“You need to be less gullible. You can’t believe everything you hear, Alison.”
I stared at her in complete disbelief. She’d said and done horrible things before, even told little lies to mess with me, but this was a whole new level.
I never told Ben what Mom had done. Even to this day, he didn’t know.
I told Mark about it once, back when we were first dating, sharing a bottle of wine, confessing secrets. I think I was testing him, seeing how much I could share with him before I scared him off. Lucky for me, Mark didn’t scare easily. This all happened before Mark met my mother. He already knew about the scars on my back. The names she had called me. But this story seemed to bother him more than any other.
“My God,” he’d said. “Your mother was a monster. That is just sick. Who does that to a nine-year-old?”
When he finally did meet her he had been civil, and remained so, but over the years he’d never gone out of his way to develop a real relationship with her. He was very protective of the girls when they were around her too—rightfully so.
Now, as I told him about my mother’s request, I watched my normally unflappable husband nearly fall off his chair.
“Here?” Mark sputtered. “She wants to come here? To stay with us?”
We were sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping tea as I did my debrief from the whirlwind trip to New York. It felt good to be home. When we had our 1893 farmhouse renovated, we’d kept as many of the original details as we could: the hardwood floors, the beautiful wooden banister (now hung with pine garland), the original doors and window trimand moldings. We’d replaced most of the other fixtures and systems and knocked down walls to open up the space.
My favorite part of the house had always been the kitchen, with its wide-plank pine floors, deep soapstone sink, and modern granite countertops. I breathed in its soothing atmosphere to regain some calm, hands around the cup of herbal tea Mark had made me.
I was exhausted. I’d stayed at the hospital until well past the end of visiting hours, tossed and turned in my hotel bed, then caught an early flight home. I nodded at Mark, looked around at the home and life I’d carefully built, full of real and solid things. But our old brick farmhouse now felt like a hastily built house of cardboard and cheap glue, a movie set ready to collapse around me.
My mother had never once come to visit us at the farmhouse in the nine years we’d lived here. She’d come to our apartment in Burlington well over a decade ago, when Izzy was a baby. She’d shown up unannounced, peered at little Isabelle for the first time, leaned close, pronounced her “an acceptable child” (which made Mark laugh out loud), then had a cup of coffee and made backhanded small talk—what a quaint little apartment, it’s nice that you’ve got the windows to make it feel bigger than it is, perhaps if you took down those dark blinds that would help too. And then she was on her way.
Mark and I later referred to it as the “hit-and-run visit.” When we saw her after that, infrequently over the years, we never went to each other’s houses. When we visited her in Woodstock, she put us up in an inn, and vice versa. I was grateful to not have to return to my childhood home, to not have to watch my girls walk through the rooms where I’d suffered such unspeakable things back when I was their age. I was sure the walls of that old dark house held memories of every terrible thing that had happened there, that my daughters would feel it, the horror of my past pushing down on them, its own kind of haunting.
During our infrequent, brief visits from my mother, we went out to eat, toured maple sugar houses, explored galleries and shops. She never reallyspoke to the girls, only eyed them warily. She occasionally brought gifts for them, but they were all wrong—meant for children either much younger or older than they were. She gave Olivia a delicate blown-glass swan when she was only three; Izzy got a dollhouse when she was twelve and well over playing with dolls. It was as if she didn’t understand children at all.
Mark frowned at me across the breakfast bar. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Oh my God.” He rubbed his face.
“I know. It’s crazy that she even asked. But she said Paul would set everything up: hospice care, nurses, whatever we need. I almost said no on the spot, but she insisted I wait to give her an answer until I’d thought it over and talked about it with you.”
“And this all came straight from her? Not Paul?”
I nodded. “She said she wants a chance to try to mend our relationship. She doesn’t want to die with things the way they are between us.”
“And what did you say?”
“Not much. I was kind of shell-shocked.”
“Wow. Understandable. As if you didn’t have enough screwed-up mother issues already,” he said.
“Thanks for the profound analysis, Dr. O’Conner,” I said with a grim chuckle.
He smiled. His PhD was in literature, but I still got a kick out of calling himdoctor.
Mark taught English at a private high school an hour away—a job he loved but for which he was vastly overqualified. He’d done a stint teaching at a prestigious New England college, but he’d hated the politics and found the students dull. The Farmstead School suited him. It was an alternative school for kids with behavioral issues who’d struggled academically. Somehow Mark found a way to get all of these kids to love writing. I loved watching him with his students, the way he came alive around them.
Mark reached over, rubbed my shoulder. “What do you want to do?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I told him. “Part of me wants to run screaming, and another part of me wants to believe that having her here would give us one last chance to make things right between us. And the truth is, she’s got nowhere else to go.” Ben certainly wasn’t about to take her in.
Mark sighed. “She’s got Paul.”
“He’s not family,” I said. “He’s someone she pays.”
