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But she was right; all I could see when I looked at her was what she had allowed her men to do to other women, what a soulless, heartless monster she was.
I wasn't sure I had even really seen her until she demanded I do so.
It took just seconds.
Three, tops.
Three seconds to see it.
Because there was no mistaking it.
It was in the subtle contours of a body, so familiar. In the bone structure of her face. In her eye color. My eye color.
And, finally, it was in the hair.
The red hair I had always envied, mostly in the confines of my own heart, not wanting to come off as insecure, or that I didn't want to inherit the dark hair from my father.
But that was my mother's hair.
It was my mother's face.
It was my mother's body.
Plus a few years.
Which, really, could only mean one thing.
"Now you're getting it," she said, smiling.
That was one difference.
While, technically, maybe those were the same lips, that was not the same smile.
When my mother did it, it lit up her whole face, it etched deep into her cheeks, made her eyes dance, gave her happy creases.
When my mother smiled, it was a sight to see.
Whereas with this woman, all you could see was the smile of a snake, fangs dripping, just ready to sink them in and infect you.
"What? You don't want to give your grandmother a hug?"
There it was.
A confirmation I didn't really need since the DNA was undeniable, but somehow, hearing it aloud made it feel more real.
Sickeningly real.
Because if this was my grandmother, it meant some of her was in me, there was a connection - even if it was only genetic - binding us.
I couldn't help but wonder as I looked at her, as my mind tried to process this information, how did others do it? How did the parents, siblings, children of serial killers, rapists, or pedophiles handle the weight of that reality? That they were related to monsters? Did they wonder if there were pieces of that evil in them as well? That such a thing could be hereditary?
Even as I thought those things though, another realization crowded them out.
My mother was related to this woman, more completely than even I was.
And there was no kinder a woman, more caring a mother, no more devoted a wife, the most morally-minded woman I had met. She was pure goodness, light, warmth. With a little dab of grit and strength to even it out, so she wasn't all mush.
That was who I had come from.
Not this abomination before me.
"I guess I shouldn't be surprised they never told you. They'd rather brush me under a rug, lock me up in a cell, deny that I ever existed at all."
They?
But even as the question formed, things started coming back to me.
Like stolen snippets of conversation that abruptly cut off when my grandfather would come to visit to speak to my parents, and I would catch him saying that she was nothing to worry about, that she was never going to get within a mile of my mom and us again.
Again.
Like she had gotten to us before?
But I would have remembered that.
I remembered the eye color of my first Barbie from back when I was three-years-old - an inhuman cobalt blue that I colored over with brown a few weeks after getting it.
I would have remembered a woman 'getting to' me before.
So, what then?
My mom?
My mom.
See, I hadn't really gotten up the nerve. To ask. I had tried over the years, wanting to know, wanting to understand, wanting her to share it with me. But she was fiercely protective over them, covering them up if I happened to walk in on her changing, quick to whip around to face me so her back was hidden.
The scars.
My mom had a lot of scars.
All across her back.
All old, healed, but still slightly raised, white-ish, shiny, standing out against her otherwise perfect skin.
Scars that had troubled me whenever I thought of them, knowing the layout of them was too precise to have been from some freak accident where she got torn up somehow.
And, besides, if it was just some freak accident, there was really no reason to hide them from me, to keep the truth of it to herself.
So the reason had to be more personal, more evil than that.
I had wondered once, feeling my loyalty tugged in two directions, if maybe my grandfather had been a different man when he had raised her, if he had been heavy-handed and brutal, in complete contrast to the man who snuck me candy and brought me on wild shopping sprees at the toy or book store.
I had never been able to picture him doing it, picking up some object, and slashing it across my mom's back.
You never really knew what someone was capable of, what ugly resided in their hearts, but I never could accept that as the reality.
