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Chapter 27
Droppingmy head into my hands, I dig the heels of my palms into my eye sockets, creating kaleidoscopes of color spotting across my vision.
A vein in my temple throbs painfully, maniacally, as I pore over the list of possible IP addresses of the flash drive culprit, growing more agitated with Ivers International’s incompetence at finding the person.
Earlier this morning, a third flash drive appeared, that same grainy footage not attributed to my state-of-the-art security, but filmed with an outside party’s camera.
Marcelline brought it in with the mail, and when I plugged it into my desktop, I was met with the black and white evidence of me baring my soul to my wife, both of us stark naked in the ocean.
Somehow, compared to the others which caught us in the middle of lascivious acts, this one felt more intimate. More exposing.
More purposeful.
I just can’t figure out why they’re appearing in the first place.
If it was about exposing me to the press, for any number of the crimes I’ve had expunged from my record over the years, most likely they would’ve been leaked already.
If it were Rafe’s doing, I have a difficult time imagining why he’d agree to give me Elena, effectively terminating his contract with Bollente Media, and fucking up the mediocre criminal empire he’s built.
Even though his name doesn’t hold as much weight in Boston as it once did, I still don’t see him resorting to self-sabotage, and then still trying to extort me in the process.
Leaning back in my desk chair, I stare up at the vaulted ceiling, losing myself in thought for several minutes. The house is silent tonight, Elena having turned in with a new copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own she bought at the only bookstore on the island.
For the first time in a long time, I reach beneath my dresser, my hand smoothing past the pistol secured just above my thigh, and tear off the Polaroid taped to the underside.
Unlike the crumpled, worn one I keep on hand of Violet, this one is so infrequently handled that it’s still in mint condition; the edges remain straight, the colors on the picture itself only slightly warped due to the passage of time. Otherwise, it’s as if the photo’s just popped out of its camera.
My mother sits up in a hospital bed, a pink bandana pulled tight over her head, because she’d just begun losing her hair after restarting chemotherapy treatments.
She’s spooning chocolate pudding out of a plastic cup, staring at whoever’s behind the camera, but her smile points at me. Even as she sits there, her body devouring itself from the inside out, she’s trying to reassure me that everything is okay.
That it will all be okay.
‘That’s the love of a mother,’nurses would sometimes say, because keeping in high spirits while trying to fight off a terminal illness isn’t something everyone can do, year after year, day after day. And yet, she made it a point to, always trying to get me to see the brighter side of things.
That big, toothy grin of hers stirs an ache within me that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in years, and a fresh dose of shame injects itself into my veins, because I can’t stop thinking of how disappointed she’d be in the way my life turned out.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Elena’s voice yanks me from my introspection, and I jolt up, straightening my spine as she enters the office. She makes her way over to me, taking a seat on my lap before I’ve even managed to ask her to.
Like she knows it’s where she belongs.
She looks at the photo, then back at me, as if waiting to see if I’ll continue.
“My mother,” I offer, smiling softly. “She passed when I was thirteen.”
One arm slides up around my neck, slipping around my shoulders, and Elena presses her head into mine. “Cancer?”
“Invasive lobular carcinoma,” I say with a slight nod. Pain lances through my heart at the term, sawing the organ in half. “When she was first diagnosed, they just called it an abnormal growth in her left breast. I don’t think they wanted to acknowledge it was that particular form of cancer, because she was so young.”
Like being struck by lightning, a sudden, sharp pang splits my chest, shocking me to the core.
Thirty-two. My mother was thirty-two when she died.
The realization that soon I’ll have been on this planet longer than her cuts deep, prodding at a scabbed wound I once believed was healed. Yet, the way it throbs and chips away, drawing new, fresh blood, suggests otherwise.
“She’s beautiful,” Elena says quietly, pulling me gently from the downward spiral of my thoughts, without even necessarily meaning to. She stares at the picture with a soft look on her face, unaware of the existential crisis brewing in the back of my mind, content that I’m once again sharing one of the secret facets of my life.
