Deb had hated her mother.
From the time she was fourteen, until it was too late, she’d been sure of it. Looking back after her mother’s death, she knew it wasn’t true, that what she’d felt had really been resentment and jealousy and unmet need, all tangled up in deep love, but at the time, she would have said—she had said, often, to her friends—that she hated her mother.
It hadn’t been rebellion. Maybe that would have been easier, if Deb had rebelled and engaged in all-out war with her mom. Maybe all that poisonous seething would have been lanced and drained if they’d ever truly fought. But that hadn’t been Deb’s way. She’d done what was expected of her, always.
It wasn’t that her mother had been a bad mother. For the most part, Noreen Wesson had been like all the other mothers Deb knew—a busy, brusque farm wife, who’d risen at four-thirty every morning, worked at one thing or another until eight-thirty or nine every evening, and gone to bed right after the ten o’clock news every night. She’d raised three children, including twin boys who’d been into everything, and she’d raised them right. She hadn’t indulged much in affection, either physical or verbal, but she’d taken care of them, and there’d been the occasional pat on the back or sweep of rough fingers over a cheek.
It wasn’t even that they hadn’t gotten along. Deb hadn’t rebelled, so they hadn’t fought much. They hadn’t talked much at all, really. Not about important things. There’d been no talk about boys, or what to do about mean girls, or even about the havoc puberty had wrought on Deb’s body. Her mother had simply handed her a box of pads when she turned thirteen and said, “When you find blood in your pants, use these.”
Deb hadn’t needed The Talk. There’d been a chapter about puberty in her heath textbook, and she’d had girlfriends for the rest of it—though that information had been sketchy at best. But around that time, she’d begun to notice that her friends and their mothers fought all the time. They all said they hated their mothers, and they complained endlessly about how nosy and demanding their moms were, how they couldn’t get any privacy, how their moms wouldn’t let them feather their bangs or wear bell-bottoms or pierce their ears.
One night at a sleepover at Aly’s house, they’d all pierced each other’s ears. They’d gotten ice cubes, swiped a wine cork from the big bowl of them Aly’s mom kept in the kitchen, and lit a match to a sewing needle. They’d numbed their ears with the ice, then taken turns pushing the needle in and through, drawing thread through their ears and tying it off.
The other girls had tittered nervously, passing Aly’s hand mirror around, studying the bloody threads, their first earrings. “My mom is going to kill me,” they’d all insisted. Deb had added her voice to the refrain, wondering if her mom would be mad, too. She didn’t know. She’d never asked if she could pierce her ears, so she’d never been told she couldn’t.
But it was the cool girls, the ones who smoked behind the school cafeteria and made out with boys under the bleachers at football and baseball games, that wore the big hoops in their ears. The fast girls. The ones who didn’t go to church on Sundays. The ones who got talked about. Her mom probably wouldn’t like that.
At school the following Monday, none of the other girls had still had their threads. Not even Aly—all their moms had made them take the threads out. A couple had even gotten grounded. Dolores had had a bruise on her cheek from her father’s backhanded slap.
Deb’s mom hadn’t noticed. For the next few days, Deb had made a point to show her ears and their threads around her mom at every chance. She’d never noticed. Not until Deb wore a pair of big hoop earrings, weeks later, had it made her attention, and she’d said simply, “Watch you don’t catch those on something and tear your ear. That’ll be a bloody mess.”
It was about then that Deb had decided she hated her mother.
All her friends had told her how lucky she was, and how envious they were, that her mom left her alone, but Deb hadn’t felt lucky. She’d felt ignored. Since she was four years old, when Martin and Max had been born, she’d come in third. From that moment, until the last moment, her mom had turned all her finite maternal attention on the boys and left Deb to fend for herself.
They’d taken all that attention and demanded more. Not only as babies, who needed double everything. It had gotten worse when they were old enough to walk and talk and run. Even Martin, the smaller, quieter, more thoughtful twin, had been happy to follow Max into a hundred different kinds of mischief every day between breakfast and dinner, and a hundred more before supper. They’d go off and come back soaked to their chests in mud, or carrying an active hornet’s nest, managing somehow not to stir them up until they were at the house, or God, just anything.
And that was just before they’d started school. Max had begun to struggle right away in class—and then, their mom was always at school for one reason or another, and always trying to sort out some kind of trouble that Max had started and Martin had followed him into.
Deb had been left, waiting. Expected to take care of herself. If she was at school, she’d had to sit and wait after school. If she was home, she’d had to stay in the house on her own. Her father was usually home, in a fashion—out in the fields or in the barn, working the farm, but Deb hadn’t been allowed to ‘bother’ him during his work day. When she got old enough, she’d been expected to take up whatever chore her mother had dropped to rescue the boys.
She’d never felt neglected or ignored by her father. He’d had work, what she’d thought of as Important Things a Father Does. He’d been then the way he was now: laconic, reserved, but demonstrably caring. More affectionate than her mother. She’d never doubted his love for her or hers for him, though he’d left her alone, too.
It hadn’t occurred to her to resent the waiting and aloneness until she’d hit puberty. Before that, she’d felt only a vague discontent that was little more than simple loneliness, and she’d tried and tried to catch her mother’s notice, thinking she just wasn’t good enough yet. But once her hormones kicked in, she’d found resentment. A big, boiling caldron of resentment, for her mother and for her brothers, too.
The day that her mother hadn’t cared that she’d pierced her ears was the first time she’d thought the words I hate you.
She’d called it hatred and harbored it close, like a secret, banking its fire, finding a twisted kind of comfort in it. And all the while, she’d gone on being the child who wasn’t any trouble, doing what was expected, letting everyone forget her, using it to feed the fire.
She’d gone to college thinking she’d never go home again.
Then a tornado had torn through her family and taken her mother and Martin and almost Max, too.
In her grief, she’d found the love she’d buried, and in that love, she’d seen the truth. It had come at her like a wave. That cauldron of resentment, that so-called hatred, had tipped over and washed her with guilt. Her mother had loved her. She’d been overwhelmed, and she’d trusted Deb to help her. She’d let her be because she’d trusted her, not because she hadn’t cared.
Her mother was gone, and she hadn’t had a good thought of her in years. Martin was gone. Her father had very quietly broken. Max had been…lost.
Deb had immediately quit school and gone home to take care of her father and Max. No other option had occurred to her. She hadn’t expected to stay forever, but once she was home, slipping into the rhythms of the farm, what was left of the family her mother had managed, picking up the chores her mother had left behind, she’d known she was home. Really home. Where she belonged.
As if her mother had trusted her again to take her place, to do what she could no longer do.
Thoughts of her family, of her past, of her missed chances and lost moments, bedeviled Deb as she lay on cold concrete in pitch black. Still hogtied, her body had gone numb without alleviating her pains and discomforts. She had a desperate need to urinate and an agonizing throb somewhere deep in her muscles that traveled all through her, pulsing in time with her skittering heart. Her head ached horribly, and her mouth and throat burned. She’d thrown up at some point—time had lost its moorings—but the gag in her mouth had forced it back, and the bile clawed into her tongue and cheeks and throat.
Leah was in this room with her, Deb could hear her occasional moans and whimpers, but she seemed far away, and Deb could neither offer nor take any comfort from the company. They might as well have been miles apart.
The darkness was complete; no amount of time spent with her eyes open had eased the blindness. Deb wasn’t even sure that the room was dark. Maybe she’d gone blind. They’d been here so long that her terror had numbed like her pain had—it hadn’t eased, but had been so constant for so long that it had receded to a steady beat, becoming familiar. She was growing used to terror and agony already. Even in the comfortless cold and the pitch black.
But it wasn’t black. Fire danced before her eyes, as if the flames that had destroyed her family home had seared themselves into her retinas. No matter what she did, she couldn’t avoid the writhing licks of orange light, or the dark ghost of the house fading into them.
They’d killed her father, the men who’d left her and Leah in this darkness. They’d killed her father and destroyed their home.
The home her mother had entrusted to her care. As Deb lay in numb agony and torpid terror, that thought grew larger and larger in her rattled mind. Her mother had trusted her, and Deb had repaid her with hatred. Her mother had trusted her, and Deb had allowed their family to be destroyed.
Max would be alone. Whenever these men were done with her and Leah, when they finally killed them, Max would be alone. He couldn’t be alone. He’d never survive on his own. He would fly apart into a million separate pieces, and there would be nothing left of him. Or of them, their family. He needed someone to hold him close. Someone to watch over him, take care of him, understand him. He always had.
She’d had someone to watch over her, just for a minute. She’d had Simon. After all the years she’d thought she hadn’t wanted such a connection, hadn’t wanted the complication, the hassle, the compromise, hadn’t wanted to have to choose between one life and another—now, with Simon, for him, she understood. Love wasn’t a complication, it was the ease of complications. A relationship was a place to set down your worries, to share them and make them smaller. Arms to hold you close and make you strong, to keep you together.
When you loved, when you were loved, you weren’t alone. Now Deb understood. She’d claimed solitude because she’d always felt solitary. Even among friends, she’d felt alone, at her core. Better to claim it, to choose it, and control it herself.
She been alone and waiting, always waiting. Simon had found her. He might have been the one. She thought maybe he was. But it didn’t matter.
Once again, she’d been too late.
~oOo~
Deb had lain for hours or days or years, lost in a fog of empty, aimless, incomprehensible thoughts, when a heavy steel door groaned open, and white fire charged into the room and stabbed her eyes. The pain was instant and explosive, and she screamed against her gag. It wasn’t until the door closed again, and the fire paled, that she understood that it was light. Sunlight had stabbed at her, but now incandescent, or fluorescent, light only poked. She eased her lids open. She wasn’t blind; the room had been simply that completely dark.
She heard movement in the room, but her eyes wouldn’t focus, so she couldn’t make sense. Even when the light-blindness eased, her vision remained blurred and doubled, but she began to understand what she saw, where she was.
Concrete floor and walls. A rusty, slotted drain in the middle of the floor. No windows—as she’d have guessed—or anything else at all. As Deb’s mental sense came to life, she realized that the walls curved. A line of fluorescent lights wrapped the continuous wall, about seven feet from the floor. They were in a round, concrete room. A silo—or no. An oil tank, or what was left of it. Its shell.
An abandoned oil refinery. Now that she’d oriented herself to that, Deb could smell the age-old crude oil, soaked deep into every surface.
Leah lay about eight or ten feet away, lying in what Deb imagined was a similar position as she herself was in—hogtied and gagged, just the same. Leah’s pretty blonde hair was clumped with dirt and oil—and blood, caked in her hair and over her face, thick and dark at her temple.
Leah’s wide eyes stared up and over, and Deb followed her gaze. Three men stood above them. Two of them, Deb recognized as men who’d attacked the farm. They held big guns, probably the same guns they’d used to kill her father—and Justin Walsh. Justin had been there, too. He’d tried to help. She hadn’t thought of him again until now.
The third man was unarmed. He was a bit smaller than the others and dressed differently. The armed men were in jeans and white t-shirts, but the third man, standing between them, wore khakis and a Polo shirt. He was more important than the others. Unarmed, dressed like a dentist on his day off, slighter than his companions, the man in the khakis was the real danger in the room.
As if to prove her point, he nodded—that was it, just one nod—and both men with guns came forward, one crouching before her, and the other by Leah.
When the man reached for Deb, she jerked her head backward. Sparks of pain flashed in her brain, but she couldn’t get away. He yanked the gag from her mouth; when she immediately vomited what little she had to lose, he hopped back on his haunches, out of the splash zone.
Leah had been freed of her gag, too. Deb heard her coughing and retching as well.
The khaki man walked up to Deb. He had a white plastic bucket—she hadn’t seen him holding that before. From the bucket he pulled a bottle of water. He opened it, crouched down, his shiny black loafer nearly in the small pool of her bilious puke, and offered her a drink.
She took it, greedily, until he pulled it away. At first, she thought she’d be sick again, but she kept it down.
As he capped the bottle, he said, “You’re Debra Wesson. That right?”
Should she answer? Would Max want her to? Or could she get him hurt in some way if she did—or if she didn’t? Deb didn’t know what to do.
Before she figured it out, the khaki man sighed and nodded again, and the other man raised up his big gun and slammed the butt down, crashing into her side. Her ribs screamed, and she coughed out a burst of air and then couldn’t draw more back in.
“I want to be clear, now. I’m all for women’s rights. I got no thought that a woman’s weaker than a man or needs special protection. Far’s I see, that’s sexist. I am equal opportunity. You understand? I got no problem doing you harm. So let me ask again: are you Debra Wesson?”
They’d attacked the farm. They had to know who she was. What hurt could there be in confirming it? “Yes,” she croaked and tried to drag air into her clamoring chest.
The khaki man turned slightly on his heels and considered Leah. “That makes you Leah, as I understand it.”
Afraid Leah would be too slow to answer, as she’d been, Deb did it for her. “She’s Leah. Don’t hurt her.” She forced the words out without breath.
The khaki man laughed. “Not in a position to give me orders, are ya, sis?” To the gunman crouching near Leah, he said, “Get the camera and the rig. Let’s get this going.” The man stood and left the room, letting sunlight in as he dragged the door open. A world beyond this nightmare was mere feet away.
Then the khaki man turned back to Deb and nodded yet again. With those short jerks of his head, he seemed able to convey whole sentences of information. The man who’d pulled her gag stood. He hooked the gun over his shoulder by a strap and pulled something from his pocket. A blade shot forward—a switchblade. He grabbed her by the hair and rolled her roughly to her stomach.
Deb found enough air to scream.