slow Ruin

by Pamela Crane

  It frightened me that I couldn’t remember what exactly happened.

  It frightened me more that I would die here, in the same wet spot by the broken sink that I had just yelled at Cody to fix, before saying what I needed to say to the woman who killed my soul fifteen years ago.

  “Where’s your cell phone? I need to call 9-1-1.” She was begging now. “Do you know what happened?” she asked me.

  I couldn’t answer. None of my body parts seemed to be working. Then I pushed every bit of willpower into opening my mouth just barely enough to let a word escape. “No.”

  “Don’t close your eyes. Stay awake until an ambulance arrives. Where’s your phone?”

  I felt weaker by the minute. I felt my life seeping out on the floor. But I wouldn’t give her the absolution she came for. Not yet.

  “Not until I get answers,” I replied.

  She gave a motherly cluck, as if she had ever played the role of mother. “What do you want to know?”

  I had to push the words out. My eyelids grew heavier by the moment. I felt like I was nodding off, but not into a peaceful slumber. More like an eternal one. “I want to know why. Why you lied. Why you did what you did.”

  It was the question I knew she couldn’t answer: Why did you give up your family for drugs? Why did you choose being high over being my mom? Why did you let my sister go? Why weren’t we enough?

  “Tell me where your phone is first. You’re not looking good, honey. I need to call for help. Now, please!”

  “No!” I yelled with a grunt. “First tell me the truth!”

  “Will an answer take it all back? Will it make everything better?”

  I tried to shake my head but couldn’t. “No,” I said, “but maybe I’ll understand.” I would never understand.

  She held an envelope near my face, letting it hover between us. “Here. This explains everything,” was all she said.

  Willing my leaden arm to rise, I grudgingly accepted her offering, knowing it would never be enough. No words could replace the empty years without her. A tickle ran down my nose, dripped to the floor beside my face, dark…like blood? I wanted to wipe it away, get the blood off of me, but my arm was a dead weight now and lay limply at my side.

  Mom left my side, returning a moment later to shove her hands along my pockets before she jumped up and grabbed the landline phone, a seventies relic from a previous tenant Cody had insisted we keep for its kitsch value. She scowled, discovering it was dead. I could have told her that.

  “Your cell phone—where is it?” she screamed.

  “Living room…table,” I finally gave in.

  When she returned, she was nothing but a hazy silhouette.

  “I need your passcode.”

  “0509.” I wondered if she would catch the significance, and it was the last thought I had.

  It was everything and yet nothing. A lie that I had believed for fifteen years. It was the day my mother had left us. The anniversary of her fake death: May 9. The day the Gilmore Girls died.

  “Don’t leave me!” Mom’s words echoed down the long dark chamber that my consciousness numbly drifted toward.

  Rushing to my side, Mom scooped me into her arms. For the first time in my life I felt like I had a mother after all. Inside myself, I shut out her fearful stare and shut in something more beautiful. All the panic, the pain, the sadness lifted as I glided further and further away, toward memories of evenings when we shared a blanket on the couch while binging on chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, snuggling through chick flicks and the occasional classic Hitchcock film. Or when we held each other and cried the day we buried the stray dog I named Antonne—after the first boy who broke my heart—on that gray misty afternoon. Or when we laughed until I peed myself after I tripped over that same dog who always slept at my feet. And the day Mom told me she was pregnant with my new baby sister, and her vow to sobriety. The nostalgia tasted good. Or were those figments of my imagination floating on the surface of memories that didn’t actually exist?

  No, they were real, just like she was really kneeling next to me, waiting for me to come back to her. Her hands roughly grabbed me—I could feel her frantic touch—and shook me hard, but I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t do anything but feel her shaking, calling me from the end of the tunnel. Her hair tickled my cheek as I felt her body heat warm my chin, her ear pressed against my chest. “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod,” she repeated.

  For an instant, time froze in a breathless moment like when you’re sailing off the cliff, into the gorge. I was Thelma to Mom’s Louise. Then she was gone.

  I wanted to call her back, tell her that yes, now I was okay. Maybe for the first time in my life I was okay. I wanted to remind her of everything we had been through together, how much I loved her, but the words wouldn’t come. My mouth wouldn’t obey. I heard her voice echoing from the other distant end. I wasn’t scared anymore, though. I felt safe and warm and loved, ready to be with my birth dad on the other side. With that last breath I made peace with the woman who birthed me, who chose drugs over me, who abandoned me, but who came back for me. If only she could have saved me.

  Chapter 46

  Josie

  OCTOBER

  “Go reconcile with your daughter before it’s too late, Josie.” Those were Bennett’s last words to me when I found him slowly deteriorating alone in the yellow brick house perched atop Grandview Avenue—and what a grand view it was—that we had once called home together. Although we had been estranged for fifteen years, he had never filed for divorce because he loved me. I never filed because I hated him.

  To be fair, I hated everyone who stood in the way of my high. That all-consuming hit of euphoria that chased the demons away was my only friend back then. Little did I recognize the face of the devil. As if stealing my past wasn’t enough, now that same devil came back to pilfer my future.

  “Which daughter?” I had wondered aloud, me sitting on the same ratty sofa we bought off Craigslist, Bennett lying in his favorite recliner.

  I hadn’t known when I showed up that random spring afternoon that my husband had given away my youngest child. Just like I hadn’t known that reconciling with Marin would cost me her life.

  “I’m talking about Marin,” Bennett replied. “I don’t think she’s ever gotten over losing you, Josie. I’d hate to die with a lie stuck between all of us.”

  So I took his advice and watched Marin from afar, waiting for the perfect time to reveal myself. The plan had never been to say my sorries and disappear. Reconcile, Bennett had said. And there was only one way to do that—by reuniting the Gilmore Girls. All three of us.

  I never saw Bennett after that first and last time, but I had gotten what I came for. Everything I needed to know—about Marin, my other daughter, where they both ended up. While Marin had distanced herself from Bennett over the years, they’d kept in touch just enough to share the basics. I could work with the basics.

  When I had returned to see him again, he had disappeared…taking with him my second-born child. Which complicated my plans to tell Vera, they called her, who I was and where she really came from. I had figured it all out—exposing the baby thief Felicity Portman to the police, reuniting with my girls, and living our best life, as the PTA moms who sipped wine out of long-stemmed glasses would say.

  I admit I was furious when I discovered Vera was missing. Initially I suspected the parents had something to do with her disappearance. What else could I assume but murder from a couple that steals a baby, which turns up missing fifteen years later? Felicity Portman was the reason I had lost both my girls, and she deserved to suffer as much as I had. I thought the message I’d left on her work voicemail about Marin was pretty clear, proving that I could reach her if I wanted to:

  “Felicity Portman, I know what you did. You are the reason she’s dead. You deserve what’s coming to you.”

  After I found out Vera was alive—and hidden away with Bennett, no less—I felt mildl
y guilty for running Felicity off the road, but not enough to lose sleep over it. She did buy my child for a few hundred bucks, after all.

  Mortimer Randolph’s demise was the icing on the cake. I’m not a killer, in case you’re wondering. I was reconciling, that’s all. It had been child’s play convincing the old fool that I was on the staff of his cleaning service; he didn’t question my arrival at irregular times, separate from his regular cleaning lady, the better to spy on Marin and see how my baby girl was getting on. I almost blew it when she nearly saw my face in the hallway. I was afraid she’d recognize me, but I’d changed a lot in fifteen years, and thanks to a cheap wig and glasses, she didn’t see through my gray-headed charwoman disguise. When I overheard how the bastard talked to her, I was livid—but at least she stood up him. Good for her! But no one treated my daughter like trash and got away with it. Not even me. So I spiked his coffee with an extra dose of all the meds he was already taking…and then some. It was merely serendipitous that he happened to die from a heart attack and left his inheritance to Marin. She deserved every penny of it. And it was my fault she never got to enjoy it.

  In a way, I was that knife in the first act, the harmless prop that turns out to be the linchpin of the whole damn play. I was there when it all began, and I was there in the end when it all was split wide open and gutted. After watching Marin die, I followed the news for the next six months, reading details of how Marin’s husband Cody—I would never understand what she saw in him—arrived back at their house to a kitchen full of paramedics and cops who had responded to my 9-1-1 call. I had been too shocked to speak, too panicked to stick around as the operator spoke to the empty air, eventually tracking the address and dispatching help. I couldn’t explain why I ran instead of waiting around for the EMTs to announce what I already knew—her time of death. Maybe it was fear of the police connecting me to Mortimer’s untimely—well past due, if you ask me—passing, or paranoia that they’d call it murder instead of an accident. I was a drug user, after all, with a rap sheet, forever stereotyped as all class of criminal. Most of all, I couldn’t risk losing my chance to reconnect with Vera. Being the only witness to a suspicious accidental death was the last thing I needed.

  Whatever pushed me out the back door, whatever prompted me to flee into the night, I would never forgive myself for what happened in that kitchen. The image of my daughter’s body being hauled out of the house, rolling by on a stretcher and cloaked in a body bag, would forever burn in my mind as I waited to be discovered. And it’d keep burning, burning, burning.

  For days, weeks, months I waited and waited. For a DNA sample to out me as Mortimer’s killer, even though I’d been extremely careful and worn gloves. For a fingerprint to emerge and tie me to Marin’s death. Month after month, nothing. Cases closed. Funerals were held. Mourners wept. All that mattered was that I was with her when she died, and that I had found my other child in the process. Now that Vera knew I existed, I imagined her wondering who I was, thinking me dead. Had Bennett told her I was alive? It didn’t matter, because I would resurrect the truth. I had learned from watching that eventually Vera would come to me if I left the right breadcrumbs. She was clever, just like her older sister. And just like her mom.

  Maybe I wasn’t the first act knife after all. My intention had never been to harm anyone, only to reconcile. I’d given up my family, my two perfect girls and my husband, to get clean. All of it, the disappearing, the endless rehab, the months of self-improvement, the sobriety, it all was for them. A fifteen-year-long journey that cost me everything. But here I was, recovering, sober, and empty-handed. My eldest was dead, and my youngest thought I was dead. No, I wasn’t the knife; I was the happy ending that the hero deserved before the final curtain fell.

  Epilogue

  Vera

  NOVEMBER

  The trees surrounding the Execution Estate were barren, brittle arms reaching for the gray sky. Vera Portman had sat in this same wingback chair in this same parlor countless times before, reading a book or playing a game with her siblings, Eliot and Sydney. But on this particularly cold November day, she sat here for an entirely different reason.

  To say goodbye.

  In one hand was the picture of her, Marin, Josie, and Bennett that she’d kept from Marin’s belongings before they were donated to Goodwill. In the other was a bloodstained envelope she had found on her bed this afternoon, shortly after the memorial for Bennett started, a simple affair hosted by her parents in their home. They had decided against a funeral home at Vera’s request; more than once she had described in vivid detail the picturesque mansion to Bennett, who was equally intrigued by its infamy and its grandiosity, and pleased that his daughter, far from being spoiled by such opulence, remained delightfully down-to-earth. It seemed only fitting to Vera that her father, a beautifully humble man who had endured with grace a lifetime of privations, should go out in stylish surroundings.

  For all that, the family decided to keep the ceremony itself—like the man—simple. Vera had sketched a portrait of Bennett in Contè crayon, depicting him as a young, vibrant man before the ravages of illness and sorrow and guilt took their toll. The picture, in a barnwood frame, sat upon an easel in the sitting room where the ceremony was held. It had been Bennett’s wish to be cremated; at Vera’s insistence, his urn sat upon the antique writing desk, the beloved heirloom of her great-great grandmother Alvera Fields, she and her father had restored.

  Vera recognized most of the callers—relatives, classmates, friends of the family, her parents’ colleagues—who dropped off condolences and flowers. Some were opportunistic looky-loos, taking advantage of the circumstances to infiltrate the fabled Execution Estate; tipped off by their blatant snooping into private areas, the security guards Oliver hired discreetly escorted them off the premises. Austin and Blythe, on the other hand, were given the grand tour of the mansion by Vera herself, with especial attention to the library, which they pronounced way-cool.

  A precious few acquaintances came to pay their respects to Bennett. He had long ago lost touch with most people, especially after Josie—aka bio mom—disappeared and he sank into a slow ruin. But this letter meant that not everything had been lost. Her biological mother was still out there. Possibly even here in this very room. And just like her great-great-grandmother Alvera, the mystery of who she was tugged at Vera. Yanked at her. Heaved and hauled her into its grip.

  The envelope dotted with her sister’s blood was addressed to Marin but left behind for Vera’s eyes only:

  My sweet, sweet Marin. You’re angry at me, I know. You’ll be even angrier as you find out I’m alive and well. As well as one can be after I gave up my children because I had to, not because I wanted to. I never meant to abandon you, and I certainly never expected Bennett to tell you I had died. But what other choice did he have, if it prevented you and your sister from following down my dark path after me? The fear of death can be mighty persuasive.

  If there’s any way I could explain it, to make you understand why I had to murder my old self in order to become my new self, I would use every word to do so. But there aren’t enough words, are there? So I hope that my simple I’m sorry is enough. I hope that my love is enough. I hope that the years I spent missing you, giving up my family in order to give up my addiction, is enough.

  This letter is more than an apology for all the wrong I’ve committed against you. It’s my amends, my attempt at reconciliation—Bennett’s favorite word—with you and your sister. I hope it’s not too late. I hope that me getting help to be a better person didn’t ruin the only good things left in my life—my girls. Rehab kicked my butt, but it was the butt-kicking I needed to rescue me from the constant treading water as addiction sucked me under. I finally rose to the top, still treading water, but I’m getting used to it now.

  If there’s a chance we can reconnect, a chance you’ll forgive me, a chance I can be your mom again, I hope you’ll take it. I may not be worth a second chance, but you are. Anyone w
ho doesn’t see that isn’t worth your time. You and your sister will forever own my heart, no matter what you decide.

  Love, Mom

  Slipping the letter back into the envelope, Vera tucked it under her leg along with the picture, desperately missing the woman she never knew but hoped to one day meet. She had been here, after all, but somehow got washed away amid the ebb and flow of bodies. At the front of the sitting room Uncle Cody stood, eyes skimming across the room of faces. He cleared his throat into his fist, then spoke.

  “I want to thank everyone for coming to celebrate the life of Bennett Hunter, my wife’s father. As you know, Marin passed away about six months ago, and after a frustrating legal situation, an estate was left in her name from her former boss. To commemorate Marin’s passion, and the life of her father, I’ve decided to use the inheritance to fund a theatre scholarship for aspiring creative artists who are interested in theater and acting—The Marin Bennett Drama Scholarship. I think this is the legacy Marin would have wanted to leave behind. Thank you again for being here for our family after such a difficult year.”

  Sitting beside Vera was Tasha Briggs, the young girl Oliver had innocently befriended during his daughter’s disappearance. Tasha glanced over at Vera and smiled sympathetically. Like Vera, she knew the loss of a father. And like Vera, she had stumbled onto a path toward healing. A friendship with Vera, a father figure in Oliver, and the camaraderie shared exclusively among those who have felt death’s harsh touch. On the other side of Vera sat Nana, dab-dabbing at her eyes like she’d known Bennett her whole life. Pappy Joe wrapped his arm around her, running his hand up and down her arm, as if rubbing the sadness away.