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My chest feels like it’s starting to burn. “This isn’t funny.”
“I risked my life by coming here.” She bites down on her lip nervously. “The people after her will come after me too if they find out I met with you.”
“Who are you?” I demand.
“It’s not safe for either of us, if you know. You need to find Irene and warn her. But don’t go to the police, FBI, any type of law enforcement—that’ll put her in more danger. I heard she’s somewhere in the Bay Area. You need to tell her she’s in trouble again.”
Again?My mother isaliveand in troubleagain?
I don’t know who put this woman up to this, maybe a former disgruntled patient, but it feels like the cruelest, sickest joke anyone could tell, and I want her out of my office. Now.
“Leave,” I say.
“I didn’t think you’d believe me,” she says, opening her tightly wound fist. That’s when I see it—a gold bracelet with a Tiffany lima bean charm, just like the one Mom wore. The one the police told Dad had been stolen after the hit-and-run accident.
My chest is on fire. I’m unable to form words. I feel like I might pass out. I try holding onto the side of the couch to steady myself.
“ … Where did you get that?”
“I gotta go,” she says, dropping the bracelet on the floor as she bolts out of my office.
Before I know it, I’m chasing after her down the hallway. My legs understand what my brain hasn’t registered yet. If what she just told me is true, this woman may be the only way to track down my dead mother.
I slip in my heels, coming down hard on my left ankle, but I pull myself back up and keep going.
She ducks into the stairway exit and runs down the stairs. I hobble after her, the distance between us growing as she reaches the first floor and swings open the door to the lobby.
By the time I reach the ground floor, she’s already outside. A black-tinted Cadillac Escalade with an obscured license plate screeches up to the front of the building. She jumps in the back seat and speeds away.
I’m left standing alone on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rexford Drive at 7:04AMon a Tuesday morning, surrounded by palm trees and sunshine like nothing ever happened.
CHAPTER2
MY COLLEAGUES ANDI keep an ice pack in the communal office fridge. I sit at my desk, icing my throbbing ankle.
For twenty-six years, all I’ve wished was for my mother to somehow still be alive.
Dad and I went through the unimaginable after we lost her. She’d been my rock, my cheerleader, my everything, and I found life without her unbearable.
All the things I’d previously taken joy in as a teenager, like hanging out with friends at the beach, going to concerts, and playing on my high school soccer team, I struggled to do. Life was marching on for everyone around me, while I was slowly withdrawing from it.
Dad had his own challenges as a new widower and single parent. In addition to her career as a therapist, Mom had been in charge of everything in our house, from grocery shopping to paying bills to calling a plumber whenever a sink was clogged. After she passed, Dad had to shoulder all of it alone, along with his job as a partner at a law firm in downtown LA.
He was barely keeping his head above water, so he didn’t notice when I started rationing my food, skipping breakfast,and barely touching my dinner. It was only when I flat-out refused to eat at all and my clothes began hanging on me like I was a Halloween skeleton that he realized I had a problem.
He tried everything in his power to get me to eat, and I was horrible to him. I threw bowls of food, accused him of abusing me by forcing me to eat, and even hit him on several occasions. My brain was so deformed from months of starvation that any will I’d had to live had all but disappeared. I was on a death march, and he was in my way.
The stress was too much for him to bear, so he started smoking again, a habit Mom had helped him quit when I was a toddler. He died of lung cancer over a decade after she passed. I’ve spent the better part of the last twelve years blaming myself for what I put him through, even questioning if I was responsible for his death.
Now, hearing that Mom could still be alive, however unlikely it is to be true, how can I not wonder if Dad and I might’ve been spared all the suffering we went through? If she’s really alive, does she know anything about what happened to us after she disappeared? Did she keep tabs on us from a distance? Or did she orchestrate her death to cut us off for good?
Maybe she was secretly unhappy in her life with us. She didn’t act like it, but I’ve read enough novels about unhappy housewives who one day decide to pick up and leave, to their families’ great surprise.
And what about what the fake patient said—how Mom is in trouble?Again.
Was she leading a double life while married to Dad? Was she in some kind of trouble?
No. She can’t be alive. We buried her. We held a memorial service at a family friend’s funeral home. Though, Dad and I never did see the body.
