She turns then, and I’m relieved to see that no, she’s not some vengeful ghost, not some unnatural creature made young again,but the same Lo who showed up here a little more than a month ago.
No longer young, but still beautiful.
And now, I realize, still deadly.
“If you want to understand what happened the night your daddy died, you have to understand the storm, baby.”
She knew.
The thought eats into my stomach like acid, a sour taste at the back of my throat.
She knew, she knew, she knew. She talked to me like we were friends, and all the time, she knew who my real father was, and that’s why she killed him, because she knew, she—
And then, through the blur of tears, through my own fury and betrayal, I realize she’s not talking to me.
She’s talking to August.
MARIE
August 3, 1985
I learned my mama was a murderer after Hurricane Audrey.
Frieda would never believe me, but the guilt damn near ate me up inside after her family was killed. That’s what it felt like, a hollowness in the center of my belly, a gnawing sickness that never went away. If I hadn’t come up with that plan to camp out, to lie to all our parents, Frieda’s family wouldn’t have been out looking for her, wouldn’t have driven their car straight into rising waters.
I tried not to let it show, how bad I felt. It sounds crazy, but I thought if I just acted like nothing was wrong, then maybe itwouldn’tbe. I think they call that “magical thinking,” and oh, Lord, I’ve engaged in a lot of that over the course of my life. I used to tell myself that it was a good quality, the power of positivity and all that bullshit.
Now I see it for what it was. Hell, what itis, because I’m sixty fucking years old and still doing it—playing pretend. Tell yourself the world is one way, and boom, presto chango, that’s reality. Making yourself feel better with pretty, silly lies, like a little kid who has to be told that thunder is actually angels bowling.
I think if I make it out of this next storm, this Hurricane Lizzie bearing down on all of us right now, I’m gonna try to stop doing that. Maybe it’s time to see things clear-eyed for once, live out the next four or five decades (a girl can dream!) in a state of Maximum Reality.
Maybe that’s why I’m writing this for the book. The whole story, for the first time.
Crazy thing is, I bet August won’t even believe it. He’ll think it’s another one of my “experiments in personal mythmaking.” That’s what he wrote in that little journal of his. That every interview he tried to do with me failed to dig below the surface because, what? I was too self-absorbed? Too obsessed with the image of Lo Bailey, Teenage Temptress?
What August doesn’t get is that it’s always beenotherpeople who made the myths. Even my own mother.
All I’veeverwanted was the truth.
Maybe Mama understood that, or maybe she could just see how miserable I was after Hurricane Audrey because, good as I was at hiding things, you really can’t hide much from your mama.
It was six months after Audrey hit—six months after Frieda’s family drowned. Mama and I were on the couch one night, watching the tail end of an episode ofThe Love Boat. Mama was stroking my hair as I rested my head on her knee, and then she said, almost like it was nothing, “Your father wasn’t a very nice man.”
Mama had hardly ever talked about Daddy, certainly never called him “your father,” so I’d perked up from my drowsy state at those words.
It came out slowly, the story of their disaster of a marriage, of his thousand cruelties, big and small, her unrelenting misery. She told it all like she was talking about someone else, but pain still lined every word, like those fancy Bibles you see with the gold and bright colors swirling around the top of the page.
That’s how I learned that on the night Hurricane Delphine hit St. Medard’s Bay, Daddy wasn’t just unlucky. He made it into that tree after all, and Mama’s foot saw him right the fuck back out of it and into the nasty waters Delphine splashed everywhere.
And I’ll tell you what. After she told me, I wasn’t horrified or shocked or traumatized or whatever else you probably think I should’ve been.
I was…glad. Proud, even. I loved my mama, but until that night, she’d always seemed so boring to me, so simple in her wants and needs, so dull in her dreams.
Now I knew that all that might still be true, but deep inside her, there was something fierce and deadly and unexpected, just like the hurricane itself, and for the first time, I understood not just her butmyselfa little better.
That it lived inside me, too, that storm.
We never talked about it again. The only thing that changed in our little house was that the next morning, the few pictures of Daddy that Mama had kept on display had disappeared. It was a lie neither of us needed anymore.
