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Where did the money come from? If you asked Mom, you would get a different answer each time. She’d say it was left to her by a distant relative, or it came from the sale of her dead mother’s jewelry. She’d never even told me the truth, most likely to protect me—and herself—in case I was ever questioned about it. One of Mom’s rules was that whatever I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell the police under questioning.
But since Mom had left my life when I was eighteen, taken back to California to stand trial for what she’d done the night we left, I’d done a little digging. I couldn’t trace most of the money, but some of it, incredibly, was my father’s life insurance. I didn’t know how she’d gotten her hands on it, or how she’d managed to siphon it into a bank account the police couldn’t find. The rest—well, I didn’t know exactly where it had come from, but as my mother’s daughter, I could make an educated guess.
She’d had plans for that money, I was certain. Then the police had found her when we lived in Fort Lauderdale—they’d tracked her somehow through the life insurance check. She’d been arrested while I was working a shift at Olive Garden. When I got home to find her gone, I’d had to pack up and get out of town. Alone.
After spending half of the money trying to free Mom, I’d been careful with the remaining half, reluctant to use money that dirty unless I had to. I’d withdraw a hundred or two at a time, only when I needed it. The fact that it was my father’s blood money didn’t bother me—I had a cracked molar and a badly healed broken pinkie finger because of him. It was the rest of the money that made my conscience stir.
And yet that money, that number in the bank, was my buffer against starvation, against homelessness. Just knowing it existed helped me sleep at night. It was the barrier against me taking a man home and taking his fifty bucks so that I could eat. I earned my own way, but if things ever got bad, I could still withdraw a hundred bucks’ worth of dignity. And now that dignity was gone.
“My lawyer says we can appeal. But appeals take money,” my mother said.
Cold sweat made my hand slick on the receiver. “We spent so much on the first appeal, and we wasted it. It isn’t going to work.”
“It could work,” she argued. “My lawyer says it could be self-defense. People pay more attention to that than they used to. Ever since that woman cut her husband’s dick off. And O. J. is on TV nonstop. It’s all over the news.”
Here’s one thing: I loved my mother. It sounded crazy after all she’d done, but I did. I really, truly loved her. For most of my life, she was the only person in the world who understood me.
Here’s another thing: My mother was a murderer.
My earliest memories were of my father hitting my mother, my father hitting me. I had lived in a constant state of fear, the only state I knew. All I had ever wanted, as a child, was to get out of that house.
So maybe it was self-defense. If Mom had shot Dad while he was coming at her, it could have been.
But that night when I was twelve, Mom had bludgeoned Dad to death with a baseball bat while he slept. She’d set the bed on fire to try and cover it up. Then she’d pulled me from the house and we’d escaped, my mother driving, me egging her on.
I’d told Eddie we had escaped my father and changed our identities that night, that my mother was dead. Because when you tell a lie, you should stick to the truth as closely as possible. We had escaped that night; we had just left behind a dead body instead of an angry abuser. Years later, after they’d finally caught her, when she called me collect from California, her instructions to me were clear: Cut your losses, baby. I’m dead to you now. Do you understand?
I’d disobeyed her, just a little. I called her regularly in prison, made sure she was all right. I couldn’t help it; she was all I had.
But if I had followed her instructions—if I had withdrawn our shared funds from the bank account and never contacted my mother again—I would still have the money. How hilarious was that?
“How did you do it?” I asked her now. “How did you get the money out from inside? You’ve never been able to access the money before without me.”
“People help me,” Mom said, and in her voice I could hear my own flat inflection, the tone I used when I was a shiny, hard surface that no one could penetrate. I hated myself so much in that moment that I felt bile in my stomach. “It doesn’t matter how I did it, honey. We always said that money was for emergencies. This is an emergency.”
“I needed that money,” I croaked.
“For what?” She waited, and when I didn’t answer, she kept talking. “You don’t tell me anything about your life, do you know that? Not ever. You think I don’t notice?”
“I have told you,” I argued. “I live in Ann Arbor. I work in a bowling alley.”
“Uh-huh. So what’s the money for? Rent? A house? Clothes?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Is there a man?” Mom paused, as if I’d spoken. “My God, there is, isn’t there? Who is he? Tell me everything.”
My temples were pounding and my eyes stung. Leave it to Mom to be able to smell a man from prison a thousand miles away.
“There’s no man,” I said.
“There’s a man.” She was sure of it now. “Who is he?”
“There isn’t a man,” I said again. “I date every once in a while. That’s it.”
“Liar.” Her voice was flat with anger. “That’s what you wanted the money for? To spend it on some man? I taught you better than that. I taught you the hard way.”
She had. The way she taught me the lesson of her life—never let anyone in—was very, very hard. She had been beaten bloody for that lesson. She had killed for it. She had fled her life, changed her name. She had left her old self dead by the side of the road, along with the husk of the little girl I had been. She was sitting in prison now for that lesson. She had sacrificed everything for it.
