James and Elena gazed at each other in sturdy silence.
“I hate this,” Elena breathed finally. “I hate that Rosa did this. She’s been a sort of hero for me for decades. I modeled my life after her in a way. I never knew.”
Suddenly, the door burst open, and Carmen stood before them, breathing rapidly, her eyes searching. James remembered that this was what she’d been like the night she’d collapsed. She’d been this harried. This confused. James hurried over and supported her. “Carmen? Are you feeling okay?”
Carmen glared down at Elena, not comprehending. “What are you doing at my desk?” she demanded. “Are you digging through my things?” Her voice was hard-edged. It was as though Elena were eight years old and messing around.
Elena got to her feet and reached for her mother. “I’m just working on articles for the paper,” she lied gently. “I’m trying to get everything done in time for Christmas. Like we talked about.”
But something was very wrong with Carmen. She shifted out of James’s grip and came toward her daughter, practically spitting with rage. It was like she’d forgotten all of the goodwill she and Elena had built up over the past few weeks.
James reminded himself that it was probably too early for the medication to start working.
“You think you’re too good for theGazette,” she sputtered. “You’re going to leave, and you’re going to leave me with a great big mess, with so many edits to make, so many articles to rewrite. You hate Millbrook, almost as much as you hate me.”
Elena’s eyes glowed with sorrow. Slowly, she shifted forward and wrapped her confused mother in a hug. Carmen continued to sputter with rage, but together, James and Elena tried to comfort her, telling her to take breaths and calm down.
And as the minutes ticked past, as Carmen slowly became gentle and tired again, it struck James that Carmen’s behavior made sense. If Carmen had always known that her mother had abandoned her, if she’d always been aware of her mother’s betrayal, it stood to reason that she’d expect everyone else to betray her, or run away from her as well.
When Elena had run off to the Middle East, when she hadn’t called for weeks or months at a time, Carmen had probably thought,It’s happening again. Why do the people I love run as far as they can away from me?But she’d found a way through it. She’d had her career until her mind had failed her.
James helped Elena take her mother to bed. Standing with his back turned in the doorway, he waited, just in case, as Elena tucked her mother in and told her, again, that everything would be all right.
“I can’t remember what happened,” Carmen repeated over and over. There was a sob in her voice. “I can’t remember, but I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, Mom,” Elena said. “I love you. Get some rest. We’ll see each other in the morning.”
Right when Elena turned to leave, Carmen cried out a final time. “I’m glad you came back, Elena. I didn’t think you ever would.”
Chapter Twenty
When Carmen woke up similarly confused the following morning, Elena called Natalie and said she couldn’t come into the newsroom that day —not until her mother calmed down, at least.
“Did you tell her?” Natalie breathed, referring, of course, to the photograph of Rosa they’d discovered on the wall of Henrietta’s mansion.
“No,” Elena said. “I don’t think I want to. And…” She trailed off. “I mean, she probably knows, right? This is Carmen Vasquez we’re talking about.”
Elena explained to Natalie that she’d discovered Rosa’s brief yet powerful obituary, proof that she’d died long after that supposed 1960 car accident. And there’d been no mention of the car accident at all, not in any newspaper.
“I can’t understand why she’d do this,” Natalie whispered.
From upstairs came Carmen’s cry, tugging Elena back. “I have to run. I’ll try to come in later.”
“We have it taken care of,” Natalie assured her. “Christmas articles are up and running. Bob’s out interviewing the Santa at the mall. Frankie’s taking photographs at the middle school.”
Natalie listed the rest of the Christmas-essential appointments the newspaper had that week, proof that she had it covered, that she could probably be editor of the paper starting now if she wanted to be. Elena thanked her, got off the phone, and hurried upstairs to find her mother tear-soaked and red-faced. She paced around her bedroom, looking for something.
“What are you after?” Elena asked, trying to calm her mother down.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Carmen blubbered. “I promise I will.”
Seeing her mother like this broke Elena’s heart in half. Slowly, she urged her back to bed, then hurried to the next room to call Maxine. “She’s taken a turn,” she explained. “Do you have anything that can help her sleep?”
Maxine said she had a break in the next hour and could come to the house right away. Elena thanked her profusely, then checked on her mother to find that she’d begun to cry and pace again. Elena wondered if the loss of her mother had been lying dormant since 1960, if Carmen’s emotional health had always been a sleeping lion, ready to pounce when the time was right.
To try to calm her mother down, Elena sat at her mother’s bedside, held her hand, and told her stories off the cuff—stories from her own childhood, stories of her father and mother that made Carmen laugh and join in. “That was the year your father had that awful mustache, do you remember?” Carmen asked, allowing her head to drop back into her pillow. “He electrocuted himself when he plugged in the Christmas tree lights, and his mustache puffed out like this.” She gestured wildly. “I couldn’t stop laughing. You were just a little thing.”
“I remember Grandpa coming by every Christmas morning as well,” Elena went on. “He always brought the best presents.”
