“So she heard voices? Saw things that weren’t there?”
“Just ... minor at first. She didn’t even know they were not real, or anything to worry about.”
Angie’s pulse quickened. “And you didn’t tell me about it? Even though she’s been suffering all these years?”
He pushed his plate to the side. “Well, you didn’t notice either. It’s not like you spent much time here lately.”
Her jaw tightened. “Youcouldhave told me.”
“And what could you have done?”
“I don’t know! Understood, maybe, what was going on in her head. Been less short-tempered with her, withyou. Come around more. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken my mother’s emotional distance so personally in my late teens. Maybe I would have had some context for why I so often felt locked out as a kid.”
“Locked out?”
“By you and her.”
“That’s nonsense—all kids—”
“What else have you lied to me about?”
“Itwasn’ta lie, Angie—”
“By omission, yes it was.”
He surged to his feet, his quick Italian temper puffing out his chest, coloring his cheeks, flashing into his dark eyes. “I don’t know why you get so angry—always so damn angry about everything!” He flung his arm out in her direction. “It’s that job of yours. Working sex crimes. It’s made you suspicious about everything and everyone.”
Coolly, she got up, started gathering the plates and cutlery. “I need to go. I’ll wash up.”
She carried the plates into the kitchen, dumped them into the sink. Bracing her hands on the counter, she lowered her head for a moment, a vise of anxiety squeezing at her temples. What was her dad going to do now, alone in this big empty shell of an oceanfront house? What about Christmas? She truly hated this time of the year—detested the thought of making an effort. The farce of it all.
Guilt weighed sudden and heavy on her shoulders. Guilt at her own selfishness—because she’d be obligated to come and visit her dad more often, and she didn’t have the time. Or inclination, even. She didnotwant to listen to him going on about her work as a cop. But he was going to need her.
And what of his wedding anniversary, come January?
Aging parents, families, were never easy. There was always so much love, hurt. Regret. All muddled together. And now there was a sense of time lost. Somehow she’d let these past years flow under the bridge without noticing them. Really noticing. And now it was over. Her mother gone. Still here, but gone.
Inhaling deeply, she began to rinse off a plate, stilling as her thumb moved over the blue flower pattern along the edge. A memory, like a piece of bright-yellow sunlight, sliced into her mind—one autumn afternoon spent shopping with her mother for this crockery set at the big old department store downtown. The Hudson’s Bay Company. Her mom used to love that store. Maybe in her more lucid moments she still did. Would her mother even be able to recall that day now, this set with the cornflower pattern that they’d bought together?
It had been eight years ago. Angie had promised to drive her mother downtown because her mom’s car had been in the shop. But Angie had been distracted by a case—she’d just made detective, and all her mom had been fretting about was whether the thirty-two-piece dinner ensemble would still be on sale when they got there. It had irritated Angie—her mother’s preoccupation with the inane.
And then suddenly life had passed her by. She’d woken up one morning and her mother was gone—lost in mind, a lifetime of precious memories erased from the hard drive of her brain. What did that do to the concept of “self”? Memories defined a person. Without autobiographical memory, the face in the mirror was a stranger’s. One became an alien, flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present with no touchstones to guide one into the future and out of the past.
Angie flattened the thought, rinsed off the second plate, and stuck it in the rack. She dried off her hands and returned to the living room to get her coat.
She found her dad sitting by the fire, his big frame crumpled into an old leather La-Z-Boy, which her mom had tried forever to persuade him to ditch. Yet there it still hunkered in its corner next to the hearth, like a dinosaur relic of some past era among her mom’s plush cream sofas and chairs. He’d put the tree lights on, and a fat glass of whiskey rested on the table at his side. Flames were dying to glowing embers in the hearth. He was paging through an old photo album, his head bowed.
Angie went to his side, placed her hand on his shoulder, gave a small squeeze. “You going to be okay?”
He nodded. He was staring at an old photo of the three of them, taken the first Christmas after the car accident that had occurred during his sabbatical in Italy when Angie was four. The legacy of that accident was evident in the fresh pink scar pulling up the left side of Angie’s lip—the photo had been shot before further surgery had restored her mouth to a more even, but never perfect, shape.
He turned the page. Another photo of Angie with her mother. This one taken when Angie was maybe six years old. Spring. Lush green grass. Cherry blossoms. The sun was gold and angled low. The rays threw a halo of copper around her mother’s strawberry-blonde hair, and it made Angie’s darker hair gleam like burnished red cedar. The O’Dell Irish legacy, courtesy of her mother’s genes.
A tightness began to build in Angie’s chest.
Her father glanced up, something unreadable and strange entering his face. “Take it,” he said, closing the album and looking away.
“I ... I don’t think so, Dad.” She didn’t have time to sit and page through these memories, these little pieces of their lives that had been trapped in time under the protective plastic sheets on the thick pages of the album. She had another Justice Institute exam to take. She was registering for as many courses as she could to bolster her bid to join the elite of Metro PD’s integrated homicide unit.
