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“Something caught fire before the carbon monoxide could spread.”
I remember rousing awake in the front yard, the sight of those flames licking up the walls as I blinked my bleary eyes. The heat on my skin as my father squeezed my hand and led me back to bed.
“He knew,” I say now, not a question but a statement—because suddenly, it all makes perfect sense. “Dad knew.”
“I can’t blame him,” my mother says. “Things were different back then. People didn’t like to talk about it.”
My mother had come to him, and he hadn’t listened. She had lost a child—held her dead baby in her arms, singing to it softly as if it could somehow hear—and still, week after week, he left her alone, vulnerable and afraid.
“Maybe if we could get some help,” she had asked, that desperate voice traveling beneath the office door. “IfIcould get some help.”
And then my father, his voice tough, like a callus on your palm: “No.”
“Yes, you can,” I say now, my eyes on hers in the dark. The fear I had just felt seconds earlier is quickly being replaced with something new, something different. “You can blame him, Mom. You asked him for help. You set our house on fire, and he didn’t do anything. He didn’tlisten.”
She shakes her head, her gaze cast down to the floor like she’s still so ashamed. It’s always so easy to blame the mother.
Abadmother. Aneglectfulmother.
“He kept saying it was an accident,” she says. “That I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“An accident,” I repeat, remembering the way he kept reiterating it after Margaret, too, almost like he needed to believe it himself.
“He didn’t want to believe that things had gotten that bad,” she continues. “It was hard for him, too, honey. And he was a congressman, Isabelle. The whole family line… they have a reputation. He was afraid of how it might look.”
I don’t know how to process this. I don’t know what to think: my father, valuing his job, his reputation, above the safety of his family—but at the same time, it doesn’t surprise me, either. Not really. Everything in our lives had always been for show: The way Margaret and I were dressed in matching outfits and the expensive furniture arranged just so. The giant house and the manicured lawn and the way strangers would ogle at us through the gate as if we, too, were on display. As if we existed for their consumption alone, satiating their curiosity as we played the part: children in the yard, mother tending to the garden.
Our life like a picture, too perfect to be real.
“It was hard,” she continues. “He was gone all the time, working, and I was always alone with you girls. Alone in my head.”
I think about my mother and those stories she told: the feelings on the back of her neck, prickling at her skin, like being watched. The meaning she had assigned in an attempt to make sense of what was happening in her own head: someone trying to send her a message, maybe. Someone telling her to do things, terrible things, she never would have done on her own.
Suddenly, I remember all those moments with Mason, too: letting my mind wander to that dusty corner of the brain where mothers are never supposed to go. The late nights, the shrieking, the overwhelming urge to make it stop by any means necessary. Those dirty little thoughts that would worm their way into my awareness in the dark, and the way I would let myself indulge in them, like sneaking into the pantry and gorging myself sick: a vile, frenzied feeding.
And then the fear that crept in like a slow injection. The way I would force myself to put him down, back away slowly. Convince myself that it was normal. Because itisnormal, isn’t it? Feeling that way? But how could you possibly know? How do you know if it’s something more? Something dangerous?
And if it is… how do you stop it?
CHAPTER FIFTY
I left as soon as the sun came up, my car winding down the driveway with those stone statues in my rearview: the baby, the angel. The woman with the sickness. I wasn’t sure if I could face them in the daylight: My mother, for what she told me. My father, for what he did—or rather, what he didn’t do.
“I always thought it was me,” I had said, a numbness settling over me as the comprehension set in. I watched as my mother cocked her head, like she didn’t understand. “I always thought I was the one who led her out there. That maybe I was asleep, and she followed me. That she tried to wake me, and I… I did something—”
And then I realized: I never really said it. Not outright, anyway. I told them I had memories from that night that didn’t add up: the water on the carpet, the clean nightgown, the mud on my neck. I told them I wanted to know what happened—whatreallyhappened—and they had glanced at each other from across the living room, like they were afraid that their mask was slipping. That their secret was about to be revealed.
Theirsecret. Not mine.
“Honey, no,” my mother had said, shaking her head. Tears streaming. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I had no idea you thought that.”
“How could Inothave thought that?” I yelled. “Margaret was always following me around. I was always waking up in strange places. I’ve spent my entire life thinking that.”
I glance to the side now, at the thick folder resting on my passenger seat. My mother had handed it to me after we descended the steps together in a wordless daze, promising its contents would help explain the rest. I can’t bring myself to open it, not yet, so instead, I keep driving, my body on autopilot. I don’t even know who’s responsible; I don’t even know who I should blame. It was my mother’s hands that shook Margaret from sleep, taking her in one arm and me in the other, eyes open but empty, as we wandered into the dark. It was her hands that beckoned her into the water, forefingers curling, promising her that it would be okay. That relief was coming. That we would be comfortable soon. Her hands that held her down, fought the thrashing, reached out to me next, once the movement had stopped.
That touched my neck, smearing those three fingers of mud, like she wanted to feel my heartbeat for the very last time, a gentle pounding that would soon slow to a stop.
It was her hands, but it wasn’ther. Not really. I know it wasn’t.
