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“I don’t think anyone’s laughing,” I said. “Not after you broke into The Manor last summer.”
Vanessa dropped her cigarette and ground it out with the toe of a high-heeled foot. “I know. That was a mistake. This whole damn thing has been a mistake.”
“Do you have the gems?” I asked, wondering what game she was playing, because I hadn’t been dealt the same cards.
She stared at me, her eyes sharp and angry. “Why would I go to all this trouble, Carter?” she asked. “If I had the damn gems.”
“To get back into our lives,” I said. Even as the words came out of my mouth I realized it wasn’t the case. Not for Vanessa. Maybe in books or movies, when the bad guy was really a good guy in the end. But Vanessa was only greedy for money. Never greedy for her children.
Her silence confirmed it.
My rage ignited. “Then what the hell was the point of all this? Are we a game to you? A score? Is this…?” I could not get my head around what she wanted, why she was here. “Are you playing some kind of angle?”
She tilted her face back and looked up at the sky. “I’m way on the other side of fifty, broke and alone. I’m out of angles, Carter. I’m done.”
I laughed before I could help myself. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She shook her head, pulling out another cigarette and lighting it. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Carter. I’m sorry I bothered any of you.”
She turned as if to leave and I felt a lightning-quick knife in my chest—my whole body deflating in shock.
“This is it?” I asked. “You come back into my life for nothing? And now you just walk away?”
She paused, smoked half a cigarette in the charged silence. I could hear myself breathing, my heart pounding. “The gems… I thought it was my way out of the game, you know, for good. Otherwise I wouldn’t have broken our agreement,” she said. “I wouldn’t have scared Savannah…and her daughter.”
Your granddaughter. You can’t even say the word.
“That’s it?”
“What more do you want from me, Carter? I’m sorry. For all of it. You want to talk?” she asked, her voice joking, but a light sparking in her eyes. “Get a cup of coffee?”
“Hell no!” I cried. “I want to know why you came back! We had an agreement. I’ve spent the last ten years away from my brother and sister in fear of bringing you back to them. Afraid of contaminating them with the lies I told!”
“Oh, Carter, it wasn’t Federal Court. No one cares anymore.”
“I know what it was, Vanessa! I told the lie and I sure as hell care!”
She stepped up to me so close I could smell her perfume, see the black rim around her iris. She searched my eyes, my face, and her sudden smile was sad.
“I’m sorry I made you do that,” she said.
I felt fire burning through my veins, incinerating every logical thing I might say. Sorry? I thought. She was sorry?
“What about dropping us off with Margot?” My voice burned, rising up through my throat from some unknown furnace in my gut.
She shook her head. “Nope. That was the right thing to do. I’m a pretty crap mother.” She watched me as I stood there, running hot and cold, feeling like my head might explode. “You guys turned out better without me.”
Honesty? Honesty from Vanessa O’Neill. Was this really happening? Was I making this up? When I was a kid I used to dream about this crap—whole nights spent dedicated to the many ways my mother would come clean about screwing up.
“You okay?” she asked. Her smile, not sharp, not cold, not that evil slice across her mouth that held a thousand lies, was soft. Like a mother’s.
Not that I really knew what that looked like.
“You’ve had a bad day,” she said. “I saw the paper.”
Right. The paper. I pushed away from her, wiping my face. I didn’t need the two giant crap piles in my life converging into one giant crap pile.
“It’s that girl from the community center, right?” Vanessa asked. “The one I paid.” I braced myself against the fire escape, the metal cool in my hot hands.
Leave. Just leave.
But I couldn’t. Not while she was still talking. It was as if she held a magnet, and as long as she answered my questions, I couldn’t walk away.
“She looks about five months pregnant.”
I watched her through narrowed eyes, waiting for her to say what had to be on the tip of her tongue, the tip of everyone’s tongue, but she was silent.
“I’d never met her before you paid her to get my attention. I’m not the father,” I finally snapped.
“I know you’re not,” she said.
“How?” I asked, “Mother’s intuition?”
“I know a first kiss when I see one.”
