I rush into the room and she looks up, tears trailing down her stricken face.
“Mama... ,” she whispers, but not to me.
14
Up until this moment I’d not heard Kat say the wordmama. I’d called myself Mam to her, and if I instructed her to give Mam something or do something for Mam, she would readily do it for me. I’ve felt like I was her mother and so I’d been expecting that when I did hear something akin to that word coming from her, she would be talking to me. But she’d been able to parse out the words in Candace’s letter, and it was Candace she was referring to now.
Martin told me Candace had died at home in the middle of the night. I’d asked him early on if Kat had seen her mother or had been able to say good-bye, and he’d replied that the body had been taken away by the undertaker while Kat still slept. Martin had thought it unwise for a five-year-old to behold her mother’s dead body. Kat had been told when she woke up that her mother had gone to heaven, and then she and Martin left Los Angeles for good five days later. I had imagined Kat’s reaction to the newsof her mother’s passing half a dozen ways: tears, shock, rage, pitiful silence, and also just as I see her now with Candace’s letter in her hand. She looks as though she’s been put under a spell and will disappear if I don’t run to her. I am at her side in seconds and I kneel so that her face and mine are close. I put my hands on her shoulders.
“Kat! Look at me, darling! Look at me!”
She so very slowly turns her gaze to me.
“All will be made right,” I tell her. “I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to take care ofthis.” I nod toward the letter. “I’m going to take you to her.”
“Mama,” she whispers again, and she’s looking at me but not seeing me, and I feel hot tears sting at my eyes. Oh, how I want to scream at a world that allows someone like Martin Hocking to keep breathing its air.
“I’ll take you to her,” I say again, and my voice breaks into pieces as I say these words. I draw Kat even closer so that she can rest her head on my shoulder if she wants, but she is stiff and limp at the same time. I could kill Martin for what he’s done to this child, for what he’s done to all of us. I can hear Belinda sniffling behind me.
“She... she... I didn’t... I didn’t...” But Kat doesn’t finish what she wants to say, and I shudder as I recall what Mrs. Lewis told me, that Kat thought it was somehow her fault that her mother had died. I can’t help but wonder now if it was Martin who first put that thought in her head.
I hold Kat at arm’s length so that I can look into her eyes. She stares back vacantly, as though she, too, is trying to make sense of what her father did to her.
“Listen, love,” I tell her. “As soon as the sun is up tomorrow morning we’ll be on our way. We’re going to send Miss Belinda home and then you and I will go find your mama, all right? I’ll take you to her, I promise.”
Kat blinks at me.
“Do you understand, my sweet? I’ll take you to her.”
She grants me a barely perceptible nod.
“I need the letter back, Kat. I need the address.”
Kat lets me take the letter out of her hand and I place it back in its envelope. I gather the other documents and the strongbox—which I will try to pry open later—and I hold them to my chest.
“Let’s go have a bit of supper, shall we?” I say, as brightly as I can. “And we’ll go to bed early so that tomorrow will come quicker.”
We head to the kitchen and I heat leftover soup and warm some bread in the oven. No one has much of an appetite. While Belinda and Kat clean up the dishes, I return to the library to use the telephone, and I place the call to Las Palomas. The night nurse tells me that, yes, Mrs. Candace Hocking still resides as a patient there, and, yes, she’s able to receive guests for short visits in the afternoons out on the patio. I don’t tell her who I am and the woman does not ask. The full confirmation that Candace is still alive doesn’t surprise me, and I’m glad there is no small part of me that hoped Candace had died. I don’t want that crushing disappointment to fall on Kat. Not now. Not twice. When I am done with the call, I close the library door so that the room will look at first glance just as Martin left it.
Upstairs, Belinda helps me pack Kat’s things for our trip and then we head to my bedroom, where I do the same. I choose a few dresses, my mother’s old hat, my da’s word book. When we aredone, we take the travel cases downstairs and set them by the front door. I place the files and the strongbox and the pieces of gold ore—which I have dried off and put into a drawstring bag—onto the entry table by the front door.
When everything is ready for our dawn departure, we head back upstairs.
“We can all sleep in here, in my room,” I say. I know Belinda will not want to sleep in Martin’s bed, and I certainly do not. And I don’t want Kat sleeping alone, either. I pull her mattress off her bed and drag it into my room and place it on the floor next to my bed. And then we change into our nightgowns—I loan Belinda a loose-fitting one of mine—and braid our hair for sleep as if it is just an ordinary day. I sing my grandmother’s Gaelic lullaby to Kat until her breathing finally slackens to that of slumber. In the darkness after she is asleep, I hear Belinda begin to softly cry beside me. I have to remind myself that she lost her husband tonight, and, yes, the man she loves does not exist, but she thought he did, and the loss feels the same.
“Will you be all right?” I ask her.
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” she says in a tired, grieved voice. “I don’t feel well. I don’t...”
She lets her voice trail away.
“There was a time when I felt like my world was ending, too,” I tell her after a pause. “But you’ve reasons to keep living, Belinda. And even if you were able to convince yourself you don’t, the sun always comes up the next day. It does. And the next and the next. It just keeps coming up.”
She says nothing, and minutes later she falls into an exhausted sleep.
As I lie there in the dark on the mattress where I let Martin touch me and delight me, where I cried out in pleasure at the union of our bodies, I am suddenly overcome with revulsion. I know it was not love between us at those times, but I’ve been blindly thinking it had been some kind comfort to us both, and I’m sick now that he was only pleasuring me to keep me compliant and content, like a stupid animal. I feel my gorge rising within me and I get myself out of bed as gently as I can so as not to wake Belinda or Kat, and I run into the water closet to heave into the commode what little supper I ate. When I’m done, I turn to run water in the bath as hot as I can stand it to cleanse myself of him, to wash any lingering fragments of his body from me. I cast off my nightgown and lower myself into the steaming water, nearly yelping at the heat, and I scrub myself until my skin is red and nearly raw.
I was stupid to think I could remain so naïve about Martin’s comings and goings, and knowing so little about his job. I was stupid to think he grieved his wife when I never saw him shed a single tear over her, never saw him looking at Candace’s photograph in Kat’s room, never saw him staring off into the distance as if she might emerge from it. I have been stupid, duped by my own desire to have what I wanted. And now I am going to lose it all.
